Once They Heard the Cheers

by Wilfred Charles Heinz

  "That couldn't have been the last time I went down," he said. "I rode four or five years after that and, hell, you can't ride four or five years without falling. I wasn't really hurt."

  "It scared me."

  "A horse hit me in the back of the head, and I was unconscious for four hours and . . ."

  "And that's not being really hurt?"

  "And there was a photographer there who took a picture of me laying there in that slop. You saw that picture in Life?"

  "I may have, but I remember it from TV."

  "The guy who took the picture saved my life. After he took it he saw I didn't move, and he turned my head out of the slop. If he didn't, I would have suffocated. Then they took an encephalogram, and it would come to one spot and zero up. The Doc said, 'There's something wrong.' I had some torn ligament in my back here too, and finally I said, 'Doc, there's nothing the matter. I'm drinking a quart of whiskey a night and dancing.'

  "I went fishing in Canada with my dad and my son, and I came back and he gave me another encephalograph. I said, 'It must be the machine.' He said, 'Let's start all over. Did you ever have a fractured skull?' I said, 'Yes, when I was eighteen.' He said, 'That's it.' I said, 'Yeah, That's just great.' I blew the Queen's Plate in Toronto. While we were fishing I heard on the radio what won it, and I said, 'What the hell am I doing here?' "

  "Are your folks living and well?"

  "My mother's not well now, and my old man is dead. He lived with us for eight years, and died in our house in Garden City. You know, he and my mother split, and when that happens it's hard to take, but when I got to know my old man I came to understand him."

  "You told me something about your dad once," I said, "and you asked me never to write it as long as he was alive, and I never did."

  "What was that?"

  "About the bootlegging."

  "You can write it now, if you want to."

  His father had a paint store and a taxi business, and then he began buying up houses and putting couples to live in them. He would also put stills in them.

  "When I was six, seven, and eight," Eddie had told me, "I remember sitting there at the dining room table and separating money. I'd separate the fives and tens, and we had a closet full. When I first came on the track as a kid, I had more money than the jocks did."

  "Hell," he was saying now, "I was labeling whiskey when I was twelve. I was getting a hundred a week when people were in breadlines, and in that town it was like everybody did it. I had my own car when I was fourteen. Then later my dad had this place in Erlanger, called 'Arcaro's,' and one day Spencer Drayton called me in."

  Spencer Drayton was the head of the Thoroughbred Racing Protective Bureau. They police racing and are concerned with the pedigrees and performances of both horses and people.

  "Drayton said, 'You're a public figure. You know they're making book down there. I want you to talk to your father.' I said, 'Why don't you go out there and tell him?' I didn't want any part of telling my old man."

  "He had that temper you inherited?"

  "Hell, he had a boiling point at zero. So Drayton sent a guy out, and after he got done talking, my old man said, 'I'll tell you what you do, fella. You finish your drink and then get the hell out of here, and remember that my name was Arcaro before Eddie's was.' "

  When Eddie's temper flared only Red Adair, the fireman of the oil field blowouts, could have capped it. In 1942 in the Cowdin Stakes at Aqueduct, it almost cost him his career. He was riding a horse named Occupation, and Vincent Nodarse, the Cuban jockey, was on one of the others.

  "All Occupation's races had been in front," Eddie had told me, explaining it, "and they wanted somebody on him who could rate him. I said I'd take him back, and I told Nodarse in the gate that I wanted to take my horse back at the start, and to give me time. You'll talk like that with other jocks, and when Occupation broke a neck on the field and I started to take him in, Nodarse got a half-length in front and sawed him off.

  "I damn near went over his head, and by the time we hit the chute I didn't have a horse beat. I was on the outside, and I just lost my temper. Nodarse was in front, and I got Occupation gathered up and hit him, and he must have run the quarter in twenty-one seconds. Before we hit the turn I got a neck in front of Nodarse's horse and I nailed him. He saw me coming, and he knew what I was gonna do. He was hollering, "No could help, Eddie! No could help!' I hollered, 'I'll help you, you sonofabitch! I'll help you right now!'

  "I just tried to put him over the fence, and it was lucky he didn't get killed. Even as bad as I rode Occupation, he finished second, but naturally the stewards claimed foul and I walked down that tunnel and up in the elevator. They were trying something new then. They had a microphone to record your claim of foul or your defense, and I sure gave it a great inauguration.

  "Marshall Cassidy said to me, 'Eddie, did you do that on purpose?' I said, 'On purpose? I'd have killed the sonofabitch if I could!'"

  From Eddie you got an honest answer, and he was grounded for a whole year. For a while he went on drunks for a day or two. He took up golf, and he said that the discipline in learning to control his nerves on the course helped to cure him.

  "I'll always remember you," I was saying now, "coming back on the train from Baltimore after you won the Preakness on Citation."

  Two weeks before, he had won his fourth Derby on him, and no other jock had ever won more than three. Now he had just won the Preakness, and he would win the Belmont and, with it, his second Triple Crown.

  "Arthur Daley and Jimmy Cannon and I," I said, "were sitting in one of the parlor cars, and you came in and sat down. Daley was always carrying around a big Manila envelope. I never knew what he had in it, but I figured it was clippings pertaining to the event he was covering, because he often used other people's research in his columns. He used to make notes on those Manila envelopes, so he took out his pencil, and he said to you, 'What's it like, Eddie, riding Citation? It must be a thrill.' And you said, 'Actually, it isn't. It's like driving a Caddy. When you want the power it's there, and there's really not much of a thrill to it.' "

  "That was right."

  "So then Arthur, writing that down, said, 'But you must have got a thrill winning your fourth Derby on him.' And you said, 'Hell, if I'd had any luck, I'd have won a lot of those Derbies.' Arthur was stunned, and I had to laugh."

  "That was right, too."

  "I know," I said.

  In 1942 he was riding for Greentree, and had the choice of Shut Out or Devil Diver. He picked Devil Diver and Shut Out won. In 1947 he was on Phalanx, the best of the three-year-olds, and was beaten a head by Jet Pilot, and he would tell me later that he bought the movie of that race and played it over and over and that he didn't sleep well for weeks.

  "You don't think about those Derbies you've won," he told me. "You've already got those. The ones I think about are the ones I didn't win when I should have."

  When I got him to thinking about them, the ones he won, though, there were stories. Four of his five Derby winners— Lawrin in 1938, Whirlaway in 1941, Citation in 1948, and Hill Gail in 1952—were trained by Ben Jones, and B.A., as he was known, starred in Eddie's stories.

  "He knew that Louisville track," Eddie said, "better than he knew the back of his own hand, and he knew those horses better than he knew his own relatives."

  On those Saturday mornings of the Larwin and Whirlaway Derbies, B.A. had Eddie come out to the stable early, and he made him walk the track. B.A. was on his stable pony, and Eddie hoofed it alongside while B.A. picked out the best footing and the spots where the track was bad.

  "Stomp right there," B.A. would say. "That should be a little soft."

  When they got back to the barn, B.A. had a chart of the course and they went over it again. In 1945, though, when Eddie won on Hoop, Jr., he rode him for Fred W. Hooper, and it had rained hard the night before the race. The track was a lake, but when they came out for the Derby, with the band playing "My Old Kentucky Home," Eddie spotted in front of the stand
s a dry spot about three-sixteenths of a mile long and about fifteen feet wide.

  "I got Hoop, Jr. out good," he said, "and I went for that beach. It gave him a three-length lead, and that did it. He didn't get any of that slop thrown in his face, and led all the way and won by six."

  He said that, just before he was to win his fifth Derby and set that record on Hill Gail, though, there was a moment in the paddock when he wouldn't have given anything for his chances.

  "Hill Gail would usually run as kind as any horse you'll ever see," he said, "but in the paddock he was a wild sonofabitch. When they led him out to put me up he lunged into the stable pony, and when he did, B.A. just reared back and hit that horse a right-hand punch on the soft part of his nose. My eyes must have popped, because I mean that's a hell of a thing to see happen to a horse you're hoping to win the Derby on, but that slowed him, and when I got on him, he was fine."

  I got him to tell me, of course, how he rode each one of them, how Lawrin's Derby was one of the roughest, and how he got knocked back to next to last at the start and then played the rail all the way, how the problem with Whirlaway was that once you got him in competition you couldn't hold him, and how Hill Gail, going into the turn coming off the back stretch, started for the outside rail and he had to spin him in mid-air and then let him open at ten-length lead because he was afraid to stop him. As he told me everything that had happened in those split parts of seconds in one race and then another, he said that thinking alone won't do it for a jockey, that it has to be instinct, and I knew what he meant.

  "So what are your days like now?" I was saying.

  "I'll be on the course in a little while," he said, "and I keep pretty occupied. I'd like to play golf and be a bum, but they won't let me. Next week I go to New York to do the TV on the Wood. I've got to go to Bermuda for a Buick meeting. I come back and I go to the Derby for Seagram's. I do public relations work for them, and then I've got seven more Buick commercials. I haven't done my OTB commercials, and I've got to do them because I've already been paid."

  It is New York State's Off Track Betting. When he was starting to ride into the big money he used to bet $1,000 or $2,000 on a horse.

  "At the end of a couple of years," he was telling me once, "I came up empty. My mother said to me one time, 'Eddie, why don't you give me some winners?' I said, 'Mom, if I could beat the races, I wouldn't have to ride.' I might ride a horse for a fella now and go for a story like any sucker and bet a hundred, but never enough to get hurt. I just don't think you can win. If you could, the bettin' jocks would be wealthy. It's the ones who don't bet who have all the money."

  We got to talking now about the match race at Washington Park in Chicago, in early September 1955, between Nashua and Swaps. Swaps, with Willie Shoemaker on him, had beaten Nashua, with Eddie on him, a length and a half in the Derby. In the newspapers and on radjo and television they made this rematch the equine battle of the century, between the western champion, owned and trained by two ex-cowboys, and the effete eastern challenger, owned by William Woodward, Jr. and trained by old Sunny Jim Fitzsimmons. It was also, of course, a contest between Shoe and Eddie.

  They had Nashua in training at Saratoga, and when I wasn't tailing Eddie, I watched some of his works. When he shipped out for Chicago, I went down to the railroad siding to watch them load him, and so I had a subjective rooting interest that, because I was not covering the event, I had no reason to constrain.

  "The day of the race," I was saying now, "I was in Philadelphia researching a magazine piece on Bert Bell, who was then the head of the National Football League. He was living at the Racquet Club, and we watched it there. There were a dozen or so others watching, too, and when you came out of that gate first, beating on that horse, and then took Shoe wide on that first turn, I came right up out of my chair. I must have been yelling through the whole thing; and when it was over and you'd come down on top I remember hollering. 'He stole it! He stole it!' There was this white-haired, dignified old gentleman there, and he came up to me and he stuck out his hand and he said, 'I don't know who you are, sir, but let me congratulate you. You've just ridden a great race.' "

  "With Shoe," Eddie said now, "he was never jealous of me and I was never jealous of him. In a stakes, if one or the other of us won it, it was just the same. After that race in Chicago, though, he said, 'You'll only do that to me once, buddy.' And that's the way it was."

  We talked about some great horses and about some people we both knew who are now gone. When I looked at my watch almost two hours had passed, and I said I would let him off the hook. We stood up and I walked him to the door.

  "I've got to tell you something you said once," I said, "that couldn't have been more wrong."

  "What was that?"

  "Like a lot of other people at the time, I was asking you how long you figured to go on riding, and why you didn't quit right then. You had enough money to retire for the rest of your life. You'd won those five Derbies, and there had been great riders who had never won one. You said, 'But I want the next one, and besides I like being a celebrity. If any sonofabitch tells you he don't like it, you'd better look at his head.' Then you said, 'And when I retire I'll be just another little man.' "

  "I said that?" he said, smiling.

  "Yes, and when you said it I knew you were wrong."

  "I didn't know it," he said, shaking my hand. "Listen, I've got to go."

  15

  The Primitive

  There was nothing to do but what we were

  told. All ten of us climbed under the ropes

  and allowed ourselves to be blindfolded with

  broad bands of white cloth . . . I was unused

  to darkness. It was as though I had suddenly

  found myself in a dark room filled with pois-

  onous cottonmouths. I could hear the bleary

  voices yelling insistently for the battle royal

  to begin.

  "Get going in there!"

  "Let me at that big nigger!"

  Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man.

  "Put your name on a piece of paper," Chick Wergeles said to me.

  "Then give it to Beau."

  It was the first time I met Beau Jack, and Chick Wergeles managed him. It was in one of the dressing rooms at Stillman's, and Beau had just finished his workout. He was still in his ring clothes, and he was sitting on a stool next to the rubbing table. With those high cheek bones in that broad face and those deep, dark eyes and that coloration, he had the appearance of an Indian.

  "But why should I give my name to Beau?" I said. I realized later that I had fallen right into the common habit of talking around Beau the way you talk around a small child.

  "He's learnin' to read," Chick said. "He wants to take your name home and study it. He does that with all the writers, so when he sees them he'll know their names."

  "Yeah," Beau said, smiling. "They all my friends."

  I cannot conceive of his ever having an enemy. He was the most amiable and, it seemed to me, the happiest of human beings, a primitive in the most primitive of sports, and a man who found joy in all the training, in the comradeship, and even in the conflict itself, whether he won or lost. He exuded pleasure, and seemed able to filter it out of the most trying experiences of his life.

  "How was the operation?" I said to him one day.

  While he had been in training in Chicago to fight Willie Joyce his left knee had given way under him. Now it was four months later, and he was back in Stillman's again getting ready to box Tony Janiro in the Garden.

  "The operation was great," Chick Wergeles said, talking around Beau again.

  "How was it, Beau?" I said.

  "Oh, fine," Beau said, smiling and slapping his knee. "I never felt better in my life."

  "You felt good?" I said. "Did they put you to sleep?"

  "That's right," Beau said, still grinning and slapping the knee again. "I never had such a sleep in my life. It didn't make me sick or nothin', and I never felt better in
my life."

  "Did you dream, Beau?" I said. "Were you dreaming when they put you to sleep?"

  "Dreamin'?" he said. "I didn't dream nothin'. I just said, 'Do a good job, Doc' After, they tells me that's all I said all the time, 'Do a good job, Doc' "

  "The guy does a great job," Chick Wergeles said.

  "That doctor that fix that knee," Beau said, and he nodded toward Wergeles, "ain't no bigger than him, and he a great man. He my friend."

  As devoid as Beau's world was of enemies, so was it filled with those he felt were his friends. Chick Wergeles, in addition to managing Beau, took care of the football press box for the New York Giants games at the Polo Grounds. He had the same duties in the hockey press box at the New York Rangers game at the Garden, handling the seating and providing programs, copy paper, and refreshments, and he used to take Beau to both places.