Saving Baby

by Jo Anne Normile

  But Coburn said to me, “I have to keep him over the winter. He’s really stubborn, the type of horse that will forget everything he’s learned. We’ve come too far, and I don’t want him to regress.”

  I felt suspicious. I was paying Coburn almost $1,000 a month. And Baby was his first and at that point only Thoroughbred—Coburn was trying to grow his business. And it was early December, so if Baby stayed, it was time to write another check.

  At the same time, Baby did have a stubborn streak. He knew he was powerful. And he could be pushy, albeit in an adorable way. When you walk a horse on a lead line, he’s supposed to respect your space, but Baby was always moving closer, brushing against us. It didn’t bother me, but I knew it wasn’t proper training, and I didn’t want to be this person who knew nothing about racing telling the trainer what to do—that wouldn’t allow for a good working relationship. And yet, all in all, Baby was such an agreeable horse. My doubt tugged at me.

  Against my better judgment, I wrote Coburn another check. So we had Christmas without Baby. And January. And February. And March. And through all those dark months, I didn’t see Baby do any progressing from the point he had reached. He had learned to walk, trot, and canter, and that’s what he did every single day in that little training arena, never being allowed out into the pasture with the other horses.

  At the end of March, Coburn told me he was going to be moving Baby to a training facility with a track on the grounds. Baby would be learning to gallop. My doubts had intensified, but I still thought perhaps Coburn knew something I didn’t. And in certain ways I was more than happy for the switch. Baby would have fresh air, which horses need. They stay healthiest when most of their time is spent outside, whether in sunshine or rain. Baby would also be able to expend some real energy if he wanted rather than just go through a structured canter indoors.

  The facility itself wasn’t in the pristine condition of the previous one, but Baby could hang his head out of his stall if he felt like it. He could see up and down the aisle. He seemed much happier there, which left me feeling much more relaxed. I was also happy because this new facility was only twenty minutes away instead of thirty. Baby and I would be closer to each other.

  While the place was a bit ramshackle, Coburn bedded Baby’s stall well. He also always made sure Baby had clean water. There were a couple of little turn-out areas with grass in them, too, and while Coburn still didn’t let Baby play with other horses, he did turn him out into these areas for an hour or so here and there when they were unoccupied.

  At those times that Baby actually trained, it was exciting to watch. At first he would try to scoot toward the gap—a spot on the track with no railing that opened to a path leading back to the barn. Still a youngster, he wanted the comfort of his stall over the rigors of running, and his discomfort and uncertainty would pull at me. The newness of things sometimes unnerved him, too. One day he saw, for the first time, a white-colored horse—called grey among equestrians—and planted his feet squarely. You could see the “What do I do about this?” in his face. He had to be coaxed past the “apparition.”

  But before long, he was flying around the track in a gallop. Seeing him run, people would ask me about him, and when I’d say, “He’s a Reel On Reel colt,” it was plain to see that they were impressed. Baby’s prospects looked good.

  I couldn’t completely shake an unsettled feeling, however. When I’d go to visit Baby each day, I’d pass a very muddy area where a mare was caring for her foal, born just that month. The foal would have nowhere to lie down but right in a mixture of straw and mud, which was never mucked of its manure. Worse, the newborn was often drenched in cold sleet mixed with the dirt, as April can be pretty wintery in Michigan. Furthermore, the drinking water wasn’t changed regularly, and the two horses were surrounded by wire fencing, which could have hurt the foal if it kicked up in a frolic and became tangled in the metal.

  Hay was thrown over the fence for the mother and would mix in with the dirty straw and horse droppings. No one made sure to keep it separate.

  The sight was stomach-turning. I couldn’t bear to look, and didn’t. But I wondered aloud who were the owners of this mare and foal living in filth.

  “I don’t know,” Coburn told me. “Someone’s boarding a horse here.” It was a first glimpse of how Thoroughbreds could be treated that I worked hard to push from my mind.

  Come the end of April, Coburn told me I needed to get Baby castrated in order to move him from this practice track to the real one, where spectators came. Baby was going to be two years old May 8th, so I was okay with gelding him. He would soon be showing interest in mating, and a stallion will break down a fence to get to a mare in heat.

  I was also okay with gelding Baby at that point because I knew it wouldn’t affect his height. Studies at the time suggested that if you castrated a horse before his second birthday, he would grow taller than he would have otherwise. You would have meddled with his genetic predisposition. But if you waited until the horse turned two, there would be very little difference in his final height versus what he would have achieved anyway. And I wanted for Baby what nature had intended.

  Baby was just starting to nip at me in the week or two before his castration—a sign of his growing sexual urges. I’d go to pet him and he’d turn his neck and take a not-so-gentle bite. Coburn also said he was beginning not to concentrate on his training because he was looking around for mares. A stallion can smell a mare in heat a half mile away.

  In May, shortly after Baby’s gelding, Coburn moved him to the Detroit Race Course, as promised. Now he really was just thirteen minutes down the expressway.

  John and I went to the State Racing Commission for our licenses within a day of his arriving there. We wouldn’t have been allowed onto the backstretch of the track without them. Because racing is a gambling entity, access to where the horses are kept is highly restricted.

  After fingerprinting, a background check for any criminal record, and our filling out the requisite forms, we had our pictures taken and were each handed back a laminated card, much like a driver’s license.

  It was a heady moment. The Detroit Race Course had once been hailed as one of the premier tracks in the country. Seabiscuit had raced there.

  But I was in for a letdown. The backstretch was in a rather decrepit state. Things looked like they had not been painted since the track was built in 1950. The main roads, made of asphalt, were cracked, with potholes everywhere. Secondary roads, composed of gravel, also contained potholes, along with deep, trench-like ruts full of mud because of poor water drainage. The track kitchen was built out of cinderblock, with old-style grayish tile that hadn’t been replaced in decades.

  I could also see immediately that I didn’t look like anybody there. The men outnumbered the women by perhaps four to one, and a number of them had a grizzled, even homeless, look. Indeed, some lived in makeshift apartments on the grounds, I later learned. These were clearly not the kind of people I hung around with.

  As surprised as I was, the regulars were doing double, triple, takes at me. I could have been three-headed for the way they were staring. Whereas they were sweating, wearing mismatched, rumpled clothing, hosing down horses, maybe walking in mud to bring a horse from a stall to another area, I had on makeup and nail polish. I was dressed like I was going to take a deposition. Of course, taking care of the horses down at my own barn, I could present a sweaty, muddy sight myself. But this felt different.

  Part of it was that the people staring at me knew quickly that I was new. On the backstretch of a track, everybody knows everything about everybody else. It’s a small-town system of passing information. But also, while I didn’t know it at the time, most horse owners rarely showed up, unless they were also their horses’ trainers. Their horses were purely investments, like a stock certificate or a mutual fund, with someone else managing it. Why would you come to see your money in person? You could check in via phone now and then and come to watch the horse race, but that was i
t. That’s why I was virtually the only one there not dressed for grooming, training, or riding.

  Despite my discomfort and surprise at the state of the backstretch and the mien of those around me, a part of me still felt like I had arrived. Here I was, licensed, one of the select few fortunate enough to see behind the scenes. And so many horses! Some were all black and glistening, some sported a large blaze, others had all white legs. And the horses led the day. They always had the right of way, with cars and trucks virtually never allowed on the roads that led from their stalls to the track, at least not during training hours—from 6:30 to 10:30 A.M. When vehicles were waved through instead of being relegated to the parking lot adjacent to the backstretch, they had to yield if a horse was passing. The horses were in all stages of training, some fractious because they had been cooped up for hours before being let out to train. Even jockeys’ agents and trainers in golf carts and workers on bicycles pedaling their way across the acres and acres of backstretch, along with those walking, had to stop for the horses.

  As I made my way to Baby, I passed aisle after aisle of shedrows, long rows of stalls with overhangs to keep the horses protected from rain or snow. Although spectators are generally not aware of it, most Thoroughbred horses are stabled at the track for the entire racing season, which in some states lasts all year long; only relatively few horses are shipped in for races.

  There were enough stalls for 1,200 horses, although perhaps only 1,000 to 1,100 horses were present. Racing had by that point begun a decline in Michigan. In the late 1970s, federal law began allowing for simulcasts—broadcasting of races in other states on television screens at the track to increase gambling revenues—but Michigan, in a conservative bent, allowed simulcasting only a few times a year, reducing funds for keeping racing going at full tilt.

  When I finally reached Baby at the far end of the backstretch, he was not in a shedrow but one of the track’s several barns, called annexes. This was not good. The annex barns were long, with no windows. The only natural light came from the exterior doors. You could barely see in there. At least in a shedrow, a horse could watch other horses coming and going and get a look at the trainers and exercise riders. Here, Baby was in a perpetual twilight.

  He let out his happy Canadian goose whinny as soon as he knew I was there; a horse can recognize his guardian’s footsteps. But while I stroked and nuzzled against him upon reaching his stall at the back end of the barn, I couldn’t come up with anything to say in return.

  Baby, I wondered to myself, what have I gotten you into?

  CHAPTER FOUR

  “Excuse me, Ma’am.”

  A trainer was apologizing to me for having just said within earshot, “That fuckin’ horse—I never thought it was going to beat mine.”

  About eight or nine of us were standing at the rail that stretches all the way around the track, watching the horses go through their paces. Everyone out there except me was a trainer or assistant, or perhaps a jockey’s agent.

  “That’s alright,” I answered. “I’m familiar with the word.”

  I had been coming to the track to watch Baby train for only a couple of weeks, and the regulars were still tiptoeing around me. I wanted them to feel comfortable to talk in front of me because I knew that was the way I was going to learn things, get the lay of the land and keep Baby safe.

  In my determination, I acted in as friendly a manner as I could. I smiled and said “hi” to people who stared at me coldly. I’d go into the track kitchen, see if anybody was sitting alone at a table, pick up an extra coffee, and offer it to him. “Would you like a cup?” I’d ask. “I’ll get you cream and sugar if you’d like.” They were only too glad, as many did not have the change to spare.

  Before long I was making twelve dozen chocolate chip cookies at a time and handing them out to people in little baggies—the security guards, a groom in a shedrow hosing down a horse after a morning session, an assistant walking a horse slowly to cool it down; hot-walking, they call it. I’d “threaten” a group of guys sitting on metal chairs in the kitchen that I was going to join their poker game.

  In this way I could ingratiate myself to the point of asking questions to which I wanted real answers. Often, the icebreaker with new people was that I had a Reel On Reel gelding. That piqued interest because Reel On Reel offspring born in the year before Baby were already racing well.

  “Who’s your trainer?” they would ask, but they had never heard of Coburn when I mentioned his name. Sometimes they’d shake their heads. I didn’t get the sense that they thought I’d made a great choice for such a promising horse.

  But the chitchat provided openings for me. “How come the place looks like this?” I would ask, pointing to chipping paint or a huge rut in the road. I assumed keeping the place up was everybody’s collective responsibility, and they had let things go.

  “Try getting the HBPA to move on it,” they’d answer.

  It turned out everybody at the track paid dues to an organization called the Horsemen’s Benevolent & Protective Association, which was supposed to look out for their interests by negotiating favorable contracts with the track owners. But I was told over and over, “Our board of directors doesn’t do a thing.” Or, “I didn’t have water the first two weeks I was here.”

  I made a mental note to myself that I should be on the HBPA Board. I’d get things done. Why should a groom, who already worked hard, have to drag water in pails from another shedrow because his own pump wasn’t working? Why should I have to use a woman’s bathroom back near the stalls that had no sink, no toilet seat, mice running around, not even a stall door? In fact, I couldn’t. I’d have to hold out for the bathroom in the kitchen. I would get things like that tended to.

  I also learned of a second association called the Thoroughbred Owners and Breeders Association, or TOBA. It didn’t have the power of the other group, which included trainers, but it still might be a place I could learn more about racing politics.

  It wasn’t long before it felt like I was on the same side of the fence as the people I was trying to ingratiate myself with; we all weren’t being treated fairly. And it wasn’t long before they appeared to have accepted me into their community. I knew I was “in” when they stopped apologizing to me for using curse words. I found, too, that for the most part, most truly were friendly. While our different styles seemed to separate us, it was easy to break through the barrier. I started to be able to tell people apart also. Jockeys were easy to spot—slight build, short, hovering around 100 pounds. Trainers tended to dress somewhat better than riders and grooms, but not always. Sometimes they were very hands-on and did the riding and cleaning themselves.

  But for all the easy conviviality, I did get signals sometimes that left me feeling on the periphery of this little microcosm rather than in the thick of things, as I wanted to be. One morning, sitting around a table in the kitchen with a few trainers, one of them asked, “Doesn’t your trainer object to your being here every day?”

  “No,” I answered. “Why should he?”

  The guys laughed and said, “That’d be the day that my horse’s owner would be here every single day!”

  “Why?” I asked. “Wouldn’t you want them here?”

  At that they all broke into peals of guffawing and one of them said, “Owners are like mushrooms. They’re best kept in the dark.”

  I knew an owner could try to step in where he shouldn’t, perhaps telling a trainer that a horse was ready for a race with a high purse that he clearly wasn’t up to—so many owners think they have the next Secretariat in the making—or putting in his two cents about how hard a horse should be trained. But their response, vaguely sinister in nature, made it seem that trainers were wont to do things not in their horses’ best interest, and it made me even more adamant that I was going to be there every day to protect Baby.

  Other things made me uneasy, too, despite the overall friendliness. One morning, as I was walking through one of the annex barns on my way back to the car af
ter seeing Baby, I came upon a trainer named Carl who was feeding a beautiful horse, nearly all black. He was putting a huge amount of hay into her stall and also filling a five-gallon bucket to the top with “sweet” feed—corn, oats, and molasses.

  Baby training at sunrise.

  It was way too much food to be giving to a horse in one feeding. Horses are built to graze for their food sixteen to eighteen hours a day. Small amounts of food on an almost continuous basis rather than large amounts of rich feed all at once helps ensure that they don’t get colic—there’s much less chance of a blockage. For that very reason, back at home, I didn’t just leave some feed for my horses in their stalls, but in winter with no grass growing, I also strewed the pasture with hay throughout the day. I wanted to simulate as much as possible what their eating habits would have been in their natural habitat.

  “May I pet her?” I asked Carl. Just like with a dog, you have to be careful and seek the owner’s permission, because you never know exactly how aggressive a horse might be, or whether the owner might not want the horse interacting at that moment.

  “Oh, yes,” Carl said.

  I moved closer, and the horse, Simply Darling, nuzzled against me. She was so sweet, leaning her head out of her stall toward me.

  Then Carl heaved up the bucket of grain, and I said, “You’re not going to give her that heavy pail of grain all at once, are you?”

  “I don’t want to have to come back later,” he answered.

  “Why don’t you give half and have somebody come by and feed the other half this evening?” I suggested. A lot of trainers would pay a groom a dollar to come by around 5 P.M. to feed a horse some hay and grain and top off its water to make sure it had enough through the night.

  But Carl just waved his hand and said, “Oh, I’m not going to waste money on that.”

  “Carl,” I implored, “she could colic with that much grain at once.” Leaving the horse with that sweetened grain was like giving a four-year-old a whole tableful of candy and expecting her to go easy.