The Ghost Horse

by Joe Layden

  The few that wash out, for whatever reason, are simply given away.

  “But that almost never happens,” explained Michael O’Farrell, manager of Ocala Stud. “We sell just about every horse we raise.”

  So it would be for the big bay filly with the splash of white across her nose. Although of relatively modest lineage, she was an attractive girl, tall and lean, with a good deal of spirit. If there are no complications in the birthing process, and no obvious physical abnormalities immediately apparent, there isn’t much you can tell about the aspirations of a newborn foal. There is no way to measure heart and competitive desire; no way to tell whether she’s hit the genetic lottery, drawing on all that is quick and efficient in her gene pool and casting aside all that might cause her to weaken or quit.

  Those answers come later.

  In the case of the bay foal, cautious optimism seemed the most prudent course of action. She was the product of a union between the mare Ennuhway, a daughter of Ocala Stud stallion Notebook, and Drewman, also an Ocala Stud stallion. Dig back a few generations and you could find some significant racing and breeding talent in the foal’s lineage: the prodigious stud Mr. Prospector and Hall of Fame competitor Dr. Fager on the sire’s side; Bold Ruler (sire of Secretariat) on the distaff side. But neither Ennuhway nor Drewman had been particularly distinguished, either at the track or in the breeding shed, leaving the unnamed filly with a pedigree of questionable value.

  Yet there was no denying the horse’s physical stature—her clean lines and skeletal structure. Breeding is as much about hope and luck as it is science. You throw all that DNA into a blender and hit the switch, and then you stand back and let nature take its course. There is no shortage of tantalizing success stories, tales of plodding nags who inexplicably foal champions; conversely, of course, there are plenty of stories about magnificent competitors who were flaccid on the farm, or whose progeny failed to live up to expectations. Secretariat was the most notable example, although his legacy was not nearly as diminished as some would believe; it was more a matter of inevitable disappointment given the extraordinary standard to which his offspring were held.

  Simply put: you never know how things are going to turn out.

  Michael O’Farrell took one look at the brand-new filly and figured she’d gotten the best that Drewman and Ennuhway had to offer. Indeed, O’Farrell was sufficiently optimistic of the foal’s future that he paid the five-hundred-dollar nominating fee for the Breeders Cup. While that certainly couldn’t be considered a large sum of money in the world of horse racing, it did speak to the foal’s potential and the optimism of her owners; it’s worth noting, for example, that O’Farrell was not in the habit of nominating every horse foaled at the farm. Some simply did a better job of passing the test. That, apparently, was the case with the daughter of Drewman and Ennuhway.

  She would be a runner.

  Like every healthy horse foaled at Ocala, the filly went into training a few months after her first birthday, and before long it became apparent that in this case, at least, looks were deceptive. Although big and strong, and presenting the appearance of a competitive racehorse, she did not tolerate workouts well and seemed less inclined to run than the rest of her class. Whether this was some innate characteristic of her personality, or the result of a physiological problem was difficult to ascertain. There were no obvious injuries or structural abnormalities. She was just … slow.

  O’Farrell had lost any hope that the filly might one day run in the Breeders Cup; in fact, he had begun to doubt whether she would ever stand in a starting gate—anywhere. As the deadline grew near for the Ocala Breeders Company Spring Sale in April 2009, O’Farrell was forced to make a decision.

  “We had her entered in the sale here at Ocala, and she wasn’t coming up to it the way we would have liked,” O’Farrell recalled. “We normally breeze our horses a quarter mile prior to the sales, and she would have been at the bottom of the list of horses that we had as far as ability—at least in terms of what she had shown.”

  In addition to apparently lacking the requisite talent to be a racehorse, the filly began having trouble recovering from workouts, which only served to further discourage her handlers.

  “She had a setback shortly before the sales,” O’Farrell said. “We call it ‘tying up,’ which basically means the muscles tighten when they exert too much energy. It’s not a big issue, most of the time. It’s part of training horses. They’re usually over it within twenty-four hours, but it’s best if you give them some time off afterward, especially when they’re so young. With this horse, though, it happened right before the sales, so we were between a rock and a hard place. So we took her out of the sale, sent her back to the farm, turned her out for two or three weeks to let her get over it, and then put her back in training.”

  Although seemingly healthy, the filly was no more inclined to run than she’d been before her recuperation. Her continued struggles, coupled with a nasty downturn in the economy, led O’Farrell to rethink his plans for the horse.

  “This was right around the time the housing bubble burst, the economy had gone to hell, and horse sales had dropped like 30 to 40 percent,” O’Farrell said. “So we were stuck with a horse that did not seem to have any speed, and was unlikely to get much quicker. She came out of a stallion that was not particularly successful—in fact, you would pretty much consider him to be unsuccessful—and the mare had not produced a whole lot at the time, either. The filly had never shown a lot of ability, even when she was healthy.”

  O’Farrell, a soft-spoken man who has been around the game long enough to know that there is no such thing as a sure thing, paused momentarily, then laughed quietly under his breath.

  “I just figured it was best to get rid of her.”

  They could have worked with her a little longer, given her a chance to demonstrate some potential in time for the next sale, in June 2009, but it hardly seemed worth the effort. No sense throwing good money after bad. O’Farrell did not even think the horse would be worth the trouble of a private transaction. Better to just hand her off to someone who specialized in this sort of thing, with no money involved.

  “One of my trainers, George Burrows, is very good friends with a fellow here in Ocala who deals in … I won’t call them cheap horses; I would call them inexpensive horses,” O’Farrell said. “So we gave the filly to him. And that’s the last I ever saw of her.”

  Six weeks later, John Shaw, the horse broker on the receiving end of that transaction, put in a call to Burrows, just to let him know how things were going. Shaw could only complain so much, since the filly hadn’t cost him a dime, aside from the usual expenses associated with the care and feeding of a racehorse. But, Jesus, what on Earth had he gotten himself into?

  “That filly you gave me?” he told Burrows. “Gotta be the slowest horse I have ever seen.”

  Chapter Five

  APRIL 1993

  If this had been Hollywood and it had happened in a romantic comedy, they would have called it “meeting cute.” But since this was Farmington, New York, some twenty-five miles outside of Rochester, on the backstretch of Finger Lakes Racetrack, the introduction provoked the sort of salty language one might expect of a near fatality.

  At the time, Tim Snyder was working as an assistant for Bill Strange, a trainer who ran one of the largest and most successful barns at Finger Lakes. Granted, Finger Lakes was a second-tier facility, where the stock on race days would rarely be confused with the elite thoroughbreds you’d see downstate at Belmont or at Saratoga in the summertime. There is a pecking order in horse racing, as there is in any other sport, and Finger Lakes was a couple rungs below the top. Within that world, though, Bill Strange was one of the best—among the leading trainers in North America, actually, in terms of winning percentage—and Tim Snyder was his right-hand man, an assistant who could be counted on to handle just about any job that was asked of him. Strange typically kept twenty-five to thirty horses in his barn, and Tim was involved with
most of them, either as a groom, exercise rider, or hotwalker.

  “Whatever Bill needed, I did it,” Tim remembers. “No job was too big or too small.”

  Lisa Calley didn’t think any job was beneath her, either, which was a good thing, given that she was new to the backstretch and thus assigned most of the low-level tasks around the barn occupied by the trainer Eddie Babcock. Tim had seen Lisa at the track from time to time but the two had not been introduced, despite the fact that they worked in adjacent barns. Looking at Lisa, in her work boots and jeans, and a baggy sweatshirt with the hood pulled up over her head, it was hard not to think that she had no interest in small talk. She looked like a hobo, Tim would say years later, like a woman who did not want to be thought of as a woman, or the object of attention, but rather simply as someone capable of doing her job. Tim knew nothing of her backstory—of the failed marriage or the cancer—but he got the impression just by looking at her that she had no interest in meeting a man, or letting anyone into her life.

  Fate, though, has a way of intervening in these things.

  Tim was on the back of an ornery horse that morning, a bad actor that had a reputation for galloping when he wasn’t supposed to gallop, and for refusing to go where he was asked to go. While guiding the rambunctious colt back to its stall, Tim suddenly found himself on an unintended joyride. As the horse raced along the shedrow, bucking and snorting, Tim shouted to everyone in his path.

  “Get the hell out of the way! I can’t stop!”

  People scattered as the colt went by. By the time Lisa knew what was happening, it was too late. She was holding a horse of her own and now the runaway was on them, and she had nowhere to hide.

  “I can still see her face,” Tim said with a laugh. “She turned around and looked up at me, and she had this blank expression. Then she put her hand up, like she was going to stop the crazy horse or something, and I just kept yelling at her to move. Next thing I knew, I was sliding by her, in between her and her horse, but there wasn’t enough room, and I knocked her into the wall. Pretty hard, too.”

  Tim rode out of the barn and across the street and then into another barn before he was finally able to convince the horse to stop. He dismounted, grabbed the horse by its bridle, gave it a good tug, delivered a few choice epithets, and led him back across the street and into the shedrow. Lisa was standing there, shaken but otherwise unharmed. Tim was immediately taken by the woman’s toughness, by her spunk, but now that he was closer and could see her with the hoodie pulled back, he was also taken by something else.

  “She looked so young,” Tim said. “And she was so pretty.”

  Before guiding his horse back to its stall, Tim stopped and chatted for a while with the new girl. He asked if she was okay; she smiled, laughed it off like someone who had been around horses her entire life—which of course she had, though Tim didn’t know it at the time.

  For the next couple days they talked occasionally while working. Then, one afternoon, Lisa surprised Tim by asking him a question:

  “Do you like spaghetti?”

  Tim said that he did like spaghetti. Very much.

  “Because my grandma makes the best sauce … if you’d like to come over for dinner sometime.”

  Tim didn’t know what to make of the new girl. She’d been so quiet, always kept to herself and did her work, and now here she was, inviting him to dinner just a few days after he’d nearly killed her. Was she charming … or crazy?

  He settled on charming, accepted the invitation, and went back to work.

  Lisa, it turned out, had done her homework, poking around the backstretch, inquiring about the man who had nearly run her down. She didn’t have to look long or hard for information; virtually everyone at Finger Lakes knew Tim Snyder. He was a little man with a big personality, a penchant for telling stories and, to be perfectly honest, a prodigious appetite for alcohol. Everyone knew Tim was a good horseman, and most people genuinely liked him, at least in small doses. But even his best friends would sometimes grow tired of his volatility and his unpredictable nature.

  “Tim is a unique guy,” said John Tebbutt, who has known Snyder for nearly three decades and is, by all accounts, his closest friend. “He knows the racetrack, he can do just about anything you ask of him. He’s truly an outstanding horseman. He commands respect from the animals; sometimes I think that’s because he’s almost as much horse as he is human. And I mean that in a good way. He bonds with them like few people I’ve ever known. The downside to that is that he’s a high-maintenance person. He can be a loyal friend, but he’s hard to get along with; he’s demanding, and he can be rude. I like Tim very, very much. We go back a long way and we’ve been friends for an awful lot of years. But those are his characteristics. It’s not his fault. It’s the way he was raised and the life he led. But that’s an honest appraisal of Tim, and I think he’d have to admit it.”

  A truncated version of that assessment was communicated by Tebbutt to Lisa Calley during the course of a normal workday. One has to be cautious, of course, when intruding upon matters of the heart, especially when they involve close friends and coworkers. Tebbutt and Snyder were not merely fellow horsemen; they were drinking buddies, as well. And while Tebbutt didn’t mind closing a bar or two with Tim, he was uneasy about the prospect of recommending him as a suitor.

  “I liked Lisa right from the start,” Tebbutt said. “We worked on opposite sides of the same barn, so I saw her every day, and you couldn’t help but be impressed by her. She was hardworking and good at her job, but the main thing was that she was so kind to the horses. She had a sweet personality, just a gentle soul. When Timmy came around and started hitting on her, I immediately told her, ‘Don’t get involved with him. He’s a real nice guy, but keep your distance.’

  “I knew too much about Timmy. He was rough around the edges, so different from Lisa. They really were an odd couple, except for the fact that they both loved horses, obviously. She was a kind, sweet little girl from a nice family in Syracuse. I tried to look out for the young girls who showed up on the backstretch. I’ve had a lot of them work for me over the years, and I always felt a responsibility. You run into a lot of people like Timmy—guys who were born and bred at the racetrack. It can be a rough place.”

  Tebbutt did his best to squelch the budding relationship; in addition to warning Lisa, he told Snyder, in no uncertain terms, to leave the girl alone. Tim’s response:

  “Mind your own damn business.”

  Years later Tebbutt would laugh and shake his head at the memory of that conversation, and of his failed efforts to keep the two apart.

  “I was so surprised it developed into anything,” he said. “I think Lisa was looking for something different in her life, something more exciting. She loved horses, but she also loved the racetrack world. She wanted to travel around, experience the whole thing. With Timmy, she could do that. He was an adventure. But I can’t imagine her family was too happy about the whole thing, at least not in the beginning.”

  On that point he was correct. Like the daughter they produced, the Calleys were a generous and accepting family, but there was something about Tim Snyder that made them wary. There was the difference in their ages, for one thing. Tim was ten years older than Lisa; with a lot of hard miles on the engine, as they say, he could have passed for her father. Then, too, there was the fact that he was such a hard-core racetrack lifer. Lisa had grown up around horses, too, but show jumping was a far more genteel endeavor. If she was suddenly enamored of the backstretch, with its incessant buzz of activity and its whiff of danger … well, her parents were less sanguine.

  Lisa was twenty-seven years old, so she was hardly a child. She had survived a broken marriage, a traumatic brain injury, and cancer. She was tougher than her appearance might have indicated. Nevertheless, some things never change. You’re a mother or father from the moment your child is born. You never stop worrying and fretting. You never stop loving and caring.

  “To be perfectly honest,�
� remembered Frank Calley, “I didn’t know what to make of Tim. I’d never met anyone like him.”

  Neither had Carol. Sitting one afternoon in the kitchen of her home outside Syracuse, looking back on that first spaghetti dinner, she could only smile.

  “Compared to the way we were, the kind of people we’d known? Timmy was … odd,” she said.

  Sitting in the same room, just a few feet away, Tim began to laugh. “I’m odd? Thanks a lot, Carol!”

  “Well, you know what I mean. We didn’t know what to think. Tim used to tell such wild stories. We couldn’t believe that anyone had actually lived like that. It was so different from the way we had raised our children.”

  Ah, yes … the stories. Tales of crisscrossing the country, living out of cars and camping under the stars, of supporting himself as an adult when he wasn’t yet old enough to drive a car or buy a beer (legally, anyway). Stories about working for men of questionable character, men who embezzled money and went to prison, sometimes dragging family members down with them. Stories about gamblers and drug dealers and tax cheats. Stories about mobsters and movie stars: When they filmed the remake of The Champ at Hialeah in the late 1970s, for example, Tim was working at the track. He said he got a job galloping horses for the production and a small check for appearing as an extra in crowd scenes. Brushes with greatness and brushes with fame, some intentional, some not. There was the time in the late eighties when he was working a feisty colt at Rockingham Park, on the same late-winter day that a production crew was shooting exterior scenes for the television show Spenser: For Hire. The horse fought with Tim throughout the workout and bolted as they left the track, carrying his rider down a narrow road and straight toward the television crew. As Tim struggled vainly to gain control of the animal, people began screaming at him to bail out. After galloping wildly past a crowd, he pulled the horse toward a snowbank and let go of the reins, jumping off at what he guessed was a speed of thirty miles per hour.