Secretariat

by William Nack

  It was through Secretariat that I had met Robinson. On the bright, cold afternoon of November 12, 1973, he was one of several hundred people gathered at Blue Grass Airport in Lexington to greet the horse on his flight from New York into retirement in Kentucky. I flew with the horse that day, and as the plane banked over the field, a voice from the tower crackled over the airplane radio: “There’s more people out here to meet Secretariat than there was to greet the governor.”

  “Well, he’s won more races than the governor,” pilot Dan Neff replied.

  An hour later, after a van ride out the Paris Pike behind a police escort with blue lights flashing, Robinson led Secretariat onto a ramp at Claiborne and toward his sire’s old stall—out of racing and into history. For me, that final walk beneath a grove of trees, with the colt slanting like a buck through the autumn gloaming, brought to a melancholy close the richest, grandest, damnedest, most exhilarating time of my life. For eight months, first as the racing writer for Long Island, New York’s Newsday and then as the designated chronicler of the horse’s career, I had a daily front-row seat to watch Secretariat. I was at the barn in the morning and the racetrack in the afternoon for what turned out to be the year’s greatest show in sports, at the heart of which lay a Triple Crown performance unmatched in the history of American racing.

  Sixteen years had come and gone since then, and I had never attended a Kentucky Derby or a yearling sale at Keeneland without driving out to Claiborne to visit Secretariat, often in the company of friends who had never seen him. On the long ride from Louisville, I would regale them with stories about the horse—how on that early morning in March of ’73 he had materialized out of the quickening blue darkness in the upper stretch at Belmont Park, his ears pinned back, running as fast as horses run; how he had lost the Wood Memorial and won the Derby, and how he had been bothered by a pigeon feather at Pimlico on the eve of the Preakness (at the end of this tale I would pluck the delicate, mashed feather out of my wallet, like a picture of my kids, to pass around the car); how on the morning of the Belmont Stakes he had burst from the barn like a stud horse going to the breeding shed and had walked around the outdoor ring on his hind legs, pawing at the sky; how he had once grabbed my notebook and refused to give it back, and how he had seized a rake in his teeth and begun raking the shed; and, finally, I told about that magical, unforgettable instant, frozen now in time, when he had turned for home, appearing out of a dark drizzle at Woodbine, near Toronto, in the last race of his career, twelve in front and steam puffing from his nostrils as from a factory whistle, bounding like some mythical beast out of Greek lore.

  Oh, I knew all the stories, knew them well, had crushed and rolled them in my hand, until their quaint musk lay in the saddle of my palm. Knew them as I knew the stories of my children. Knew them as I knew the stories of my own life. Told them at dinner parties, swapped them with horseplayers as if they were trading cards, argued over them with old men and blind fools who had seen the show but missed the message. Dreamed them and turned them over like pillows in my rubbery sleep. Woke up with them, brushed my aging teeth with them, grinned at them in the mirror. Horses have a way of getting inside of you, and so it was that Secretariat became like a fifth child in our house, the older boy who was off at school and never around but who was as loved and true a part of the family as Muffin, our shaggy, epileptic dog.

  The story I now tell begins on that Monday afternoon last October on the macadam outside of Stone Farm. I had never been to Paris, Kentucky, in the early fall, and I only happened to be there that day to begin an article about the Hancock family, the owners of Claiborne and Stone farms. There wasn’t a soul on the road to point the way to Robinson’s place, so I swung in and out of several empty driveways until I saw a man on a tractor cutting the lawn in front of Marchmont, Dell Hancock’s mansion. He yelled back to me: “Take a right out the drive. Go down to Claiborne House. Then a right at the driveway across the road. Go up a hill to the big black barn. Turn left and go down to the end. Lawrence had a stroke a few years back, y’know.”

  The house was right where he said. I knocked on the front door, then walked behind and knocked on the back, and called through a side window into a room where music was playing. No one answered. But I had time to kill, so I wandered over to the stallion paddock, just a few yards from the house. The stud Ogygian, a son of Damascus, lifted his head inquiringly. He started walking toward me, and I put my elbows on the top of the fence and looked down the gentle slope toward the stallion barn.

  And suddenly there he was, Secretariat, standing outside the barn and grazing at the end of a lead shank held by groom Bobby Anderson, who was sitting on a bucket in the sun. Even from a hundred yards away, the horse appeared lighter than I had seen him in years. It struck me as curious that he was not running free in his paddock—why was Bobby grazing him?—but his bronze coat reflected the October light, and it never occurred to me that something might be wrong. But something was terribly wrong. On Labor Day, Secretariat had come down with laminitis, a life-threatening hoof disease, and here, a month later, he was still suffering from its aftershocks.

  Secretariat was dying. In fact, he would be gone within forty-eight hours.

  I briefly considered slipping around Ogygian’s paddock and dropping down to visit, but I had never entered Claiborne through the back door, and so I thought better of it. Instead, for a full half hour, I stood by the paddock waiting for Robinson and gazing in the distance at Secretariat. The gift of reverie is a blessing divine, and it is conferred most abundantly on those who lie in hammocks or drive alone in cars. Or lean on hillside fences in Kentucky. The mind swims, binding itself to whatever flotsam comes along, to old driftwood faces and voices of the past, to places and scenes once visited, to things not seen or done but only dreamed.

  It was July 4, 1972, and I was sitting in the press box at Aqueduct with Clem Florio, a former prizefighter turned Baltimore handicapper, when I glanced at the Daily Racing Form’s past performances for the second race, a 5 ½-furlong buzz for maiden two-year-olds. As I scanned the pedigrees, three names leaped out: by Bold Ruler-Somethingroyal, by Princequillo. Bold Ruler was the nation’s preeminent sire, and Somethingroyal was the dam of several stakes winners, including the fleet Sir Gaylord. It was a match of royalty. Even the baby’s name seemed faintly familiar: Secretariat. Where had I heard it before? But of course! Lucien Laurin was training the colt at Belmont Park for Penny Chenery Tweedy’s Meadow Stable, making Secretariat a stablemate of that year’s Kentucky Derby and Belmont Stakes winner, Riva Ridge.

  I had seen Secretariat just a week before. I had been at the Meadow Stable barn one morning, checking on Riva, when exercise rider Jimmy Gaffney took me aside and said: “You wanna see the best-lookin’ two-year-old you’ve ever seen?”

  We padded up the shed to the colt’s stall. Gaffney stepped inside. “What do you think?” he asked. The horse looked magnificent, to be sure, a bright red chestnut with three white feet and a tapered white marking down his face. “He’s gettin’ ready,” Gaffney said. “Don’t forget the name: Secretariat. He can run.” And then, conspiratorially, Gaffney whispered: “Don’t quote me, but this horse will make them all forget Riva Ridge.”

  So that is where I had first seen him, and here he was in the second at Aqueduct. I rarely bet in those days, but Secretariat was 3–1, so I put $10 on his nose. Florio and I fixed our binoculars on him and watched it all. Watched him as he was shoved sideways at the break, dropping almost to his knees, when a colt named Quebec turned left out of the gate and crashed into him. Saw him blocked in traffic down the back side and shut off again on the turn for home. Saw him cut off a second time deep in the stretch as he was making a final run. Saw him finish fourth, obviously much the best horse, beaten by only 1 ¼ lengths after really running but an eighth of a mile.

  You should have seen Clem. Smashing his binoculars down on his desk, he leaped to his feet, banged his chair against the wall behind him, threw a few punches in the air a
nd bellowed: “Secretariat! That’s my Derby horse for next year!”

  Two weeks later, when the colt raced to his first victory by six, Florio announced to all the world, “Secretariat will win the Triple Crown next year.” He nearly got into a fistfight in the Aqueduct press box that day when Mannie Kalish, a New York handicapper, chided him for making such an outrageously bold assertion: “Ah, you Maryland guys, you come to New York and see a horse break his maiden and think he’s another Citation. We see horses like Secretariat all the time. I bet he don’t even run in the Derby.” Stung by the put-down “you Maryland guys,” Florio came forward and stuck his finger into Kalish’s chest, but two writers jumped between them and they never came to blows.

  The Secretariat phenomenon, with all the theater and passion that would attend it, had begun. Florio was right, of course, and by the end of Secretariat’s two-year-old season, everyone else who had seen him perform knew it. All you had to do was watch the Hopeful Stakes at Saratoga. I was at the races that August afternoon with Arthur Kennedy, an old-time racetracker and handicapper who had been around the horses since the 1920s, and even he had never seen anything quite like it. Dropping back to dead last out of the gate, Secretariat trailed eight horses into the far turn, where jockey Ron Turcotte swung him to the outside. Three jumps past the half-mile pole the colt exploded. “Now he’s runnin’!” Kennedy said.

  You could see the blue-and-white silks as they disappeared behind one horse, reappeared in a gap between horses, dropped out of sight again and finally reemerged as Secretariat powered to the lead off the turn. He dashed from last to first in 290 yards, blazing through a quarter in :22, and galloped home in a laugher to win by six. It was a performance with style, touched by art. “I’ve never seen a two-year-old do that,” Kennedy said quietly. “He looked like a four-year-old out there.”

  So that was when I knew. The rest of Secretariat’s two-year-old campaign—in which he lost only once, in the Champagne Stakes when he was disqualified from first to second after bumping Stop the Music at the top of the stretch—was simply a mopping-up operation. At year’s end, so dominant had he been that he became the first two-year-old to be unanimously voted Horse of the Year.

  Secretariat wintered at Hialeah, preparing for the Triple Crown, while I shoveled snow in Huntington, New York, waiting for him to race again. In February, twenty-three-year-old Seth Hancock, the new president of Claiborne Farm, announced that he had syndicated the colt as a future breeding stallion for a then world record $6.08 million, in 32 shares at $190,000 a share, making the 1,154-pound horse worth more than three times his weight in gold. (Bullion was selling at the time for $90 an ounce.) Like everyone else, I thought Secretariat would surely begin his campaign in Florida, and I did not expect to see him again until the week before the Kentucky Derby. I was browsing through a newspaper over breakfast one day when I saw a news dispatch whose message went through me like a current. Secretariat would be arriving soon to begin his Triple Crown campaign by way of the three New York prep races: the Bay Shore, the Gotham and the Wood Memorial Stakes.

  “Hot damn!” I blurted to my family. “Secretariat is coming to New York!”

  At the time, I had in mind doing a diary about the horse, a chronicle of the adventures of a Triple Crown contender, which I thought might one day make a magazine piece. The colt arrived at Belmont Park on March 10, and the next day I was there at 7 A.M., scribbling notes in a pad. For the next forty days, in what became a routine, I would fall out of bed at 6 A.M., make a cup of instant coffee, climb into my rattling green Toyota and drive the twenty miles to Belmont Park. I had gotten to know the Meadow Stable family—Tweedy, Laurin, Gaffney, groom Eddie Sweat, assistant trainer Henny Hoeffner—in my tracking of Riva Ridge the year before, and I had come to feel at home around Belmont’s Barn 5, particularly around stall 7, Secretariat’s place. I took no days off, except one morning to hide Easter eggs, and I spent hours sitting on the dusty floor outside Secretariat’s stall, talking to Sweat as he turned a rub rag on the colt, filled his water bucket, bedded his stall with straw, kept him in hay and oats. I took notes compulsively, endlessly, feeling for the texture of the life around the horse.

  A typical page of scribblings went like this:

  “Sweat talks to colt . . . easy, Red, I’m comin’ in here now . . . stop it, Red! You behave now . . . Sweat moves around colt. Brush in hand. Flicks off dust. Secretariat sidesteps and pushes Sweat. Blue sky. Henny comes up. ‘How’s he doin’, Eddie?’ ‘He’s gettin’ edgy.’ . . . Easy Sunday morning.”

  Secretariat was an amiable, gentlemanly colt, with a poised and playful nature that at times made him seem as much a pet as the stable dog was. I was standing in front of his stall one morning, writing, when he reached out, grabbed my notebook in his teeth and sank back inside, looking to see what I would do. “Give the man his notebook back!” yelled Sweat. As the groom dipped under the webbing, Secretariat dropped the notebook on the bed of straw.

  Another time, after raking the shed, Sweat leaned the handle of the rake against the stall webbing and turned to walk away. Secretariat seized the handle in his mouth and began pushing and pulling it across the floor. “Look at him rakin’ the shed!” cried Sweat. All up and down the barn, laughter fluttered like the pigeons in the stable eaves, as the colt did a passable imitation of his own groom.

  By his personality and temperament, Secretariat became the most engaging character in the barn. His own stable pony, a roan named Billy Silver, began an unrequited love affair with him. “He loves Secretariat, but Secretariat don’t pay any attention to him,” Sweat said one day. “If Billy sees you grazin’ Secretariat, he’ll go to hollerin’ until you bring him out. Secretariat just ignores him. Kind of sad, really.” One morning, I was walking beside Hoeffner through the shed, with Gaffney and Secretariat ahead of us, when Billy stuck his head out of his jerry-built stall and nuzzled the colt as he went by.

  Hoeffner did a double take. “Jimmy!” he yelled. “Is that pony botherin’ the big horse?”

  “Nah,” said Jimmy. “He’s just smellin’ him a little.”

  Hoeffner’s eyes widened. Spinning around on his heels, jabbing a finger in the air, he bellowed: “Get the pony out of here! I don’t want him smellin’ the big horse.”

  Leaning on his rake, Sweat laughed softly: “Poor Billy Silver. He smelled the wrong horse!”

  I remember wishing that those days could breeze on forever—the mornings over coffee and doughnuts at the truck outside the barn, the hours spent watching the red colt walk to the track and gallop once around, the days absorbing the rhythms of the life around the horse. I had been following racehorses since I was twelve, back in the days of Native Dancer, and now I was an observer on an odyssey, a quest for the Triple Crown. It had been twenty-five years since Citation had won racing’s Holy Grail. For me, the adventure really began in the early morning of March 14, when Laurin lifted Turcotte aboard Secretariat and said: “Let him roll, Ronnie.”

  The colt had filled out substantially since I had last seen him under tack, in the fall, and he looked like some medieval charger—his thick neck bowed and his chin drawn up beneath its mass, his huge shoulders shifting as he strode, his coat radiant and his eyes darting left and right. He was walking to the track for his final workout, a three-eighths-of-a-mile drill designed to light the fire in him for the seven-furlong Bay Shore Stakes three days later. Laurin, Tweedy and I went to the clubhouse fence near the finish line, where we watched and waited as Turcotte headed toward the pole and let Secretariat rip. Laurin clicked his stopwatch.

  The colt was all by himself through the lane, and the sight and sound of him racing toward us is etched forever in memory: Turcotte was bent over him, his coat blown up like a parachute, and the horse was reaching out with his forelegs in that distinctive way he had, raising them high and then, at the top of the lift, snapping them out straight and with tremendous force, the snapping hard as bone, the hooves striking the ground and folding it beneath him. Laur
in clicked his watch as Secretariat raced under the wire. “Oh my god!” he cried. “Thirty-three and three fifths!” Horses rarely break 34 seconds in three-furlong moves.

  Looking ashen, fearing the colt might have gone too fast, Laurin headed for the telephone under the clubhouse to call the upstairs clocker, Jules Watson. “Hello there, Jules. How fast did you get him?”

  I watched Laurin’s face grow longer as he listened, until he looked thunderstruck: “Thirty-two and three fifths?” A full second faster than Laurin’s own clocking, it was the fastest three-furlong workout I had ever heard of. Tweedy smiled cheerily and said, “Well, that ought to open his pipes!”

  Oh, it did that. Three days later, blocked by a wall of horses in the Bay Shore, Secretariat plunged through like a fullback, 220 yards from the wire, and bounded off to win the race by four and a half lengths. I could hear a man screaming behind me. I turned and saw Roger Laurin, Lucien’s son, raising his arms in the air and shouting, “He’s too much horse! They can’t stop him. They can’t even stop him with a wall of horses!”

  I had ridden horses during my youth in Morton Grove, Illinois, and I remember one summer I took a little black bullet of a thoroughbred filly out of the barn and walked her to the track that rimmed the polo field across Golf Road. I had been to the races a few times, had seen the jockeys ride, and I wanted to feel what it was like. So I hitched up my stirrups and galloped her around the east turn, standing straight up. Coming off the turn, I dropped into a crouch and clucked to her. She took off like a sprinter leaving the blocks—swoooosh!—and the wind started whipping in my eyes. I could feel the tears streaming down my face, and then I looked down and saw her knees pumping like pistons. I didn’t think she would make the second turn, the woods were looming ahead, big trees coming up, and so I leaned a little to the left and she made the turn before she started pulling up. No car ever took me on a ride like that. And no roller coaster, either. Running loose, without rails, she gave me the wildest, most thrilling ride I had ever had.