The Ghost Horse

by Joe Layden

  “He got left in the gate, literally ten lengths behind the field at the first call,” she remembered. “I’m in front at the eighth pole, winning the race, when suddenly this blur goes by me. I finish second, lose to this horse. Then I go back to the Racing Form, and look at the workouts: all 50s, and 49s (for four furlongs). And this horse is like 10-1? And he goes on to win (a Triple Crown race)? There’s just no way.”

  The first official, timed workout for Lisa’s Booby Trap came at a distance of four furlongs, on an early spring day at Finger Lakes. Her time, over a track surface classified as “good,” was a respectable 50.6 seconds, in a workout that Snyder described as “not that hard.” Two and a half weeks later, on May 4, Lisa returned to the track for her second official workout, this time on an uncommonly bright, clear day, over a track labeled “fast.”

  Unlike most races (steeplechase events being the exception), workouts sometimes begin informally, with the rider galloping the horse back and forth, until eventually reaching the “starting line,” which is nothing more than one of the track’s marker poles (which are placed at intervals of one sixteenth of a mile all around the track), a specified distance from the finish line. He’ll jog the horse to that point, then urge his mount to begin running hard, while an assortment of clockers—official and unofficial (trainers, owners, handicappers, gamblers)—stand at the ready. On other occasions, though, the horse will work out of a starting gate, which was the case with Lisa’s Booby Trap on this day.

  “She almost left the jockey in the gate, that’s how fast she went out,” Snyder recalled with a laugh. “But the horse ducked a little bit, just out of greenness.”

  Blake-Baeza remembered the trip vividly, particularly the start.

  “Maybe because she was blind in that one eye, she came out of the gate and sort of made a hard turn,” Blake-Baeza said. “I didn’t fall, but I slipped off the side of her, and I was riding her Indian-style all the way across the chute. She went maybe ten strides with me hanging off the side. It was scary. But I got myself back up there, and she was very professional about it. Didn’t stop or bolt or anything.”

  Once righted, Lisa found her stride and quickly went to the lead among a small group of horses working together.

  “She was in there with two other horses,” Snyder recalled. “A couple veterans that had made some money, older horses, and after she caught up, she just left them all behind.”

  While Snyder knew Lisa was running well almost as soon as she found her rhythm, what he saw as she crossed the finish line still surprised him. Her time, according to his watch, was a shade over forty-five seconds, which would have earned a bullet at just about any track in the country on most days.

  At Finger Lakes Racetrack it was an anomaly of almost epic proportions.

  “She did it easy, too,” Snyder recalled. “So graceful. There were a few guys with watches, and we all had her in about the same time, all between forty-five and forty-six. At first I thought maybe I hit the button at the wrong pole—that’s how fast she was. You don’t get many 45s at Finger Lakes. Forget workouts—you don’t even get 45s in the afternoon, when they’re racing. The cat was out of the bag then. I knew she’d be a short price after that.”

  Not as short as she might have been, for the published time on Lisa’s four-furlong workout that day was 47.4 seconds, still a solid number, but not quite reflective of the jaw-dropping performance she apparently had turned in. Snyder said he wasn’t aware of the discrepancy between his watch and the official watch until later that morning, when times were posted. His reaction: a shrug of the shoulders.

  “That happens sometimes, especially at small tracks. But I know what she ran. And if she hadn’t come out of the gate sideways, she might have gone forty-four.”

  Later that afternoon, Snyder said, one of the track’s clockers showed up at Tebbutt’s barn, angling for Lisa’s Booby Trap.

  “He told me it was the fastest time he’d ever seen at Finger Lakes,” Snyder said. “And he was interested in buying the horse, or brokering her for another guy. So maybe he wrote the work slower than it was to keep people away. I don’t know.”

  Snyder listened as the man made his pitch.

  “I got a guy in Florida who will buy her for forty thousand dollars.”

  Tim did not hesitate before answering, probably because he knew that if he thought long and hard enough, and allowed logic to enter the equation, he might part ways with his prized filly.

  “That’s a nice offer,” he said. But I’m not selling her.”

  Some time later, long after the market value of Lisa’s Booby Trap had soared and plummeted, Snyder tried to explain his line of thinking.

  “I figured, I’ve gone this far with her, I might as well keep going, see what she can do. By now I’ve got a connection with her. We’ve made a lot of progress together.”

  Snyder paused, waved a hand dismissively.

  “I’ve been around a lot of goddamn money in my day. Worked for a lot of rich people, had some money myself. I’ve bought cars and trucks and other stuff, and none of it mattered much. None of it makes you happy. It’s material shit, and it don’t matter. You have it for a while, and then it’s gone. This was my horse.”

  * * *

  By the time late May rolled around, Janice Blake-Baeza had also developed a personal and proprietary interest in Lisa’s Booby Trap. The journeyman rider felt an understandable kinship with the overlooked and underappreciated filly. If the horse had more talent than she had been given credit for, well, then maybe the same was true of her rider. It takes only one great horse to forever alter the career of a trainer or jockey, and maybe, for Blake-Baeza, this was the horse.

  Then again, maybe not.

  Although a regular around John Tebbutt’s barn, and unfailing in her commitment to galloping Lisa’s Booby Trap whenever Tim Snyder required her services, Blake-Baeza could hardly make a living on one horse. So, in the time-honored tradition of racetrack hustling, she showed up on the backstretch each morning, chatted up trainers and owners, and slowly developed a clientele. One trainer, in particular, Pat Baratta, thought highly enough of Blake-Baeza to assign her multiple mounts in the morning, the implication being that if any of these horses made it to the starting gate, she would get first call as jockey. Among the most promising of these horses was a four-year-old mare named Sandy Castle.

  “A nice horse,” Blake-Baeza said, “and I’m working her every morning, same as I’m doing for Tim and Lisa. But Pat is my big stable. He likes me, he’s going to give me work.”

  All well and good until Baratta and his mentor, Danny Poliziani—who was listed as Sandy Castle’s official trainer for a short period in 2010—decided to enter their horse in the sixth race at Finger Lakes, on May 24, a six-furlong allowance race for fillies and mares three years of age and older.

  The very same race in which Lisa’s Booby Trap would be making her debut.

  Janice Blake-Baeza had the call on both girls. She’d come to Finger Lakes without an agent or any guarantee of steady work and suddenly, it seemed, she had more opportunities than she could handle.

  “What a fiasco,” Blake-Baeza said. “I got Lisa’s Booby Trap—one broke-down guy with one horse—and I got this other guy, Pat Baratta, who’s got money and a whole barn. Lisa’s a good horse, but I’m still not one hundred percent sure she can beat Sandy, who’s also a good horse. I’m watching all this develop, and I’m thinking, ‘This can’t be happening!’ I’m lucky to get six rides a week at Finger Lakes, and now I’ve got a double-call? With two good horses? Unbelievable!”

  Divine intervention notwithstanding, Blake-Baeza let practicality and common sense guide her decision. She committed to Sandy Castle, ensuring that that there would be a steady stream of work in the coming weeks and months, but leaving Lisa’s Booby Trap without a rider just a few days before her first race. Not that this was unusual in horse racing. Trainers drop jockeys and jockeys drop trainers all the time, for any number of reasons, rangin
g from conflicting commitments to disputes over job performance.

  In this case it was simply a matter of the rider making the prudent choice.

  “I have to ride Pat’s horse,” Blake-Baeza told Snyder one morning on the backstretch.

  Tim accepted the news reluctantly.

  “It’s your decision,” he said, “but I think you’re making a mistake. This is a nice horse.”

  “I know,” the jockey said. “I’m sorry.”

  Those who have been around Tim Snyder for any length of time, and have seen how openly he wears his heart on his sleeve, might be surprised to learn that he expressed not a trace of anger.

  “Tim was cool about it,” Blake-Baeza noted. “He knows the racetrack and he knows what you’ve gotta do to survive. It’s not like I didn’t know it might happen; we had talked about the possibility. I had a choice, but it wasn’t a very good choice. What would happen if I took off Pat’s barn and rode Lisa, and she finishes up the track? And the jockey on Pat’s horse wins the race? First of all I look like an idiot, and now I’m not in Pat’s barn anymore. I couldn’t ride both horses, so I had to pick one. Believe me, I didn’t want to do it. I even asked Pat to scratch his horse and enter her the next week.”

  Snyder did not have to look far for a replacement rider, and once again he selected a female jockey for his filly. Her name was Elaine Castillo, and she had long been a favorite of John Tebbutt’s.

  “Nothing against the other rider, but I was delighted when Timmy picked up Elaine,” Tebbutt said. “She was another one of those really nice people you come across sometimes. Just a sweetheart of a person, and she got along great with horses; she had a natural way with them.”

  Like most people on the Finger Lakes backstretch, Castillo by this point had heard about the one-eyed, clubfooted filly. In fact, she’d first gotten word of the filly a few months earlier, when she was galloping horses and racing for Tebbutt in Florida. Tim Snyder would occasionally run his mouth about this new horse he’d acquired, and how she was enormously talented and could one day make a hell of a racehorse—if he could only get her straightened out.

  “I’ve known Tim for quite a while, actually,” Castillo said with a laugh. “He’s a bullshitter, so when Timmy talks … well, you believe what you want to believe. I’d never worked for him, but I knew some people who don’t like him—a few riders who said you couldn’t trust him, that he’d promise you a ride and then sting you at the last second. But I try to get along with everyone, and Timmy was a friend of John’s, so we were fine. In Florida he kept telling me about this horse, and how no one else could even breeze her, she was so messed up, but he was going to turn her around. I just listened and thought, Okay, Timmy, have fun with that.”

  By late May Castillo knew the filly was in Tebbutt’s barn, supposedly training well, and that Snyder had burdened her with some ridiculous name. (“Only Timmy would do something like that.”) In all candor, that’s about all she wanted to know—until she was approached by Tebbutt just a few days before the filly was to race for the first time.

  “She’s available,” Tebbut said. “I think you should ride her. She’s going to do great.”

  Had it been anyone else, Castillo would have declined the offer.

  “But John was my guy,” she said. “And the filly was under his name. If not for John, who I trust and who wants the best for me, I wouldn’t have considered her.”

  Whatever skepticism Castillo harbored, it melted away the next morning, when she climbed aboard Lisa for an introductory gallop.

  “Wow, she looked good,” Castillo recalled. “She was this big, huge filly, and she moved so well. At that point I immediately started to feel pressure. I mean, she was a first-time starter, and sometimes people are worried they might be bad or misbehave. I thought maybe that’s what had happened with Janice taking off. But if she’d been working her the whole time, she should have known how good [Lisa] might be. It didn’t really matter; that stuff happens on the track all the time. I was just grateful for the opportunity.”

  On May 24, the sixth race at Finger Lakes was an allowance race with a purse of twenty thousand dollars. At Belmont or Saratoga, that would be a decidedly minor event; at Finger Lakes it was the feature race of the day. As he would do virtually every time she ran, Tim Snyder spent much of the day with Lisa’s Booby Trap, hanging out by her stall, chatting with her—or at her, as the case may be—ostensibly trying to keep her calm, but really just trying to maintain control of his own frayed nerves.

  Shortly before three o’clock he led the filly out of her stall and began the long walk to the paddock area. Horses, most trainers will tell you, thrive on routine; they can also be shaken by routine. A horse racing for the very first time does not know what to expect, and thus her handlers have no way of knowing what to expect from her. Once seasoned, a horse is likely to be highly spirited, even to the point of agitation, as she goes through the race-day routine, for she knows that inevitably she will end up in a starting gate, crammed alongside ten other anxious horses, and that soon she’ll be running so hard that she might bleed from her nostrils. She associates prerace prep with pain and discomfort.

  For even the most naturally competitive and gifted of horses, race day is one filled with anxiety and unpredictable behavior.

  To Lisa’s Booby Trap, all this pampering and parading was new. She had no frame of reference, and so she reacted indifferently. As she walked from her barn to the track, with Tim holding the reins, she seemed completely relaxed—until they reached the entrance of the track, near the quarter-pole chute, and found themselves temporarily blocked by one of the track’s maintenance trucks as it went about the business of watering down the track. (This is ordinary maintenance that occurs between races, to keep the surface from drying out). As the truck passed, then stopped, Tim led his filly onto the track.

  “That’s when I almost lost her,” he recalled. “The truck had stopped, then the guy opened his door and jumped out, and the noise spooked Lisa. She ran backwards, and I went with her. Then I couldn’t get her past the water truck, because she was so nervous. It took me a while to get her settled down.”

  By the time Lisa arrived in the paddock, she had been made a 6-5 favorite by the betting crowd at Finger Lakes, who no doubt were swayed by the filly’s strong workout record, as well as the fact that, as a newcomer, she would be carrying only 118 pounds, six pounds less than Sandy Castle. None of this mattered much to John Tebbutt, who paced nervously in anticipation of the filly’s arrival.

  “Where have you been?” he asked Snyder. “You’re going to get me fined for being late.”

  Tim scoffed.

  “Let ’em fine me. I don’t give a damn, as long as they fine the guy driving the water truck, too.”

  At 3:24 P.M., Lisa’s Booby Trap broke cleanly, if not enthusiastically, from the seven hole—the far outside in a seven-horse field—and rushed quickly to the front alongside a 31-1 long shot named She’s An Outlaw. They hit the quarter-mile mark together in a swift 22.58 seconds; by the half-mile mark, passed in 46.1, She’s An Outlaw was laboring, and Lisa had begun to pull away.

  “She broke well and she ran easy … I mean easy,” Castillo said. “None of us really knew how much horse there would be, but she was strong and steady. Obviously she impressed everyone.”

  Indeed she did, including racetrack announcer Tony Calo, who marveled at the filly as she romped through the stretch, essentially under a hand ride from Castillo (meaning the jockey rarely used her whip), while pulling away to a 17¾-length victory. She covered the six furlongs, or three-quarters of a mile, over a track labeled “fast,” in 1:10.40, an inaugural performance so lopsided that it would have raised eyebrows at virtually any track in the country.

  “Check out this debut-er!” Calo shouted. “Lisa’s Booby Trap, very impressive in her first look. She is an authoritative winner! And it’s a good running time.”

  Then, after an uncomfortably long pause (or maybe not, given the gap betwe
en the two horses), Calo resumed calling the race.

  “Sandy Castle for second…”

  At a handful of elegant, genteel racetracks—Saratoga, Del Mar, Churchill Downs—where great flocks of tourists not only help fuel the business but also diminish the harshness of the clientele, a rider often spends much of his time on the long walk back to the jockeys’ room signing autographs and shaking hands with fans. This is not the case at most tracks, where virtually every attendee is either a hard-core racing fan or a degenerate gambler. Either way, they hate to lose, and given the rather obvious fact that horses don’t give a damn how much money you bet on them, racetrack patrons must look elsewhere to heave their scorn.

  As often as not, it’s the rider who shoulders the blame.

  And so, as she walked from the track to the jocks’ quarters after the race, Janice Blake-Baeza tried to ignore the taunting and the sarcasm hurled her way by a small but vocal Finger Lakes crowd.

  “Smart move, girl!”

  “That could have been you on that horse!”

  Walking briskly, eyes straight ahead, Blake-Baeza said nothing in response. They had paid their money; they could say whatever they wanted. She had been around far too long to take any of it personally. As much as she loved the sport, she hated the hardness that it provoked in some people. The meanness. Like so many other things, though, it was part of the game.

  “What are you gonna do?” she would later say. “It’s not the Jerry Springer Show. You can’t yell back at them. You make your decision and live with it. You move on. You don’t chew your arm off over it.”

  Chapter Twelve

  Shortly before six o’clock on the morning of May 25, John Shaw’s phone began ringing. Predawn calls are not unusal in the world of horse racing, where the workday typically begins under the cover of darkness, so Shaw felt no urgency to pick up the line. Instead, he went about his business and let the call kick over to voice mail. A few minutes later, he checked the message.