Traveling Light

by Bill Barich

  …

  Before I left my rented house, I stopped in to say goodbye to O’Neill. I told him I never did manage to catch a weakfish in the surf. O’Neill said I shouldn’t worry—the experience would stand me in good stead on future trips.

  “You going back to California now?” he asked.

  “Not yet,” I said. “First, I’m going up to Saratoga for some racing. After that, I might go to Europe.”

  “You won’t catch nothing overseas, kiddo. You think you’ll ever come back this way?”

  I told him I probably would. I’d become attached to Long Island again; I’d made a kind of peace.

  “Then I better show you these lures I just got in,” O’Neill said, pulling open a drawer.

  Horse-trading at Saratoga Springs

  Around racetracks, it’s common knowledge that quality thoroughbreds have become a fashionable investment among people with money to burn, but I didn’t understand how or why this had happened until I went to the Fasig-Tipton Company’s sixty-first annual yearling sales, held during the New York Racing Association’s summer meeting at Saratoga Springs. Fasig-Tipton is the Sotheby Parke Bernet of yearlings—it has annual gross receipts of about $200 million, on which the firm earns a five per-cent commission—but even John M. S. Finney, its astute president, did not anticipate the riot of conspicuous comsumption that occurred while I was there. In the course of four glittering evening sessions, I watched Finney and his tuxedo-clad auctioneers sell off two hundred and thirty-eight head of prime racing stock for a total return of $38,220,000. The average price per yearling was $160,000—an astonishing fifty-thousand-dollar increase over the previous year’s average.

  Saratoga has a history of wretched excess. Even before there was a racetrack, gamblers and swells came to town to play faro and roulette, attend grand society balls, and take the healing waters at a variety of spas that offered many strange and wonderful treatments. Indians had been touting the curative properties of the mineral springs around Saratoga for centuries, but the locals didn’t start dipping in their toes until the eighteenth century. The first was William Johnson, an Irish baronet, who crossed the ocean in 1738 to manage his uncle’s estates in New York. Johnson had a sterling career as a soldier and an administrator, and, eight years after his arrival, he was appointed Commissary of New York for Indian Affairs. The Iroquois were supposedly quite fond of Johnson, and he returned their fondness in traditional colonial style by acquiring several Iroquois mistresses and fathering over a hundred illegitimate children by them.

  In middle age, Johnson contracted gout. He also had some referred pain from an old battle wound—a bullet was still lodged in one of his legs. Molly Brant, who was a sister to Joseph Brant, the great Mohawk chief, arranged for him to visit High Rock Spring and be treated for his ailments. Johnson took a boat down the Mohawk River to Schenectady. He could not walk very well, so native bearers had to carry him on a litter to High Rock. Johnson spent four days there, in a bark hut, undergoing a strict regimen that included copious interior and exterior applications of spring water. His health improved so much that the Indians only had to carry him part of the way home. “I have just returned from a visit to a most amazing spring, which almost effected my cure,” he wrote to a friend. Later visitors to High Rock shared Johnson’s enthusiasm. By 1821, the springs in Saratoga were famous, and a guidebook from that year listed the most popular spas and the diseases they might be expected to meliorate: Jaundice and bilious affections generally, Dyspepsia, Habitual Costiveness, Hypochondriacal Complaints, Depraved appetite, Calculous and nephritic complaints, Phagendic or ill conditioned ulcers, Cutaneous eruptions, Chronick Rheumatism, Some species or states of gout, Some species of dropsy, Scrofula, paralysis, Scorbutic affections and old scorbutic ulcers, Amenorrhea, Dysmenorrhea and Chlorosis.

  Thoroughbred racing was added to the enticements of Saratoga in August 1863. The person responsible was John Morrissey, a fine heavyweight boxer, also Irish, who’d parlayed his connection to the Dead Rabbits gang on the Bowery into a life in New York politics. Morrissey had been a pimp and a hired thug as well as a fighter. He financed his political campaigns with the proceeds from his investments in faro parlors—he had sixteen of them scattered around Manhattan. When Morrissey decided to come to Saratoga on holiday, he brought some card dealers and faro tables with him and set up a parlor on Matilda Street, near all the best hotels. His operation was an instant hit, but he reckoned that his wealthy customers might be induced to spend even more lavishly if they had a racetrack around to amuse them.

  The track Morrissey used for his first meeting was called Horse Haven. It was located on rough land in the pine woods. The meeting lasted for four days only, with just two races on each day’s card. Horses were in somewhat short supply, since most healthy animals had been conscripted into the Union and Confederate forces to help fight the Civil War. Morrissey’s venture was a success anyway, largely because he had the good sense to involve men like William Travers in it. Travers was a highly respected stockbroker and bon vivant who belonged to twenty-seven clubs and had unimpeachable ties to the society crowd. He became the first president of the Saratoga Racing Association. In August 1864, the association transferred its meeting to a new track across the road from Horse Haven. The inaugural Travers Stakes was run that year; a Travers-owned horse, Kentucky, won it. The grandstand at the new track was bigger, the racing strip was wider, and everybody was pleased. Since then, many changes have been made in the plant, but races have been held continuously, and the course is counted as the oldest still in use in the United States.

  Saratoga Springs lies about thirty miles north of Albany, in the foothills of the Adirondacks. I drove up there from Long Island on a brilliantly clear afternoon in August. Although the sun was hot, there was a touch of autumn in the air; frosts can come early in the mountains. I got off the Thruway outside the town proper and followed a map that my hosts had drawn for me. It led me past farms and woods, then past a murky slough where two men in overalls were fishing for bullheads—snub-nosed catfish that thrive in even the most polluted streams. I could see Saratoga Lake in the distance. It’s a substantial body of water that’s now a tangle of moss and water hyacinths. Once, it held a large population of native trout, but resort owners who had hotels and cabins along the shore stocked it with pickerel and black bass, and the trout were soon cannibalized. The bass showed up as a specialty on resort menus, cooked over a fire and basted with an upstate version of beurre noir.

  The house that my hosts had rented for the duration of the month-long meeting could have been a remnant of one of those vanished resorts. It had a screened porch and a crabgrassy little yard. After I put my bag in the guest bedroom, I tried to make some small talk about matters unrelated to thoroughbreds, but I learned quickly that this was a breach of etiquette, and I confined all my later remarks to equine affairs. In the morning, I was given a Daily Racing Form with my coffee and told to be ready for an eleven o’clock departure for the track. The convoy left right on time. We were in town by noon. The streets were jammed with hundreds of Nature-drunk punters from Manhattan who were thumping their chests to make space in their lungs for the unfamiliar fresh air. They were as tanned and carefree as kids on vacation, and so were the trainers and jockeys I saw in the paddock before the first race. Saratoga was apparently like every other summer camp in the Adirondacks, except that it catered to adult horse fiends. The pressures of urban life had been suspended or forgotten, and nobody seemed to be taking things very seriously.

  Saratoga is one of the few rural tracks in the United States where you can see absolutely first-rate racing. The stars of Belmont and Aqueduct are in attendance, along with a few outliers from Kentucky, Florida, and southern California. The atmosphere is a mix of county fair and chautauqua. You can buy apples and peaches from farm-girl concessionaires, and there’s a fountain beneath a vintage pergola that dispenses, absolutely free, the fabled waters of the Big Red Spring. The horses are saddled under the pine
s and elms, then brought to the paddock, and this adds to the casualness of the place. Some of the bettors become so relaxed that they actually take naps between races, stretched out on blankets in the midst of picnic scraps and empty wine bottles. If you’re in a hurry to get to the windows, you have to watch that you don’t step on anybody’s hands or face. All racetracks exist at a considerable remove from reality, but Saratoga is definitely the king.

  This spirit of unreality was also reflected in the Fasig-Tipton yearling sales. Admission to the sales was by invitation only, but my hosts had finagled tickets, and, after dinner that first night, they had me put on my sport coat and then took me to the Humphrey S. Finney Sales Pavilion—a crate-like modern building that’s located across from the racetrack on a few acres of land that Fasig-Tipton owns. Inside the pavilion, there are eight hundred red auditorium seats arranged in a scallop that faces a horseshoe-shaped auction ring. The ring is bounded by ropes threaded through iron hitching posts; it could have been used for one of Morrissey’s prizefights. The best seats, close to the ring, are given to Fasig-Tipton’s best and oldest customers. Balcony seats generally go to infrequent bidders and what Fasig-Tipton calls “nontraditional interests”—people who’ve made a sudden fortune in auto parts or missile nose cones and must divest themselves of extra cash or pay it to the government in taxes. Spectators like us got to stand behind the balcony seats and observe things from a distance.

  Promptly at eight-thirty, John Finney stepped onto a wooden platform near the auction ring and seated himself in the kind of bar chair you find in country clubs. He nodded politely to the audience, to his auctioneer, and to six men in black tie. The men were bid spotters. They were stationed at strategic intervals around the room, so that they could translate the audience’s ear tugs and cheek pulls into bids and then relay them—usually by whooping—to the auctioneer. At the previous night’s sales, the bidders had shown a marked ability to spend money at a record-breaking pace, and Finney decided to poke some fun at them. He announced that the local police had informed him that a group in favor of redistributing American wealth had been granted a permit to hold a peaceful demonstration outside the pavilion. “I thought we’d been trying to redistribute the wealth all week long,” said Finney, deadpan, his glasses slipping down his nose.

  This provoked a lot of laughter, but the laughter was transformed into awe when Woody Stephens, a Hall of Fame trainer bidding on behalf of Hickory Tree Farm, in Virginia, shelled out a million dollars for the first yearling to appear in the auction ring—a dark bay colt by the two-time Prix de l’Arc winner Alleged out of the Sea-Bird mare Gulls Cry. Stephens’s purchase was topped later in the evening when E. P. Taylor, a prominent Canadian breeder, paid $1,200,000 for a chestnut filly by The Minstrel (winner of the 1977 Epsom and Irish derbies) out of Directoire. Even the most jaded bidders seemed to tremble a bit when the filly—now valued at about eleven hundred dollars a pound—was led away, back to her stall on the Fasig-Tipton compound, where she’d wait for a van to take her to her new home, Windfields Farm, Taylor’s spread on Maryland’s Eastern Shore.

  The inflationary spiral we were witnessing at Saratoga really began in the mid-1970s. Until then, the practice of speculating in horses had been confined to professionals, and to old-line racing families, like the Phippses and the Whitneys. But the glamour of the sport, along with its significant investment advantages, has gradually attracted more and more nontraditional interests—the phrase suggests the Great Unwashed—to the bidding arena. For them, as well as for the Phippses and the Whitneys, racehorses represent a tax shelter of no mean proportions. According to the Internal Revenue Service, a yearling may be presumed to have a “useful life” of five years; during that period an owner may annually deduct twenty per cent of the yearling’s purchase price, and also any expenses related to racing—food, training costs, veterinary bills, travel, and so on. Real estate barons get a similar break when they buy a string of condominiums, but condos have little prestige value compared with the offspring of Hoist the Flag.

  There are other possible benefits from investing in racehorses. A yearling, as a colt or filly, may perform well on the track and earn a few hundred thousand dollars in purses. A handful of extremely talented colts will develop into candidates for the jackpot known as syndication, which can bring lucky owners millions in profit. Syndication is the process by which shares in a colt about to be bred (he’s called a stallion now) are offered to selected investors—often breeders and other individuals who know the value of quality horseflesh. The shares are ordinarily sold in units of forty, and the holder of one share is entitled to use the stallion’s services for one mare or to sell them to somebody else during the breeding season, which occurs in spring and early summer. Stud fees can be considerable if the stallion is fertile and his offspring are successful—sometimes upward of a hundred thousand per mating—and continue to pour in until the stallion gives up the ghost: ten or fifteen years, maybe. Some enthusiastic studs, like Nashua, who was twenty-nine and still ready to go, last even longer. The market value of brood mares is not so high—a mare delivers only one foal every season, while a stallion can cover as many as sixty mares—but a pretty penny can be turned on a filly who has raced decently and has desirable bloodlines.

  All this means gravy for Fasig-Tipton. In 1981, the firm conducted forty-six horse auctions, in seven states and Canada. The Saratoga sales have always been the most prestigious and rigidly controlled. Breeders who want to have their yearlings included must nominate them by the first of March. Fasig-Tipton’s experts then grade the pedigrees on a scale of one to ten. Yearlings who pass the test are subjected to an exhaustive physical examination and graded again on the same scale. They must achieve a minimum combined rating of eight to qualify for Saratoga. Once a yearling has been accepted, its breeder signs a contract with Fasig-Tipton: the breeder agrees to pay a small penalty if the yearling is withdrawn from sale, except for a veterinary reason, and Fasig-Tipton agrees, among other things, not to sell the yearling for less than ten thousand dollars. In late July, the yearlings are vanned to Saratoga—they come primarily from Kentucky, Virginia, Maryland, Florida, and New York—and stabled in Fasig-Tipton’s barns.

  One afternoon, I toured the barns. The famous outfits, like Spendthrift and Newstead Farms, had taken over entire shed rows, and decorated them with color-coordinated feed tubs, potted flowers, and brightly painted signs advertising the choicest items in their lines. Consignors who were handling the stock of four or five small breeders did their best to compete, but there was something of the visiting poor relation about them. It was odd how the usual odors of the backstretch—manure, sweat, liniment—had somehow gotten expunged from the barns. Instead, I smelled soap and perfume. Every now and then, I saw a groom bring out a yearling for the inspection of potential customers, including narrow-eyed bloodstock agents. Each yearling wore an identifying number on its halter. The grooms were cleaner than any grooms I’ve ever seen. Some of them were required to wear Izod Lacoste shirts and khaki trousers—a preppy uniform that I read as an unintentional act of parody. But the yearling inspections were still conducted in dead earnest, since Fasig-Tipton sells every horse “as is”; title passes to the buyer at the fall of the auctioneer’s hammer.

  So the Fasig-Tipton sales became an integral part of my stay at Saratoga. Every evening, I put on my sport coat, joined the other idle spectators behind the balcony seats, and watched the auction. There was always a steady stream of gossip going on. In it, I could hear echoes of that star-struck “Middle Western” youth Nick Carraway, who once wrote the names of guests who’d come to Gatsby’s fancy parties in the margins of his railroad timetable. I had no timetable, only a Racing Form, but on it I noted that Thomas Mellon Evans, Pleasant Colony’s owner, came to the sales in a powder-blue blazer and beige slacks. Mrs. Cloyce Tippett, of Llangollen Farm, came in a raspberry caftan studded with gold sequins. Ogden Mills (Dinny) Phipps came, and so did Mrs. C. V. Whitney, who threw a splashy ball.
Helen Alexander, the King Ranch heiress, was there, and so was Dolly Green, whose father founded Beverly Hills. The Indian shipping magnate Ravi Tikkoo came with his associate, Peter Howe. And then there was Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum, son of the ruler of Dubai, who came with an entourage of family and servants and bought many fine animals for his racing-and-breeding operation, Aston Upthorpe Stud, in Berkshire, England.

  The pattern of the auction didn’t change much from evening to evening. It always began with John Finney taking his seat in the bar chair and delivering some prefatory remarks. Then a groom led the first yearling to be sold from the outside paddock to the pavilion door and turned it over to a Fasig-Tipton handler—sallow men in starched white jackets and loose-fitting trousers that made them look like stewards on an ocean liner bound for the Balkans. The handler took the yearling through the door and into the ring. This was always a bad moment for the horse, to move from semi-darkness into brilliant artificial light. Some yearlings whinnied; others reared or bucked. A few defecated and then an old black man dressed like the handlers came out with a shovel to clean up the mess.

  When the yearling started to quiet, Finney would read its pedigree in orotund, preacherly tones before letting the auctioneer cut loose. The bid spotters’ heads bobbed up and down; they whooped and cajoled. The auctioneer carried on a sweet, rhythmical, singsong patter, registering the bids and asking for more. If things slowed down, Finney jumped in to remind his audience that they were about to miss an extraordinary opportunity to purchase a yearling of such high caliber that it could not possibly disappoint. And then the auctioneer would pick up his cadence again, wheedling and cajoling, drawing out the affair until an acceptable conclusion was reached. Bang! went the hammer on a disk of wood, and yearling No. 201, a chestnut colt by Nijinsky II out of Fast Line, was sold to Dolly Green for four hundred thousand dollars. Minutes later, a new yearling was in the ring, glancing around in bafflement.