by William Nack
Yet, despite the brilliance of the workouts, despite those assuring him that the colt could not lose, that he was training America’s ninth Triple Crown winner, Laurin spoke and moved with caution. The pressure heightened. At times he was expansive, open, and friendly, at other times tight lipped and snappy, stewing and blowing up over small things. He had been on racetracks far too long to come to any race as confident as some of Secretariat’s staunchest supporters. There were too many ways to be beaten. He wriggled openly.
“I’ve never seen so many goddamn favorites beaten as in the Belmont,” Lucien said one morning in his stable kitchen. He was sitting at the formica table over a large plate of eggs, sunny-side up, surrounded by shingles of beef and toast. A cup of coffee sat steaming next to him. Turcotte, reading the Daily Racing Form, sat across from him, his helmet on his lap. Turcotte looked over the top of the paper as Lucien spoke.
“I’ll tell you one thing,” he said. “I’ll be glad when this son-of-a-bitchin’ thing is over with, believe me. I just want it to end, and soon.” The conversation drifted. Laurin talked a moment of the way the colt’s value had soared since the Derby, to over $250,000 a share, though no one had sold out. Between bites of toast, he nodded across the table at Turcotte and said petulantly, “Just don’t fuck it up Saturday or he’ll go down in value again.”
Staring at Laurin, whose face returned to his food, Turcotte looked for the moment as if he wanted to pick up the plate of eggs and break it over Lucien’s head. But he said nothing.
For Laurin, the press to win was on. He grew touchier, more protective than ever of Secretariat’s privacy. One morning, a television crew of eight men arrived at Barn 5 to take a sequence for a news show, and as the colt emerged from the barn they followed him quietly, their lenses fixed. Lucien watched them, letting them into the paddock for the pictures. Later that morning, after the day’s work was done, he watched them trooping up the shed toward Secretariat’s stall. He howled them out, gesturing fiercely.
And he became more sensitive to routine, to what had been working well for him in the past. George (Charlie) Davis, who had been exercising Secretariat since he’d left for Louisville and the Kentucky Derby, had remained his most trusted exercise boy, the rider of Riva Ridge, and he felt a constancy in him that he didn’t feel in Gaffney. In fact, he hadn’t been pleased with the way Gaffney had ridden the colt, believing Jimmy was too busy putting on a show, grandstanding when he galloped him of mornings. Now in the crunch he turned to Charlie Davis, as if by instinct. Gaffney sensed what was coming. He had been warned on the first Wednesday following the Preakness, when Lucien met him after he had galloped Secretariat.
“How did he go?” Lucien asked.
“Like a champ, Mr. Laurin. He wanted to play a little out there.”
Lucien then confided in him: “Jimmy, Mrs. Tweedy doesn’t like the way you ride the horse.” So Gaffney knew there was a problem, yet he wasn’t expecting what happened in the shed on Friday morning. Henny, who had hired Jimmy just a year ago, approached him there. Lucien was in the office.
“Jimmy,” said Henny, “Lucien’s taking you off the big horse.”
“What?” said Gaffney. “What for?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well, I quit, then.” Henny tried to talk him out of it, but it was no use. “I’ll pick up my paycheck,” said Gaffney.
Crushed and bitter that Laurin hadn’t fired him himself, Gaffney left the barn with his Secretariat saddlecloths and his pummel pad, the one that his mother had knitted for him, and then drove home to tell his wife. She had sensed it coming, too, and knew what had happened when she saw him walk in the door of their Queens apartment. She saw his eyes filling. Sitting down, he said nothing.
“I can’t believe it,” Jimmy finally said. “I didn’t believe they’d do it.”
So the pressures of the Triple Crown were felt by all those around the colt. Even Eddie Sweat, while still talking freely to reporters, seemed more remote, less communicative amid the daily intrusions, more pressured as the demands on his time increased. He had come a long way from the vegetable gardens of Holly Hill, South Carolina, to the shed row at Belmont Park, to take his place with Will Harbut as racing’s most celebrated groom, the doyen of backstretch swipes. Now, as the biggest moment of his life arrived, he spent more and more time at the barn, arriving earlier, going home later, making sure the colt had everything he needed—hay, water, bedding. Like Lucien, he became increasingly protective of the colt and the routine that regulated his life.
The Time and Newsweek covers appeared on newsstands during Secretariat’s final week of training for the Belmont Stakes, and they gave the colt an aura of invincibility. Both labeled him a superhorse on the covers. There were few dissenters following the Derby and the Preakness Stakes. But there were a few, and among them was Pancho Martin, whose faith in Sham had never waned. It felt like months since those chilly mornings in Kentucky when Pancho leaned up against the cinder block of Barn 42 and extemporized on Sham’s superiority, attacking Laurin. Now he spoke in more subdued tones of Sham’s superiority in the Preakness. This time he was wearing patent leather shoes, chewing on his cigar, and sitting on a park bench beneath the trees at Belmont Park.
Pancho held a copy of Time magazine, with Secretariat looking at him, and he stared at it for a long time.
He muttered, “Superhorse.” Then he clamped the cigar in his mouth, pointed to the front of Time and said, his words solemn, “If he beat me in the Belmont Stakes, then I’ll call him a superhorse. I know he’s a good horse—everybody knows that! If he beat me fair and square—and he hasn’t beaten me fair and square yet—then I will”—he paused, poising his cigar—“I’ll call him the nicest things you can call a racehorse.” Then he denounced the accounts that Sham appeared washed out and tired in the first few days home from Pimlico. “He looked like a drowned rat,” said Charles Hatton, who watched Secretariat and Sham train at Belmont Park, where he wrote his daily column. But Sham recovered, and Pancho with him, and he claimed that Sham had not lost confidence, that he had a chance to beat the red horse going twelve furlongs.
Pancho was also planning to enter Knightly Dawn in the Belmont. He was the colt who came into Linda’s Chief in the Santa Anita Derby, but there seemed no way that Pancho could beat the red horse other than with Sham. Speed would only help Secretariat, set it up for him, so Knightly Dawn would work for Secretariat as well as Sham. The Belmont was the center of discussion at the racetrack for a full three weeks preceding it, among trainers and grooms, hot walkers and track officials. Only a handful thought Sham had a chance. One was John Parisella, a youthful trainer and a man far closer to Martin than to Laurin.
“If I was in Frank’s position,” Parisella said one day at the racetrack, “I would say his best chance to beat Secretariat is to go to the front and dictate the pace. Lucien Laurin had better take the lead. Martin actually believes he has the better horse. All he wants is a clean-run race. If Sham goes to the front with slow fractions, Secretariat is going to have to go get him. This is a grueling distance and Sham is eligible to beat Secretariat. It’s not as simple as some people might make it seem.”
But Parisella and Martin were in the smallest of minorities as Belmont Day approached. Most of the intelligent trainers, such as Phil Johnson, were speculating on the length of victory rather than on the strategy.
“If Knightly Dawn goes out there and sets the pace, he’ll make it a true race,” said Johnson. “And if it’s a true race, Secretariat will win it. Turcotte has only two things to worry about. If the pace is too slow, he has to go to the front. If the pace is too fast, he has to sit still for a while. All this psychology—whether Knightly Dawn or Sham will go to the lead—doesn’t make any difference. They’re not going to unnerve Turcotte, who sits so cool on a horse. If Frank was dealing with anything but that big red bombshell, it might work. But not against him.” Many horsemen felt that way; that there was no fair way he could be beat. And that feel
ing set the tone of things.
The fact is that the Belmont Stakes was not to be seen as a race but rather as a coronation. All that remained to speculate was the margin of Secretariat’s victory, his running time, the incidentals. However he won it, whether by two and a half lengths—as he had won the Derby and the Preakness—whether by five or by ten lengths, the important thing was that he win. And there seemed no doubt of that. Victory would be enough to satisfy a public that had waited all these years to see a racehorse win the Triple Crown.
Turcotte sensed he was riding possibly the greatest horse that had ever lived. One evening, he and Lucien had dinner at a restaurant in Valley Stream, Long Island, then drove to Belmont Park and to Barn 5. They had each been drinking. They stood together outside the barn and talked. It was very late and it was dark. Outside the shed, Turcotte said to Lucien, “He’s the greatest horse that ever looked through a bridle.”
“Do you think so, Ronnie,” said Lucien. “Do you really think so?”
“If we don’t win the Belmont,” said Turcotte, “I might as well pack my tack and leave New York.”
“You?” said Lucien. “What about me?”
So Turcotte came to the race supremely confident, talking about winning as he rarely did. At the Belmont Ball on Thursday night, Turcotte accepted accolades for his victory on Riva Ridge the year before. The winner of the Belmont is honored at the ball the following year. Turcotte told the formal gathering of socially elite from the Jockey Club: “If it’s a clean race, I’ll be back here next year.” As he sat down at the table, his wife Gaetane whispered, “Ron! You never talk that way. I hope you didn’t jinx him.” Sitting back in his chair, Turcotte lit a thin cigar and sipped his drink.
Laurin, as cautious as he had been, got caught up in the air of coronation in the final days before the race. There had been speculation on the running time, some believing a record was possible. The Belmont main track had been lightning fast the week before the race, but it had slowed through the final days. The talk of a record Belmont Stakes had tailed off. Andy Beyer would predict 2:27, two-fifths of a second slower than Gallant Man’s track mark, if Secretariat ran a speed figure of 129, as he had done at Churchill Downs and Pimlico. Of the winning margin there was some conjecture. Some thought the margin would be a repeat of the Derby and the Preakness. Others thought that, with the added distance, Secretariat might win by five, perhaps more.
Lucien had his own ideas. He knew the colt was at his peak in physical condition, wound up and ticking since that final sharpener in 0:46 3/5, and the night before the race he abandoned all caution.
“I think he’ll win by more than he’s ever won by in his life,” said Lucien. “I think he’ll probably win by ten. What do you think of that?”
Chapter 28
It is four sharp on Saturday morning at Belmont Park, and Pinkerton guard Joe Fanning sits framed against the light of the tack room door in Barn 5, hunched forward in his chair and snapping off the playing cards in front of him. The Belmont Stakes is thirteen hours away, and the imminence of it pervades the silence of shed row and the world of the horses sleeping in it. The air is warm and a wind is blowing from the sound, turning the leaves on the row of trees by the street lamps of the stable area. A tire screeches occasionally along Hempstead Turnpike, which runs alongside the stable. A rooster crows. The night is cricketless. Nightwatchman Clem Kenyon has just fed Secretariat his single quart of uncrushed oats, the limited ration of grain on the day of a race, and now Kenyon is gone and Secretariat is finished with it. He is lying down again, his legs folded under him in Stall 7. Breathing deeply, his sides rising and falling like bellows, he is asleep.
It is 5:10. Secretariat, on his feet, pokes his head outside the stall and looks at Henny Hoeffner. Henny sees him, stops and looks him up and down, very slowly, and walks on. More men emerge from the doorway. Screens slam. The coffee truck idles past, stops. Seth Hancock, intense and uncommunicative, emerges from the complex of ground-floor rooms by the barn and walks down the road to another shed. Ed Sweat arrives in his Dodge at 5:25, and moments later stable foreman Ted McClain strolls by, too. They are coming to work. There is muttering, the sipping of coffee, lips smacking.
“I can hardly wait to see this day over with,” says McClain.
“This is it,” responds Sweat. “I’m as ready now as I can get.”
Sweat ambles down the aisle of the shed, passing the rows of stalls, and on the way calls Secretariat’s name. The colt sticks his head from the doorway and pricks his ears and flips his nose in the air. Setting his coffee down across the aisle from him, Sweat crosses over to see him. “Hey, Red,” he says. “Let me get old Big Red ready here.”
The routines begin. Sweat spreads a piece of burlap cloth in front of the stall and begins piling it with large forkfuls of old straw and moist bedding and manure, whistling and chattering with his red horse. A rake leans tipped against the webbing, and Secretariat suddenly grabs it, seizing the handle in his teeth. He scrapes it across the aisle in front of him, then pulls it back into the stall. Grooms stop, look, and laugh.
The activity at the barn picks up, the rich composts of straw and hay rising in front of all the stalls down the shed.
Davis leads the colt out of the stall and into the fresh light of the walking ring in the paddock. A thin dirt path traces the circle, perhaps 100 feet around, passing the shed and the pony stalls, passing the chain and wooden fences and the spigot where the grooms come to fill their buckets with water. Caring for the ponies in the stalls, Robin Edelstein rattles a bucket on the wall, and the effect is of an explosion under Secretariat, who leaps high on his hindlegs in the air and paws at the sky, a bronze general’s horse in Central Park. He rises high above Davis, who looks up, cowering, and snatches the chain that connects them.
Floating down, Secretariat prances around the ring, his neck bowed and drawn up tightly beneath the throat, kicking dirt and cinders in the air, spraying the walls of the pony shed, jumping again, shifting left and right. He has never been so fit. In all these past three months, from the days leading to the Bay Shore Stakes, he has never seemed so sharp. Robin Edelstein rattles the bucket again and he rises up once more, towering above Davis, higher this time, his hindlegs almost straight, and coming down he dances off sideways, his nostrils flared and snorting, his eyes darting, islands of brown in pools of white. The final half-mile drill in 0:46 3/5 has ground him so fine at the edges, leaving him sharper than he has ever been. He moves as if on springs, bouncing when he walks, aglide, and those who pass him stop to look in wonder at the sight. Now Davis is talking almost incessantly to him, trying to calm the colt and keep him on his feet. Davis tugs on the chain. A plane flies overhead and Secretariat stops and raises his head and watches it, turning his head slowly as it passes off to Kennedy. There is noise as a set of horses passes by and he lunges forward again, up and down twice, spinning on his hooves, and kicks and then goes up once more. He comes down moving as if in dressage, his neck arched in a crest, which accentuates the power, while his back and shoulders are roped with muscles taut beneath a dappling coat that shifts with light.
Trainer Bill Stephans rides by on horseback and stops to watch Secretariat play. “Looks good, don’t he?” he says.
Henny Hoeffner comes by.
“Okay, Charlie,” says Henny. Davis shortens his hold on the shank and leads the red horse back inside the shed, then up the aisle and into Stall 7. He has been out eighteen minutes. He will not leave the stall again until he walks to the paddock for the Belmont Stakes.
Secretariat is back in his stall at 6:15, and five minutes later Lucien Laurin arrives in his gray Mercedes.
“He was buckin’ and playin’ the whole time he was out this mornin’,” someone says to him.
“That’s good. That’s good. Means he feels good.”
Henny Hoeffner has already organized the morning on his clipboard, orchestrated it through to its conclusion, and Lucien wanders about abstractedly for a moment, peeri
ng into stalls, the tack room, and finally into Stall 7 to see the red horse.
Horses are going out now in sets, and Lucien and Henny follow Capital Asset and Capito, the two half brothers, out the gate and to the track to watch them exercise.
So the morning passes in review—bays and chestnuts, grays and browns, galloping slowly past, working out.
By ten o’clock news and TV men have begun to stop by the barn. The day has grown oppressively muggy, and the last of the horses are back in the barn. In the paddock, Billy Silver, who will take Secretariat to post for the Belmont Stakes, is now limping about heroically on a sore foot. Beseechingly, Charlie Davis takes him around and around to help work out the kinks.
“Come on, Billy,” says Davis. “Can’t stop on us now.”
Mopping his forehead with a handkerchief, Lucien looks at Billy Silver and shakes his head and flees the heat to his air-conditioned office. He sits down on the couch, his face red, and rubs his face once more. Turcotte is there talking to CBS commentator Frank Wright. Jack Whitaker asks Laurin how he is doing.
“I’ve done my part,” Lucien tells him. “It’s up to the master now. God almighty. I’m glad it’s close to the end. It’s getting rough and tough. It’s beginning to get the best of me, so help me. Everyone expects him to do so much. That’s what bothers me.”