Secretariat

by William Nack

  He seemed destined for some measure of success from the outset. There was so much in his favor. Bold Ruler would begin with the choicest mares. Hancock, as well as Mrs. Phipps and her son, Ogden, and other clients at Claiborne had assembled bands of champion race and broodmares over the years—the foundations of all great studs—and to Bold Ruler many of them would be sent.

  He had the pedigree himself, on both the male and the female sides, representing a popular foreign and domestic mixture of bloodlines in his ancestry: the son of a thoroughly European stallion and a completely American mare. Genetically, he was what is known as a “complete outcross,” with no name appearing more than once in the first four generations of his family tree.

  Since siring Bold Ruler in 1952, Nasrullah himself had become a champion stallion in America, representing the flourishing Nearco male line, and his dam, Mumtaz Begum, was among the most prized of mares in the Aga Khan’s magnificent stud. She herself was a daughter of Blenheim II, the stallion later imported to stand at Claiborne Farm, and Europe’s “flying filly” Mumtaz Mahal. By the time Bold Ruler was sent to Claiborne, Nasrullah had already led all American sires in 1955, when his performers won 69 races and $1,433,660, and in 1956, when they won 106 races and $1,462,413. Bold Ruler was only one of several champion runners by Nasrullah: he also sired the 1955 Horse of the Year, William Woodward’s Nashua, who retired in 1956 with earnings of $1,288,565, a world record until Round Table broke it three years later. Nasrullah had also sired the 1956 two-year-old filly champion, Charlton Clay’s Leallah; the 1957 two-year-old colt champion, Nadir, eventual winner of $434,316; and Captain Harry F. Guggenheim’s Bald Eagle, America’s champion handicap horse of 1960 and the winner of $676,442.

  Miss Disco, among the fastest fillies of her generation, was no doubt a source of some of Bold Ruler’s quickness, and as a daughter of one of the greatest weight carriers of all time, she gave bone and bottom to the underside of Bold Ruler’s pedigree. He had everything a sire should have.

  Bold Ruler also had the brilliant speed of the Nearco tribe—speed is an important characteristic for a stud horse to have—and he had it in greater abundance than any other of Nasrullah’s sons and daughters. Moreover, he carried that speed the classic distance of a mile and a quarter, and he did it carrying high weights against horses who were just as serious about their business as he—Clem, Gallant Man, Sharpsburg, and Round Table.

  Yet no one, not even a breeder as experienced and astute as Bull Hancock, could have foreseen the extent to which Bold Ruler would dominate the American sire championships. He became a phenomenon at the stud, and some believe the greatest sire in the history of American bloodstock.

  For seven successive years Bold Ruler was the leading American stallion. Only Lexington, a stallion from a different era, was America’s leading sire more often, for sixteen years between 1861 and 1878. But the two horses are hardly comparable. The “Blind Hero of Woodburn,” as Lexington was known, competed with only 215 sires of runners in the last year he was the champion, 1878. In 1969, Bold Ruler was competing with 5829 sires of runners. Only three other stallions—Star Shoot, Bull Lea, and Bold Ruler’s own sire, Nasrullah—led the list as many as five times.

  His reign as America’s premier blooded stallion began in 1963, when his twenty-six performers from only two crops of racing age won fifty-six races and $917,531. And this was only a foreshadowing. His influence and power as a stallion grew steadily.

  In 1964—44 performers, 88 wins, and $1,457,156.

  In 1965—51 performers, 90 wins, and $1,091,924.

  In 1966—51 performers, 107 wins, and $2,306,523, the first time in history a stallion’s progeny ever won more than $2 million in a single season.

  In 1967—63 performers, 135 wins, and $2,249,272.

  In 1968—51 performers, 99 wins, and $1,988,427.

  In 1969—59 performers, 90 wins, and $1,357,144.

  While his two-year-olds were often precocious and brilliant, and for five years he was America’s leading sire of juveniles, Bold Ruler’s ability to transmit stamina became suspect. His sons Bold Lad, Successor, and Vitriolic, as well as his daughters Queen of the Stage and Queen Empress, were all champion two-year-olds in their divisions. Yet each failed to return as a champion three-year-old, the year the distances stretch out. No son or daughter of Bold Ruler, in all the seven seasons he dominated the sire standings, had ever won the Kentucky Derby, Preakness, or Belmont stakes.

  As he added championship upon championship to his record at the stud, his value as a stallion climbed to an incalculable level. Gladys Phipps was the founder of a major racing dynasty, one supported largely by dozens of valuable broodmares at Claiborne Farm, and she and her heirs were interested in maintaining and building on it, not selling the fruits of it piecemeal.

  Money could be made in many ways, but there was only one Bold Ruler, and he was the stuff to build and serve a racing dynasty. William Woodward, Sr., was fond of saying, “Upon the quality of the matron depends the success of the stud.” Bull Hancock later agreed with that, but he would add, “Remember, Mr. Woodward’s big success came when he got Sir Gallahad III as a stallion. As long as I have a Nasrullah and a Princequillo, an Ambiorix, Double Jay and Hill Prince, I’ll be on top.” (Ambiorix, another import from France, and Double Jay were leading stallions in America in the postwar resurgence of Claiborne as a thoroughbred nursery.)

  Mrs. Phipps had the greatest stallion in the history of the American turf in this century, and his breeding services were not for sale. Owners of mares would have to enter into an unusual agreement with the Phippses to get a mare bred to Bold Ruler. In general, a breeder would offer the Phippses a prospective broodmare for Bold Ruler. If the mare was acceptable, she would be bred to Bold Ruler for two seasons, or until she had two foals. First choice of the foals was determined by the flip of a coin. Thus, Bold Ruler was the Phippses’ lever in acquiring foals out of some of the finest broodmares in the world, broodmares they did not own. And one of the breeders with high-class mares was Ogden Phipps’s friend, and a fellow member of the Jockey Club, Christopher T. Chenery.

  Chenery had been sending mares regularly to Bold Ruler at Claiborne, where he had Hill Prince standing at the stud, since Bold Ruler stood his initial season there. The first mare Chenery sent him was Imperatrice, and in 1960 the twenty-two-year-old matron had a filly foal that Mrs. Chenery named Speedwell. The Meadow Stable’s Speedwell was Bold Ruler’s first of many stakes winners. Chenery sent his mare First Flush to Bold Ruler in 1961, and she had a filly foal named Bold Experience, who eventually won $91,477 at the races.

  In 1965, Chenery ceased sending mares singly to Bold Ruler. Instead, in a coin-flip arrangement with the Phippses, he began sending two mares to Claiborne every year. The Phipps-Chenery deal, matching the greatest sire in America with some of Chenery’s choicest mares, was anything but a smash: the biggest winner, the stakes-winning Virginia Delegate who started fifty-five times and won $67,154, ended up a gelding.

  Then events began unfolding in the spring of 1968 that set the stage for the most monumental coin toss in racing history, a curious flip in which the winner lost and the loser won—but neither knew it at the time.

  For the breeding season of 1968, Chenery sent the mares Somethingroyal and Hasty Matelda across the Alleghenies to Claiborne Farm. Each was bred to Bold Ruler. Each conceived. Each had a foal the following year.

  Hasty Matelda had a colt foal.

  On March 19, 1969, Somethingroyal had a filly foal.

  Just a month later at Claiborne Farm, Somethingroyal entered her heat cycle, and on April 20 she was separated from her suckling foal and taken to a stall at one end of the black creosote board breeding shed at Claiborne. In the adjoining stall, his head sticking into Somethingroyal’s stall over an open half door, was a “teasing” stallion named Charlie, a mongrel of Percheron and saddle horse ancestry. Somethingroyal was already believed to be in heat, but the breeding men wanted to be sure, so they walked her into
that stall next to Charlie the teaser. Charlie nipped at Somethingroyal, sniffed at her, nuzzled her. She did not protest, backing up to Charlie, squatting, and exposing herself to him. “She was red hot,” said the keeper of the stallions, Lawrence Robinson. But Somethingroyal was not mounted by Charlie, as are some of the virgin mares. A few of the thoroughbred stallions at Claiborne come into the breeding shed screaming and whinnying. Such carryings-on can frighten a maiden mare, especially when the screamer mounts her for the first time. Docile Charlie, among his other jobs at the farm, was trotted out to mount such nervous mares—though he did not have intercourse with them—to get them used to it.

  Somethingroyal was taken around the breeding shed, where the road runs past the huge sliding front doors, and walked inside the large 35-by-35-foot room. Robinson signaled Snow Fields, Bold Ruler’s groom. Fields went to the main cinder block stallion barn and unfastened the sliding bolt from Bold Ruler’s stall, with its fireproof ceiling and stained oak walls and heavy oaken door. Snow slipped a bridle on the horse, inserting a straight, stainless-steel bar bit in his mouth, clipped a lead shank to it, and walked the horse the short distance from the stall to the front of the breeding shed.

  Robinson met Fields outside the shed, took the shank, and walked Bold Ruler through the door, turning him around in the nearest corner so that he faced Somethingroyal, who was standing in the center of the room with her back to him. One man held Somethingroyal. Her hind legs stood in an indentation on the gravel floor where the hind legs of hundreds of other mares had stood while breeding and bearing the weight of the stallion. Other men—including Dr. Walter Kaufman, holding a pint cup—waited nearby.

  Bold Ruler’s penis dropped from its flap as he walked into the breeding shed. He was a fifteen-year-old horse who knew what he was about. The mood was sober and businesslike.

  Fields immediately dipped a sponge into a bucket of warm, clear water and washed Bold Ruler’s penis, which was beginning to stiffen. Some stallions excite themselves into readiness by sniffing at a mare, but Bold Ruler was not one of them. All he needed to do was look. Robinson restrained the horse, who soon began prancing, and waited until he saw the horse was ready, watching for the penis to harden fully. Irving Embry, at the front of Somethingroyal, lifted up her left front foot, a precaution designed to prevent her from kicking Bold Ruler while he mounted her. Another man moved in and lifted the mare’s tail. Privacy was neither demanded nor afforded.

  Robinson brought the horse forward and raised the shank. Bold Ruler mounted Somethingroyal in an instant. Holding the shank with his left hand, standing on the left side of the horse and mare, Robinson gave Bold Ruler one final assist: with his right hand, he guided the penis in. Bold Ruler was inside Somethingroyal no more than two and a half minutes, and Robinson watched for the single most compelling sign that the horse had covered the mare, watched for the flagging of the horse’s tail, the dipping of it during orgasm. Some stud horses dismount during copulation, either to rest or prolong the pleasure of it, but Bold Ruler rarely did. “He was one of the most wonderfullest coverin’ horses you have ever seen,” Robinson said. “The first time up, every time.”

  Bold Ruler flagged. And as he dismounted Somethingroyal, Dr. Kaufman came to the horse’s side with the pint cup to catch a dripping for examination. Then Fields, with a sponge dipped into a soap and disinfectant solution, washed the horse again. Bold Ruler was then led from the barn, no more than five minutes after he walked into it, and was turned out to romp on the greenery of his nearby private pasture.

  Kaufman later checked the dripping, in a routine examination, to make sure the horse had ejaculated. He had.

  Two days later, on April 22, Somethingroyal was returned to the breeding shed for a second and final mating with Bold Ruler. The same procedure was repeated. There was no way of telling, Robinson said, when Somethingroyal actually got pregnant that spring. But she did.

  That year, The Meadow sent Cicada to Bold Ruler as the second mare in the arrangement with Phipps, but she proved barren.

  In the summer of 1969, Penny Tweedy was in Saratoga to meet Phipps and Phipps’s trainer, Eddie Neloy, in the offices of the chairman of the board of trustees of the New York Racing Association, James Cox Brady. It was time to flip the coin.

  Each knew the consequences of winning the toss.

  Under the rules of the flip arrangement, the winner of the flip would automatically get first choice of the first pair of foals—the two born in 1969—either the Somethingroyal filly or the Hasty Matelda colt. The loser, while getting the second choice of the first pair, automatically would get the first choice of the second pair of foals. And the winner would get the second choice of the second pair.

  But there would be no second foal in the second pair. Somethingroyal was pregnant, but Cicada was barren.

  So neither party wanted to win. The winner would get only one of the three foals, the first choice of the first pair. The loser of the flip would get the second choice of the first pair but also the only foal to be born in 1970—the foal that Somethingroyal was carrying on that day in August.

  The coin sailed in the air. Ogden Phipps returned to his box seat and dourly told his son, Ogden Mills Phipps, “We won the toss.” And that was it. The Phippses took the filly foal from Somethingroyal. They called her The Bride; she couldn’t run a lick, finishing out of the money in four starts as a two-year-old before she was retired to the Phippses’ stud at Claiborne. The Meadow Stable got the Hasty Matelda colt, who was named Rising River because he was foaled when the river below The Meadow was flooding. He always had more problems than future.

  The Bride was weaned at Claiborne in the fall of 1969 and taken from her mother at Claiborne. On November 14, Somethingroyal was loaded on a van and returned across the Alleghenies to Doswell. She was almost seven months pregnant. She spent the winter that year at The Meadow, with the other broodmares, her belly growing larger and rounder until came that chilly night of March 29, 1970, when Southworth rang Gentry from the foaling barn in the field.

  Chapter 7

  The newborn Somethingroyal foal gained his legs just forty-five minutes after birth and began suckling when he was an hour and fifteen minutes old. He was well made, well bred, healthy, and hungry, and that made him as much a potential Kentucky Derby winner as any of the other 24,953 thoroughbreds born in America in 1970.

  The mare and the foal were turned loose together the following day in a confined one-acre paddock behind the foaling barn. So that the newborn foal does not injure himself trying to stay at her side, a mare is not given much room to run and roam about. After the foal had gained the strength to stay with her—four days later—the pair was turned out with other mares and their foals in a three-acre pasture near the broodmare barn. The routine of farm life began.

  For six weeks the mare and foal were pastured in the daytime, and returned at night to their single Stall 3 in the broodmare barn. The routine changed in mid-May, when groom Lewis Tillman began taking them outdoors in the early afternoon, leaving them out all night, and then returning them in the morning to Stall 3. The foal subsisted on Somethingroyal’s milk for the first thirty-five days of his life. Then Tillman began to supplement the youngster’s regimen with grain, preparing him for the day of weaning in October. Tillman would tie up the mare in the stall and give the colt small portions of crushed oats and sweet feed. He grew quickly as the summer passed. Christopher Chenery’s personal secretary of thirty-three years, Elizabeth Ham, visited the farm and looked at the foals. Miss Ham noted in her log, dated July 28, 1970:

  Ch. C Bold Ruler-Somethingroyal

  Three white stockings—Well-made colt—Might be a little light under the knees—Stands well on pasterns—Good straight hind leg—Good shoulders and hindquarters—You would have to like him.

  Summer cooled into October. The daily rations of the Bold Ruler colt were boosted periodically, up to five and finally to six quarts of grain a day by the time he was separated from Somethingroyal on October
6, 1970. Like other newly weaned colts, the youngster howled and stomped around the stall and field, but that passed in a couple of days. Somethingroyal was far into pregnancy once again by then, this time carrying a foal by the Meadow stallion First Landing. The aging Imperatrice, the colt’s maternal granddam, had been bred for the last time in 1964, and since then had been pressed into service as baby-sitter for nervous, young, and uncertain mares, especially for broodmares visiting the farm. They would gather around her in a field, as if around a grandmother, within the apron and circumference of her calm. Chenery had bought her twenty-three years before, when she was nine in 1947, so while her grandson was romping around toward his yearling year, which would begin January 1, 1971, Imperatrice was already pushing thirty-three. She was aging visibly, three dozen ribs and elbows dressed up inside an old fur coat, but her eyes were clear. Everyone hoped she would live to reach the milestone age of thirty-five.

  Her chestnut grandson had begun to fill out into a striking if still pony-sized colt by the day of his weaning, and on October 11, Miss Ham was moved to note: “Three white feet—A lovely colt.” Lovely was twice underlined.

  In autumn it was time to name the weanlings, a tiresome process for many owners. Nine of ten names submitted to the stewards of the Jockey Club, which administers the naming of all thoroughbreds, are rejected for various reasons. Under the rules of the Jockey Club, a name cannot be that of a famous horse, such as Swaps; or advertise a trade name, such as Bromo-Seltzer; or be that of an illustrious or infamous person, such as Jesus Christ or Hitler; or duplicate the name of a horse having either raced or served in the stud during the last fifteen years, such as Virginia Delegate or Imperatrice; or have more than eighteen characters, including spaces and punctuation marks (Man o’ War, for instance, counts ten characters). Nor are names of living persons allowed unless they give their written consent, as have Shecky Greene, Pete Rose, and Chris Evert. Most names are rejected because they are identical to the names of existing horses.