The man leaning back in his lawn chair and swigging on his soda is angled toward the light. “We live on hope,” he says, and here in the bluegrass country, hope springs eternal. Everybody here knows someone with a filly or colt who brought home the gold.
Riggs tells the story of Xtra Heat, relates it like a parable. Its lesson: Never give up on a horse until you see that horse run. Xtra Heat sold as a weanling, as a yearling, and as a two-year-old for next to nothing. Tried in cheap claiming races at Louisiana Downs, the filly won, and kept on winning, moving up in class every time and taking sixteen races in a row. Xtra Heat would earn $2.3 million.
I liken this to finding water in the desert: Everyone has an oasis tale. As for dying of thirst, that’s just what happens in the desert. Now imagine discovering Niagara Falls in the desert (to bring this back to Secretariat).
Many owners and dabblers, therefore, own pieces of horses—10 percent of this one, 20 percent of some others. The racing game is a numbers game, and you try to spread your losses, never putting all your eggs in one basket.
“A commoner on the backside,” as Joe Riggs, Jr., calls himself, does not know what it feels like to win a major stakes race. But he does know the feel of victory. “A win is a win is a win,” he tells me, even if it’s a claiming race. “At that moment in time, when your horse has been shown to be better than the other horses on the track, it’s hard to imagine feeling any better.”
I tell Riggs the story of Snowman, a story that seems a natural follow-up to his tale of Xtra Heat. In February 1956, Harry de Leyer arrives too late at a horse auction in New Holland, Pennsylvania. The decent horses have all been sold, and fifteen sorry dregs have been loaded into a slaughterhouse truck. But one, a dappled gray, catches Harry’s eye. The horse’s tail is caked in manure, his body bears bite marks and sores, and there is a crease across his chest from years of pulling a plow. Harry buys him for seventy dollars and calls him Snowman because of the way he blinks when he emerges from the van’s darkness. Inauspiciously, the horse trips at the bottom of the ramp.
Harry cleans him up, schools him a little, and sells him to a chiropractor down the road. But Snowman keeps leaping the five-foot fencing and running back to Harry, who realizes, one, the gray loves him and, two, he can jump. Snowman goes on to become the American national show-jumping champion for two years running. Harry declines offers to buy him for $400,000. Countless articles, and two books, are written about “the Cinderella horse.” In my favorite photo, he is swimming with three of Harry’s gleeful kids on his back. Snowman’s mouth is open in a brown horsey smile and he still has what Harry saw that day in the abattoir truck—“a kindness in his sad eyes.”
Joe Riggs has a rescue story of his own: Simply Bell was within an hour of boarding a meat truck. Riggs knew nothing about her, only that she was a sweet mare temporarily parked in his field, and he had no wish to see her go down that road. She repaid him with a foal that sold for $35,000, money that helped Joe and Elise buy the farm. “We’ll keep her until she dies,” says Riggs.
As I drive north to the Paris Pike and back to Lexington, what rings in my ear is his mantra: “We live on hope.” Hope to sell a horse to put a roof on the house, to keep the farm going. And if Joe Riggs, Jr., were to strike it rich with a horse, what would he do? “The same thing,” he said. “Only better. Better babies, better mares, better stallions.” Bull Hancock—who plucked from Ireland in 1949 the great Nasrullah, who sired the even greater Bold Ruler, who, in turn, sired the immortal Secretariat—was famous for this advice: Breed the best to the best and hope for the best.
“The love of the horse.” This racetrack phrase is uttered with the solemnity of a prayer—most of the time. The love between horse and human exists everywhere on the planet and has done so ever since one of our ancestors bravely backed that first horse, perhaps six thousand years ago on the steppes of Asia. Eddie Sweat, were he alive, would admit such love. And Secretariat, were he alive and given voice, would surely testify that he loved his Shorty as much as any horse can love a human. Ask any girl in your local Pony Club about the horse–human bond; ask the mounted exercise riders grinning at first light on the tracks at Keeneland and Woodbine. Ask me. But love can be, and is, exploited.
I am trying in these pages to understand Secretariat’s world—the world of the racetrack. And it strikes me that it’s a lot like the world of the writer—at heart, a solitary pursuit.
The handicapper bent over his Daily Racing Form is almost always alone, as gamblers always are. The trainer, with binoculars and stopwatch, nervously guards the flock like a rooster with hawks circling overhead. The jockey (or the jockey’s agent) goes trainer door to trainer door, pleading and cajoling, scrambling for mounts. The exercise rider gets a leg up on that first colt or filly in the cold dawn. The groom, bolstered by strong coffee, leads a lathered horse. The horse stands alone in a stall for twenty-two hours a day. And the race, of course, which pits one horse against a dozen or so others, is a cruel sorting out.
The backstretch is Darwinism played out daily. There do exist helping organizations—the Jockey Club Foundation (“a charitable trust created to assist needy persons connected with the turf and racing”), for example, and the Winners Foundation (which helps backside workers overcome drug addiction). There are kind racetrackers, and many were generous to me as I researched this book. But horse racing is not about collegiality or sharing. It’s about winning. (Somehow it seems significant that the Horsemen’s Benevolent and Protective Association—which sounds like an organization that helps dispossessed track workers, and it does—actually represents owners, breeders, and trainers.)
A cruel fate often awaits those in track society—human and equine—who do not win, or do not win enough. Raymond Woolfe remembers all too well the day that a powerful and prominent owner called his trainer to the owner’s private box at Saratoga. “He fired him on the spot,” says Woolfe. “He used the worst kind of language, every kind of insult. I heard it myself. People turned away, they were so embarrassed for that trainer.”
Raymond Woolfe has lived his whole life on and around the racetrack. “Fortunes can turn around quickly on the track,” he says. “Reputations, lives. The track will break your heart in a minute; it’ll make you a king in a minute.”
A woman I know—well connected in racing—recalled, with fresh shock and disgust, watching as her then husband leaned on a pillar at a racetrack and bawled his eyes out. His mare, his favorite, had come in second in a famous race.
What about me? the young woman asked herself that day.
The man had pursued her, set aside his passion for horses while the courtship ensued, and the woman swooned at his attentions. She was too young to know the fervor would not last, that the other fervor would soon reassert itself.
The woman hated being left behind—left behind emotionally, spiritually, literally. Her husband was up at dawn watching those long-legged-beauties—the bays and the grays, the roans and the chestnuts—gallop in the morning mist.
When Go for Wand shattered her leg in the 1990 Breeders’ Cup, trainer Ron McAnally struck a note that managed to blend sympathy, acceptance, and disgust. “It’s part of racing,” he said. “They give their lives for our pleasure.” The filly went down only sixty yards from the spot where Ruffian was buried fifteen years before after shattering her right foreleg in a match race with Foolish Pleasure.
Tim Tam broke his leg during the 1958 Belmont and somehow finished second. Cool Reception finished second to Damascus in the 1967 Belmont—despite running on a broken leg for the last eighth of a mile. Why do so many horses break down on the track? Are injured horses—on painkillers like bute and Banamine—running when they should not? Are they too young, at the age of two, to be running at all? Are the track surfaces too hard? Is the breeding of Thoroughbreds too intense, the gene pool too shallow? Is racing year-round the problem?
Given the extraordinary value of these animals, the surprise is that we seem not to know the precise a
nswer, but the numbers tell a tale. A University of Minnesota study done in 1993 revealed that 840 horses were fatally injured on American tracks the year before. One horse in every twenty-two races—3,566 horses in all—was so severely injured that he pulled up short of the finish line. Not included in this tally were all the horses suffering fatal injuries during morning workouts. Bill Nack, writing in Sports Illustrated, called the figures “appalling and unacceptable by any humane standard.” A more recent Australian study, done at the University of Melbourne in 2003, noted that while less than 1 percent of racing Thoroughbreds suffer catastrophic injuries, more than 50 percent experience “career-ending or career-delaying musculoskeletal problems.”
Nack had quoted a vet who had given up a lucrative twenty-one-year career working at Southern California tracks after he became disillusioned with what he called the “rampant” use of drugs at racetracks. The vet lamented that drugs aimed at healing and pain control were now being used so an animal could run through pain and injury—“to force the animal, like some punch-drunk fighter, to make just one more round.”
In his little classic on life at the racetrack (Laughing in the Hills, first published in 1981), Bill Barich says he was told by one trainer, “You can’t get too attached to the horses.” The author describes seeing a horse call Ruling Don die before his eyes during a morning workout after shattering his right front leg. “It always gets to me when that happens,” an exercise rider told him through tears. “Don’t matter how often I see it, it always gets to me.” Barich heard trainers curse the hard turf and the fact that “too goddam many sore horses running.” One trainer just spat on the ground and said, “So what else is new.”
What Barich describes seems a far cry from “the love of the horse” and the glory that surrounds a horse like Secretariat. Maybe the company of horses is what sustains the people of shed row. Best not to have favorites, for a horse—in the time it takes to change your mind— can be claimed, sold, injured, traded, shipped for meat, put out to stud, die. If Shorty Sweat knew that wisdom, it seems he ignored it. Maybe Secretariat was beyond resisting, so that when Eddie every day touched that Adonis of a horse and breathed in the colt’s essence, when this supreme creature responded and bestowed on a humble man all his affection, the hook was well and truly set.
I told friends, as I wrote this book over the course of three years, that I was writing about a racehorse and his groom, a man called Eddie Sweat.
“Is that really his name?” some asked. As if the name Sweat were simply too apt to be believed; as if mucking out stalls and attending to a horse could only constitute hard labor. Some could not imagine that anyone would see such work as privilege, that contact with a great horse could make a man happy and proud and fulfilled. Eddie Sweet, more like it. But neither could my friends imagine the sordidness of the racetrack.
Some trainers inclined to drug a horse before a race are too cheap to deploy the same drugs when it comes time to ship even an injured horse to slaughter. A horse is worth more when shipped live (I imagine this is because they can squeeze more bodies into the truck and because horses meant for human consumption must arrive alive at the abattoir), and I pity any horse forced to make that journey. What kind of person would put an already-suffering horse on such a truck and deny that horse a painkiller?
There are no laws against hardheartedness. A horse is private property, and private property is a sacred notion. And so it is that some Thoroughbreds must literally run for their lives. There is glory on the racetrack, glory writ large. But there are shameful acts, too, and callousness.
The track has many names for trainers. Anthony J. Schefstad listed them in his thesis on the backstretch: A horseman is a respected trainer; a class trainer is a true professional; a star is a media hound; a good guy is naïve and easily taken advantage of. Then there are the gyps, whose cost cutting threatens even quality horses, never mind the claimers, the barbers without experience or education, and the butchers, who will drug an injured horse and run him.
Every year, Charles Hatton wrote “Profiles of Best Horses” for the American Racing Manual, and in 1972, he wrote, of course, about Secretariat. But in that first of his series on Secretariat, there is a line, understated as always, about horses breaking down. “Literally hundreds of horses suffer broken bones with each season,” Hatton wrote then. “The adamant surfaces, together with the tax structure and stable costs, impel many racing men to make extensive use of horses.” This man, who would die three years later, loved racing. But some of its practices apparently distressed him.
The Thoroughbred Retirement Foundation, one of several organizations that tries to accommodate retired racehorses, endeavors to place about eight hundred horses every year. It’s a goodly number, but consider that some nine thousand Thoroughbred racehorses are sent to slaughter every year in the United States (the total number of horses killed for meat annually is eighty thousand, with twenty thousand of that number shipped north of the border). And since there are only three slaughterhouses for horses in the entire country (two in Texas, one in Illinois), it means a long trip for many horses. In Canada, some sixty thousand horses are killed for meat each year (including the twenty thousand exported from below the border). I got these figures from Dr. Nat Messer, associate professor of equine medicine and surgery at the University of Missouri.
The racehorse industry is adamantly opposed to sending racehorses to abattoirs, says Dr. Messer, and the Thoroughbred Charities of America has set up a trust fund to look after at least some retired racehorses. In 2005, $2.2 million went to 158 organizations that retire, rescue, rehabilitate, and adopt out former racehorses. At the American Horse Council convention in Washington, D.C., in April 2005, the American Association of Equine Practitioners hosted an “Unwanted Horse Summit,” where Dr. Messer moderated. He is encouraged by what he sees but bothered by the number of horses going to slaughter. Maybe the simple answer is to breed fewer horses.
“I’m a practicing vet,” Dr. Messer told me. “I used to work for Penny Chenery in Colorado, I grew up in the Thoroughbred industry, and my dad had racehorses. But there has to be a better plan. We have to establish a definition of responsible breeding. Research may help us answer this question, but maybe you don’t have to breed, say, one hundred mares to produce a winner. Maybe the number is sixty.” The breeders would then be spared the expense of raising all those foals, and fewer horses would board meat trucks. But tell that to Joe Riggs, Jr., who sees every foal as another crack at the lottery.
A friend of mine, Robert Danielis, sculpts wood for a living in Picton, Ontario, and one of his set folk art pieces is a miniature rocking horse with real horsehair as its mane. A rider in his youth, he recently made a trip to an abattoir and was given the massive eight-foot-long tail of a Percheron—enough material for a great herd of rocking horses. “I will never forget the smell of that place,” Robert told me.
I imagine it’s more than blood and bone, shit, piss, and body gases that conspire to make that stink. Into the mix must go despair and betrayal, fear and anguish and shock, all that a horse must feel in the last few seconds.
Michael O’Sullivan, executive director of the Humane Society of Canada, describes his own visit to a horse slaughterhouse a decade ago as a shattering experience. “The slaughterhouse is a numbers game,” he says. “It’s an assembly line, with rewards for volume, and the rush makes people sloppy. Everyone who sends a horse to slaughter should be made to go there and see for themselves. And I would say to them, ‘This is what you did to your horse.’ ”
The Scottish author and adventurer R. B. Cunninghame Graham (1852–1936) once wrote, “God forbid that I should go to any heaven in which there are no horses.”
If there is eternal heaven, may it be graced by horses, especially those who arrived there via hard passage. And if there is eternal hell, may the gyps and barbers and butchers enjoy their stay.
There were a few thousand horses at Woodbine when I was there in August of 2005, and most
of the horses there lose most of the time. Losing is a constant, and, win or lose, so is work.
If you want to reach trainer Sherrie-Lee Hawley, it’s best to call her between 4:00 and 7:00 p.m., just before she retires to bed. Her alarm clock goes off every morning at 2:45. After a lifetime of show jumping (she jumped at the elite World Cup level) and exercise riding (including thirty-two years at Woodbine), and all the falls and fractures that go with such a résumé, Hawley endures more or less constant pain in her back and knees. The role of owner, trainer, exercise rider, groom, and hot walker all converge in her lean, muscled frame. The only thing she doesn’t do is put on the silks and race her three horses (though she was once married to a jockey, Sandy Hawley).
Just watching her work is tiring. Clean the feed tubs daily, or these fussy Thoroughbreds won’t eat. Feed the horses—hay, grain, hydroponic grass. Make up their meds. Do the stalls. Pick the horses’ feet, bandage their legs, put the tack on, gallop them, take the tack off, hot-walk them, graze them, talk to them. Grease the palm of the assistant starter, humor the vet, wait for the farrier, hope against hope. Hawley is a pepper pot of a woman, with biceps I’d be happy to call my own. But when I lament that there is no downtime in her endless string of twelve-hour days, when I offer a shoulder to cry on, she passes.
“Yeah, but it’s nice,” she says, emphasizing that last word. “The weather is nice, the birds are chirping, and you’re working with animals. I could never work in an office.” Some years, Hawley has earned $100,000 at the track, but she has endured some bad luck lately: One of her horses, a four-year-old filly called Aces Are Wild, almost died from a throat infection, another is off with an injury, and wins have been rare. Someone even stole her old wheelbarrow. She sometimes wishes she had other options, and yet the track at dawn, for all its flaws and dangers, tugs at her. I can see it in her eyes when she launches her defense of her grueling up-before-dawn regimen, and in that moment I understand why Eddie Sweat kept faith with the track all those years.
The Horse God Built Page 8