Secretariat

by William Nack

  John told her of the Irish offer. She listened to him, saying finally, “Hold on a minute. Let me get a pencil and paper. It sounds very interesting.” Penny jotted down the details. “My brother is in the Bahamas and he won’t be back until Sunday or Monday,” she told John. “I’ll have to consult with him.”

  Through Finney, the Irish had made their offer for Secretariat. Rogers and Irwin waited. And Finney waited, too, though not for the Irish alone: he was moving now to protect his domestic flank in the event the Irish deal blew up in his face.

  After speaking to Penny for the Irish, Finney then contacted a prominent horseman in Florida whose name would certainly appear on Seth’s list of potential syndicate members. So Finney asked his source to advise him if and when he was offered a share and what the terms of the contract were. If he didn’t get the whole of Secretariat for his European clients, Finney wanted to get part of him for his American clients.

  So Seth and Finney waited together, their deals unknown to each other, while Penny canvassed the members of the family.

  At about 9:30 on Wednesday evening, unknown to Finney, she called Seth as he waited in the house and read the Racing Form and wondered what had happened to her.

  “All right,” she told Seth. “We’re ready to start.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  On Friday morning, he decided, he would embark on the job before him, on his first major job as the president of Claiborne Farm, Inc.

  Seth was born on July 22, 1949, about five months before his father arranged the purchase of Nasrullah from the Irishmen. He had just turned twenty-three when Bull died. In fact he was still doing his novitiate when he was forced into the void created by his father’s death, but Bull didn’t leave the farm in Seth’s hands alone. His will created a three-man advisory committee—composed of breeders Ogden Phipps, Charles Kenney, and William Haggin Perry—to oversee the running of the place until Bull’s youngest child, then twenty, reached the age of thirty-five. Seth became the president, but his powers of decision making were limited.

  Seth didn’t have the depth of training and experience on the farm that Bull had when he took over from Arthur Hancock, Sr., in 1948. By then Bull was already nearing forty, and he had had years to learn the business of breeding horses from his father. Seth acquired most of his experience during summers at the farm, spending time with the yearlings and the broodmares between years spent at Woodberry Forest Prep School in Virginia, where Bull had studied, then later at the University of the South in Tennessee and the University of Kentucky. He graduated in agriculture in 1971, knowledgeable about the quality of hay and cattle.

  His passion was not for hay and cattle, however, but for horses, the racehorses and the farm. Through all his years in college, he was a voracious reader of racing publications, with a steady diet of the Daily Racing Form, the Thoroughbred Record, and The Blood-Horse. He wanted to work at Claiborne Farm, to learn the business as his father had learned it. After the army, he came to work for his father, permanently, in February of 1972. They had Seth’s training program all worked out.

  First he would work six months with the broodmares. Then he would work six months with the yearlings. Then he would spend a year riding the giant spread with William Taylor, the farm manager, learning all ends of running the empire. Then Seth would move into the office.

  He had just finished working six months with the broodmares when Bull died, and the set-piece training program fell apart. He never got to the yearlings, and he never spent the year trailing after Bill Taylor. Suddenly he had real work to do.

  He dove straight into the center of the place—Bull’s old office—slipping a picture of his dad beneath the glass on the top of his broad desk and spending hours working over it. “He’d leave early in the morning and he’d be gone all day,” said Ellen. “Then he’d come back home for maybe half an hour or an hour for dinner, and then he’d go back to the office and come home again about nine-thirty, and then he’d sit in his office here and read until eleven or eleven-thirty. That’s late down here. Most men are in bed by nine. He’d be up at six-fifteen. We were married only six months when all this happened and it was a big switch in our life. But I knew how much he wanted to do it and I wanted him to do it.”

  Most of the clients were his elders, and he knew he had something to prove about himself. He was intensely serious, and he was least patient and angriest with those who would exploit him because of his age—his most vulnerable point. Seth was not the sort to be shoved around. He liked and respected his father enormously, but he refused in the end to knuckle under to Bull on the matter of his college education.

  He wanted to work with horses after high school, and not go to college, but his father insisted that he get a degree, and that he get it at a school away from Kentucky. Seth went along with that for two years, attending Sewanee, then decided to transfer to the University of Kentucky, closer to the farm. Bull objected.

  “If you do, you pay your own way,” Bull finally told him.

  “I thought, ‘If he’s going to be bull-headed, I can be, too,’ ” said Seth. “So I decided to pay my own way.”

  Seth got up early on Friday to begin the selling of a racehorse for more than one had ever been sold before. He walked past the horse cemetery to the office and settled into the green chair behind the desk. He faced the fireplace and the list.

  The office was utilitarian—a beige rug, wood panels hung with pictures of horses that Claiborne raised, bred, or owned. To the front, there were oils of Nasrullah and Round Table, and on the mantel above the fireplace was a football, dedicated to Bull the day he was buried, that was used in play in the Villanova-Kentucky football game.

  Behind the desk and chair stood a wall of books—volumes of the American Stud Book, Thoroughbred Broodmare Record, and American Produce Record. To his left, within reach, was the telephone—pale green with three plastic buttons, his instrument of syndication.

  The list was his key to it. On it were the names of many prominent owners and breeders, billionaires, millionaires, and six-figure businessmen. There were the names of large and small breeders raising horses for the marketplace, private breeders who raced the horses they bred, old society breeders and newly established breeders and some dependent on the business itself. There were names of well-connected thoroughbred agents—buyers of bloodstock for a wealthy clientele—and names unknown to Seth, friends of Penny’s whom she asked him to call. The list was no tight clique of friends of Claiborne, no fraternity of the inbred elite. What they all had in common, if they had anything in common at all, were mares, money, and a serious interest in breeding and raising thoroughbreds. Socially, financially, racially, and nationally, the list was a mixed bag.

  Among the names was the Greentree Stable of John Hay Whitney and his sister, Mrs. Joan Payson; the Rokeby Stable of Paul Mellon, the sportsman and patron of the arts; and the Tartan Stable of billionaire William McKnight, who built the colossus of 3M. From the southwest were Will Farish III, the owner of Bee Bee Bee; Howard Brighton Keck, the oil executive; and Nelson Bunker Hunt, the brother of Lamar and the son of H. L. Hunt, the oil billionaire. Also on the list was the Calumet Farm of Admiral and Mrs. Gene Markey; the Mereworth Farm of Walter Salmon, Jr.; the Darby Dan Farm of John W. Galbreath; and the Fountainebleau Farm of Zenya Yoshida, the prominent Japanese breeder. In Canada there were Jean-Louis Levesque, the insurance millionaire; and sportsman Edward Plunkett Taylor, the father of Canadian racing and a major thoroughbred breeder in two countries. Also on the list were F. Eugene Dixon, who was living on a yacht at the time; the French horseman Alec Head, who once trained for the Aga Khan; the bass-voiced Warner Jones, a breeder and one of Bull’s closest friends since boyhood in Kentucky; E. V. Benjamin, Jr.; the Nuckols Brothers; and Dr. William Lockridge, who carries a clipboard at yearling sales and looks like a high school football coach. Seth would also call Bob Kleberg, whose King Ranch is larger than the state of Rhode Island; Dan Lasater, who began working for sixty cents an
hour at McDonald’s when he was seventeen and retired with $30 million at twenty-nine; Mrs. Richard C. du Pont, whose husband was a pioneer in glider aviation; Doug and Mary Carver; Mr. and Mrs. Paul Hexter; Milton (Laddie) Dance; Dr. Eslie Asbury, the Cincinnati surgeon; Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt; and Captain Tim Rogers, who was waiting to hear from Finney. And finally polo-playing Michael G. Phipps, the president of the family’s Bessemer Properties and a cousin of Ogden Phipps; and Ogden Phipps himself.

  Ogden Phipps would have owned Secretariat if he’d won that coin toss two and a half years ago, and now young Hancock was asking him to buy one-thirty-second of the colt for $190,000, just $10,000 less than he spent on the debut of his daughter Cynthia.

  Hancock had just called Phipps seeking permission to syndicate the horse. As a member of the three-man advisory committee set up to oversee the operation of the farm, Phipps would have to approve the decision. He did. And while discussing the syndication, Seth asked Phipps if he would buy a share. For several minutes they bandied the price about while Ogden hesitated.

  “Do you think I ought to go?” he asked Seth.

  “Well, Mr. Phipps, Bold Ruler was your horse and this is his greatest son. It would be a kind of slap in your horse’s face if you didn’t.”

  Bold Ruler raced in Mrs. Phipps’s colors, but Ogden managed much of the stallion’s career as a stud horse, arranging the coin flips and building the bloodstock, and finally, ordering the dying horse put down. At his mother’s death, Ogden ascended to the leadership of the most powerful racing family in America, a family with bands of the finest bred mares in the world and stables at Belmont Park filled with their sons and daughters.

  The $190,000 for a share gave him only brief pause.

  “Yes, I better go,” Ogden said.

  By the time he walked into his office early that February morning, Seth had already recorded Phipps as the first shareholder in the Secretariat syndicate. He was about to start working the telephones when he glanced outside and saw the blue 1973 Fleetwood cruising by. It was seven-forty-five. Dr. William Lockridge eased his Cadillac to a stop near the office, shut off the engine, and picked up a copy of the Daily Racing Form. It was a cold morning in Paris, and Bill Lockridge sat bundled against it in his quilted duck-feather coat, pearl gray, waiting for the van that was trailing him from his Walmac-Warnerton Farm in Lexington. Lockridge was a modest but successful market breeder, selling at auction the young horses he bred and raised himself. He was a regular customer at Claiborne Farm, breeding his mares to Claiborne stallions. In fact one of his mares had an appointment with Reviewer, a young Bold Ruler stallion, that morning. The breeding shed opens at eight o’clock, so Lockridge killed the engine and sat back with the racing form. He had fifteen minutes. His eye caught a story about Secretariat. He became engrossed in it.

  Lockridge’s opinion of Secretariat had changed considerably since he first saw him in a picture on the front of the Thoroughbred Record that past summer. At the time, the photo reminded him of something his New York trainer, Jimmy Picou, had told him earlier. Picou had seen Secretariat run, and he told Lockridge that the colt was a son of Bold Ruler who ran as if distances wouldn’t bother him. When Lockridge saw the picture, when he noticed the Nearco sloping rump and the thick muscles packed along his neck and shoulders, he concluded that he was looking at a Bold Ruler sprinter and nothing more, a prototypical dashman.

  Lockridge followed Secretariat closely through the autumn, through the extremely fast mile of the Champagne Stakes, through the stakes-record clocking in the Laurel Futurity at a mile and a sixteenth, and finally through the victory at Garden State Park. And he saw what Picou had seen as far off as Saratoga.

  What most compelled his interest in the colt, what made the colt so attractive to Lockridge as a stud horse, was the male line to which he belonged.

  Seth Hancock opened the door of Lockridge’s Cadillac, startling the doctor, and slipped in next to him.

  “I’m getting ready to start syndicating now. What do you think?” asked Seth, and quoted the price.

  “That’s the retail price,” said Lockridge, but he didn’t hesitate.

  “Do you want in?”

  Lockridge, considering it briefly, was convinced that the red horse would do well in stud, and the better he did the more he would be worth. “This horse had to do well because he was from the most genetically prepotent male line in the history of American thoroughbred racing. That line gets a higher percentage of high-class horses than any other male line in the breed.”

  “Do you want in?”

  “I certainly do,” said Lockridge.

  Secretariat being led to the track at Belmont Park for a workout.

  PHOTO: N.Y.R.A.—PAUL SCHAFER

  Secretariat, with Jockey Ron Turcotte up, finishes a morning workout at Belmont Park.

  PHOTO: N.Y.R.A.—BOB COGLIANESE

  Field of five breaks from starting gate for 105th Belmont Stakes. Secretariat is in #2 post position.

  PHOTO: N.Y.R.A.—BOB COGLIANESE

  Secretariat rounds turn for last quarter-mile in the 1½-mile race at Belmont.

  PHOTO: N.Y.R.A.—BOB COGLIANESE

  It was a record that still stands: Secretariat winning the Belmont by 31 lengths in a time of 2:24.

  PHOTO COURTESY OF THOROUGHBRED RECORD

  Ron Turcotte checks his record-shattering time as he crosses the finish line.

  PHOTO COURTESY OF THOROUGHBRED RECORD

  Chapter 19

  So the first day has begun, not behind the desk but outside the office, where Seth is shaking hands with Lockridge, climbing from the Cadillac, and ducking back inside to search the world for twenty-six more.

  Seth tells Patti Tompkins, his secretary, who is working in a nearby office, to start making calls to breeders at the top of the list, to those Penny has asked him to call, and to those he believes are most likely to buy a share. For he is moving early and quickly to lay a strong foundation for the syndicate, something he regards as essential, playing to the psychology of the marketplace as he understands and anticipates it. He knows the price and the speculative nature of the investment could create conditions for a flourishing stock market mentality, in which what appears is as vital as what is, and it is imperative to keep up the appearances.

  Seth believes that speed is important to ultimate success, that the longer the syndication takes to complete, the more suspicious of the goods becomes the marketplace.

  “See if you can get Walter Salmon for me,” Seth tells Patti.

  Tan and still vigorous, nearing seventy, Walter Salmon, Jr., has just returned home to New York from Florida, where he has heard that a Meadow Stable syndication is about to begin.

  He has already thought about buying a share in Secretariat, anticipating since hearing of Chris Chenery’s death that the colt might have to be sold to raise cash for inheritance taxes. So when Salmon picks up the phone in his Roslyn, Long Island, home—a renovated stable set back off the sound—he knows the instant he hears Seth’s voice that he is calling on the syndication of either Secretariat or Riva Ridge. It is his business to know and anticipate such things.

  Salmon’s father started him in the business of raising and selling thoroughbreds more than fifty years ago, and to that work he has applied himself ever since. At the time Seth calls, Salmon is the head of a large and diversified real estate and farming enterprise that fixes his energies on his sixty-story office building at 500 Fifth Avenue and his thirty-two-story office building at 11 West Forty-second Street, both in Manhattan; on his Hiram Walker, Coca Cola, and Canadian Club signs that wink and nod above Times Square; on Saint Thomas in the Bahamas, where he owns 120 acres of land on the top of Fortuna Mia Mountain; and on his 3500-acre showplace of a farm, called Mereworth, in the heart of the Blue Grass country, where his father bred and raised Discovery more than forty years ago. Walter Salmon owns fifty-eight broodmares and breeds and raises yearlings for the marketplace. He runs a major commercial breeding enterprise, one
of the largest and most successful in Kentucky, annually dispatching his best bred mares to some of the finest and most promising stallions in America—to Arts and Letters, Damascus, Dr. Fager, Majestic Prince, Nashua, Tom Rolfe, Creme de la Creme, Buckpasser, Le Fabuleaux, Hail to Reason, Hawaii, and Gallant Man. Salmon owns shares in numerous stallions, and he has earned a name as one of the industry’s most active buyers, investing money from his considerable fortune to gain access for his mares to all the most vigorous male lines available in the country.

  “And we wanted to know if you wanted a share in the horse,” Seth is telling him.

  “What’s the price?” Salmon asks.

  “One hundred ninety thousand a share.”

  Salmon does not leap into a commitment. He questions Seth on the terms of the contract. He wants to know, for instance, how many other commercial breeders there will be in the syndicate. Salmon always asks this. It is one of his standard questions.

  Walter Salmon thinks about it, and then he says to Seth, “I’ll call you back.”

  Walter Salmon, vigorous investor in bloodstock, will call back?

  What is wrong?

  For Seth Hancock this is the first disturbing moment. It is not a refusal, just a hesitation, but it gives him pause to wonder whether something might be whacky in the general American economy, something that would make a financially sensitive man such as Salmon hesitate to check the economic barometer. Seth knows that the thoroughbred breeding and sales industry is robustly healthy. Just a month ago, at the dispersal sale of the late Fletcher Jones’s Westerly Stud in California, the champion mare Typecast had been sold for a record $725,000, a whopping sum to be paid for a broodmare. Business has been booming in the bloodstock industry, yet Salmon is taking his time.