Secretariat

by William Nack

  Now the red horse was returning to Long Island, the soundest and most brilliant of all the candidates in history, and he generated crackling excitement in and out of the sport of racing. He had a presence to him that the others did not have, a sense of greatness, what horsemen used to call the “look of eagles.” Sweat sensed this in the horse’s poised demeanor, his superior air.

  He walked Secretariat through the shed to the loading ramp, waited a moment out of the rain, and then walked him quickly to the foot of the gentle incline and up into the wide open door. Turning the colt, Sweat backed him into a narrow stall, then clipped chains to each side of his halter. On Secretariat’s right was Spanish Riddle, while facing across from him, about ten feet away, was the melancholy Billy Silver. Sweat quickly fastened the hay rack to a post between Secretariat and Spanish Riddle, and the two reached and tore at it voraciously, nervously.

  Davis moved to Secretariat’s head, patting him and talking softly. He climbed quickly into the cab, and moments later the engine fired up, raucously, the van shook with tremors, and Secretariat spread both fores to brace himself. Sweat let out the clutch, sending the van pitching and teetering slowly through the stable to the gate. The red horse tossed his head sharply as the van hit bumps and wobbled left and right. He pawed at the floor and strained forward on the chains that held him. Davis talked to him above the engine noise.

  The van picked up speed, passing the manure bins, and Secretariat pounded violently at the rubber matting on the floor, beating and scraping it with his left fore.

  As they neared the stable gate, Davis picked up the leather end of the lead shank and put it, like a lollipop, into Secretariat’s mouth, and the colt grabbed it at once, settling down. Sweat waved to the guards at the gate—“Good luck,” one of them yelled back—and took a right on Winner Street for home.

  “As soon as we start moving, he’ll settle down,” said Davis. “He ships beautiful. No trouble. No trouble at all.”

  Sweat turned off Winner Street and headed up Northern Parkway toward the superhighways skirting Baltimore. He stopped at a light, outside the gates of the track, and motorists gazed up indifferently at the chestnut with the blaze of white down his face. It was still raining steadily, drops running down the glass, and his ears played constantly as he looked across the streets of Baltimore. Horns honked. A small child waved to him. He sniffed at the window pane.

  At three o’clock in the afternoon, Sweat came to a halt at the Belmont stable gate, turned left inside with the light, and edged slowly through the doors, parking under a mass of leaves dripping with rain. Leaves were sticking through the windows, and Secretariat sniffed at them. It had rained all the way. The cab door slammed and Sweat walked toward the office for the paperwork.

  Moments later he emerged from the office and took off in the truck through the stable area, turning left at Ogden Phipps’s barn and past Paul Mellon’s barn and the stable of the Calumet Farm. He edged past Barn 5, and there were grooms and stable workers and racing officials and photographers waiting for him, newsmen from the Associated Press and United Press International and the New York Daily News and Newsday.

  Sweat led Secretariat down the ramp and toward the barn, and everyone greeted him as he crossed the road, slapping him on the back and shouting encouragement to him.

  Cameras were clicking as photographers ducked around to get pictures. Horses’ heads popped out of stalls and regarded Secretariat as he walked past. Among them were Angle Light, Voler, Capito, and, farther on down the aisle, there was Riva Ridge. Almost a year had passed since Riva Ridge had returned from Pimlico, the latest of the Triple Crown hopefuls who had failed. Riva Ridge stuck out his nose as the red horse passed, sniffing at him. The photographers hovered for pictures. Sweat grew annoyed. A cat sneaked out of the tack room and Secretariat reached down and nibbled at him.

  “You can’t come in here with all those cameras,” said Eddie Sweat finally. But they all came anyway. Sweat turned the colt in Stall 7, freshly made with straw, unclipped the lead shank, and left. Photographers hovered, wild with delight as Secretariat made two quick turns of the stall, sniffing at the bedding, and then collapsed to his side, rolling on his back and kicking his feet in the air. They loaded film and snapped pictures of the red horse, urging him to prick his ears, which he frequently did at the sound of shutters snapping.

  Thus Secretariat came home to Belmont Park, and those first few minutes were but an augury of the weeks to come. The day after his return, a full nineteen days before the Belmont Stakes—a day that he didn’t even leave the shed—at least sixty reporters, photographers, and film crew members turned up at Barn 5, some wandering into the shed, others standing in the paddock adjoining it. Secretariat was now clearly an object of national adulation and curiosity, a source of intense interest that grew as the Belmont neared. CBS-TV was estimating that 28 million saw the Kentucky Derby, and that as many saw the Preakness Stakes. The impact of that exposure was just beginning to be felt.

  The colt became the cover boy for three national weekly magazines—Time, Newsweek, and Sports Illustrated—and the topic of features and news stories in newspapers throughout America. The two wire services had men covering the red horse daily, and television and film crews tramped to Barn 5 periodically, taking film and tape of him grazing, walking, and working on the racetrack. The traffic was so heavy, in fact, that Penny and Lucien sought to establish some kind of controls. Reporters were not allowed inside the shed, first of all, and then they were not allowed inside the paddock adjoining the barn. Then interviews were granted largely by appointment. Penny had her home phone number changed and unlisted. Secretariat was a media happening, an event whatever he did, a celebrity.

  Through the weeks leading to the Belmont Stakes, Penny became a familiar voice on radio, a face on news and talk-show television and in glossy magazines, a name in print. She was frequently referred to as the “First Lady of American Racing,” a title she would protest, but she was certainly the sport’s most engaging, visible, and energetic spokeswoman. People stopped her on the street and approached her in supermarkets. And she loved all the fame and attention. She loved the hectic eighteen-hour days leading to the race, at the barn early watching the colt exercise and giving interviews most everywhere, seated and on the run—in the paddock, in the stable office complex, in the dining room of the clubhouse, in her box seat and home and in her wine red Mercedes Benz in which she scooted hurriedly from home to racetrack to the city.

  On network television she expanded in her role, simplifying and clarifying for a public largely uninformed about racing and breeding. Thus she appeared on NBC’s Today Show, interviewed by Gene Shalit, and spoke in the simplest terms, though not patronizingly, about bloodlines and the record syndication and racing generally, about the red horse in particular.

  “Now, Secretariat is what is known as a Bold Ruler because his sire is Bold Ruler,” said Shalit. “Bold Rulers usually don’t run a mile and a half, which is the Belmont distance.”

  “That’s true,” she said.

  “Do you think this horse is an exception? That this son of Bold Ruler can go a mile and a half?”

  “Well,” she said, “I do think so. Of course, he’s half Bold Ruler but he’s one-quarter Princequillo, and Princequillo is staying blood.”

  “That’s the dam?”

  “That’s the dam. She’s Somethingroyal, by Princequillo. Her family, Imperatrice, is also staying blood; so he has an even chance and I think we might be able to do it.”

  “Everyone talks about Secretariat as some kind of a superhorse as a three-year-old,” said Shalit. “The horse is so remarkable. Are there any more home like him?”

  “Yes, he has a baby brother who is a year now, and I’ve taken the terrible risk of giving him an important-sounding name. He’s by Northern Dancer and we’ve named him Somethingfabulous. I think this is the sure kiss of death. But so far he looks good.”

  “He’s a brother or a half brother?”

&
nbsp; “He’s a half brother . . .”

  “Then there’s another horse, called Capito, who made his debut just a few days ago. That’s Riva Ridge’s half brother. How did he make out in his first race?”

  “He won! It was very satisfactory.”

  “So you’ve got two horses coming up that you have your eye on. One a half brother to Secretariat, one a half brother to Riva Ridge. How soon can you predict that a horse is going to be a great racehorse? When he’s a colt? Can you tell when you’re looking at him running ’round The Meadow?”

  “With Secretariat, he’s so good-looking that we always had high hopes for him, but you really don’t know until you see him run his first race. People say, oh, he had the look of eagles and so forth, but I think that’s romance. I don’t think real horsemen believe that.”

  “Some of the big news lately was the syndication of Secretariat,” said Shalit. “You sold him for something over $6 million. What was it, about $180,000 a share?”

  “A hundred and ninety.”

  “A hundred and ninety thousand dollars a share. You have four shares, the others have the others. Now, that was before a lot of this attention and excitement came to Secretariat. Suppose you had waited, suppose you had bitten your nails and said, ‘I’m going to hold off until after the three races, to see what he does in the Triple Crown.’ Or even after the Kentucky Derby and the Preakness. What do you think he would be worth now in syndication?”

  “This is a gambling game and we had to take a gamble. We had a tremendous obligation to Uncle Sam, and I didn’t feel we could gamble with Uncle Sam’s money. We had to pay those inheritance taxes whatever the horse did, so we took a gamble. Perhaps you hadn’t heard of him in January but he was Horse of the Year as a two-year-old; it had never happened before. So he had quite a lot going for him then. I think probably if we were to syndicate him today we could get a quarter of a million dollars a share. That sounds terribly greedy. But if he wins the Belmont I just don’t know, we haven’t had one in twenty-five years!”

  “Citation was the last. Are you superstitious, since you’re a gambler? Since you’re in horseracing? I mean, do you always wear the same pair of shoes when you go to the track?”

  “Well, I always wear this little pin.”

  “Can we see that on camera?”

  The camera dollied in. “It’s a jockey,” said Penny. “It was my mother’s. A jockey riding a horse. It was given to her by old friends of the family and whenever we have a horse in a race I have that on. That’s about the only consistent thing I do, and I try not to bet too much on our horses.”

  “Mrs. Tweedy, thank you very much, Mrs. Helen Tweedy, manager of Secretariat. We wish you good luck at the Belmont Stakes!”

  Penny Tweedy enjoyed an enormously responsive and largely sympathetic press. Newsmen admired her wit, her enthusiasm, her ability to frame a sentence, and her respect for candor when she spoke of herself and how people had responded to her. So she told Jurate Kazickas of the Associated Press, in a story circulated widely: “I have not really done anything not related to horses in the last five years, but it has given me the thrill of accomplishment. I love the prestige, the excitement, and the money.”

  Asked about her fan mail, she said, “Most of the letters are wonderful, but occasionally we get hate mail, too. Things like, ‘Oh, you rich Anglo-Saxon bitch with your roses and silver trays.’ ”

  Several news and magazine stories depicted her as “handsome,” one of them as “extremely handsome,” while another called Penny “striking,” as if to differentiate. She was described as “articulate and bright” and “warm and open” and as having “a sense of steely determination” and “an unabashedly competitive spirit, independence and ambition.” The press loved her.

  More, she always had a sense of humor and understood what made readable copy. When she might have been bland, she was not.

  “Speaking of Penny, where does that come from?” Jerry Tallmer of the New York Post, asked.

  “My mother’s name was Helen, as was mine, so there was a need to differentiate. I guess it was an era when nicknames were popular. And I deplored it. Penny, Boofie, Muffie—we should all be shot.”

  In the crush of the publicity, authors and artists wanted to do books and paintings about Secretariat, so Penny sought the counsel of the William Morris Agency, the world’s largest talent agency, among whose clients were Mark Spitz, Elvis Presley, Don Rickles, and Sophia Loren. “Only two things bother me a bit,” she would tell Tom Buckley of The New York Times between dances at the Belmont Ball. “The first is that Secretariat will be retired from competition so soon, although it was unavoidable. The second is that we’ve had to put a price tag on a horse who should be appreciated for his good qualities alone.” Yet there was more than one price tag on Secretariat, more than the $6.08 million syndication. Anyone who wanted to paint Secretariat and merchandise photographs of him, to publish the books and make Secretariat T-shirts and medallions, had to talk money and percentages with Penny or the agency. Penny liked money, as she told Jurate Kazickas, and she sought her share, not only for herself but for the C. T. Chenery estate, which would benefit from all proceeds earned by the name of Secretariat off the racetrack.

  Those who sought to do Secretariat-related projects had to receive her permission or that of the agency. And she continued acting decisively and forcefully on matters involving the selling of Secretariat.

  “What about the artist from South Africa?” Lucien asked her one day outside the office, as she dipped into her Mercedes Benz. “Has he been commissioned?”

  “No!” Her tone was emphatic. “He’s been given permission, that’s all.”

  “Well, he keeps coming around here,” said Lucien.

  “Well,” she said, thinking a moment. “Tell him the next time he comes, that Mrs. Tweedy hopes he has gotten enough pictures. And ‘Please don’t come around here anymore.’ ”

  His stable was besieged daily by reporters and photographers, by racing officials and the merely curious. His days were consumed by work and interviews, but Lucien Laurin trained with greater insight than he had ever done before. That Lucien was now sixty years old, that he was being subjected to the crudest pressures in the sport—those brought on by the historic quest for the Triple Crown—that trainers were quietly second-guessing his every move, seemed not to shake or deter him from the course he had plotted and thought was right. He had never in his life trained so superbly, and Secretariat thrived on it. The colt had just cracked two track records, and Lucien hardly let up on him. He kept cranking him tighter, asking more and more of him, for the first time actually beginning to get to the bottom of the colt. Between workouts, Secretariat was galloping a full two miles every morning, stretching his muscles for the longer distance of the Belmont Stakes, measuring his stride. Those mornings were events, with photographers and cameramen following him by the dozens to the track. Yet among them he remained unruffled. Nothing fazed him; nothing upset him.

  Lucien walked Secretariat three days after the Preakness. The first workout was May 27. Turcotte sent him three-quarters of a mile in 1:12 1/5, an almost perfect twelve-clip. The colt looked sharp, bouncing off the racetrack and jumping back at the barn.

  As the Belmont Stakes neared, Secretariat continued training brilliantly. The colt walked the day following the six-furlong workout, then galloped just three days. On June 1, eight days before the Belmont Stakes, Laurin sent him out for his most critical work in preparation for the race. He wanted Turcotte to work the colt a flat mile in 1:36, time that would have won a classy race for stakes-winning fillies just the day before. The winner, Barely Even, raced the mile in 1:36 4/5. But standards of time were beginning to have no meaning whenever the colt performed—in the Kentucky Derby, quarter after quarter; in the sensational workout prior to the Preakness Stakes, when he galloped out three-quarters in 1:10; and in the record-shattering Preakness Stakes itself.

  Turcotte emerged at 9:10 at the gap in the fence, stoppin
g to let photographers take their pictures, and then walked the colt onto the racetrack and to the far turn. Turning him around, he set out jogging back past the stands and around the clubhouse turn. Then he stopped. He looked around, left and right, then urged Secretariat into a gallop, and coming to the red and white striped mile pole, he sat down crouched on him.

  The two took off quickly. Turcotte sat still on his back, the red horse racing the first eighth in 0:12, the second eighth in 0:11 4/5, for an opening quarter in 0:23 4/5. Down the backstretch Secretariat picked up speed, racing the third eighth in 0:12 but then the fourth in a rapid 0:11 1/5, which gave him a half in 0:47. He was bounding along airily. Keeping to the beat of twelve, he raced to the five-eighths in 0:58 4/5, then to the three-quarters in 1:11 and then to the seven-eighths in 1:22 4/5, already a sensational move. He kept to the beat down the lane, finishing out the last eighth in 0:12.

  Lucien clicked his watch at 1:34 4/5. He watched the colt gallop out a mile and an eighth in 1:48 3/5. Lucien sighed heavily. It was a marvelous workout, but was it too fast?

  “He went faster than I really wanted,” said Laurin. “But he did it so easily that I am very pleased.” Yet there were murmurs from other trainers at the track that Laurin had worked his horse too fast.

  The work hardly bothered Secretariat. The next day he was bucking and playing when they walked him up the shed, and three days later Laurin had him galloping again, limbering him up and stretching his muscles for the longest distance he would ever run. By the morning of June 6, Secretariat was ready for the third and final workout, one of those zingers to open his eyes and bring him to his toes. Laurin told Turcotte to let the colt roll for a half mile, and the red horse took off with him around the turn. It was one of those gray, melancholy mornings at Belmont Park—a chill was in the air—and when the colt appeared turning for home he seemed to emerge through the mists, grabbing at the ground and folding it under him. You could hear him breathing through all of the upper straight. For those who sought to beat him in the Belmont Stakes, that move was an omen. As Secretariat flashed past the wire, the clockers caught him in a fiery 0:46 3/5, fast enough to put him near the pace in sprints, and then he came dancing home, his neck bowed and his eyes rolling white in their sockets.