by William Nack
And there was nothing like the ride that Secretariat gave me in the twelve weeks from the Bay Shore through the Belmont Stakes. Three weeks after the Bay Shore, Turcotte sent the colt to the lead down the backstretch in the one-mile Gotham. It looked like they were going to get beat when Champagne Charlie drove to within a half length at the top of the stretch—I held my breath—but Turcotte sent Secretariat on, and the colt pulled away to win by three, tying the track record of 1:33 2/5.
By then I had begun visiting Charles Hatton, a columnist for the Daily Racing Form, who the previous summer had proclaimed Secretariat the finest physical specimen he had ever seen. At sixty-seven, Hatton had seen them all. After my morning work was over, I would trudge up to Hatton’s private aerie at Belmont Park and tell him what I had learned. I was his backstretch eyes, he my personal guru. One morning, Hatton told me that Secretariat had galloped a quarter mile past the finish line at the Gotham, and the clockers had timed him pulling up at 1:59 2/5, three fifths of a second faster than Northern Dancer’s Derby record for 1 ¼ miles.
“This sucker breaks records pulling up,” Hatton said. “He might be the best racehorse I ever saw. Better than Man o’ War.”
Those were giddy, heady days coming to the nine-furlong Wood Memorial, the colt’s last major prep before the Kentucky Derby. On the day of the Wood, I drove directly to Aqueduct and spent the hour before the race in the receiving barn with Sweat, exercise rider Charlie Davis and Secretariat. When the voice over the loudspeaker asked the grooms to ready their horses, Sweat approached the colt with the bridle. Secretariat always took the bit easily, opening his mouth when Sweat moved to fit it in, but that afternoon it took Sweat a full five minutes to bridle him. Secretariat threw his nose in the air, backed up, shook his head. After a few minutes passed, I asked, “What’s wrong with him, Eddie?”
Sweat brushed it off: “He’s just edgy.”
In fact, just that morning, Dr. Manuel Gilman, the track veterinarian, had lifted the colt’s upper lip to check his identity tattoo and had discovered a painful abscess about the size of a quarter. Laurin decided to run Secretariat anyway—the colt needed the race—but he never told anyone else about the boil. Worse than the abscess, though, was the fact that Secretariat had had the feeblest workout of his career four days earlier, when Turcotte, seeing a riderless horse on the track, had slowed the colt to protect him from a collision. Secretariat finished the mile that day in 1:42 2/5, five seconds slower than Laurin wanted him to go. Thus he came to the Wood doubly compromised.
The race was a disaster. Turcotte held the colt back early, but when he tried to get Secretariat to pick up the bit and run, he got no response. I could see at the far turn that the horse was dead. He never made a race of it, struggling to finish third, beaten by four lengths by his own stablemate, Angle Light, and by Sham. Standing near the owner’s box, I saw Laurin turn to Tweedy and yell, “Who won it?”
“You won it!” Tweedy told him.
“Angle Light won it,” I said to him.
“Angle Light?” he howled back. But of course! Laurin trained him, too, and so Laurin had just won the Wood, but with the wrong horse.
I was sick. All those hours at the barn, all those early mornings at the shed, all that time and energy for naught. And in the most important race of his career, Secretariat had come up as hollow as a gourd. The next two weeks were among the most agonizing of my life. As great a stallion as he was, Bold Ruler had been essentially a speed sire and had never produced a single winner of a Triple Crown race. I couldn’t help but suspect that Secretariat was another Bold Ruler, who ran into walls beyond a mile. In the next two weeks, Churchill Downs became a nest of rumors that Secretariat was unsound. Jimmy (the Greek) Snyder caused an uproar when he said the colt had a bum knee that was being treated with ice packs. I knew that wasn’t true. I had been around him all spring, and the most ice I had seen near him was in a glass of tea.
All I could hope for, in those final days before the Derby, was that the colt had been suffering from a bellyache on the day of the Wood and had not been up to it. I remained ignorant of the abscess for weeks, and I had not yet divined the truth about Secretariat’s training: He needed hard, blistering workouts before he ran, and that slow mile before the Wood had been inadequate. The night before the Derby, I made my selections, and the next day, two hours before post time, I climbed the stairs to the Churchill Downs jockeys’ room to see Turcotte. He greeted me in an anteroom, looking surprisingly relaxed. Gilman had taken him aside a few days earlier and told him of the abscess. Turcotte saw that the boil had been treated and had disappeared. The news had made him euphoric, telling him all he needed to know about the Wood.
“You nervous?” he asked.
I shrugged. “I don’t think you’ll win,” I said. “I picked My Gallant and Sham one-two, and you third.”
“I’ll tell you something,” Turcotte said. “He’ll beat these horses if he runs his race.”
“What about the Wood?” I asked.
He shook me off. “I don’t believe the Wood,” he said. “I’m telling you. Something was wrong. But he’s O.K. now. That’s all I can tell you.”
I shook his hand, wished him luck and left. Despite what Turcotte had said, I was resigned to the worst, and Secretariat looked hopelessly beaten as the field of thirteen dashed past the finish line the first time. He was dead last. Transfixed, I could not take my eyes off him. In the first turn, Turcotte swung him to the outside and Secretariat began passing horses, and down the back side I watched the jockey move him boldly from eighth to seventh to sixth. Secretariat was fifth around the far turn and gaining fast on the outside. I began chanting: “Ride him, Ronnie! Ride him!” Sham was in front, turning for home, but then there was Secretariat, joining him at the top of the stretch. Laffit Pincay, on Sham, glanced over and saw Secretariat and went to the whip. Turcotte lashed Secretariat. The two raced head and head for 100 yards, until gradually Secretariat pulled away. He won by 2 ½ lengths. The crowd roared, and I glanced at the tote board: 1:59 2/5! A new track and Derby record.
Throwing decorum to the wind, I vaulted from my seat and dashed madly through the press box, jubilantly throwing a fist in the air. Handicapper Steve Davidowitz came racing toward me from the other end. We clasped arms and spun a jig in front of the copy machine. “Unbelievable!” Davidowitz cried.
I bounded down a staircase, three steps at a time. Turcotte had dismounted and was crossing the racetrack when I reached him. “What a ride!” I yelled.
“What did I tell you, Mr. Bill?” he said.
I had just witnessed the greatest Kentucky Derby performance of all time. Secretariat’s quarter-mile splits were unprecedented—:25 1/5, :24, :23 4/5, :23 1/5 and :23. He ran each quarter faster than the preceding one. Not even the most veteran racetracker could recall a horse who had done this in a mile-and-a-quarter race. As quickly as his legions (I among them) had abandoned him following the Wood, so did they now proclaim Secretariat a superhorse.
We all followed him to Pimlico for the Preakness two weeks later, and he trained as if he couldn’t get enough of it. He thrived on work and the racetrack routine. Most every afternoon, long after the crowds of visitors had dispersed, Sweat would graze the colt on a patch of grass outside the shed, then lead him back into his stall and while away the hours doing chores. One afternoon I was folded in a chair outside the colt’s stall when Secretariat came to the door shaking his head and stretching his neck, curling his upper lip like a camel does. “What’s botherin’ you, Red?” Sweat asked. The groom stepped forward, plucked something off the colt’s whiskers and blew it in the air. “Just a pigeon feather itchin’ him,” said Sweat. The feather floated into the palm of my hand. So it ended up in my wallet, along with the $2 mutual ticket that I had on Secretariat to win the Preakness.
In its own way, Secretariat’s performance in the 1 3/16-mile Preakness was even more brilliant than his race in the Derby. He dropped back to last out of the gate, but as the field
dashed into the first turn, Turcotte nudged his right rein as subtly as a man adjusting his cuff, and the colt took off like a flushed deer. The turns at Pimlico are tight, and it had always been considered suicidal to take the first bend too fast, but Secretariat sprinted full-bore around it, and by the time he turned into the back side, he was racing to the lead. Here Turcotte hit the cruise control. Sham gave chase in vain, and Secretariat coasted home to win by 2 ½. The electric timer malfunctioned, and Pimlico eventually settled on 1:54 2/5 as the official time, but two Daily Racing Form clockers caught Secretariat in 1:53 2/5, a track record by three fifths of a second.
I can still see Florio shaking his head in disbelief. He had seen thousands of Pimlico races and dozens of Preaknesses over the years, but never anything like this. “Horses don’t do what he did here today,” he kept saying. “They just don’t do that and win.”
Secretariat wasn’t just winning. He was performing like an original, making it all up as he went along. And everything was moving so fast, so unexpectedly, that I was having trouble keeping a perspective on it. Not three months before, after less than a year of working as a turf writer, I had started driving to the racetrack to see this one horse. For weeks I was often the only visitor there, and on many afternoons it was just Sweat, the horse and me, in the fine dust with the pregnant stable cat. And then came the Derby and the Preakness, and two weeks later the colt was on the cover of Time, Sports Illustrated, and Newsweek, and he was a staple of the morning and evening news. Secretariat suddenly transcended being a racehorse and became a cultural phenomenon, a sort of undeclared national holiday from the tortures of Watergate and the Vietnam War.
I threw myself with a passion into that final week before the Belmont. Out to the barn every morning, home late at night, I became almost manic. The night before the race, I called Laurin at home and we talked for a long while about the horse and the Belmont. I kept wondering, What is Secretariat going to do for an encore? Laurin said, “I think he’s going to win by more than he has ever won in his life. I think he’ll win by ten.”
I slept at the Newsday offices that night, and at 2 A.M. I drove to Belmont Park to begin my vigil at the barn. I circled around to the back of the shed, lay down against a tree and fell asleep. I awoke to the crowing of a cock and watched as the stable workers showed up. At 6:07, Hoeffner strode into the shed, looked at Secretariat, and called out to Sweat: “Get the big horse ready! Let’s walk him about fifteen minutes.”
Sweat slipped into the stall, put the lead shank on Secretariat and handed it to Davis, who led the colt to the outdoor walking ring. In a small stable not 30 feet away, pony girl Robin Edelstein knocked a water bucket against the wall. Secretariat, normally a docile colt on a shank, rose up on his hind legs, pawing at the sky, and started walking in circles. Davis cowered below, as if beneath a thunderclap, snatching at the chain and begging the horse to come down. Secretariat floated back to earth. He danced around the ring as if on springs, his nostrils flared and snorting, his eyes rimmed in white.
Unaware of the scene she was causing, Edelstein rattled the bucket again, and Secretariat spun in a circle, bucked and leaped in the air, kicking and spraying cinders along the walls of the pony barn. In a panic, Davis tugged at the shank, and the horse went up again, higher and higher, and Davis bent back yelling, “Come on down! Come on down!”
I stood in awe. I had never seen a horse so fit. The Derby and Preakness had wound him as tight as a watch, and he seemed about to burst out of his coat. I had no idea what to expect that day in the Belmont, with him going a mile and a half, but I sensed we would see more of him than we had ever seen before.
Secretariat ran flat into legend, started running right out of the gate and never stopped, ran poor Sham into defeat around the first turn and down the backstretch and sprinted clear, opening two lengths, four, then five. He dashed to the three-quarter pole in 1:09 4/5, the fastest six-furlong clocking in Belmont history. I dropped my head and cursed Turcotte: What is he thinking about? Has he lost his mind? The colt raced into the far turn, opening seven lengths past the half-mile pole. The timer flashed his astonishing mile mark: 1:34 1/5!
I was seeing it but not believing it. Secretariat was still sprinting. The four horses behind him disappeared. He opened ten. Then twelve. Halfway around the turn, he was fourteen in front . . . fifteen . . . sixteen . . . seventeen. Belmont Park began to shake. The whole place was on its feet. Turning for home, Secretariat was twenty in front, having run the mile and a quarter in 1:59 flat, faster than his Derby time.
He came home alone. He opened his lead to twenty-five . . . twenty-six . . . twenty-seven . . . twenty-eight. As rhythmic as a rocking horse, he never missed a beat. I remember seeing Turcotte look over to the timer, and I looked over too. It was blinking 2:19, 2:20. The record was 2:26 3/5. Turcotte scrubbed on the colt, opening thirty lengths, finally thirty-one. The clock flashed crazily: 2:22 . . . 2:23. The place was one long, deafening roar. The colt seemed to dive for the finish, snipping it clean at 2:24.
I bolted up the press box stairs with exultant shouts and there yielded a part of myself to that horse forever.
I didn’t see Lawrence Robinson that day last October. The next morning, I returned to Claiborne to interview Seth Hancock. On my way through the farm’s offices, I saw one of the employees crying at her desk. Treading lightly, I passed farm manager John Sosby’s office. I stopped, and he called me in. He looked like a chaplain whose duty was to tell the news to the victim’s family.
“Have you heard about Secretariat?” he asked quietly.
I felt the skin tighten on the back of my neck. “Heard what?” I asked. “Is he all right?”
“We might lose the horse,” Sosby said. “He came down with laminitis last month. We thought we had it under control, but he took a bad turn this morning. He’s a very sick horse. He may not make it.
“By the way, why are you here?”
I had thought I knew, but now I wasn’t sure.
Down the hall, sitting at his desk, Hancock appeared tired, despairing and anxious, a man facing a decision he didn’t want to make. What Sosby had told me was just beginning to sink in. “What’s the prognosis?” I asked.
“Ten days to two weeks,” Hancock said.
“Two weeks? Are you serious?” I blurted.
“You asked me the question,” he said.
I sank back in my chair. “I’m not ready for this,” I told him.
“How do you think I feel?” he said. “Ten thousand people come to this farm every year, and all they want to see is Secretariat. They don’t give a hoot about the other studs. You want to know who Secretariat is in human terms? Just imagine the greatest athlete in the world. The greatest. Now make him six-foot-three, the perfect height. Make him real intelligent and kind. And on top of that, make him the best-lookin’ guy ever to come down the pike. He was all those things as a horse. He isn’t even a horse anymore. He’s a legend. So how do you think I feel?”
Before I left, I asked Hancock to call me in Lexington if he decided to put the horse down. We agreed to meet at his mother’s house the next morning. “By the way, can I see him?” I asked.
“I’d rather you not,” he said. I told Hancock I had been to Robinson’s house the day before and I had seen Secretariat from a distance, grazing. “That’s fine,” Hancock said. “Remember him how you saw him, that way. He doesn’t look good.”
I did not know it then, but Secretariat was suffering the intense pain in the hooves that is common to laminitis. That morning, Anderson had risen at dawn to check on the horse, and Secretariat had lifted his head and nickered very loudly. “It was like he was beggin’ me for help,” Anderson would later recall.
I left Claiborne stunned. That night, I made a dozen phone calls to friends, telling them the news, and I sat up late, dreading the next day. I woke up early and went to breakfast and came back to the room. The message light was dark. It was Wednesday, October 4. I drove out to Waddell Hancock’s place in Par
is. “It doesn’t look good,” she said. We had talked for more than an hour when Seth, looking shaken and pale, walked through the front door. “I’m afraid to ask,” I said.
“It’s very bad,” he said. “We’re going to have to put him down today.”
“When?”
He did not answer. I left the house, and an hour later I was back in my room in Lexington. I had just taken off my coat when I turned and saw it, the red blinking light on my phone. I knew. I walked around the room. Out the door and down the hall. Back into the room. Out the door and around the block. Back into the room. Out the door and down to the lobby. Back into the room. I called sometime after noon. “Claiborne Farm called,” said the message operator.
I phoned Annette Covault, an old friend who is the mare booker at Claiborne, and she was crying when she read the message: “Secretariat was euthanized at 11:45 A.M. today to prevent further suffering from an incurable condition. . . .”
The last time I remember really crying was on St. Valentine’s Day of 1982, when my wife called to tell me that my father had died. At the moment she called, I was sitting in a purple room in Caesars Palace, in Las Vegas, waiting for an interview with the heavyweight champion, Larry Holmes. Now here I was, in a different hotel room in a different town, suddenly feeling like a very old and tired man of forty-eight, leaning with my back against a wall and sobbing for a long time with my face in my hands.
Appendix A
Secretariat at Stud
Secretariat launched his career as a stallion at Claiborne Farm with a host of breeders expecting him to sire champions by the herd, to turn out brilliant racehorses as quickly and efficiently as he had once knocked off quarter-mile splits in the Triple Crown. His pedigree and talent notwithstanding, however, none but the most romantically optimistic of horsemen ever harbored any hope that the horse would accomplish in the breeding shed what he had achieved on the racetrack. History was against him. Fact is, not one of the indubitable giants of the American turf—not Man o’ War, Count Fleet, or Citation—ever sired a horse who could have beaten him on the race course. Man o’ War came the closest to reproducing himself: War Admiral, by far his greatest offspring, had flashed high and abundant gusts of speed while winning the 1937 Triple Crown, the year before Seabiscuit whipped him in their celebrated match race. But what the Admiral had to offer seemed to pale in comparison to the relentless drive and power that carried his sire to twenty victories in twenty-one starts. And neither Count Fleet nor Citation, the ’43 and ’48 Triple Crown winners, respectively, came even remotely close to siring a horse with War Admiral’s brilliance on the courses.