The Ghost Horse

by Joe Layden

  Whatever Tim had left by the time he recovered, it wasn’t enough to cover the costs of feeding and caring for a new thoroughbred racehorse, and for shipping that horse from Florida to New York. So he borrowed some money from his mother-in-law and he borrowed money from his sister, and he worked a deal with Markgraf in which the owner would ship Lisa’s Booby Trap to Finger Lakes along with the rest of his stock, with the understanding that Tim would eventually pay him back.

  Then he slid behind the wheel of his Ford Taurus, cupped a hand under his aching ribs, put T-Bone in the seat beside him, and chased the horse van up I-95 for twenty-four hours straight. They arrived in upstate New York in early April, the busted owner with a single horse and a hungry dog, and a mounting pile of debt.

  Chapter Ten

  When she arrived at Finger Lakes Racetrack in April 2010, Lisa’s Booby Trap was just another cheap and obscure filly lazily munching hay in a stall, with virtually no reasonable chance of ever becoming anything more than that. She was prettier than most of her stablemates, taller, a bit gangly, but with long muscles still in development, and so she certainly looked like more of a racehorse. But appearances can be deceptive and breeding unreliable; no one knew better than Tim Snyder that the filly was far from the second coming of Ruffian. His goals for her remained modest: to correct any lingering structural issues and determine whether she was even capable of running. If he succeeded at that, then perhaps she might eventually make a few bucks at the track.

  It remained, however, a daunting project.

  Tim had started working with Lisa in Ocala, and what he saw both encouraged and distressed him. The fact that she was at least partially blind in one eye did not overly concern Snyder, for she did not seem distracted or hampered by it. One-eyed horses, or at least horses with diminished vision, routinely make it to the starting gate; some perform surprisingly well. Tim was confident that Lisa’s Booby Trap fell into the latter category. When he approached from the blind side, Lisa would not spook easily, as some vision-impaired horses do. In a bridle, she did not jerk her head awkwardly, as if trying to accommodate the disability. She simply went about her business, almost as if the problem didn’t exist.

  “The eye was no big deal,” Tim said. “I’ve been around a lot of blind horses. It doesn’t stop them from running—if they want to run, they can run with a bad eye. That was the least of her problems.”

  A horse’s genetic blueprint is determined very early in the game, and there is only so much that can be done after the fact to correct mistakes or shortcomings. It’s best to concentrate on the things that can be fixed. In the case of Lisa’s Booby Trap, that meant working on feet that were not designed for running. Like Don Hunt before him, Snyder recognized issues with Lisa’s feet and attempted to correct them by trial and error.

  “I trimmed her feet and put shoes on her when I first got her in Florida,” Tim said. “Then I went to Ocala, and a month later I took some more off her feet, put another set of shoes on her. I was lucky to have a couple good blacksmiths who could help me. I’ve been lucky a lot with this horse. Seemed like everywhere I went, I knew somebody who needed me to work, and I needed their help, and we were able to work out a deal. You can’t do it alone.”

  The way Tim saw it, maybe Lisa wasn’t really the slowest horse in the world. Maybe she was simply a horse whose structural and balance issues were so severe that she was disinclined to even take that first step, for she knew what lay ahead: discomfort and anxiety. Imagine trying to run with one bare foot and one protected by a shoe. Imagine trying to run on shoes of unequal size. Imagine having legs of unequal length.

  While none of these scenarios reflect exactly the issues faced by Lisa’s Booby Trap, they offer a glimpse into the challenges encountered by anyone trying to prepare her for a career on the racetrack. The more Snyder worked with Lisa, the more he began to think that her feet were the source of all problems. She had a clubfoot on the right front side; on the left front, a diminished heel.

  “So she’s up on her heel on one side, and flat-footed on the other,” Tim said. “It’s like she’s a got a high heel on one side, and a sneaker on the other. No way you can even walk like that, let alone run. It was very bad. Horses like that don’t often make it to the racetrack; sometimes they do. Trainers don’t notice that shit, usually, but it was really obvious with Lisa. That’s why I ended up with her. Her lineage was fine, but she was structurally unsound. Trainers and owners get rid of horses in that condition, pawn them off. Usually, best a horse like that can hope for is to become a barn pony or a jumper. Basically a big pet. Nothing wrong with that. But I thought maybe Lisa could be more. I took her because she was big and had a long stride on her. She was graceful despite her problems.”

  Had Lisa’s Booby Trap never stood in a starting gate, had she never become anything more than a cheap Finger Lakes claimer, chances are no one would have disputed Snyder’s assertions about the condition of the horse, or the amount of work he put into her. As it happened, though, Lisa entered the spotlight just long enough for Snyder’s claims to come into question.

  “She was in bad shape when I got her,” said Don Hunt. “Her feet were atrocious. I still have the X-rays to document the feet when I got her. But Tim did not do any miracle work with her feet. I did whatever straightening out there was, and apparently it did help the horse somewhat. She looked like a million bucks when they took her out of here. There wasn’t any second-guessing about what she looked like. The horse was picture perfect when Tim bought her. I’ve got vet reports about how good her feet were.”

  John Shaw is similarly unconvinced that Snyder worked any magic with Lisa’s Booby Trap.

  “When I got her she looked fabulous, and Don takes great care of his horses, too. I read somewhere that Snyder said she was wormy or whatever. That’s just hocus-pocus to make himself look better.”

  As for whether the filly’s feet were as bad as Snyder claimed?

  “I don’t think she had a clubfoot” Shaw said. “If she has one now it’s from poor shoeing. If she did have a clubfoot, it might have been just a little narrow. Don X-rayed her feet because she had some rotation on the coffin bone, which would cause her to be sore. And that’s what basically turned it around, because he told Snyder to be aware of the possibility that she’s got a rotation in the coffin bone. Other than that … I don’t know.”

  Snyder gets visibly agitated when he hears this sort of thing. He claims that he never said anyone mistreated the filly; at the least, he never intended for that message to come across. But he stands by his assertion that the horse was a structural mess and that he put in the time to correct those issues—to the extent that they could be corrected.

  “I changed the degree on her feet with every new shoeing,” Tim said. “Her feet were way out in front of her, like having long nails. And each shoeing, I was getting her feet up underneath her, straight with the knee, so she wouldn’t strain her tendons and ligaments. I’d cut the toe up, move the shoe back. But you can’t make a drastic change; you have to do it a little at a time. It’s a long, slow process.”

  John Tebbutt, a genial sort whose even temper serves as a neat counterbalance to Snyder’s more volatile nature, bristles slightly when asked how much credit his friend deserves for the transformation of Lisa’s Booby Trap.

  “I think he deserves all the credit. After this horse started working well, everybody considered her a freak. When they are that far out of alignment you wonder how long they can last. It’s like driving down the road with one good tire and three tires that are bald. It doesn’t mean they can’t run, it just usually means their time is very limited. And that turned out to be the case with Lisa. But in the beginning there was no reason to think she’d ever amount to anything. She was a big, good-looking horse, but her muscles didn’t look right, and she was very awkward.”

  Tebbutt is at times almost oddly defensive about a man he openly describes as “a pain in the ass.” But such is the nature of friendship, particularly
when it has endured the twin tests of time and hardship.

  “I have been Tim’s best friend for a very long time,” Tebbutt said. “That’s not going to change, no matter what he does. “Since I quit drinking and drugging about fifteen years ago, I’ve become very compassionate to other people, you know? Tim has had a hard life. I try not to judge people in a negative way; I try to find the positives about them. Anybody that comes along, you try to support the best you can. I worked in California for a while, and I saw that from an old man I worked for. We were the first barn at Hollywood Park, and every single kind of person would come to his barn first, to borrow five dollars or fifty thousand. Or just to say hello. Everybody owed him a favor—from the chief stewards to the mega rich, to the hotwalker who never had anything and never would have anything. He was kind to everyone; that was an attribute I admired.”

  It’s worth noting that the old man to whom Tebbutt referred was no ordinary backstretch plugger. His name was Charlie Whittingham, a Hall of Fame trainer widely regarded as one of the greatest horsemen in the game, as well as one of the most generous of spirit. With Whittingham as a mentor, it’s probably no surprise that Tebbutt comes across as someone with unusual patience—at least where Tim Snyder is considered.

  For example, when Tim returned to Finger Lakes from Ocala, he did so with the intent to continue working for Dave Markgraf. That arrangement lasted only a few days, and soon Tim found himself at Tebbutt’s barn, in need of stall space, a job, a paycheck, and something else, as well.

  He needed someone he could trust.

  “I was the registered owner on Lisa, but I had no trainer’s license,” Snyder explained. “It had lapsed, and I didn’t have the money to apply for a new one. You need six hundred bucks for the track fee, and another four-fifty for workman’s comp, so that’s a thousand bucks I didn’t have at the time. I had already borrowed so much money to keep this horse going. I figured it made more sense to just run her in John’s name. If she won a couple races, I could get my license and put her in my name.”

  For someone with Tim’s naturally skeptical nature, the thought of turning over Lisa to another trainer, if only as a matter of protocol, was enough to cause a serious spike in anxiety.

  “I didn’t want to put the horse in anyone else’s name, just in case she went the other way and turned out to be a nice horse,” he said. “That could cause problems. Racing is a tough business; you’ve gotta watch your own ass.”

  Or have a friend willing to watch it for you. For Tim, that person was John Tebbutt, who became, in April 2010, the official trainer of Lisa’s Booby Trap, and who saddled the horse in her first couple races—albeit with Tim, as an “assistant,” right by his side.

  “It wasn’t a big deal,” Tebbutt said with a shrug. “Just part of the game.”

  With the appropriate paperwork in place and his new horse comfortably settling into her upstate home, Tim turned his attention to preparing Lisa for the racetrack. He continued to tinker with her feet and her shoes, until finally she appeared to walk normally, without bobbing from side to side. Then he went about the hard business of training, and correcting another of Lisa’s apparent structural abnormalities: an imbalance in her shoulders.

  Snyder first noticed the issue in Florida, when he worked Lisa in a eurociser. The eurociser is a circular, mechanized training apparatus, divided into stalls, that permits horses to walk or jog in a tightly controlled space, without having to bear the burden of a rider. Akin to a giant, horizontal hamster wheel, it’s particularly useful when working with horses that are either new to the sport or recovering from some type of injury. In the case of Lisa’s Booby Trap, it gave Tim Snyder an opportunity to monitor the gate and stride of his new filly; what he saw concerned him.

  “Her right shoulder was much larger than her left shoulder,” he recalled. “It was the strangest thing.”

  What Snyder quickly determined, after taking Lisa out on the track a few times, was that she was unable to switch leads while galloping. The concept of switching leads sounds complicated and mysterious to those who haven’t spent any time around a racetrack (or around horses in general), but it’s actually a normal and instinctive behavior, albeit one that sometimes needs tweaking and prodding. Basically, when a horse gallops it “leads” with the legs on one side of its body, meaning the legs on either the left or right side reach farther forward than the legs on the other side. (This contrasts with, say, a rabbit, which ambulates by pulling rear legs forward first, in tandem, and then front legs afterward.) If the horse leads with his left, he will first push off his right hind leg. Then he will reach forward simultaneously with his left hind leg and right foreleg. Finally, he pulls the left front leg forward. Then he repeats the motion, over and over, creating what appears to be a beautiful and effortless gallop. A horse leading with its right simply reverses the movement, driving first off its left rear leg.

  When a horse runs in a straight line, it really doesn’t matter whether a left or right lead is utilized. But it’s generally accepted that when running in a circle, the inside leg should be the lead leg. In other words, a horse rounding the final turn of a racetrack, running in a counterclockwise direction, should be using its left—or inside—lead.

  “If they’re on the outside lead going through that turn, they can veer out fast and get into trouble,” Snyder explained. “They have to be on the inside lead. Then, after they get through the turn, they switch to the outside lead because they want to go straight. Halfway down the stretch they’ll switch again just because they’re tired.”

  If the horse is sound and a natural runner—as all thoroughbred racehorses are presumed to be—all of this happens smoothly and imperceptibly. The jockey feels it, though, and sometimes can prompt the change in a horse that is either reluctant or too tired to think straight.

  But when a horse fails to switch leads, it typically struggles and fades, for it is no longer running efficiently.

  “If he’s tired and he doesn’t switch leads, something bad is going to happen,” Snyder said. “He’s going to fall or pull up, or veer out into traffic. Nothing good, that’s for sure.”

  The first few times he galloped his new filly, Tim noticed that she would not use her left lead. Whether this was because of the imbalance in her shoulder muscles, or whether the failure to use the left lead caused the imbalance (or whether both were caused by her bad feet) was almost irrelevant. It was a serious impediment to her future as a racehorse, and it had to be corrected. Snyder wasn’t sure how he was going to fix the problem, but he knew this much: he wanted it to remain a secret.

  “I’d jog her all the way around to the backstretch, then only gallop a half-mile or so, because I knew people were watching. I didn’t want all those big-time trainers and owners to see that she couldn’t switch leads. Shit, some of these guys were paying a half-million dollars for horses that looked like jackasses. I had a horse that looked great, but didn’t know how to run. I figured maybe if I could hide that fact for a little while, one of them would want her. Maybe they’d pay real money.”

  At the very least, Tim was encouraged by what he felt was a diagnostic breakthrough. Prior to being purchased by Snyder, the filly had routinely plodded through workouts of three-eighths of a mile in forty-three seconds, a good five to seven seconds slower than her peers. Thus the declaration by John Shaw (and others) that she was among the most hopeless of cases: a racehorse that would never race; a filly of almost incomprehensible torpor. Snyder saw and felt something else: a big, strong girl who wanted to run, but couldn’t.

  “She didn’t know how to switch leads,” he recalled. “I thought if I could get that worked out, maybe she’d be all right.”

  One day in late February, after a particularly energetic session of breezing, Snyder called his mother-in-law.

  “If I can figure this out,” he told her, “I think I might have one of the best horses on the East Coast.”

  Carol Calley didn’t know how to respond. She was happy that
Tim seemed excited, optimistic; she respected his knowledge of the game. Still …

  One of the best horses on the East Coast?

  Tim was prone to wild mood swings, ferocious highs and lows that knew no boundaries. He could be thrilled about a horse one day, moribund the next. Although she didn’t say so at the time, Carol figured that eventually the filly would be revealed for what she was: a $4,500 gamble unlikely to ever pay off. But maybe that didn’t really matter. If the horse never gave Tim a trip to the winner’s circle, at least she’d rekindled his passion for horse racing, and maybe for life in general. In that sense, she’d been a solid investment.

  * * *

  Eventually, after a few weeks in upstate New York, Snyder noticed that Lisa tended to clip heels when she tried to switch leads. Once properly shod—and he stressed that this does not mean his previous owners failed her in this regard, but rather that more experimentation was necessary; in the case of Lisa’s Booby Trap, this included the use of a rear shoe on a front foot—she was able to work crisply and efficiently, and before long she began to take on the appearance of a real racehorse.

  Not that anyone really noticed. Finger Lakes is several hundred miles and a metaphorical galaxy away from the center of the racing universe. While the most notable performers in that season’s three-year-old crop—Super Saver, Lookin’ at Lucky, Drosselmeyer—were plowing through the Triple Crown races, in front of hundreds of thousands of fans and national television audiences, with million-dollar purses on the line, Lisa’s Booby Trap was quietly working out in the obscurity of Finger Lakes Racetrack, in the gloom and mud of an upstate spring.