The Horse God Built

by Lawrence Scanlan

  More riders and horses now dot the track. A lovely black horse moves past at a slow gallop, the rider, in black chaps, up out of the saddle and leaning on his knuckles at the horse’s withers. Two women riders trot against the flow on the outer rail.

  Every exercise rider at every track in North America obeys the same traffic laws: You walk and trot clockwise on the outer trail; you hard gallop, or “work,” counterclockwise on the inner rail. Riders on galloping horses are to stay in the middle of the track. Likewise, the middle zone is meant for horses being “ponied”: a riderless horse being led in a walk, trot, or gallop by a mounted rider (this is done for several reasons, but the main one is to relieve pressure on the horse’s legs while still getting in training miles). The track has virtually been divided into color-coded speed zones, so that a rider’s speed always dictates place on the track and direction.

  Some breezing horses (running at a fast gallop, almost top speed) snort like old trains; others are as quiet as computer fans. By the time morning light begins to cast long shadows over the track, several dozen riders are out there. Some are curious about this audience of one.

  “Did you bring your breakfast?” one rider asks as she trots past and sends me a smile.

  “What are you doing?” another asks cheerily.

  Researching a book, I tell them. Walking a little in Eddie Sweat’s shoes, to see what he and Secretariat and their crew saw and did on tracks like this one all over North America. I am also learning the language of the track: a furlong is an eighth of a mile; a blowout is a short, quick, two- or three-furlong hard gallop to condition a horse before a race; a pipe opener is a longer fast workout; a two-minute lick means covering a mile in two minutes; a walkover is when every other horse in the race miraculously scratches and the remaining entry need only cover the distance in a gallop to fulfill the rules of racing.

  One rider with a bracing Scottish accent stops her horse at the rail where I stand. Our conversation goes like this:

  “What time do you get up?”

  “I rise at five.”

  “What time do you go to bed?”

  “As late as I can.”

  “Do you like the speed?”

  “The faster the better.”

  “How long you been doing this?”

  “Seventeen years.”

  “Do you like your work?”

  “Oh, I love it.”

  She has fat white stars on her round green crash helmet, the kind of thing you might see on a circus performer about to be shot from a cannon. Her cutoff T-shirt reveals a muscled back, a flat, flat belly, and nut brown skin. Whenever an exercise rider’s arms are exposed, I notice, be the rider male or female, young or old, the muscles of the biceps and forearm are taut and ropy. Most riders wear flak jackets; some have whips stuck in the backs of their pants; some have walkie-talkies attached with strong elastic bands to the back sides of their helmets (trainers sometimes want a word before or after a ride, so this enables easy communication).

  Now come more riders, and they are galloping more frequently. You can hear the Hispanic riders chirping to their horses (¡Vámonos! ¡Vámonos!), you can hear the odd crack of whip on horseflesh, a curse of displeasure at a horse’s antics. This soundscape is available only to the trackside observer at dawn. During a race, the shouts of the thousands—that sound of surf that Ron Turcotte talked about— obscure the other, singular sounds.

  When Secretariat was running and at the peak of his popularity, thousands of people would rise at dawn to watch him work. Eddie Sweat, Jimmy Gaffney, Charlie Davis, Ron Turcotte, Ted McClain, and the rest must have marveled to see their private dawn world so invaded. At Saratoga Springs one time, some daring entrepreneur—no doubt claiming to have risen early and done his spadework—was hawking Secretariat manure at two dollars a bag. (The red horse’s poop continues to draw interest. In the late fall of 2006, the Miami Metrozoo was featuring a large exhibit called “The Poop on Scoop”— with stool samples from around the animal kingdom. Two local donors to the zoo had loaned a prize of their own: a lump of the great horse’s excrement encased in a glass globe.)

  Everyone at the track is selling something, but sometimes there are no buyers. One fresh-faced rider stands at the Keeneland in gate, his riding helmet in his hands, looking forlornly to the track, as if gazing out to sea. Were he to place a want ad in the newspaper, it might read, “Freelancer for Hire: Will ride any horse, any time, fee negotiable . . . very, very negotiable.” He has come all the way from Ireland, hoping for work, and this, apparently, is how it is done. You stand where this man stands, he of the freckles and red hair, and hope to be noticed. You hope a trainer likes the look of your face and puts you on the work list and up on a horse, then another, and another. But the Irishman tells me he has been here for days, with no takers, and, with money running low, he may soon turn back for home.

  Some riders are salaried and work for one trainer. The rider gets to know the horses in that stable, and thus experiences fewer surprises. Freelancers, on the other hand, can sometimes make more money by riding a dozen horses at the track in the morning and another dozen “babies” on farms in the afternoon: At $15 a pop, that’s $360 a day. But a freelancer never knows what he or she is up against. Maybe the horse has been stall-bound for weeks, storing energy like a kid who cannot wait to free the contents of his piggy bank—all at once, by smashing it with a hammer. Maybe the horse is rank or sore or simply sour on the whole business, a ticking time bomb.

  In Blood Horses, writer John Jeremiah Sullivan calculated that a typical Thoroughbred—from yearling to the end of his racing career—spends 91.7 percent of the time in a twelve-foot-by-fifteen-foot stall. Before that time, as foals, they are turned out to pasture, so they do know something of fresh air and space and the smell of grass. By comparison, a stall must feel like jail.

  In my own barn, I’ve seen the look on horses kept in on stall rest to let an injury heal. They whinny to you as you pass; they look at you accusingly and pleadingly. What have we done? the horses seem to say, to deserve this? And I know from hard personal experience, and from reading far too many horse books, that a horse denied turnout and confined to a stall is less happy, and more wired, than one given extended daily romps in a paddock or even an hour of schooling every day. But racehorses are costly, and their health must be guarded. Riders, on the other hand, are cheap and easily replaced. This is the hard math of the racetrack.

  I see a rider wearing Stars and Stripes gloves, her white saddle pad likewise festooned with red stars. A just-retired jockey named P. J. Cooksey, she was in a horrific spill at this very track the previous October, and a photograph in the Lexington Herald-Leader not only captured the dramatic moment but won an Eclipse Award—the highest honor for racetrack scribes and photographers. Three horses went down when the front legs of one horse clipped the back legs of another; the result was three riders down and three loose horses. The photo shows Patricia Cooksey on her back and unconscious, and a riderless horse galloping straight for her. Two track EMTs, Horatios at the gate, stand before her, legs apart, as if braced for a blow, the one in front with his arms high and wide. Both men are eyeing the horse. Come what may, they will stand their ground.

  An outrider, Bob Landry, described to me how that loose horse bore down on the three figures and did not stop or sidestep them, but leapt over them all like some winged horse—“pretty as you please.”

  I encounter Cooksey on the shed row and walk with her to the barn, one at least half a mile from the track. She is up on a tall filly, a dark bay by Fusaichi Pegasus, the Kentucky Derby winner in 2000 and one of the great runners and potentially great sires of this era. On such a big horse, even this little woman towers over me, and I thrust my tape recorder as high in the air as I can to catch her words.

  P. J. Cooksey was a jockey for twenty-five years. Only later will I learn what a trailblazer she has been: the second woman to ride in the Derby, the first woman to ride in the Preakness, one of only two femal
e riders to record more than two thousand victories. As for “gettin’ on horses in the morning,” as she puts it, that she’s been doing for twenty-eight years. I tell her, one, that I have yet to meet any exercise rider who does not love the work, despite the risks, and, two, what a thrill it has been to watch the dawn gallops. I want her to express what it’s like, and Cooksey cannot stop smiling as she tries. “Oh, it’s just a great feeling,” she says. “It’s just you and the horse. You hear the horse’s nostrils flarin’ and blowin.’ They get into that rhythm as they’re stridin’, and when you’re out there by yourself pretty much, it’s real quiet then. It’s just you and the horse. It’s hard to describe but you just. . . you just love it!” There is no mention of the calamitous fall that left her with a concussion and two broken legs.

  The nicest aspect of her work, Cooksey says, is being on a gifted horse like the one she’s on now. “They’re a different breed, the really good ones,” she says, and my mind goes back to what Jimmy Gaffney said about Secretariat. How this experienced rider sensed, even in the walk and early on, the young chestnut’s power.

  What an astute rider can pass on to a young horse is trust, and it is what makes these dawn workouts so much more than fitness rituals. A young horse learns to stay calm and relaxed while running— whether in the lead, dead last, or being passed—and to let the jockey decide. I tell Cooksey that I am struck by how little credit the backside workers—grooms, hot walkers, exercise riders—get for what they do to shape and educate, comfort and encourage young horses.

  “Your grooms,” she says, “they’re the backbone of the industry. And the exercise riders, they’re the extended hands and feel of the trainer. You have to have a good exercise rider who knows how a horse feels underneath him and can communicate that back to the trainer.”

  At that point, we arrive, finally, at the barn, and the filly’s trainer quickly approaches. If this is a party, I am not on the guest list. The butler has pounced to show me the door.

  “Can I help you?” he says gravely. Behind this thin veil of courtesy lie other, implied questions, such as “Who the hell are you?” and “What are you doing with a tape recorder in my rider’s face?”

  I tell him I’m just talking to the exercise rider, though what I really mean is, “What is your problem ?” And he turns to P. J. Cooksey and asks her, “Do you know this man?”

  “Oh sure,” she says, giving me a sly wink, and the trainer, vaguely satisfied, retreats to the barn. He is, she says, a prominent trainer with expensive horses, and he is wary of snooping reporters. I thank Cooksey, for I truly am grateful, and I play a little of our recorded conversation as I walk back to the track. The filly’s clip-clop is like music, a Greek chorus to the words of a woman who never tires of “gettin’ on horses in the morning.”

  At 9:30 in the morning, Joe Riggs, Sr., has stopped for a late lunch—a fried-egg sandwich and a thermos of coffee. Riggs is something of a legend among outriders, the grand old man of the bunch. The Daily Racing Form once called the former jockey “one of racing’s most respected outriders.”

  An outrider is a traffic-cop-cum-rescuer, there to see that exercise riders obey the rules and respect one another’s space, there to save them when the horse gods rule against them during the faint light of dawn or the harsh light of a race. Every outrider has stories to tell of dashing to stop a riderless runaway horse, or about one dragging a rider with a foot caught in the irons.

  “I don’t know how you’re supposed to feel at sixty-one,” Riggs tells me. “All I know is I’m doing the same stuff I did when I was forty-one.” And if he still had the pants he wore as a teenager, he could wear them, too, and make weight if he had a mind to go back to racing.

  Helmet and goggles, leather chaps and jacket still on, he looks a little like a World War I fighter pilot as he sits at a makeshift counter in the tack room that doubles as the outriders’ lunch room. I ask him about job satisfaction, and he offers terse answers, as if this were all so self-evident and beyond explanation. There is much on the mind of Joe Riggs, Sr.: He had a bout with cancer awhile back, he is casting about for a new horse to replace his gifted but aging track pony, and he is trying to seal the deal on a land purchase in Florida. “That’s kinda layin’ on me,” he says.

  But Joe Riggs, Sr., is here to tell me an outrider has the best job in the world. He loves the fact that his day is done at 11:00 a.m.—“and I don’t mind gettin’ up in the mornin’” (though I think he means the middle of the night, since for him it’s rise and shine at 4:00 a.m.). He would say the money is pretty good, and when I tell him that a stockbroker would scoff at his wages, he has a counter. The stockbroker cannot say in the morning, “ ‘I’m goin’ horseback ridin’ today.’ I can.” Every day, Riggs gets paid to go for a hack. (He would retire in 2006.)

  Riggs’s thin dash of a mouth gets a fraction wider, and he goes back to his egg sandwich.

  Back at the rail is Joe Riggs, Jr., a farmer, trainer, and breeder who has breezed one of his own horses just minutes ago. His farm is outside Paris, Kentucky, close by Claiborne Farm. For sixteen years, he was an outrider at Keeneland, working early mornings alongside his father, then as an exercise rider at farms in the afternoon. He gives me his card, says he’ll be home all day if I care to visit. I am reminded of the billboard I noticed outside Paris enticing visitors with its promise of “Horses. History. Hospitality.”

  It is a pleasant thing to be lost on Bethlehem Road in Bourbon County. I am lost often, and when it happens and I am my own navigator, I feel no particular frustration. To be lost is to be expected. Best to be lost alone (my wife, Ulrike, I think, will back me on this), free of that sometimes sour chemistry between driver and navigator.

  I am looking for Joe Riggs, Jr.’s farm—Holly Valley Thoroughbreds. Meanwhile, there is the view. Trees over the road often link to form a canopy, black horse fencing follows every hill and dale, and the hills offer no end of broodmares and foals. The sight makes me sigh with pleasure. A field of clover compels me to stop in the shade, roll down my window, and take in the perfume. It’s so invigorating, I get out of the car, and the scent’s power increases tenfold. If I can smell the clover, the horses must be reveling in it (or pacing in frustration if the clover is a fence line away). I pass a farm called, optimistically, Winning Ways, others with rockers on the porch. Bliss is a view of rolling fields dotted with Thoroughbred horses.

  Finally, I find the Riggs farm. A long, meandering driveway ends at an old stone house, or, more precisely, the shell of one. The house is windowless, doorless, and, at one end, roofless. Joe Riggs, Jr., as laconic a man as I have ever met, seems unsurprised to see me pull up. He is just bidding adieu to his wife, Elise, who is heading off to work. She is a horse broker, and her income is the only steady one on the forty-acre farm.

  The farm was once part of a sixteen-hundred-acre plot allotted to a Colonel Matson from Virginia, who fought in the War of Independence and got the land in lieu of pay. A generation down the line, the land fell to a distant relation, a Union army general, whom local history would remember as “Butcher Burbridge” after he allegedly killed Confederate sympathizers and buried them in ditches on or near the farm.

  The dark tale does not bother Riggs, who seems intent on restoring the house that dates from 1806 and has not been occupied since 1987. “I like that old stuff,” he says.

  Ask him what he does and he may say, “I breed a few, train a few, sell a few.” The first bit of business is to take me out to the paddocks to meet the horses—he has about twelve broodmares and foals, all of whom come to us as we enter their field.

  In the barn are more horses, including one very sick baby. This, too, is a fact of life for the breeder. A few years ago, a mysterious illness raced through this farm, killing foals, as it did throughout the American South. Mares would get just to the point of dropping their foals, then suddenly abort. The mysterious scourge (so-called mare reproductive loss syndrome, or MRLS) was blamed by some on pesticides, by others on
tent caterpillars on cherry-tree leaves, which horses love to eat. Whatever the cause, the scourge seems to have gone.

  Then we settle into plastic lawn chairs on gravel in the shade of an oak by the drive shed, my host procures two cold Mountain Dews from a fridge inside, and we chat for several hours. Riggs is a forty-year-old man wearing a white Keeneland ball cap, a short-sleeved shirt that hangs off his lean frame, and white cargo pants that somehow stay up despite no belt or the press of a belly. Joe junior has his father’s dry wit and small, thin mouth, which opens to reveal a fine set of teeth. Too fine, I’m thinking, to be the originals, long ago lost to horses’ hooves. But I’m wrong.

  We talk about the horse he breezed that morning at Keeneland, how he let another horse come abreast of his filly—“so the beast can look into the eye of the beast.” He was heartened by what he saw and felt. His horse—out of a mare he nursed back to health nine years ago—surged; the other folded.

  “She left that other filly,” says Riggs proudly, “like she was tied to a fence.” There’s nothing better, he tells me, than achieving success with a colt or filly that you yourself have pulled into this world from its mother’s body. “You go through all the little sicknesses, the colt running into the fence. . . . Sometimes you think he’s not worth the bullet to shoot him with, and that could be the one that makes you all the money. You gotta stick with it.”

  We talk, in part, about hope. It is what every horseman must have. breed more secretariats was the note on Ron Turcotte’s ball cap. If only it were that simple. Joe Riggs, Jr., talks of not getting a hoped-for price for a filly, of illness and injury and all that can befall horses. And so it is that home, for the moment, is a double-wide mobile home behind the drive shed.

  “Trailer trash,” Riggs jokes.

  “So what keeps you going?” I ask him.

  He sighs as he answers. “It’s hard to put it on any one thing,” he begins. “I wish I had a good quote for you. The only one I can think of—and old-timers used to say this all the time—‘No man with a young horse in his barn ever jumped off any bridges.’ Like you said, I’m gonna need luck, but if you know you need luck, that means you gotta have hope. That’s what keeps you going. And if not this year, then next year.”