Secretariat

by William Nack

  He remained through all of this a partisan of Riva Ridge, his first good horse, his first Derby horse, and even in the end he seemed unable to comprehend the dimensions of Secretariat’s greatness. Charles Hatton once estimated that Secretariat was twenty pounds the better horse, but Lucien never seemed to recognize that. Before the Marlboro Cup, Lucien said of Secretariat, astonishingly, “The more I keep training this horse, the more I’m doing with him, the more I’m getting to believe that he’s the greatest horse I have ever trained.” And even after the race, even after Secretariat blew past Riva Ridge with such authority, Laurin told Turcotte and Eddie Maple in the stable office, “I still think Riva Ridge can beat Secretariat.” Turcotte looked at Maple, who smiled and said nothing, and told Lucien, “From a quarter mile to a mile and a quarter, you name the bet. $1000? $2000?”

  Eddie Sweat waited by the fence for Secretariat, holding the lead shank as Ron Turcotte cantered the colt up the homestretch by the cheering fans. Sweat had come a long way from the rural backwaters of Holly Hill, South Carolina. In three years he had become the most famous groom in America, a symbol of Secretariat with whom many would identify. In the end, he was the one person the colt visibly responded to, the one he recognized and waited for. “I’ll miss him,” said Eddie, as Secretariat went past. “This is a hurting thing to me. I’m so sad I didn’t even want to bring him over here. It’s been a wonderful two years. Now it seems like my whole career has ended.” What he had beside the memories was the victory hat, the symbol of the three-year-old campaign. The day after the Canadian International, as he sat at home in Queens with his wife, Linda, Sweat was clutching the hat and looking at the label inside of it. Linda was reading a letter when she looked up and saw him.

  “You got a girl’s phone number in that hat?” she asked.

  “I’m gonna retire my hat,” he said.

  “You’re what?”

  “I’m retiring my hat. This hat is now retired.”

  “That’s stupid,” she said.

  “It’s not stupid. A lot of people retire their hats.”

  And so he did. Linda helped him, showing him how to press it down and fold it for a frame.

  On the racetrack, as the applause followed the colt, Turcotte stood in the stirrups and went easily with him, rocking with the stride and holding fast to the reins. It would be the last time that he would ever ride Secretariat. On his back, Turcotte had come into his own in the last two years. He would not be recognized in America for his accomplishments, even in his most successful year. But he would be feted in his native Canada. Turcotte had endured the pressures of the Triple Crown—the first jockey since Eddie Arcaro to win it. Though he had ridden two other champions of 1974, Riva Ridge and Talking Picture, and was the leading rider in New York, the toughest circuit in the world, the turfwriters and racing officials chose to honor Laffit Pincay, Jr., with the Eclipse Award, the industry’s Oscar, for being the first jockey in history to win over $4 million in purses. Yet, in his native land, the Queen of England would bestow upon Turcotte the Order of Canada, one of the nation’s highest honors, and that to him was worth five Eclipse awards. When he climbed down from his mount on November 6 at Aqueduct, he was convinced he had had the good fortune to ride the greatest horse that ever lived.

  Not all remained with memories so fond. Of the thousands who were at Aqueduct that day, one was Frank Martin. He was wearing the same hat he wore those mornings at Churchill Downs, when he was soliloquizing about Laurin and Sham. It had been a long year. The Belmont was the culmination of a four-part horror show that began when Sham failed to fire in the Wood Memorial. For the Sommers, too, Sigmund and Viola, the classics had been an ordeal. The day following the Belmont Stakes, the Sommers came to see Sham at the barn. They looked tired.

  “I was humiliated,” said Mrs. Sommer, standing by the car.

  “I went home last night and got drunk and cried,” said Sigmund Sommer. He was wearing a white shirt with the SS monogram over his heart.

  Now it was five months later, and Martin had not forgotten. Sham, the colt who was to take the place of Autobiography in the Sommer barn, had fractured a leg at Belmont Park months before. He was operated on and retired to stud at the Spendthrift Farm on Iron Works Pike, off the road to Paris. Martin was leaving the paddock when the ceremonies were taking place, a cigar jammed in his mouth and his hands plunged into his jacket pockets.

  “I’m just sorry it’s not Sham,” he said, and walked away.

  Others were affected, too. Gaffney was selling mutuel tickets on the day of the farewell, still sorry at what had happened to him on that Friday following the Preakness Stakes. He had been the first to recognize the colt on the racetrack, the first Secretariat fan and booster, and he had missed the greatest glory of all. In Angle Light there was another quiet ending. Following the Wood Memorial, he never won again. Eventually he broke down. Whittaker retired him to the stud in Kentucky, and he began there with a fee of $3500 for a service. The advertisements in the breeding magazines would announce, predictably, that he was the colt who had beaten Secretariat in the Wood. That race had helped to earn him the life of leisure at the stud, giving him an identity all his own.

  Whittaker’s life had changed, too. He never got over the Derby experience, and the aggravation of that week ruined the game for him. He would speak, at times, as if he was still wondering what had hit him. “So I had one little horse, okay? And she had a lot of them. And here she is, has everything that she could want in the horse racing business—top friends, the publicity, the wonderful horse she had, and here she is, telling one guy, with one horse, to pick up his marbles and go home. Why?”

  They played “Auld Lang Syne” at the farewell ceremony, as Turcotte galloped Secretariat up the stretch, and Henny Hoeffner and Ed Sweat met him as Turcotte rode him back.

  “Eddie,” said Henny, after the saddle was taken off. “Go right back to the truck with him. He don’t need anything. He doesn’t know what he’s doin’ out here with all this applause.”

  And Ed Sweat led him off the racetrack for the last time.

  As the L-188 came into Lexington, the airport tower called to pilot Dan Neff, “There’s more people out here to meet Secretariat than there was to greet the governor.” To which Neff replied, “Well, he’s won more races than the governor.”

  The cargo door opened to Lexington and more than 300 persons gathered on the grass of the Blue Grass Airport to greet them. Among them was Seth Hancock. Ed Sweat led Secretariat down the ramp and walked after Seth, who took them to a small orange Claiborne Farm van. From there the procession, with police lights blinking, began for Paris. It was a bright, chilly afternoon, and all down the Paris Pike out of Lexington the leaves were falling and the countryside was alive with change. Pregnant mares were sniffing at the fields of grass, stallions romped the pastures, the foals were weaned and the yearlings in training. There was a sense of renewal in the air.

  The cars and the vans filed slowly across the railroad tracks and up the Winchester Road in Paris, which lay half asleep. The vans pulled into the stone gates and edged up Kennedy Creek, to the office and the loading ramp. By now Seth was out directing traffic. Beyond the ramp was the black creosote breeding shed. Next to the office, just fifty feet away, were the gravestones of the greatest of the Claiborne stallions, from Sir Gallahad to Bold Ruler. It had been seventy years since Arthur Hancock, Sr., married Nancy Clay and moved from Ellerslie, and these graves stood like monuments to the empire that he had built and passed on to Bull, and that Bull had passed to Seth, who was standing on the loading ramp and watching the gates come open on the van. It was there, from the same ramp, that Bold Ruler was loaded and destroyed almost three years before.

  Lawrence Robinson was at the colt’s head inside the van.

  “Want to wait on Mrs. Tweedy?” asked Lawrence. Penny had been held up.

  “No, I want to get him in his stall now,” said Seth. “You ready, Lawrence? Let’s go. Good, Lawrence.”

&n
bsp; In a moment, Secretariat was out of the van and on the ramp and turning and walking off, across the grassy field to the breeding shed, and then past the shed and down the path to the stallion barn. At one point he wheeled, kicked Robinson, snorted, and turned to walk off again.

  At the white and orange cinder block stallion barn, Robinson led the colt inside and turned him into the first stall, freshly bedded with straw. Across from him was the stall of the aging Round Table, Princequillo’s finest son and the second leading money winner of all time. He was the colt who had been born the same night and in the same barn as Bold Ruler twenty years before.

  Robinson turned the colt around in the stall, and Secretariat leaned down and sniffed at the bedding, made a few quick circuits of the wood-paneled box and looked out his rear window, which faced the fields of Claiborne, and pricked his ears.

  On the door was a large brass plate: “Bold Ruler.” He was in his sire’s stall.

  Sweat approached behind Robinson and went inside. “Whoa, Big Red,” said Eddie, who dropped to his knees and unfastened the bandages on the horse’s legs.

  “How’s it goin’, Eddie? Have a good trip?”

  “Yeh, fine, Seth.”

  The men were working when Seth left the stall, filled a bucket of water, and brought it back and hung it in a corner. Riva Ridge joined Secretariat in the stallion barn. They shared the place with some of Claiborne’s leading stallions—Round Table, Nijinsky II, Hoist the Flag, Drone, and Le Fabuleaux. Penny and Lucien arrived moments later, and now crowds of farm workers and reporters gathered in the doorway of the stallion shed. “It’s like giving up a child for adoption,” said Penny, lingering in front of Riva Ridge’s stall. “I know it’s best, but I hate to do it.”

  “Well, you’re in your daddy’s old stall,” said Eddie Sweat, looking at the nameplate on the door. “How about that!”

  “If he only does as well,” someone said.

  “He’s got a lot of wood to chop,” said Snow Fields, Bold Ruler’s old groom. “Yes, sir. He’s got a lot of wood to chop.”

  The van had arrived at Claiborne at three-thirty, and two hours later the Meadow Stable party—Elizabeth, Penny, and Lucien—had left for dinner with Seth. It was growing dark at the farm. Now and then a car would roll through the gates, its headlights glinting on the trees and shrubs that lined the way, and then disappear. A nightwatchman came by later. Then a family from the farm, the Logans. They turned on the lights in the shed and opened the door of Secretariat’s stall. He looked at them.

  “He looks like just another horse, doesn’t he?” said Marion Logan.

  “Yeh, just like another horse in there now,” said the nightwatchman.

  And they left. The lights went out again. By the office, a farm worker sat inside the shed by the graveyard. “That’s just something we took out of Bull’s office when he died,” said the man. He was looking at a sign in the back of the shed:

  Cows may come

  And cows may go

  But the Bull

  In this place

  Goes on forever.

  “Now he’s just another horse here,” said the man. “Now he’s a stud horse and he has to prove himself here, just like he proved himself on the racetrack. Until he does that, he’s just another horse at Claiborne.”

  Outside the sun was down and it grew colder now by the grove of trees in the dark by the stallion barn. Leaves fell, and a faint wind strummed and turned along the trees that rose along the paddocks in the back. Then in the distance, beyond the Claiborne fields toward the home called Marchmont, the sound of a horse whinnying rose. Secretariat came to the window of his stall, and through the darkness of it you could see nothing but the rims of his eyes and hear the breathing in the quiet. The sound of the whinnying rose again, and beyond that and beyond the rows of fences and the fields of grass and the salmon-colored sky, beyond the stands of trees strung out along the skies of Paris, there was the sound of horses charging the bend and the crowd on its feet roaring and the announcer calling the name of a lone figure of a horse reaching and snapping, pounding in a rush, at the turn for home.

  Author’s Note

  Upon his death, Secretariat was survived by all the principal members of the small family that had surrounded him almost throughout his racing career: owner Penny Chenery, trainer Lucien Laurin, groom Ed Sweat, and jockey Ron Turcotte. Over the last thirty years of the twentieth century, Chenery served tirelessly as an ambassador-at-large for thoroughbred racing and as the most visible link to Secretariat and the decade of the 1970s, truly the Golden Era of the sport in America. While making her home in Lexington, Kentucky, the bluegrass cradle of American racing, and later from a retirement home in Boulder, Colorado, Penny would travel regularly to all major racing venues, from the Kentucky Derby in May through the Breeders’ Cup races in the fall. “She has been a beacon for the sport,” said Dan Liebman, the executive editor of The Blood-Horse, the industry’s leading trade publication—a graceful reminder of racing’s most glorious days and a bearer of the torch for the horse who most vividly represented the best of them.

  Lucien Laurin retired as a trainer in 1976, came out of retirement to condition horses again in 1983, then retired permanently in 1987, ten years after he was inducted into racing’s Hall of Fame. Of course, Riva Ridge opened the door to the Hall of Fame, but it was Secretariat who carried Laurin inside. Laurin spent most of his retirement at his home in Key Largo, Florida, with his wife, Juliette. He died on June 26, 2000, at Miami’s Baptist Hospital from complications following surgery to repair a broken hip. He was eighty-eight.

  Ed Sweat, whose handling of Secretariat made him the most renowned groom in America, the man whose touch with horses was almost lyrical, died virtually penniless in April 1998 after spending the last years of his life battling a host of physical ailments, including heart problems (he had suffered a heart attack and undergone open-heart surgery), asthma, and cancer of the stomach. At age fifty-nine, in New York, Sweat lost a long and final struggle to leukemia. The man had spent, given away, or lost what money he had saved from his heyday as a groom, and in the end the Jockey Club, which administers a fund to assist racing’s neediest, stepped up and paid for Sweat’s funeral in Vance, South Carolina. Trainer Roger Laurin, Lucien’s son and the man for whom Sweat had worked as groom of the 1984 two-year-old champion, Chief’s Crown, paid the airfare for Sweat’s widow, Linda, and his two daughters to fly there from New York and back. Throughout the last twenty-five years of his life, Eddie never gave up hope of rubbing another Secretariat, of finding the Big Horse again. “I been on the racetrack thirty-four years, and I ain’t never gonna give up,” Sweat told me in 1991. “I think they’ll take me to my grave with a pitchfork in my hand and a rub rag in my back pocket. . . . I might not ever find another Secretariat, but I’ll never stop lookin’.” He never did.

  Nor did Ron Turcotte, who searched in vain throughout his last five years as a leading rider in New York. In 1979, like Laurin two years earlier, Turcotte was fairly swept into racing’s Hall of Fame—on the back of Secretariat, of course, with Riva Ridge merely showing the way.

  The induction ceremonies came a year after Turcotte’s career had ended tragically at Belmont Park, the scene of the most memorable ride of his career. On July 13, 1978, Turcotte was paralyzed from the waist down after his mount in the day’s eighth race, Flag of Leyte Gulf, fell after clipping heels with a horse in front of her, throwing Turcotte violently to the ground. A year later, after months of rehabilitation, Turcotte and his family moved from their Long Island manse to his hometown of Grand Falls, New Brunswick, where he still resides. There he first raised cattle and later got into the business of tree farming, planting and growing thousands of red pines for eventual use as telephone poles. Turcotte became a man genuinely at peace with himself and his place in history, and he ultimately came to terms with his paralysis; with his wife, Gaetane, at his side, he has often visited America at Triple Crown time, cheerfully signing Secretariat pictures an
d memorabilia for the fans and horseplayers crowding around him and telling stories about his record-breaking tour de force in 1973. One day a few years ago at Saratoga, as he sat by the paddock in his wheelchair, Turcotte ended a Secretariat soliloquy by saying, with the trace of a grin on his lips, “He should never have been beaten. Make no mistake, my friends. He was the greatest racehorse who ever lived, and I was the luckiest guy in the world to be on his back.”

  “Pure Heart”

  —William Nack from Sports Illustrated

  Just before noon the horse was led haltingly into a van next to the stallion barn, and there a concentrated barbiturate was injected into his jugular. Forty-five seconds later there was a crash as the stallion collapsed. His body was trucked immediately to Lexington, Kentucky, where Dr. Thomas Swerczek, a professor of veterinary science at the University of Kentucky, performed the necropsy. All of the horse’s vital organs were normal in size except for the heart.

  “We were all shocked,” Swerczek said. “I’ve seen and done thousands of autopsies on horses, and nothing I’d ever seen compared to it. The heart of the average horse weighs about nine pounds. This was almost twice the average size, and a third larger than any equine heart I’d ever seen. And it wasn’t pathologically enlarged. All the chambers and the valves were normal. It was just larger. I think it told us why he was able to do what he did.”

  In the late afternoon of Monday, October 2, 1989, as I headed my car from the driveway of Arthur Hancock’s Stone Farm onto Winchester Road outside of Paris, Kentucky, I was seized by an impulse as beckoning as the wind that strums through the trees there, mingling the scents of new grass and old history.

  For reasons as obscure to me then as now, I felt compelled to see Lawrence Robinson. For almost thirty years, until he suffered a stroke in March of 1983, Robinson was the head caretaker of stallions at Claiborne Farm. I had not seen him since his illness, but I knew he still lived on the farm, in a small white frame house set on a hill overlooking the lush stallion paddocks and the main stallion barn. In the first stall of that barn, in the same space that was once home to the great Bold Ruler, lived Secretariat, Bold Ruler’s greatest son.