Wild About Horses

by Lawrence Scanlan

  Something in the bond between horse and rider is so ancient, so archetypal and rich, that writers will never tire of exploring it. Redemption and seduction, danger and ecstasy, hope and despair — these are the territory of the horse. “How the horse dominated the mind of the early races, especially of the Mediterranean!” wrote D. H. Lawrence in Apocalypse. “You were a lord if you had a horse. Far back, far back in our dark soul the horse prances … The horse, the horse! The symbol of surging potency and power of movement, of action, in man.”

  In her contemporary story “What Shock Heard,” Pam Houston sketches a cowboy remarkable for his quiet hands and calm. When a frantic horse called Shock balks at entering a trailer, the cowboy just whispers something in his ear; that and a carrot do the trick. A woman watching him ride sees, in effect, the centaur. Perfection: “I hung back and watched the way his body moved with the big quarter horse: brown skin stretched across muscle and horseflesh, black mane and sandy hair, breath and sweat and one dust cloud rose around them till there was no way to separate the rider from the ride.” Later, the woman, not yet the cowboy’s lover, asks him what he said to Shock to entice him into the trailer. The cowboy tells her there are no words for that.

  CHAPTER 7

  SPORT HORSE LEGENDS

  He is an athlete, a champion, and when you hold that

  picture in your mind, or the picture of his closing run

  in the Kentucky Derby, you have defined … a standard

  for all the other horses you will ever see.

  PETER GZOWSKI ON NORTHERN DANCER,

  IN An Unbroken Line

  HORSE SPORTS ARE dangerous for horse and rider both. Speed may come at a price; ground can be so unforgiving.

  Dick Francis turned to writing novels — longhand, in pencil, one a year — when, at the age of thirty-six, his body could no longer stand the rigors of the steeplechase (so called after Irishmen named O’Callaghan and Blake agreed to a village-to-village, church steeple-to-church steeple horse race in 1752). The word rigors, though, politely skirts a shattering, orthopedic litany. Francis, a former champion, has fractured his skull, wrist, jaw, arm and three vertebrae, broken his nose five times, his collarbone a dozen times (twenty-one broken bones in all) and more ribs than he can remember. “You don’t count broken ribs,” he once said. “The pain stops when you warm up.” Every night before bed the seventy-seven-year-old Francis must heavily bandage his left shoulder, the one he dislocated horribly in a fall from a horse.

  Bones mend, though. Bodies heal. The hidden wounds, the ones of the mind, sometimes never do. In 1956, Dick Francis was riding in the Grand National at Aintree, a demanding course of thirty fences stretched over four and a half miles. I have never been to a steeplechase race, but footage invariably depicts horses crashing through hedges and riders landing ingloriously in heaps. The up-and-over motion reminds me of merry-go-rounds, especially because riderless horses continue leaping fences.

  Francis was leading the pack that day on a horse called Devon Loch — owned by the Queen Mother — and galloping toward the finish line only thirty-five yards away. With the last fence behind them, the path to victory seemed clear. “In all my life,” he would later write in his autobiography, The Sport of Queens, “I have never experienced a greater joy than the knowledge I was about to win the National.” Never had he felt “such power in reserve, such confidence in my mount, such calm in my mind.” He would have broken the speed record for the course. Would have, had Devon Loch taken ten more strides. No one, least of all Dick Francis, understands what happened next.

  The horse’s hind legs stiffened and he fell flat on his belly, spread-eagled cartoonishly. When the horse stood up he seemed paralyzed and not a little perplexed. A photograph records Francis tossing his whip in anger and dismay. He has his head buried in the horse’s neck, as if he cannot bear to watch the pack streak past. Like the race car driver on empty a stone’s throw from the finish line, he felt an anguish so great that even forty years later it remains a painful topic of conversation. “A post-mortem one day,” Francis wrote, “may find the words ‘Devon Loch’ engraved on my heart, so everlasting an impression has that gallant animal made upon it.” Did the crowd’s roar unhinge the horse? Was it a medical problem missed by the vets — who later found nothing amiss despite exhaustive examination? Or was it a quirky shy?

  The memory of the spills, the burden of being tagged the man who “lost” the National (a race he would never win) — these Dick Francis sets aside. What he chooses to recall is the adrenaline rush. One of his characters, a retired jockey in Whip Hand, awakens from a dream in which he has won a race: “I could still feel the irons round my feet, the calves of my legs gripping, the balance, the nearness to my head of the stretching brown neck, the blowing in my mouth, my hands on the reins.”

  A horse race, whether we partake or watch, awakens something in us. One galloping horse offers a vicarious thrill; a dozen horses on the fly fiercely pull us in. In the final moments of a race, who can turn a back to all those horse heads bobbing, those legs pounding the turf? Moderns feel the tug, as the ancients did.

  The Romans were so keen on chariot racing that individual charioteers loomed as large in that society as Michael Jordan and Wayne Gretzky loom in ours. Roman fans knew the horses, their pedigrees, their quirks. On the floor of a Roman bath archeologists found a two-thousand-year-old tribute to a horse named Polydoxus: Vincas, non vincas, te amamus Polydoxus, the mosaic tiles read. “Whether you win or lose, we love you, Polydoxus.”

  The track, or hippodrome, drew huge crowds, and spectators wore blue or green to reflect allegiance to the charioteer of their choice. But the swelling numbers of Christian converts viewed horse racing as a pagan vice; invaders — Huns, Vandals, Goths — sacked Roman cities; earthquakes toppled hippodromes; and for a thousand years there was no racing.

  Or at least no organized racing. But in fields and along dirt roads, challenges were surely laid down. Boys must have raced their colts; girls, their ponies; men and women, the pride of their stables.

  The U.S. Cavalry and plains Indians engaged in savage fighting in the nineteenth century, but during lulls they often indulged in a favored pastime — racing horses. One day, at Fort Chadbourne in Texas, soldiers and warriors laid down their bets and the Comanche produced a most unlikely horse and jockey: an oversized rider on a pony with a three-inch-thick coat of hair. Throughout the four-hundred-yard race, the rider apparently used his weighty club on the pony and eked out a win — by a neck. The officers brought out a better horse, who also lost to the bedraggled pony — by a nose.

  The cavalry had saved for the third and final race a Kentucky racing mare. But the Comanche bet everything they had on that miserable pony. When the gun went, the rider this time tossed his club, let out a whoop and took off. The trooper and the sleek Kentucky mare were soon so far behind that the Comanche rider took to sitting backward on his pony and beckoning them to catch up. The pony, it turned out, was a celebrated racer, and the Comanche had previously stripped another tribe of six hundred horses using the same sucker tactic.

  The first Europeans to land on America’s shores could not wait to race their horses. The otherwise dour Pilgrims were forced to pass laws against racing horses in the street. In the film Friendly Persuasion, Gary Cooper plays a Quaker tempted to race even on the way to church Sunday morning when a neighbor speeds by in his buggy. Not wanting to be seen succumbing to that temptation, yet keen to race, he cleverly trades for a horse with a minor vice; he will not abide being passed.

  The first formal racetrack in America was built in 1665 in what is now Nassau County, Long Island. In The History of Thoroughbred Racing in America, William H. P. Robertson points out that while racing in England was the sport of kings, with courses designed by gentry for gentry, “The democratic spirit in America resisted such treatment. The public demanded that contestants in races should be visible from start to finish, rather than disappear over a hill, and for this reason the circu
lar track came into existence.”

  7.1 Eventer seeming to dance on water: to ride or watch an elite horse is to partake in that animal’s grace. (photo credit 7.1)

  Canadians similarly longed to watch horse races and, more important, to bet on their outcome. Front Street in York (present-day Toronto) was the scene of legitimate street racing in the early 1800s. The Plate, Louis E. Cauz’s history of the Queen’s Plate, among the longest running stakes races in North America, describes racing’s origins in what was then known as Upper Canada. “Trials of speed, one cavalry officer challenging another, or two farmers wagering livestock or produce to settle whose mare was fastest” had offered afternoon entertainment since the late 1700s.

  The American Civil War would introduce new equine blood on both sides of the border. For safe keeping, many fine southern Thoroughbreds stayed in Canada and improved racing stock. The Canadian horse, meanwhile, a sturdy all-purpose roadster bred in Quebec, went south by the thousands.

  The horse was on the move, and so was the horse sport. While the West produced the explosive Quarter Horse specifically for the quarter-mile dash, the East refined the Thoroughbred and Standardbred for longer races. Ranch work begat the rodeo, which pulled the cutting horse into competition. No other animal but the horse would be used in so many diverse athletic endeavors. No other sport but the horse sport would partner human and animal so directly or find so many ways for men and women to go head to head in competition.

  Dressage, the hunt, the rodeo, polo, steeplechase, eventing, driving, show jumping — the theater of horse and human would make us, if not actors ourselves, then keen patrons, and sometimes both.

  The literature of the sport horse is like a deep spring you return to again and again, so revitalizing is the water. The stories that touch me most are the ones that end suddenly and calamitously. In such a telling, there is no chance for the horse’s gifts to erode, no time to second-guess the horse’s worth as the career winds down and the losses mount. No, the fire burns hot and bright, then it’s out.

  I cherish the story of Ruffian, the stunning black filly. Walter Farley said she was the horse he envisioned (never mind her sex) as he wrote The Black Stallion books. One veterinarian called her the most perfectly conformed — best balanced, best proportioned — horse he had ever seen. But I remember the words of another vet, who took from the Devon Loch episode a lesson about the sublime: “The nearer to perfection, the more likely something has got to give.”

  A granddaughter, on the dam’s side, of Native Dancer (a line that produced Northern Dancer), Ruffian was a fleet and spirited horse. She had a grace that belied her size and a quickness that staggered everyone.

  Her long, fluid stride certainly confounded the exercise rider who first rode her on the track. The former jockey Yates Kennedy, then fifty-nine, had been around horses all his life, and Ruffian’s ride seemed so effortless he thought he had gone the three-eighths of a mile distance in thirty-seven seconds. Like many other jockeys and show jumpers, he came equipped with a little stopwatch in his head. Rarely off, Kennedy was that day way off — by almost two full seconds. He later conjured an image to capture the sense of being on Ruffian’s back. It felt as though she unfurled an invisible sail between strides, he said, so that when her feet were off the ground she rode the wind at her back.

  Ruffian was born in April 1972 at Claiborne Farm, one of the grand old breeding farms of Kentucky. Colts rule Thoroughbred racing, but this filly was an exception. Some rank her not just the greatest filly who ever lived, but the greatest racehorse.

  Her owners had already set the name Ruffian aside for a certain colt, but when he was sold they gave the name to the little filly. “Girls,” insisted her owner, Barbara Janney, “can be Ruffians, too.” She would be no delicate little mare. Stable hands nicknamed her Sophie, as in sofa. As big as a couch she may have been, but she was not ungainly, as many large horses are. Quite the opposite.

  7.2 Ruffian: the Great Match Race of July 6, 1975 would be her last. (photo credit 7.2)

  Before trainer Frank Y. Whiteley Jr. put the jockey on Ruffian for her first training ride, he defied a superstition at the track: he sang her praises. Racing reveres luck — your starting position is drawn from a hat; a loss can be a matter of breaking a second too soon or too late, the mood of the horse, the footing, the weather. Wise track people therefore honor the tradition of withholding praise until duly earned. Best not rile the god of luck. But old Whiteley reckoned Ruffian’s star would shine a long time, for the gods themselves had blessed her with special gifts. “I got a big black filly I’m gonna put you on,” he told the rider. “It’s the fastest horse you’ve ever been on.”

  In a short race against horses at the stable, the jockey, Jacinto Vasquez, restrained Ruffian, but she breezed by the others. This despite a poor start and a trip around the outside to catch the leaders. The trick with Ruffian was not to find the gas pedal but the brakes. It took every ounce of Vasquez’s considerable strength to stop her from continuing to run when the race ended. He was then a leading jockey on the circuit, thirty years old and notoriously tough. Vasquez’s hands and arms went numb from pulling. Old Whiteley was right.

  In her first race, on May 22, 1974, against other untried fillies, Ruffian opened up a fifteen-length lead and matched the track record. Ruffian won her second race by seven lengths; her third, by thirteen lengths. This would be her pattern. In nine of her ten races she either matched or broke the track record and only once was she pushed (that race marked the one time a crop was used on her, and only four cracks at that). In the tenth race, Ruffian was coming off an injury and the jockey was specifically instructed to coast to victory and not to break any records.

  Racing magazines called her “a wonder” and said she was “invincible.” “Speed to spare,” reported the Daily Racing Form. “One was seeing something very rare,” trumpeted the Bloodhorse scribe who admired her almost effortless acceleration. At Saratoga, her jockey tried to hold her back on the home stretch (he was that much ahead) and she still ran the six furlongs faster than any two-year-old in the history of this track where racing began after the Civil War. For all that, she had never really been tested and she had never run against a colt. How fast, went the whisper, could she run?

  Someone proposed running Ruffian against the best colt of the day, the Kentucky Derby winner Foolish Pleasure. Just those two horses. The Great Match Race would be held at Belmont Park in New York on July 6, 1975. Boy versus Girl. Colt of the Year versus Filly of the Year. Bold Ruler’s grandson versus Bold Ruler’s granddaughter. The Race of the Century.

  People wore buttons to the race, each one depicting a head shot of one of the horses, with the horse’s name below and “The Great Match” above. Some buttons simply read “Him” or “Her.” Of the fifty thousand spectators at Belmont that day, many appeared to divide along gender lines. Men and boys wore Foolish Pleasure buttons. Women and girls demonstrated their support for Ruffian by wearing her button. One newspaper ran a cartoon showing women known for their strong views on women’s rights — Gloria Steinem, Betty Friedan and Billie Jean King among them — all yelling “C’mon Ruffian!”

  In most races, colts will outrun mares. Often bigger and stronger, they sometimes intimidate fillies before the race even begins. But many experts were picking Ruffian in this rare match race: she was taller by three inches, heavier by sixty-four pounds. Even Vasquez, who had ridden Foolish Pleasure in his last nine races, switched back to Ruffian for the match race. In a prerace workout, the Daily Racing Form’s chief clocker said of Vasquez and Ruffian: “I think if he turned her loose my watch would explode. I’ve been around about half a century and I’ve never seen a Thoroughbred work so fast so easily.” Foolish Pleasure was just as impressive. Anticipation for the race was monumental: some twenty million people would watch on television.

  Barbara Janney remembers a moment when Ruffian halted as she was led past the grandstand. The crowd was roaring — and this was before the race. Tra
ck aficionados would later say they had never heard a crowd so animated. Ruffian paused to consider these onlookers, as if certain she held center stage. Janney would savor that memory because of what followed. Maybe that is how she wanted to remember Ruffian: composed and self-assured, acutely aware of her own greatness.

  When the gates broke open, Foolish Pleasure smartly took the lead on the outside, but within several strides Ruffian had nosed out in front by a few inches on the inside. She was so much bigger than he was that fans in the stands could not see the colt as the two horses rounded the clubhouse turn for the backstretch. The filly looked to be running alone.

  Near the halfway point, with Ruffian ahead by half a length, it happened. Both jockeys heard a snap. It is the sound a hefty branch makes when it cracks in a windstorm. It is the sound of bone breaking, and those who have heard it even once never forget it or care to hear it again.

  A Thoroughbred is a remarkable animal. Within six strides of exiting the starting gate, the horse is streaking at forty miles an hour and taking in five gallons of air a second. The force on the horse’s front cannon bone has a calculated impact of ten thousand to twelve thousand pounds. The red line is perilously close: at eighteen thousand pounds the stress on the bone is simply too much to bear.

  Ruffian had taken what the Thoroughbred world calls “a bad step.” That curious expression appears to blame the horse or the Fates for what is often a numbing, life-ending event. Her right front hoof, suddenly loose and flapping, no longer supported the leg. She was running on raw bone. It splintered, one vet said later, like an ice cube hit with a hammer.

  At the moment the leg broke, Ruffian appeared to bump Foolish Pleasure. But the videotapes reveal that she was actually leaning on him, trying to compensate, to remain on three legs and keep running. On she ran, somehow, for fifty more yards, while Vasquez desperately struggled to rein her in. Then she veered right and staggered to a halt, blood and bone issuing from the terrible wound. The jockey leaped off, held his hands aloft and tried to support Ruffian, who screamed in pain.