The Only Game in Town

by David Remnick

  The Home Stretch was often like this—friendly, wistful, and a little ragged at the edges. Grooms, trainers, winners, losers, mailmen, any and all of them were likely to wander in and sit down and order a drink and then tell you their life story, or, at least, the most immediate part of it, how they’d dropped a sawbuck on a sure thing only to see the horse go wide on the turn and wind up in the parking lot. The day bartender, Benny, a cigar-chomping five-by-fiver out of a Joe Palooka comic strip, ran the place with an iron hand and brooked no displays of unnecessary roughness. He yelled as loudly at friends as at enemies. “Whaddaya want? A Bud? Speak up. Can’t hear you!” Once, I heard somebody say to him, “Benny, like you to meet a friend of mine, he’s a nice guy.” Benny frowned. “We’re all nice guys in here,” he said. On the wall there was a photo of him and Rocky Marciano. Benny had his head on the Rock’s shoulder and he was smiling like a baby. After dark, when the regulars disappeared, the Home Stretch underwent a subtle transformation. Drunken grooms began talking to themselves, and pale outsiders with unauthorized business to effect somewhere in the night sat alone and sipped iced gin, their eyes on the clock.

  In the morning, I felt better. Morning is the best, the most optimistic, time at any race track; everything seems possible again. Some mornings when I left the Terrace early, just after six, to watch the horses working out, the dawn light filtering through the fog on the bay echoed the gold I’d seen in painted halos all over Florence. I thought I could feel its healing properties. Out on the freeway, the first commuters were tangling, but from where I stood along the rail I was aware only of the animals. Around me there rose the smells of manure, tobacco, coffee, and new-mown grass, and I found myself agreeing implicitly with Slaughterhouse Red, the gateman who supervised the comings and goings of riders, when he raised his abused face to the sun and said, “Anybody don’t like this life is daffy!” Red was a former cowboy who had grown up in the old Butchertown section of San Francisco and had earned his keep as a boy by herding cattle from stockyard trains to the slaughterhouses lining the streets. He worked at the track until noon and then, if the weather was good, left for Martinez, where his fishing boat was docked. If the weather was only fair, or if an old buddy was in town, or even if he just had the itch, he stayed around for the afternoon’s races. Once in a while, if the itch was bad, he’d drive directly from Golden Gate to Bay Meadows, some thirty-odd miles to the south, so he could catch the quarter-horse races held there at night.

  Horses came up from the barns in constant process, differing appreciably in their approach. Some looked half awake, some looked sore, and some looked lazy. Some kicked up their heels because they were feeling good, while others, the rogues in need of stricter handling, bucked and snorted and let it be understood that they were performing under duress. The true race horses were always ready. They took to the track prancing, and when they returned from a gallop they were slick with sweat and their veins protruded in marmoreal splendor. A few of them wanted to keep right on running, and their riders were forced to hold them tight, pulling in on the reins, which put a crook in the animals’ necks and gave the horses the look of knights on a chessboard. They were beautiful. Ponies and human beings were interspersed among them, but they provided the movement, the exhilaration. Back at the barns, they were bathed and brushed, then hooked to hot-walkers and set to circling. Everywhere I looked, I saw horses—chestnuts, bays, browns, and blacks—and I felt locked within the clashing perspective of a battle scene painted by Paolo Uccello.

  Right from the start, horses move fast. A mare gives birth in something between fifteen and thirty minutes, and during parturition her foal, born with eyes open, begins to pull away, tugging its legs out of the vagina and breaking the umbilical cord. In less than an hour, the foal is standing and looking around, and in two hours it can suckle, walk, vocalize, and show affection for its mother. Before the first day is out, the foal can trot, gallop, protect itself from insects by nipping, kicking, and shaking its tail, play, and even forage. The mare’s milk gives the foal antibodies and serves as a purgative. Even the digestive system of horses is geared to acceleration. They process food almost twice as fast as cows and can live on poor-quality graze, because their digestive system rapidly transforms any available protein into amino acids. But they have to eat twice as much, twice as fast, and their teeth are sometimes worn down to the jawbone by the high silica content of grass. In the wild, horses without teeth starve to death. Race horses are fed hay and oats with an occasional taste of mash—a healthy, balanced diet—but their relatives in other parts of the world exist on oddments like grapevines, lawn clippings, compost, bamboo leaves, and dried fish. Whatever they eat passes quickly through them. They defecate from five to twelve times a day and urinate from seven to eleven times. They have a normal body temperature of 100.3 degrees Fahrenheit, which they maintain by shivering and sweating. The panniculus muscle, just beneath their skin, allows them to shake off excess moisture, along with pesky flies, and acts as a thermostatic control.

  Horses don’t see very well, especially close up. They are often astigmatic, and suffer, too, from color blindness. To them the backstretch—the barn area behind the racing strip, which also functions as a meeting ground and sometimes a home for trainers, jockeys, grooms, and other track habitués—appears as a band of varying shades of gray. They don’t register individual items like pails, hoses, or saddles, but they know when their groom is moving, by changes in relative brightness and tone. On the other hand, horses have an excellent sense of hearing. Their ears are concave and can move in any direction, like dish antennae, picking up sounds at a great distance—a mouse scratching five stalls down. When a horse pricks its ears, its nostrils flare simultaneously, so the receptors can work in tandem. Stallions can smell a mare in heat miles away if she’s upwind, and even an average animal can locate water or snakes by following its nose.

  While I watched the horses come and go, business was booming around me. Jockeys’ agents, carrying small notebooks with hand-tooled leather covers, moved from barn to barn booking mounts. If they represented a live rider, a kid who had been winning lately, trainers met them eagerly, and even offered them a cup of coffee, but if they were pushing a loser, their eyes were often sunk in rummy sadness and they were treated like pariahs. “Lemme know if you get something Richie can’t handle!” they shouted to Bob Hack, the agent who held Rich Galarsa’s book, and Hack steered them on occasion to a needy trainer. Everybody wanted to use Galarsa, because he was live and still had the bug, a five-pound weight allowance granted to apprentice riders—riders who are still in the twelve-month period following their first five wins. Apprentices are called bug boys, because an insectlike asterisk appears next to their names and weights in the program, distinguishing them from journeymen, who receive no allowance.

  Trainers had more vital things to do than to mess with importunate jockeys. They had horses to clock, owners to call, grooms to supervise, and orders to place with tack salesmen and feed suppliers, and they had to be ready when the vet arrived to examine sick or damaged stock. Furthermore, they had to waste precious time trying to read the Condition Book, which was about as cleanly written as an IRS pamphlet. The Condition Book set forth the eligibility requirements for future races, and it was updated every ten days. You needed a postgraduate degree to unscramble its sentences:

  Starter Allowance. Purse $9000. For four-year-olds and upward, non-winners of two races at one mile and one-eighth or over in 1978, which have started for a claiming price of $16,000 or less in 1977–78 and since that start have not won a race other than maiden or claiming, or a claiming or starter race exceeding $16,000.

  “Jay-sus!” the trainers cried, dumping the book into an empty feed bucket. Most of them relied on agents when it came time to enter a horse. “Where do you think I ought to run ole Wind Chime?” they’d ask, and Hack or somebody else would set them straight, presenting the options.

  Trainers (they were the first to tell you) had a rough job—e
ven established guys, like Bobby Martin and Bill Mastrangelo. Maybe Mastrangelo seemed relaxed when he walked around the barn singing Jerry Vale ballads at the top of his lungs, but he felt the pressure anyway. He had to feel it, because he had to deal with owners, who applied it. Owners were almost always trouble. Sure, they looked classy when you saw them on TV at the Kentucky Derby, rich, polite, soft-spoken, but this image was deceiving. In fact they were part of the incomprehensible freeway universe, and 90 percent of them knew absolutely nothing about horses or racing. Five of the remaining 10 percent thought they knew something but didn’t, and four of the final 5 percent knew a little bit but not enough to make a difference. They’d buy a rickety colt as a tax loss, and when the colt broke his maiden, finally winning his first race after sixteen tries, the jerks thought they owned another Man o’ War and ordered the trainer to jump the colt to stakes races, where the competition was much tougher, and then when the colt lost repeatedly, by grotesque margins, they blamed the trainer or fired him or moved the colt to another track and skipped out on the balance of their bill. What could you do, take them to court?

  Gary Headley, a trainer, and his groom, Bo Twinn, were having coffee the first time I visited their barn—No. 25, a cobwebby structure situated in nonpreferential territory, among the shops of feed merchants, tack salesmen, and purveyors of riding silks, at least a quarter mile from the track. They sat in lawn chairs, smoking and reading the Form, and rested their cups on a round, low-slung table—a salvaged telephone-cable spool. There were doughnuts on the table, and empty almond packs and soda cans. Both men looked tired and dirty after the morning’s work. Headley’s blue nylon Windbreaker was creased as though he’d slept in it, and his blond hair wandered off in random shocks. Bo hadn’t shaved yet, and his face looked weather-beaten and old. It was the sort of face that occurred in hot, dusty places. I’d seen it before, in Depression-era photographs. Over the years, Bo had developed a crusty personality to match his face, and he could be formidably short-tempered on occasion, but he loved horses and they loved him. “If you was smart, you wouldn’t have to ask that question,” he would say, pursing his lips like a schoolmarm. Headley, who was in his late thirties—younger than Bo—took great pride in employing him. “Best groom on the grounds,” he’d say confidentially, hiding his mouth behind a hand, “and the best paid, too.” There was no way to substantiate such statements, and, besides, Headley made them all the time.

  Headley was a hyperbolic and something of a flake, not the best trainer at Golden Gate but also not the worst. His life so far had been a model of fluctuant behavior. His brother Bruce, a respected trainer on the Southern California circuit, had hired Gary, taught him the trade, and introduced him around, but Gary had never been able to commit himself absolutely to the track, not for any length of time. He’d work for a while, building up his business, then wash out and drift through odd jobs in the real world or (if he had a little money saved) stay in his apartment, behind closed curtains, sipping wine and watching TV. Then he’d decide that training horses really was right for him, and he would go back to work, starting at the bottom, and keep at it for a few years before becoming disillusioned or bored or upset and washing out again. Headley recognized the pattern but seemed incapable of breaking it. This was his major problem. The track, like any subculture, extracts a mean price for ambivalence, and Headley had been paying it too long. His marriage—to a legal secretary, a woman who knew nothing about racing—had recently fallen apart, and the failure bothered him. “First divorce in the family in seven generations,” he said, as though reminding himself. These days, almost in compensation, he seemed more dedicated than he had in the past, although the odds were even that he might flip-flop at any minute, disappearing from the backstretch without leaving a forwarding address.

  Bo had other problems. He lived in a tack room—a compact space, ten by fifteen feet, ordinarily used for storing saddles, bridles, and the like—and two female cats had adopted his residence as their own and presented him with ten kittens. “I got all kinds of cats,” he said, showing me the litter nursing on his bed. The room smelled overpoweringly feline. There was a TV set on the bureau, a few shirts hanging from a rod inside an open closet, and pictures of horses taped to the walls. “The two mama cats, they take turns nursing. I never did see anything like it before. One nurses and then the other. This kitten here’s the prettiest.” He picked up a long-haired calico by the scruff. “I might even keep her. Don’t know what I’ll do with them others, though. I got ’em in every possible color. That little guy over there, he’s the runt. They push him around. Maybe you’d like a cat for your house?”

  Headley took me around his barn, which he shared with Bud Keen, another trainer. Keen kept a goat in his section to help quiet a high-strung filly. When the goat saw us coming, he backed off, making goat noises. Headley had six stalls, and the horses in most of them were hurting in one way or another. “Think this horse is sound?” he asked rhetorically, stopping in front of a bedraggled-looking mare. “She’s raced twice in six months, that’s how sound she is. I could get a better class of horse, but I don’t want the hassle. I used to train a big string at Santa Anita, but the owners drove me nuts. See this?” He pointed to a deep cleft between his eyebrows. “I got this from worrying.” Next, he showed me a handsome two-year-old, Urashima Taro, who hadn’t raced yet. “I think this colt’s a winner,” he said. “This colt’s my dream horse. I already nominated him for the Del Mar Futurity and the Hollywood Juvenile. It’s cheaper to pay the entry fees now than waiting.” We continued down the shed row. “See this filly? She was crazy when she came in. I couldn’t even touch her. She was wrecked. Her owners are nice people, though. For a change. They gave me plenty of time with her. Now she’s rounding into shape. What are those people, Bo? The Sandomirs. What are they? They speak Spanish, but I know they’re not Mexicans. The wife speaks English pretty good. I think they might be Panamanian. Are those people Panamanian, Bo?”

  “All’s I know is they’re not Mexicans,” Bo said.

  “No, they’re not Mexicans. I think they might be Panamanians.”

  “What’s the filly’s name?” I asked.

  “Pichi,” Headley said. “Don’t ask me what it means.”

  I never met Gregory Sandomir, a native of Argentina, but his wife, Mary, once explained his involvement in racing quite succinctly. “My husband has the feeling since he’s very young,” she told me. “He likes the horses very much.” Sandomir, who manufactured blue jeans in Los Angeles, had always wanted to own a Thoroughbred, and in the summer of 1976 he began shopping around. He knew some trainers, and they sent him to various breeding farms and ranches to look at the stock for sale, but it took a while before he found what he wanted. At Walnut Wood Farm, in Hemet, California, he fell for an eight-month-old chestnut filly by Dr. Marc R out of Atomic Jay. Sandomir knew little about conformation (the ideal physical structure of a Thoroughbred) or bloodlines (its all-important heritage), but this served him well, because the filly had nothing much to commend her except a distant, minimal relationship to War Admiral, which might have accounted for her willful nature. She was pretty and excitable, and Sandomir, thoroughly smitten, made the purchase and named her Pichi. This had been his nickname for his daughter, who was married now and gone from his house.

  As a two-year-old, Pichi was consigned to a Hollywood Park trainer who had no tolerance for her moodiness, and soon she was locked into a battle of wills. She resisted most stringently at the starting gate. She hated the machinery and balked whenever she went near it. Instead of trying to ease her in, comforting her, the trainer apparently used force, which aggravated matters. Horses who have an aversion to the gate can usually be counted on to break poorly in a race, sometimes a half second behind the field, and Pichi followed the rule. In her first race, a five-and-a-half-furlong sprint (eight furlongs equal a mile), she finished eighth by thirteen lengths, and two weeks later, against weaker opponents, she loped home tenth, twelve casual lengths beh
ind the leader. Sandomir became concerned about her condition. She didn’t look well. There was no reason, he thought, to extract victory from a horse’s hide, so when the meet ended and the action shifted to Del Mar, he arranged for Pichi to be trained by Ross Fenstermaker, who ran her twice at a mile. She improved, breaking better both times, but she was still far from winning a race, or even finishing in the money. Fenstermaker would have stayed with her, but he got an offer to train a string of first-class horses for Fred Hooper, an owner of some prominence. Owners like Hooper tend to demand exclusivity from their trainers in exchange for the privilege of working with quality stock, so Fenstermaker had to get rid of his outlaw. His old friend Gary Headley was just getting back into the game at Golden Gate, and he urged Sandomir to give Headley a try. The competition was much cheaper in the north, and Pichi would have a better chance at breaking her maiden. Fenstermaker gave Headley a single caution: Watch this filly, she’s murder in the gate.

  Pichi arrived by van in February 1978, toward the end of a long, cold, wet winter that had broken the back of a two-year drought. Rivers were running again, the snowpack was deep around the Sierras, and Pichi, who had spent a few months standing in mud, had an awful-looking pair of hind legs, raw and infected. Headley led her to his barn. He examined his new charge and thought, Another cripple. He had plenty of cripples on hand already, representing varying degrees of unsoundness—here a grapefruit-size knee, there a quarter-cracked hoof—and Pichi fit right in. She hadn’t raced in half a year and was in miserable shape. Headley found a crescent-shaped scar on her rib cage and figured that somewhere along the line a groom must have hit her with something heavy and broken a rib. But the rib appeared to have mended on its own, although imperfectly. She had other imperfections as well. The tip of her tail was missing, nipped off in a starting-gate accident; she had muscle spasms in her back; and when she ran, her vulva opened abnormally wide and she sucked air into her vagina, which caused a certain amount of discomfort. She also had what Headley called “psychological” problems. She was tense and wouldn’t let anybody touch her. Nor would she eat, no matter what was served—oats, hay, some special mixture—and she was mean-tempered and kicked at Bo whenever she could. When she wasn’t acting up, she remained aloof, staring at the rear wall of her stall like an infanta trapped in a tower, her regal bearing violated, and she flicked her tail at passersby and pinned her ears at the slightest provocation.