The Horse God Built

by Lawrence Scanlan

  An old guy who has a stall next door to Hawley’s three tells me he retired from the track and tried golfing for a year. “Nearly drove me crazy,” he says, so he bought another horse, went back to predawn wake-ups, got back in the game. (The Game, by the way, is the name of a monthly publication read by racetrackers across Canada, including those at Woodbine.)

  Leaning on the rail at Woodbine, a red ball of a sun rising in the east and the night cool already surrendering to the heat of the day, I watch riders by the dozen walk their horses up the ramp and onto the track—chatty girls in threesomes, a lone grim Japanese, pairs of men in cloth-covered riding helmets the black, green, and yellow of the Jamaican flag. And here she comes, in her brown jacket and battered helmet, a woman pushing sixty, galloping her filly Fancy Wish tight by the rail. I do not envy Sherrie-Lee Hawley, for there is little life left in the day when her horses are finished with her. But right then, as she flies past, what I feel most is envy. Creaky bones and all, Hawley’s got zip, and not many—of any age—can keep pace with her.

  They say there is no sentimentality at the track, but Fancy Wish wouldn’t be here were that so. A friend of Hawley’s had shipped the three-year-old dark bay to Kentucky for fall sale, but the filly failed to meet the reserve bid, and the owner threw up her hands when some cowboy from Nebraska offered to buy the horse and a truckload of others for a pittance. It was either that or pay to have the horse shipped all the way back to Canada. The promise of a newborn filly had given way to a hard business decision. But then Hawley’s pal, a jockey’s wife, had regrets, tearful ones. As a favor to a friend, Sherrie-Lee came on board as a partner, and they called the cowboy and paid a premium—financial and emotional—for this change of mind and heart.

  Fancy Wish is as sweet as Aces Are Wild is sour. In a perfect world, the charming filly—doglike, she loves to be stroked and has the kindest of eyes—would reward Hawley with victory, Snowman-style. So far, that has not happened. The filly keeps “hitting the board”—achieving top-four finishes but nevertheless out of the money. “Horses,” says Hawley, “know when they’re in over their heads and they know when they’re better than the competition.” I am reminded of another track adage: Surround yourself with the best of company and your horses with the worst.

  In mid-September 2005, I call Hawley back, wanting to know how Fancy Wish is faring, for I have taken a shine to her. Not as hoped is the answer. The vet found a big chip in her ankle and she has been retired. Hawley is also looking for a good home for Aces Are Wild, maybe as a broodmare. But so far, there are no takers, and giving her away is the next step. But even then, Hawley will see that strings are attached in order to spare the filly that trip on the abattoir truck.

  When she was young and show jumping, Hawley bought and sold horses all the time and gave it little thought. Now, “the love of the horse” actually means something.

  Hawley tells me she has taken on one lone prospect, a two-year-old, and a job in a tack shop. She is still in the game but is starting to pull back. On the phone, she sounds almost relieved. In December 2005, just days before Christmas, we reconnect again. Aces Are Wild, I learn, has had surgery and is now moving nicely. Sherrie-Lee Hawley will try her in a new five-year-old maiden class next summer.

  Hawley knows what Joe Riggs, Jr., knows, and what Eddie Sweat knew: that bad luck can turn to good; that one horse can change everything.

  GRACE

  I had found a profile of Bill Nack, one of Secretariat’s biographers, in a magazine published in Louisville to mark the 1998 running of the Kentucky Derby. The journalist, Josh Pons, observed that Nack had written in his book about Secretariat’s unique way of accelerating. But Pons much preferred (and so do I) Nack’s whole-body explanation to capture that moment in a race when Secretariat found his other gear. Here, in part, is what Nack said about Secretariat’s action, with Pons offering color commentary:

  He would raise his shoulders and his forelegs would come up (Nack’s chest swells and his arms fold at his throat) and he would snap them out like this (his elbows smartly spring his arms out to full extension) so that his forelegs were parallel to the ground for a split second. He would scoot his hind legs way under him . . . and drive down with the front, then come back up and repeat the motion. It was extraordinary to watch.

  If you go to page 111 of Raymond Woolfe’s book on Secretariat, you will see what Nack was talking about. Woolfe has a more succinct phrase for it—“his sensational looping rush”—but he is surely describing the same moment Nack was. Secretariat is actually angled upward, as if about to vault a fence. Nack marveled at the economy of his action, how his form lost nothing of its grace even at the end of long races.

  And, as brilliant as the horse was in afternoon races, it is his work in the morning that continued to astonish his chronicler: “No horse on the planet,” Nack wrote in his preface, “has ever hung up faster morning workouts than Secretariat.”

  3

  “YOUR MIRACLE HAS ARRIVED”

  IT’S 12:10 A.M., MARCH 30, 1970. The temperature near Doswell, Virginia, has plummeted almost to freezing, the day marked by drizzle, fog, and blustery winds. In a two-stall foaling shed, number 17A at the Meadow Stud, just by the North Anna River in Caroline County, a strikingly handsome chestnut foal takes his first breath.

  Howard Gentry, then sixty-two years old and the longtime manager of the farm, had been playing pool at home with a friend when the night watchman called to say that Somethingroyal was showing signs in the foaling stall on the western edge of this sprawling 2,600-acre farm: The mare’s udder was swollen with milk and secreting a waxlike substance that dried on her teats like water on a just-buffed car. And, as advertised, the foal arrived that night. With white feet (save the left front), and a star and a stripe on his forehead, he looked ready for the world. In twenty minutes, he was on his feet; in forty-five minutes, he was nursing at Somethingroyal’s teats.

  In his alertness, his poise and manner, he seemed unlike any foal this illustrious farm had ever seen. “Big, strong-made foal with plenty of bone,” Howard Gentry pronounced him.

  Elizabeth Ham, the farm secretary and a knowledgeable horsewoman, remarked in her log on the arrival of the well-made colt: “good straight hind leg—good shoulders—good quarters. You just have to like him.” Ham once worked for an American diplomat and delegate to a disarmament conference in Geneva, Switzerland, home to the old League of Nations secretariat, forerunner of the United Nations. She suggested the name Secretariat. (The name, though, was her sixth choice. Ham had submitted five other names to the Jockey Club, in this order: Scepter, Royal Line, Something Special, Games of Chance, and Deo Volente (a Latin phrase meaning “God willing”). But all five names were rejected, since they had already been used.)

  Penny Chenery’s own notebook entry was terse but keen: “Wow!”

  The little twenty-four-by-fourteen-foot shed featured two doors and a wood railing on one side, and a little nubbed awning at the front. But this humble box housed a foal with royal blood coursing through him.

  The colt’s sire, Bold Ruler, was one of the finest Thoroughbred stallions of his time. His get, or offspring, tended to be fast as two-year-olds. And, contrary to a commonly held belief (as Raymond Woolfe, Jr., points out in Secretariat), they could also go the distance as three-year-olds. On the other hand, Bold Ruler horses often suffered from unsoundness and went lame early in their racing careers.

  Bold Ruler himself seemed accident-prone in his early years: He once almost lost his tongue in a barn accident, and on another occasion, he came close to breaking his leg at a water trough. And though he could be hot and unmanageable, he could be a sweet horse for the right person.

  The writer Charles Hatton was at Belmont the day in 1956 that Bold Ruler won the Futurity. Gladys Phipps, wife of Ogden Phipps, the owner of the horse, had taken a shine to Bold Ruler and fussed over him. After the race, this tiny woman, who could not have weighed more than ninety pounds, went down to walk Bold Ruler to the w
inner’s circle. Hatton called it a most amazing sight: the big colt lowering his head to her and walking beside her amiably—“like an old cow.”

  The dark bay colt impressed as both runner and sire, though he was as plain in his looks as his sire, Nasrullah, was flashy. Bold Ruler earned $764,204 for his owner over the course of three racing seasons and he was named leading sire in the United States a stunning eight times. Remarkably, he sometimes carried punishing weights (up to 136 pounds) and still managed to win—twenty-three times in thirty-three starts. But by the time Secretariat came around, Bold Ruler was arthritic and suffering from cancer. By 1971, when Secretariat was just a yearling, his sire—only seventeen—would be dead.

  Somethingroyal, the colt’s dam, was by Princequillo, and his get tended to the rough-and-tumble. “The Princequillos will run all day,” one breeder told Penny Chenery. Better yet, Princequillo himself—a small bay horse born in Ireland in 1940 and brought to the United States as a yearling—produced astonishingly good broodmares. He was leading broodmare sire in America for seven years, so Somethingroyal was a proven mare from a proven line.

  Would Secretariat be that rare kind of racehorse, both a sprinter, with the speed to win at a mile or less, and a stayer, with the toughness to win at distances of more than a mile?

  It seemed there was cause for great hope, but there always is when a leggy foal comes into the world, and especially a foal with such classic lines. But worry over the Bold Ruler flaw was not the only one in the air that night. For all its size and tradition, the Meadow Stud was tottering. Christopher T. Chenery, the farm’s eighty-three-year-old patriarch and founder, was in failing health, and his daughter Penny had taken over (her older brother and sister having declined). In 1970, when Secretariat was born, she was a capable rider and possessed a master’s degree in business, but neither of those qualifications really equipped her to run the farm. Her learning curve would be steep, her education on matters of breeding and racing just beginning.

  Her father, an engineer who had made his millions in utilities, had bought the family homestead—which had passed out of his ancestors’ hands after the Civil War—in 1936. A polo player and huntsman who rode daily, he dreamed of transforming his ancestral home into a fine horse farm. Against all advice (he was told the land was too wet, the fields too poor), he drained the swamps, reclaimed the pastures, then replanted them.

  Christopher Chenery also bought horses shrewdly, sometimes on the advice of his horse-wise friend Arthur Boyd “Bull” Hancock, whose wife had inherited, in 1910, thirteen hundred acres of prime land in Kentucky’s Bourbon County—the start of the illustrious Claiborne Farm. Princequillo was a Hancock horse, and so was Nasrullah, Bold Ruler’s sire. The Hancocks and the Chenerys, Claiborne Farm and the Meadow Stud—all would figure in the Secretariat saga.

  But those august Virginia and Kentucky bloodlines, human and equine, appeared not to count for much when Secretariat was born. The Meadow’s greatest success seemed behind it, and the grand breeding and racing operation was high on expenses, low on income. “We need a miracle,” said Penny Chenery. On the morning of March 31, Howard Gentry told her over the telephone, “Miss Penny, I think your miracle has arrived.”

  Lucien Laurin was born in St. Paul, near Joliette, some twenty miles north of Montreal. He, like jockey Ron Turcotte, was a Francophone who had spent time in his youth working in lumber camps. “Use ton propre jugement,” Laurin would sometimes say to Turcotte before a big race, meaning “Use your own judgment.” Laurin likely would have said the same thing to the horse if he’d thought the horse could understand him.

  “I never believed in fighting horses, trying to change the way they want to run,” Laurin would say. “I lost a lot of races when I was a jock by taking too many orders from people who didn’t know enough about horses.” You might think he was a loose and easy man, one inclined to prepare horse and rider as best he could before letting the fates decide once the starting gates clanged open.

  My sense, though, from poring over the literature on this trainer, is of a worrywart, but a funny one, someone who always had time for the press. He was universally well liked. His barn foreman, Ted McClain, thought him a tough taskmaster but a fair boss, though often a tempestuous one. “He was hot and cold. He’d go ballistic one minute,” McClain told me, “and the next minute you would never know anything had happened.”

  Lucien Laurin died in 2000. He had fallen at his home in Key Largo, Florida, but subsequent surgery on his hip led to complications, from which he never recovered. He was eighty-eight years old, and for seventy-one of those years, he had lived the racetrack life.

  Like Eddie Sweat, the man he would later employ, Laurin quit school early and fell into a life with horses. He got a job at Montreal’s Delorimier Downs hot-walking horses and then as an exercise rider. By 1929, he was a jockey. By his own admission, he enjoyed only middling success. (Though he did, in 1935, ride a horse called Sir Michael to victory in the King’s Plate. Now called the Queen’s Plate, the race has the same stature north of the border that the Derby has south of the border.) But three years later, at one of the small East Coast American tracks where Laurin was then plying his trade, someone found in the pocket of his jacket—which he had hung up during a card game—a battery-powered device used to shock horses in hopes they’ll go faster. Such devices were then illegal, and they still are, although they continue to be found. Laurin insisted he had been framed, and perhaps he was. Several years later, he was reinstated and went back to riding, but only for a time. During his expulsion from riding, he had turned to training, and he seemed to have a knack.

  Eventually, he was hired on by a businessman named Reginald Webster, and a champion filly named Quill fortuitously came his way. The champion filly of 1958 was a daughter of Princequillo (the sire, remember, of Secretariat’s dam, Somethingroyal), so the Secretariat-Laurin connection seemed to have been ordained by the fates. Years before that, Laurin had bought into a training facility in Holly Hill, South Carolina, which was where he crossed paths with groom Edward “Shorty” Sweat and exercise rider Charlie Davis. Both men would play key roles in the racing life of Secretariat.

  Laurin had even worked as a trainer for Bull Hancock, father of Seth Hancock, who would later run Claiborne Farm—the stud where Secretariat would spend the last sixteen years of his life. You would think someone had planned this whole Secretariat thing— decided that this or that person would be touched by an almost mythical creature, and that others would miss contact by a hair’s breadth. If, for example, coming to train the horse of the century was like winning the grand lottery, Lucien Laurin had managed to win without buying a ticket—his own son had handed him the winning number just before the draw.

  Roger Laurin, Lucien’s son, would have trained Secretariat, but in 1971, Roger accepted a job training horses for Ogden Phipps, one of the great names in Thoroughbred racing. When Phipps died in 2002 at the age of ninety-three, he was the longest serving member of the Jockey Club and its former president. A World War II naval commander and seven-time American tennis champion in the 1930s and 1940s, he had enjoyed great success breeding such horses as Personal Ensign, Easy Goer, and Buckpasser—a horse who won twenty-five of thirty-one starts and earned Phipps some $1.5 million. Both Buckpasser and Easy Goer would stand at stud at Claiborne Farm in Kentucky, and the latter horse, ironically, would occupy the same stall that Secretariat would when he came along. In signing on with the Phipps operation, Roger Laurin was sure he was heading to greener pastures.

  Before he left, Roger urged his fifty-nine-year-old father to come out of retirement and take his old job at the Meadow Stable, working for Penny Chenery.

  Ogden Phipps owned Bold Ruler, the sire of Secretariat. And he would have owned Secretariat, too, had he called “heads” and not “tails” during a small ceremony in 1969. Under a complicated agreement he had with Penny Chenery, they flipped a coin to decide first choice of the progeny from two Meadow mares bred that year and the followin
g one to Bold Ruler. I use the word complicated because one mare produced a foal, then proved barren, so there would be three horses to choose from, not four. The parties thus agreed on this arrangement: The winner of the coin toss would get one foal of his or her choice, and the loser would get the other two foals, which prompted both horse owners to joke about hoping to lose the toss. This was in the fall that year at Belmont Park, inside the offices of the New York Racing Association’s board of trustees. Phipps called “tails” when that fifty-cent piece rose in the air. Tails it was.

  Phipps took into his stable a filly (out of Somethingroyal) called The Bride, a dud at the racetrack, never finishing better than sixth in four races. Of the two young horses whom Penny Chenery won that day, a colt (out of Hasty Matelda) called Rising River appeared unsound and was later sold for fifty thousand dollars on the strength of his bloodlines. And when Somethingroyal was bred again to Bold Ruler, the foal was Secretariat. Winning a horse like that on a lost coin toss is like finding a priceless gem in a birthday-party surprise bag.

  Many people—Penny Chenery among them—are firmly convinced that the planets aligned in Secretariat’s favor from the day that coin was tossed. Ron Turcotte may have been the perfect jockey for that horse, for he knew how smart and capable the horse was and, for the most part, quietly guided him to the finish line. Lucien Laurin was perhaps the perfect trainer for a horse who thrived on fast, blistering workouts. Track wisdom has it that a trainer inclined to coddle a horse would never have suited the big chestnut, with his immense appetite for work and food. (In fact, two years before he died, Lucien Laurin told Thoroughbred Daily News that maybe he should have pushed Secretariat even harder than he did. “He was a tough horse,” he said. “A really tough horse.”) Finally—and who can say where this ranks in the Secretariat saga?—the right groom came along to rub the great horse into legend.