Secretariat

by William Nack

  “Whatsah mattah, Ronnie, you fall asleep out there?”

  “That’s the last time you’ll ever ride that horse.”

  “Where are the stewards?” said another. “A 1–5 shot runs like he’s 50–1.”

  Ed Sweat led Secretariat down the racetrack, back toward the receiving barn, his face expressionless amid the taunts and boos that followed him. Henny Hoeffner led Angle Light into the winner’s circle. Pictures were snapped, and Vasquez hopped off. Laurin walked immediately to Turcotte, who had just weighed out at the scale. Turcotte’s brow was furrowed, his eyes wide open as he talked to Laurin. He looked like a man who was genuinely amazed.

  “He just didn’t fire,” Turcotte said. Turcotte walked across the paddock for the jockeys’ room, descending the staircase below a crowd of bettors that jeered him raucously.

  Laurin, talking to reporters, said he couldn’t explain it. “Ronnie says the horse didn’t fire,” he said. “Didn’t have his usual punch. I think they lost the race on the turn, going wide. That and the slow pace.”

  Awkwardly, somewhat sheepishly, Vasquez stood around a moment as if waiting to apologize to someone, to anyone, for winning the Wood. He had ridden brilliantly, with understanding and insight, engineering the most artful upset in New York racing in the last year. Vasquez reached out his hand to Laurin.

  Sitting nearby on the bench in front of his locker, a towel wrapped around him, Turcotte was listening to Vasquez expound upon the race. “I always thought Angle Light was a good colt,” Turcotte said quietly. “Never as good as Secretariat, but a good colt. I always knew he was as good as those other horses.”

  The race had plainly baffled and worried him, and he was trying to make sense of it.

  What puzzled him was the colt’s uncharacteristic dullness throughout the race.

  That afternoon and evening—in fact for the next several days—Turcotte would examine a whole range of explanations for Secretariat’s race in the Wood, turning each one over in his mind. He was reaching for something to hold on to, for some clue to explain the horse’s lethargy, for something that might make sense to him. He knew Secretariat well by then. He had ridden him in most all major workouts and in all races since the summer past, and the race in the Wood simply didn’t figure in any pattern that he knew. The Derby was only two weeks away, which left him no time to fool himself.

  Turcotte considered that Secretariat, as a son of Bold Ruler, might be out of his depth in races beyond a mile, despite the colt’s rompings in the Laurel Futurity and Garden State Stakes and the records of the several Bold Rulers who had won at a mile and a quarter. It was known as the “invisible shield” theory, and it was trotted out whenever a Bold Ruler ran brilliantly in the sprints and then stopped at nine or ten furlongs, as if running into something unseen. Turcotte also rejected a correlative belief that Secretariat, as a scion of the temperamental Nasrullah tribe, resented being taken back and rated off the pace, finally refusing to run when Ron asked him. Bold Ruler had resented Arcaro’s exertions in the 1957 Kentucky Derby, and he came up sulking down the backside. Penny Tweedy, among others, came to believe this theory to explain away the Wood.

  Turcotte summarily rejected it. Never had Secretariat shown any tendency to sulk. He was not a moody horse. In all those workouts and races, Turcotte could not recall any problems of temperament. Secretariat never quit, never spit out the bit and refused to run. In fact Turcotte had come to regard him as a kind of model of tractability. He could do anything with him. Several days before the Wood, recalling races on the colt, Turcotte said he thought he had ridden him poorly in the Garden State Stakes. He took him back sharply after the break, falling many lengths behind. Secretariat didn’t sulk then.

  Why suddenly now?

  It made no sense to him. The colt hadn’t given off what Turcotte regarded as a vital sign of a sulker: a resentful hardening of the neck and body muscles.

  Nor had he acted sickly or weak. Nor had he been walking sore. He didn’t feel limp and tired. In fact, because Secretariat didn’t feel especially “short” or tired under him, Turcotte didn’t take too seriously those who blamed the slow workout. If the work had been inadequate, which it no doubt was, at least the colt would have made his run and then tired. But he didn’t even do that.

  Reluctantly, for want of a more compelling explanation, Turcotte, who still didn’t know about the abscess, finally settled on the notion that the record-tying mile in the Gotham Stakes probably sapped more out of Secretariat than anyone had realized, dulling his edges severely.

  The impact of the Wood was felt at once, and reaction to it ran from the anger of Pancho and Penny to the alarm and concern of syndicate members, even to a cause for hope among owners who’d been conceding the Derby to the dominant shape of Secretariat. All bets were off. The Wood threw open wide the Derby doors—buggered it up, as Whittaker said. But more, it colored the days leading to May 5, setting the frantic pace, dictating the tone of things at Churchill Downs, and heightening the tension born of the rivalry between Secretariat and Sham. The Derby had become a horse race.

  Word of Secretariat’s defeat spread swiftly from Aqueduct that day—from New York to Kentucky and Texas and Ireland and France. Telephones started ringing that evening, and they continued ringing for weeks. Many of those who had invested $190,000 in the red horse were troubled deeply over the loss. Others were not.

  Meanwhile, the Blue Grass country was rampant with rumors about Secretariat physically breaking down. The rumors said the colt was walking wide in front, a sign of bad knees, though walking wide was a characteristic of many Bold Rulers. They said he had bone chips on his knees, bad ankles, more splints hurting him, and bucked shins. The place was a nest of speculation and hearsay.

  In the stable area at Belmont Park, where just a month ago news of that sensational workout swept among the sheds, the Wood had vastly tempered enthusiasms for the colt. The change in attitude was swift, and it stunned syndicate member Vanderbilt, who spent his mornings in barns, coffee shops, and clockers’ sheds there. Listening to the talk, he heard knowledgeable horsemen no longer giving the colt a chance at Churchill Downs. He couldn’t believe it. In all his years at the racetrack, ever since his mother took him to Pimlico as a child, Vanderbilt had never seen such a wholesale abandonment of faith in a racehorse, or an abandonment executed with such suddenness, and all on the basis of just one race.

  The Wood Memorial began something that only the Derby could resolve.

  The evening of the Wood, Penny Tweedy and Laurin returned to Barn 5 at Belmont Park, and there gathered with friends and family with whom they had a dinner date at the Tweedy home in Laurel Hollow. The mood was subdued, even somber. Ron Turcotte, done working for the day, joined them as he usually did following a race. Secretariat and Angle Light, fed and cooled out, were in their stalls. Turcotte and Penny spoke briefly of the race, of his timing and even of how hard he had been working. She never told him that he ought to take time off, that perhaps he had been working too hard, but that was what Turcotte understood she meant.

  “I don’t think you were sharp in judging the pace,” Penny told him. “Your timing could be off.”

  She reminded Turcotte of Secretariat’s last workout and of an error in judgment he made while working Riva Ridge the same day. “You worked Secretariat too slow the last time you worked him a mile, and then you broke off Riva Ridge an eighth of a mile too soon in his last work,” she said. Riva Ridge was supposed to work seven-eighths, and Turcotte erred and broke him off at the mile pole, though he realized his mistake en route and compensated for it by pulling him up at the eighth pole instead of at the wire. He had no excuse for the lapse.

  Turcotte agreed that he had messed up the workout; all week he had been assuming blame for it, and he would continue to take responsibility for it. Then he added, “I thought he might blow out before the race,” but he decided not to press the point. He didn’t want to imply criticism of Lucien: Laurin worked for Penny and Ron was ridi
ng the colt because Laurin put him there. Diplomatically, it would be unwise for Turcotte to criticize Laurin to his boss.

  “The horse just didn’t run his race,” he told her. “I don’t feel I took too much hold of him. I got him in the clear and he just didn’t respond. I started nudging him at the three-quarter pole and there was no response.”

  She believed Turcotte had misjudged the pace and let Angle Light steal away with it. In fact, she wanted to take him off Secretariat and find another jockey, but they were coming to the biggest race of all, and it would not be prudent to switch jockeys now.

  She, too, knew nothing of the abscess on the upper lip.

  Penny expressed no displeasure with Laurin while they gathered in the office at Belmont Park. She would not make a scene. But when the guests left for the drive to Oyster Bay, Penny and Lucien climbed into his Mercedes and drove out the stable area and through the iron gates, then up the Cross Island Parkway north toward the sound. The drive usually took about forty-five minutes, but that evening it took them longer.

  It was a “terrible fight,” beginning before they reached the stable gate, and Penny started and controlled it, setting whatever thrust and intensity it had. She gave him little chance to speak in defense of himself.

  For that hour, Penny vented upon Lucien all the fear, suspicion, frustration, and confusion that the running of the Wood had aroused in her. She felt he had humiliated her in public. She was chagrined, but it really went beyond chagrin. She felt she had a moral obligation and responsibility to all those people who had an interest in Secretariat—to the family and her father’s estate, to Claiborne Farm and to the syndicate members—not to put the colt in the position of embarrassing himself and harming his value. She felt they had invested their faith as well as their money in the red horse, and now her trainer had beaten him with another horse.

  The ultimate chagrin was that Lucien had just told Charles Hatton the only way they could beat Secretariat was to steal the Wood. Then he up and stole it himself. And Penny was hopping mad at him. So she reproached and rebuked him the hour long, and he in turn became so furious with her that he refused to follow her directions on getting to her house.

  She even wondered whether Lucien felt some obligation to Whittaker, as one Canadian to another, and then she remembered all the times she told Lucien how she feared Angle Light, and she remembered all the times he told her there was nothing to fear, and she remembered all the easy assurances of the autumn and winter past. She knew Lucien had spent his early years bumping about the leaky-roof circuit trying to win a pot to pay the bills. She thought he had entered Angle Light in the Wood as a kind of insurance—a backup in case the red horse didn’t fire.

  “You got greedy . . .” she told him that evening in the car.

  “I couldn’t tell the other man not to run his horse in the race,” Lucien protested.

  “No you couldn’t. You’re a public trainer. Each man has his shot. But you should have warned Ronnie that this could happen. You had a special responsibility. Not that you shouldn’t have let Angle Light run, but you should have made sure that Ronnie understood your fears about him . . . You should have been super careful with Secretariat. We gave you a free service to him just to make sure you were careful with him. You should have taken Angle Light seriously and made sure Ronnie knew this was a real threat.”

  “Blame Ronnie!” Lucien cried.

  “No! I blame you because every other jock figured you weren’t going to get Secretariat beat by Angle Light. So they all took the cue from what Ronnie did! The other jocks figured, ‘Angle Light’s supposed to be a rabbit, he’s supposed to back up. Certainly Laurin won’t let this expensive horse get beat. So this must be a phony, and even though it’s a phony pace, Angle Light’s going to die, it’s all right.’ And that’s how Angle Light just stole the Wood! You’ve embarrassed yourself, you’ve embarrassed me, and you’ve embarrassed a good horse. And for nothing! Because Angle Light is never going to be any more than he was today. And if I didn’t have so much faith in you and weren’t so fond of you, I would throw you out now. I would have reason to change trainers tonight! And instead I’m going to give you hell.”

  They ended up lost in the old whaling community of Cold Spring Harbor. By the time he pulled into the Tweedy’s driveway, the fighting had subsided, and Penny was feeling better.

  “We really had a knock-down, drag-out fight and it was really so good,” she said. “By the time I got here I was pleasant. Lucien was very silent.”

  So they were Derby bound.

  On April 22, the day after the Wood, Laurin was already preparing to ship Secretariat and Angle Light by plane to Louisville. He had decided to send them the following day—Monday—accompanied by Ed Sweat as groom and Jimmy Gaffney as exercise boy. When the red horse traveled to Laurel and Garden State the autumn past, Charlie Davis took Gaffney’s place as exercise boy for Secretariat. Gaffney had his family in New York and his job behind the mutuel machines at Aqueduct, and he didn’t want to give up the money to go with the red horse then. But Secretariat in the Kentucky Derby and Preakness Stakes was something different. Thus he decided to sacrifice his mutuel clerk’s pay and accompany the colt out of town, prevailing on Laurin to send him instead of Charlie Davis.

  There would be that triumphant sweep through Louisville and Baltimore, a tour de force: he had it all dreamed out in his mind. On the day of the Belmont Stakes, the day he saw Secretariat winning the Triple Crown, he would fit himself out—tails, top hat, and cummerbund—and lead Secretariat to the starting gate on Billy Silver. Secretariat would win, and Gaffney would step down in that warm flush of victory, full of good memories. It was his wish to retire that way, and all dressed up for the occasion; he had it all worked out. Now it was the morning of April 22, in the somber wake of the Wood.

  “Are you ready to go?” Laurin asked Gaffney.

  “I’ve wanted to talk to you about that,” said Gaffney. “I’ve changed my mind. No one around here wants to talk dollars and I just can’t afford it.”

  Laurin said he understood. But Ron Turcotte was not as understanding. He remembered Gaffney had been telling him for weeks how much he was looking forward to going to Kentucky with Secretariat. So he was caught off guard.

  “I’m not going to the Derby,” Gaffney told Turcotte.

  “Why?” he asked. Turcotte would remember how disappointed he was thinking that Gaffney—of all people!—was so let down on the colt after the Wood, and after boosting him for so long.

  So Laurin sent Charlie Davis, a long-time friend of Sweat’s from Holly Hill, South Carolina, for years Laurin’s most trusted journeyman exercise boy, the regular rider of Riva Ridge. On Monday they flew to Louisville out of Kennedy, vanned the short distance from the airport to Churchill Downs, and unloaded the two colts, Billy Silver, the trunks, and the suitcases at Barn 42, the main Kentucky Derby barn. They bedded Angle Light in Stall 20. Sweat took Secretariat to Stall 21, the same stall occupied by Riva Ridge the year before.

  And there the final drive to win the Kentucky Derby began—the last two weeks of feast and fever played out in an old riverboat city on the Ohio, with its racetrack, a graceful flight of wood and spires overlooking a mile oval. The rumors of Secretariat’s unsoundness persisted and increased in the closing days; pressures intensified and bitternesses surfaced while, oblivious to most of this, thousands flocked to Louisville to see Secretariat do battle with Sham.

  The abscess had worsened since the Wood, and Sweat was clearly troubled by it. The colt was not himself. The day after their arrival in Louisville, Dr. Robert Copelan came by the barn and Sweat spotted him. Copelan was the regular veterinarian for Laurin’s horses when they were in Kentucky.

  Copelan lifted the lip, looking under it. By now the abscess was larger than on Saturday, and it was growing more painful as it matured. It was sore and puffed up and there was an actual swelling on the outside of the lip, but Copelan was not alarmed about it. It wasn’t serious. The upper l
ip was not an uncommon place for a horse to get an abscess. Copelan thought it might have been caused by a hay briar or an ingrown hair. But it was something that had to be watched and cared for. Copelan decided to treat it conservatively. He instructed Sweat to bathe it with hot towels in hopes of bringing it to a head on its own. He would lance it on Thursday if it failed to break open by then.

  So the bathings became a part of Sweat’s routine the next two days, Tuesday and Wednesday. Sweat would fill a bucket with hot water from the faucet—as hot as his hands could tolerate—dunk and wring out a towel and press the steaming cloth to the lip. The colt’s eyes would widen and Davis and Sweat would mutter to soothe him.

  Early Thursday morning, Sweat climbed out of bed and went into Stall 21 to check the abscess again. Raising the lip, he saw it had a pimple on its peak and it was festering, with pus and blood oozing from it. Grabbing a wet, clean sponge, Sweat wiped it off, then called Davis. Sweat quickly prepared another hot-towel application, and Davis held Secretariat as Sweat dunked and wrung and pressed the steaming towel to the lip, squeezing it gently, working to force the seed of the abscess from it and reduce the swelling and hence the pain. The abscess continued to drain. Doc Copelan, prepared to lance it, arrived at the barn shortly after noon on Thursday and examined it.

  “Well, Eddie,” said Copelan, looking at it, “that’s good. This thing has already ruptured on its own and I don’t think we’re going to have any more trouble with it.”

  So things were breaking for them just in time, and it wouldn’t be the last time.

  That evening—Thursday night—Jacinto Vasquez and Turcotte flew together to Louisville to work Secretariat and Angle Light the following morning. Signing into the Executive Inn not far from the track and airport, Turcotte received a message telling him to meet Laurin and Penny for a conference in her room. He went upstairs immediately. Walking into the suite, Turcotte could feel that the moment had an edge to it—sharp with emotion and tension. The Wood had been a horror show and Penny was still agonizing over it. Laurin had already spoken to friends about retiring if the colt lost the Derby. For her part, Penny knew she would seriously have to consider retiring Secretariat if he ran as poorly as he had in the Wood. She had no legal obligation to retire Secretariat, but the moral commitment was firm and unmistakable. She had told Seth that if Secretariat lost once, she would wonder why; if he lost twice, she would consider stopping him and sending him to Claiborne. She knew the colt would have to run big in the Derby. It was crucial. They could not tolerate another Wood Memorial. So they had reached a juncture together, and the future was as uncertain for them as the immediate past was bleak.