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Secretariat

Page 3

by William Nack


  HERE LIES THE FLEETEST RUNNER

  THE AMERICAN TURF HAS EVER KNOWN,

  AND ONE OF THE GAMEST

  AND MOST GENEROUS OF HORSES.

  That is the epitaph on the monument of Domino, the “Black Whirlwind,” who was buried in 1897 in a grave outside of Lexington. There was no faster horse than Domino in the sprints—he was the Jesse Owens of his species in the Gay Nineties—and when they retired him to stud, he whirled the wind again as a progenitor. Domino died at six, twenty years too soon for a sire of his prepotency, and he left only twenty offspring from his duty as a stud horse, eleven daughters and nine sons. But among the sons was Commando, a horse who would strike his and his sire’s names into the pedigree charts of champions for many years. Through Pink Domino, a daughter, his name would surface often in the family trees of numerous racehorses, appearing in the distant collateral reaches of the bloodlines of many modern horses, including the colt Gentry delivered that night at The Meadow.

  Domino was a phenomenon, a complete thoroughbred, sui generis. He remains today one of the few American racehorses in history who left the land and became one of the fastest horses of his era, then returned to it and made an even deeper imprint on the breed itself. Most thoroughbreds, in the days of Domino and since him, left the land and failed at the races—if they ever got to the races at all, which many did not—or they raced through careers of declining mediocrity. Many colts were gelded along the way, destroyed for a variety of reasons, sold for use as saddle horses or jumping or hunting horses, or hitched to wagons or rented out, by the hour, at livery stables everywhere.

  Scores of stallions, coming off superior racing careers, failed as stud horses, some more ignominiously than others. Sir Barton, winner of the 1919 Triple Crown, failed to transmit much of his speed to his offspring, and he finished out his stud career at a cavalry remount station in Douglas, Wyoming. Grey Lag, one of the most gifted runners in the early 1920s—winner of the 1921 Belmont Stakes and the prestigious Brooklyn Handicap—was virtually sterile when sent to stud. Returned to the races at age nine, he had trouble beating horses that could not have warmed him up in his younger days. He was retired a second time, given away, and a few years later was discovered again, at the age of thirteen, running against cheap $1000 claiming horses in Canada. Harry F. Sinclair, who raced Grey Lag in his prime while leasing oil fields at Teapot Dome, was in no need of more adverse publicity. Quietly, he dispatched an agent to Canada, bought the horse, and retired him to his Rancocas Farm. Grey Lag never raced again, living out his life as a pensioner. The other famous impotent, 1946 Triple Crown winner Assault, did the same, as did many fine geldings, such as Exterminator and Armed.

  But most of the horses sent back to the farms, the many fillies and mares and the few colts and horses, were pressed into the service of breeding enterprises, of large stud farms such as Hamburg Place and Himyar, Rancocas and Idle Hour and Calumet Farm. The fortunes of the farms and their owners, in some ways, ran with the fortunes of the horses and the bloodlines they produced. All of them would rise to prominence in their day, wane, reemerge, or die away. There is no great Himyar anymore, no flourishing Idle Hour since Colonel E.R. Bradley died, though the land still raises horses. Sinclair sold the last of the Rancocas horses in 1932, all but Zev and Grey Lag. Hamburg Place, once the showplace of American breeding, bred its last Derby winner, Alysheba, in 1984. And Calumet Farm is no longer the 1927 Yankees it was when Bull Lea filled the farm’s stable with so many high-classed runners, three Derby winners and all those nimble-footed tomboys. But what is behind them, behind all the young horses and the new owners and breeders of thoroughbreds, is the land.

  While Christopher T. Chenery was piecing together the shards of his family homestead, the descendants of Richard J. Hancock emerged as the leading breeders of thoroughbreds in America. It had taken seventy years.

  R. J. Hancock founded Ellerslie Stud and within ten years of the war had bought his first stallion, Scathelock, and his first broodmare, War Song. That was the start.

  Hancock’s rise to prominence as a Virginia breeder actually began after he acquired the stallion Eolus from a Maryland breeder, swapping Scathelock in an even trade. The transaction revealed Hancock’s shrewd eye for horses. Eolus sired a number of winners, giving a measure of prestige to the Hancock name among Virginia horsemen. Among the best was Knight of Ellerslie, who not only won the 1884 Preakness Stakes, but also made a name as the sire of Henry of Navarre, the chestnut colt who battled Domino, the Black Whirlwind, in one of the most celebrated struggles in the history of the American turf. High-rolling Pittsburgh Phil bet $100,000 on Domino and calmly ate figs out of a bag as he watched the two horses struggle to a dead heat.

  Eolus died three years later, in 1897, but by then Ellerslie had become a major thoroughbred nursery in Virginia, selling its yearlings every year at auction, buying and raising its own bloodstock. And by then, too, Richard Hancock’s son, Arthur, had graduated from the University of Chicago, a reedy young man, six feet six inches and 165 pounds, who came home in 1895 to be about his father’s business. He became his father’s assistant, attending yearling sales and doing his novitiate on the farm. And then, within one three-year period, a series of events occurred in Arthur Hancock’s life that enlarged its scope and potential, multiplying the possibilities open to him as a breeder.

  In 1907, seeking a man without local ties or friendships, Senator Camden Johnson of Kentucky invited Hancock to judge a class of thoroughbreds at the Blue Grass Fair in Kentucky. Hancock accepted. While he was there, he met Nancy Tucker Clay, one of the many Clays of Bourbon County. Like the Harrises of Virginia, the Clays of Kentucky were landed gentry, owning lots of land, acres of some of the choicest real estate in the Blue Grass country. Nancy Clay and Arthur Hancock were married the following year, in 1908, fusing a family owning one of the finest estates in Virginia with another owning miles of rolling greenery in Kentucky.

  In 1909, Arthur Hancock took over the operation of Ellerslie from his aging father.

  In 1910, within a span of four days, Nancy Clay Hancock’s father and mother died. Nancy Hancock inherited 1300 acres of property in Paris, Kentucky, rich farmland set off Winchester Road. So the events of the year made Hancock the steward of two manors, and they left him an heir to his fortune and name. Earlier in the year, Nancy Hancock had given birth to a son, Arthur Boyd Hancock, Jr., a man whose influence on American bloodstock would one day exceed that of his father. Arthur Hancock, Sr., did not take long to coordinate the operations at Ellerslie and Claiborne Farm, the name they chose for the land in Paris. The Hancock stud at Ellerslie survived the horse-racing blackout of 1911–1912, when the sport was outlawed in New York during an outburst of moral fervor, but Hancock had to cut back the broodmare band to all but about twelve mares. Over the next twenty-five years, Hancock’s long climb to preeminence as a breeder began. He moved his family permanently to the Kentucky farm in 1912, a move suggesting that he knew Kentucky would one day be the home of thoroughbred breeding in America.

  A year later he bought the stallion Celt, a son of Commando, for $20,000 in a dispersal sale at Madison Square Garden. Under Celt, the Hancock stud regained the vigor it possessed in the days of Eolus. Hancock’s interest in foreign bloodstock heightened when the prices dropped in Europe at the start of World War I. In 1915 he bought the English stallion, Wrack, for $8000 from Archibald Philip Rosbery. It marked Hancock’s first major acquisition of a foreign stallion, and it launched a breeding operation at Claiborne Farm, where Wrack was sent to stud. Barns were built near Kennedy Creek. Part of the land was fenced with planking. A grazing paddock was built for Wrack to loll away his idle hours. And the farm itself expanded, growing in size from 1300 to 2100 acres.

  The Hancock studs flourished in the 1920s, grew in influence and prestige. In 1921, Celt was America’s leading thoroughbred sire in the amount of money won by his offspring, his fifty-two performing sons and daughters winning 124 races and $206,167 in purses. Hancock
reached out for more foreign blood. His acquisition of foreign bloodstock reached its zenith in 1926, when he formed a four-man group—composed of Hanover Bank president William Woodward, Marshall Field, Robert Fairbairn, and himself—and bought Sir Gallahad III, a French stallion and a son of Teddy, for $125,000. Sir Gallahad’s impact at the stud was felt almost at once.

  Bred his first year in America to Marguerite, a daughter of Celt, he sired Belair Stud’s Gallant Fox. “The Fox of Belair,” as he came to be known, won the Triple Crown in 1930, the second horse to do it. Sir Gallahad III was the leading American sire that year, with just sixteen offspring winning forty-nine races and $422,200, a record in purses that stood until 1942. He led the sire list three more times, his horses winning more than the horses sired by any other stallion.

  Through the importation of the potent Teddy blood, through Sir Gallahad III and later his full brother, Bull Dog, American and other imported blood was freshened and invigorated. Sir Gallahad III’s influence became unusually pervasive in his role as a “broodmare sire,” so pervasive that he led the annual broodmare sire list for twelve years, ten years in a row, from 1943 to 1952. The broodmare sire list is a special category that singles out stallions whose daughters are exceptional producers. For twelve years the daughters of Sir Gallahad III produced racehorses that won more money than the racehorses produced by the daughters of any other sire. No horse in American history, before or since, ever dominated that list so long. He sired La France, dam of the 1939 Kentucky Derby and Belmont Stakes winner, Johnstown; and he sired Gallette, dam of champion handicap mare Gallorette; Fighting Lady, dam of the speedy Armageddon; and Black Wave, dam of the 1947 Kentucky Derby winner, Jet Pilot.

  In 1936, Hancock was instrumental in bringing Blenheim II, the 1930 Epsom Derby winner, to America. Blenheim II cost an American syndicate $250,000. Among Blenheim II’s first sons to reach the races in America was Whirlaway, winner of the 1941 Triple Crown, the fifth horse to win it.

  Hancock’s fortunes as a breeder soared. In 1935, horses bred by Hancock won more races—392—and more money—$359,218—than the horses bred by any other breeder. He led the breeder lists for the next two years. Hancock was not racing his homebreds. Following a policy adopted originally by his father in 1886, he sold his yearlings at auction every year. Through the years, he developed a reputation as a breeder knowledgeable about bloodlines, both foreign and domestic, who could recall in minute detail the distant reaches of a pedigree.

  By then his son Arthur was a student of breeding, too. “I grew up at Claiborne and when I was twelve, my father was paying me fifty cents a day to sweep out after the yearlings,” he once said. That was in the summer of 1922, the year before he left the public school system in Paris and went to Saint Mark’s Academy in Southborough, Massachusetts, a bastion of righteous Episcopalianism, where he subscribed to the Daily Racing Form, the industry’s trade newspaper and the horseplayer’s bible. He transferred to Woodberry Forest, a Virginia school, and there picked up his nickname, Bull, by which he would one day be known throughout all the major world marketplaces for the blooded horse. His central ambition was to be a thoroughbred breeder.

  In the summers of his youth, when his jobs went beyond sweeping out after the yearlings, he worked with the broodmares, the stud horses, the yearlings, the farm veterinarian, alternating jobs summer after summer. He went to Princeton, played baseball and football, and earned letters. He was a six-foot-two raconteur with a reverberating baritone voice.

  At Princeton he studied eugenics, French, and genetics. And when he graduated in 1933 he returned to Claiborne, as his father had returned to Ellerslie almost forty years before, to become his father’s assistant. He learned, as his father learned, from the grass up—about the care and feeding of the yearlings and the broodmares and the stud horses, starting from the beginning. He learned about the land, too, walking it so often that one day he would know every tree and plank on it.

  “I never wanted to be anything but a horseman,” Bull once said. “I just never thought of anything else.”

  Chapter 4

  Claiborne Farm was no empire of prepotent young stallions and mares of promise when Bull Hancock returned to it in 1945, the year the air corps released him after his father suffered the first of several heart attacks.

  Bull was thirty-five then and much had begun to wane since he became his father’s assistant. What he came back to was a farm with a twilight presence to it—old stallions and old mares and an aging, ailing owner who would not let go. Arthur Hancock, Sr., had been the leading breeder again in America, but there had been no infusion of fresh bloodstock. Breeding blooded horses is an enterprise that flourishes most vigorously with recurrent transfusions of young horses and mares of quality, with the culling of the failures and the replacement of the aging stock with younger animals. Stallions and mares—with some notorious exceptions—usually produce their finest offspring before they reach the age of fifteen.

  In 1945, Blenheim II was already eighteen years old and beyond his prime, though he later sired several excellent runners. Sir Gallahad III, whose influence as a broodmare sire was growing, was a ripened twenty-five and only four years away from Valhalla. The younger stallions were not successful. In general, the 250 mares living on the farm, most of them owned by Claiborne’s clients, who boarded them there, were well bred but not exceptional producers. Hancock was unenthusiastic about the quality of Claiborne’s own mares. “We had gone twelve years without replacing stock,” he once recalled. “He [Arthur, Sr.] had sold everything. When I took over he had about seventy-five mares and I didn’t like any of them, except two. I started rebuilding. I made up my mind that my children wouldn’t have to go through what I did.” And by 1950, when he was refreshing the bloodstock with mares like Miss Disco, he already had two sons. The oldest was Arthur B. Hancock III. And the youngest, an infant at the time, was Seth.

  The rebirth of the Hancock breeding dynasty actually began to take place six years earlier, launched by an event so inconspicuous that it stirred only the mildest notice of a day. It occurred when the Georgian Prince Dimitri Djordjadze and his wife Audrey, a Cincinnati heiress, decided to retire their little bay colt, Princequillo, and arranged to have him stand at stud in Virginia.

  Almost two decades earlier, in 1928, two figures connected with the Belgian turf purchased a weanling—a colt by the stallion Rose Prince out of a mare named Indolence. The cost was 260 guineas. The weanling, shipped to Belgium, was named Prince Rose.

  Prince Rose became the greatest racehorse in the Belgium of his day—probably the best that had ever run in that country—and one of its greatest sires. He had the bloodlines: Prince Rose’s sire, Rose Prince, was by Prince Palatine, a son of Persimmon, who was himself a son of one of the greatest sires in thoroughbred history, the undefeated St. Simon. As a direct male-line descendant of St. Simon, Prince Rose descended in what is called “tail male” from St. Simon, a potentially valuable genetic trait. The St. Simon male line produced an unusual number of superior horses.

  As Prince Rose was establishing himself as Belgium’s leading sire, the American representative in France for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Laudy Lawrence, obtained the horse from Belgium on a three-year lease. Lawrence brought the horse to France in 1938 and installed him in his Haras de Cheffreville. In the spring of 1939, he bred Prince Rose to his mare Cosquilla, a daughter of Papyrus, winner of the Epsom Derby. She conceived. The breeding occurred in a turbulent time. War was coming to Europe. The German armies were menacing France. Pregnant, Cosquilla didn’t stay there long. She was dispatched across the English Channel, while in foal, to be bred in England the next spring.

  In early 1940, as the Battle of Britain was about to begin, Cosquilla gave birth to her bay colt at the Banstead Stud at Newmarket, near Suffolk, about ninety miles outside of London. The air war over England began in July of 1940, and later that summer or fall—after the colt had been weaned—he was sent to Lawrence’s farm in Ireland. Then, in 1941, he an
d a number of yearlings were shipped across the North Atlantic, by then a lair of submarines, to New York. The colt disembarked as a refugee of sorts.

  Named Princequillo, he was broken at the Mill River Farm in New York and put in training there. Prior to leaving the country again, Lawrence leased Princequillo to Chicago owner Anthony Pelleteri. One of the clauses of the lease permitted Pelleteri to run Princequillo in claiming races—in which the horse could be bought or “claimed” for a specific price—even though Pelleteri did not own him.

  Pelleteri raced Princequillo for the first time under a $1500 claiming tag. No one took him.

  He then ran the colt back for a $2500 claiming price, and again there were no takers.

  Pelleteri then raced Princequillo for $2500 in his fourth start, winning with him then, and that was the last time Pelleteri had him. Trainer Horatio Luro, acting for the Boone Hall Stables of Princess Djordjadze, claimed him for the price. Luro ran him as a claimer, too. Aside from his pedigree, there was no apparent reason for anyone to believe that Princequillo would develop into the best long-distance runner in America in 1943. But he did, running best beyond a mile and an eighth.

  In 1943, the spring classics were dominated by Count Fleet, an extremely fast horse who raced to easy victories in the Kentucky Derby, Preakness, and Belmont stakes and became the sixth horse in history to win the American Triple Crown. He won the Belmont Stakes by twenty-five lengths, the longest margin by which it had ever been won. Princequillo began his three-year-old year modestly. He won an allowance race in New Orleans, not a major racetrack compared with those in New York, then lost two others there, but he quickly became sharp. On June 12, seven days after Count Fleet rushed to his record-breaking clocking in the Belmont Stakes—clipping two-fifths of a second off War Admiral’s stakes record of 2:28 3/5 for the mile and a half—Princequillo ran the best race in his career. He defeated Bolingbroke, the great long distancer, beating him going a mile and five-eighths.

 

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