Another Meadow employee, Howard Gregory, was around Secretariat from the time of his birth, and he remembers the colt as something special. “We knew from the get-go he was different,” he would later tell The Blood-Horse magazine for an article that gathered the recollections of old Meadow grooms. Just walking the young Secretariat to the paddock, he said, was an exercise in maintaining focus, because the instant a handler lost his, that horse knew it—“he was gone.”
Whenever the farm won a big race, the grooms got a week’s extra pay. Now Penny Chenery wondered if she had anything like her father’s touch, or his luck, as she struggled to restore the balance sheets and the winning tradition—all this while some family members considered the wisdom of selling the farm and playing the stock market with the proceeds. On Bull Hancock’s advice, Chenery brought in a new trainer, Roger Laurin. Some horses were sold, and some were bought. In 1971, the Meadow’s future was still precarious, and Penny Chenery patiently waited for the “miracle” horse to take shape.
Tattooed inside the colt’s upper lip was a number (all registered horses have one, for identification purposes). Secretariat’s was Z20669.
In the paddock, he was, by all accounts, a bruiser. Bigger than other foals his age, he would cuff his playmates, bite and kick them, and try to outrun them. In her book A Year at the Races, the Pulitzer Prize–winning author Jane Smiley considers the theory that the relationship between dam and foal is critical to the young horse’s formation and future happiness. There is some evidence that the happy, well-grounded, and nurtured horse is more successful at the track than one with a lackluster upbringing. The horse, Smiley seems to be saying, is more like us humans than perhaps we imagine. No matter the genus, upbringing matters. And the picture I have of the young Secretariat is of a horse secure in his place. Somethingroyal apparently licked her young foal not just at birth but long after, and her affection for him may well have helped make him even and brave. And the Meadow staff, too, may have played a role in all this: They made a point of handling every foal, driving home the point that humans posed no threat.
Even so, the rambunctious young Secretariat had a mind of hisown when being led from barn to paddock. He would bolt for the grass in a heartbeat, and staff had to loop a chain through his halter and over his nose to keep him in check. Howard Gentry called him “a very aggressive type of colt,” especially in his paddock, where he soon became the dominant foal. The colt was precocious and bold and very competitive. He was as healthy as his appetite—a “good doer,” as some call a horse who loves his feed bucket.
Meadow staff had a habit of putting the three best weanlings in adjoining stalls, with the best of the bunch getting the first, stall number 11. Secretariat got that stall, so there must have been some agreement that he looked to be the finest prospect. Staff who worked with him remember how easygoing he was, but some also recall his temper.
The young Secretariat was groomed by several men at the Meadow, and all remember him fondly. One, Louis Tillman, is dead now. A photograph in Woolfe’s book shows Tillman holding the horse for his Jockey Club ID photo, and you can see the whites of the colt’s left eye as he worries about the photographer and that rod in the ground with the number 9 hanging on a hook. You can also see Secretariat’s ribs, so the colt had yet to put on the fleshiness that marked his youth.
What is remarkable about the photograph is just how muscled the horse appears, even as a foal—long before any serious exercise or training. “He was muscle-bound from the beginning,” Raymond Woolfe told me. “I remember walking behind Secretariat with Lucien Laurin, and Lucien would wonder aloud if the horse would ever run—he was that muscled. He didn’t walk, that horse; he waddled. I know there was talk later on that Secretariat was on steroids, but Lucien never messed with that stuff.” Secretariat on steroids, said Woolfe, would have created a true freak.
Woolfe likened the foal grooms at the Meadow to mother hens, but Tillman, especially, he wrote in his book, had a feeling about Secretariat. Tillman had remarked on the colt’s presence.
After the colt was weaned from his dam—with the usual dashing round the paddock and plaintive calling—other grooms took on the task of caring for Secretariat. There was Bannie Mines, now in his late sixties and still living near the Meadow. “He gave you an idea even then,” Mines later said, “that he might turn into something.” Mines remembers him as easy to work with, but also a horse with a temper.
There was the aforementioned Howard Gregory, of course. And Charlie Ross (also now in his late sixties, and a brother-in-law to Bannie Mines), who these days works at a nearby truck stop. Ross spent nearly a year grooming Secretariat when the horse was a yearling. He told The Blood-Horse magazine how proud the Meadow was then, how they would repaint the training barn every year. Outside the young Secretariat’s stall, Ross hung a plaque that announced the horse’s name, sire, and dam. And he remembered how Secretariat’s size worked against him when he was young, how only slowly did he learn to run with any grace.
In August of 1971, Secretariat moved from his virtual nursery to the compound of stables inside the oval of the Meadow’s training track. It was a kind of kindergarten, where young colts and fillies were introduced to horse realities, such as saddle and bit and rider.
Secretariat had good and capable men in his corner, and you have to think that this, too, contributed to his later success. Patiently and by degrees, the young horse experienced a saddle on his back, then a bit in his mouth, and the weight of a rider across his back. Charlie Ross would hold the young horse while Meredith Bailes—son of the Meadow’s former trainer and, like his father, a fine and sensitive horseman—sat astride the horse in a stall. Later, they did the same things in the indoor exercise shed, and the rider taught Secretariat about pressure from the legs and the reins and what this all meant. Then Charlie Ross let horse and rider walk and trot by themselves. Finally, they went out on the track.
For all his dashing good looks and promising bloodlines, Secretariat was so oafish on the track that “Ol’ Hopalong” became his nickname. On January 20, 1972, the big colt left the Meadow and rode in the van to Hialeah, in Florida, where almost everyone agreed that Secretariat was plump and pretty, clumsy and slow. Laurin paired the chestnut with a horse of his own, one named Gold Bag. The latter would become a good racehorse (and later a stakes winner), and he left Secretariat eating his dust.
It seemed the colt could not take the racing game seriously. What he did learn in Florida was how to dump his exercise rider by slamming on the brakes and veering hard to the left. After the colt tossed off Paul Feliciano one morning, Jimmy Gaffney suggested a different bit—and that seemed to curtail the dumping. But the young Secretariat continued to record unimpressive morning workouts, even after he was taken back north to what would become his “home barn”— Barn 5 (stall number 7) at Belmont Park, on Long Island. One morning in June, however, he caught Lucien Laurin’s attention by going five furlongs in 57 3⁄5 seconds. Secretariat was like a teenager who had finally grown accustomed to his new body, to his suddenly acquired height and weight. In the early days of that summer in 1972, the flashy two-year-old chestnut began to show what he was made of.
He had put the Ol’ Hopalong character behind him for good, and his workouts continued not just to impress Lucien Laurin but to astonish him. “We have a racehorse on our hands,” he told Penny Chenery.
In his brief but starring role as racehorse, Secretariat would enter twenty-one races. Given the way he won some of them, several observers—Ron Turcotte, Charles Hatton, Raymond Woolfe among them—would later wonder how it was that he had ever lost even one.
THE GREATEST
Lucien Laurin, Secretariat’s trainer, was reminiscing in 1981 about the Triple Crown victories.
The Derby: “Most people don’t know this about Secretariat,” he told Joe Hirsch at the Daily Racing Form, “but his best game was around turns. He could fly around turns: faster than any horse I’ve ever seen, before or since. I never saw
a horse run as fast as he did that day, from a point leaving the backstretch to the head of the stretch.”
The Preakness: “He was fourth going into the first turn. But then he caught sight of the two horses on the lead, Ecole Etage and Torsion. As competitive as he was, Secretariat wanted to run with them, and once he picked them up he was in high gear. Ronnie [Turcotte] couldn’t hold him, and rather than strangle him, he just let him run his own race. Pincay, on Sham, was in front of Secretariat on the first turn. Suddenly he looked over to see the Red Horse alongside and he must have gotten the shock of his life. You can see his reaction in the films.”
The Belmont: “I couldn’t believe the fractions. . . [Penny Chenery] kept looking at me and saying, ‘He’s going pretty fast, isn’t he?’ Fast? If I’d had had a gun I’d have shot myself.”
After the race, Laurin asked Turcotte, “Ronnie, he wasn’t short, was he? Was he out of wind?”
The jockey replied, “He could have gone faster.”
Laurin told him, “Ronnie, don’t tell that to anybody else.”
After the Belmont, the late Holly Hughes—a Hall of Fame trainer—told Laurin that he had seen Man o’War, Citation, and Count Fleet race, and none could compare with Secretariat, especially in that Triple Crown campaign. “You have,” Hughes told Laurin, “the greatest horse in the history of racing.”
4
“EDDIE WAS A PRINCE”
RACING LITERATURE TENDS TO FOCUS on the owner/trainer/jockey triumvirate, a hot mix of ego, blame, praise, and meddlesomeness. Every winner’s circle photograph masks the small wars among them that have invariably preceded victory. But the fourth character in those photographs, the groom, tends to be nameless.
And when the photograph has been taken, the owner goes back to his or her fancy box, the trainer and jock move on to the next race, and the lowly groom, horse in tow, does his or her duty—walk, bathe, feed and water the horse, muck out his stall, pick his feet, blanket him, rub him down, load him on the van. No one understands that horse better than an astute and caring groom, and no one gets less credit.
Here is Susan Nusser, author of In Service to the Horse: Chronicles of a Labor of Love, talking about the relationship between Samantha Burton and an accomplished event horse named Tailor. (Three-day eventing, the most challenging equestrian discipline, requires horses to master conventional show jumping, cross-country courses, and dressage.) At the time Nusser was writing this book (2004), Sam and Tailor had spent almost every day of the past four years together. “Before he knows he’s hungry, she is feeding him. Before he knows he’s frightened, her voice is calming his fears, and before he knows he’s hurt, her hand is soothing his pain. She knows his quiet emotional side better than anyone else in the world. . . . [Tailor] quietly follows the groom he trusts, and, in his own horsey way, loves.”
Another book, The Event Groom’s Handbook: Care of Horse and Rider, likewise focuses on eventing, a discipline quite different from that of racing. But I like its wisdom on the relationship between groom and horse, a way of seeing that surely also applies to the track.
Early in the book, authors Jeanne Kane and Lisa Waltman offer this message to would-be grooms. “One of the most desirable traits in a groom—and one of the reasons for having the job in the first place—is the ability to get under the skin of the horse that you are caring for and to notice and understand all the tiny idiosyncracies of each individual animal. You must realize that is why you have been employed—this is your gift and your contribution towards a successful team.”
This is your gift.
The more I learned about Eddie Sweat and his extraordinary gift, the more I was drawn to the man. Everyone who ever knew him or saw him with a horse described his way with horses in terms of its exceptional nature. Bill Nack, for example, wrote of Eddie’s “lyrical” touch with horses.
Raymond Woolfe’s book Secretariat is a remarkable assemblage from someone with impeccable credentials: lifelong horseman and steeplechase jockey, horse trainer, horse-farm manager and, for eleven years, chief photographer for the Daily Racing Form. Woolfe, seventy years old when I spoke with him, lives at Hawk’s Nest Farm, near Charlottesville, Virginia.
“Eddie Sweat really loved Secretariat,” Woolfe told me. I said I was writing about Secretariat and his groom, and that the book owed a great deal to a photograph Woolfe took of Eddie Sweat with his back to the photographer, an image that captured all the emotion of the day he surrendered his horse at Claiborne Farm.
“I just caught him sitting there,” said Woolfe. “He had been crying but when I asked him what was wrong, Eddie said, ‘I just got a cold.’
“Eddie was very special,” Woolfe went on. “He was the only one who could handle Secretariat. The horse wasn’t mean; he was just powerful. Eddie was as strong as an ox. But Riva Ridge and Secretariat, they respected him. Damn right they did. Eddie called the tune; they listened.”
What was Eddie like? “He was sweet,” said Woolfe. “As kind a guy as you’d ever want to meet.”
Eddie Sweat’s image is peppered throughout Woolfe’s book, though most times you see just a piece of him. He is behind the horse, or just out of the frame, but if you follow the chain-and-leather lead, it invariably ends in the big hands of Eddie Sweat. He is almost always holding Secretariat via that lead and, at the same time, looking directly at Secretariat to see what he might be up to; or he is holding Secretariat and looking away to see what the photographers, videographers, and onlookers are up to. Eddie looks more relaxed in photos taken during dawn workouts, when crowds were infinitely more sparse and more distant. But on race days, there is about him a measured vigilance.
Years later, he talked about both his fondness for the horse and the constant worry. He told the Thoroughbred Record in 1979, “Secretariat was special. I had to work that much harder with him. I had to keep my mind on business and be more serious. There was a lot of pressure when grooming a Triple Crown winner. You can’t make any mistakes and you have to keep your eye on other people.”
On special occasions such as big races, Eddie would trot out his best duds—wild stripes and checks in pants, spats for shoes, florid shirts, loud hats. Some of Woolfe’s photographs are in black and white, so I’ve had to imagine the color of those hats. Goldfinch yellow, I’m thinking, or willow green. Dean Eagle, the sports editor at the Courier-Journal in Louisville, said that Eddie Sweat looked “more like a flamboyant golfer than a stable hand.” Red Smith in the New York Times once remarked—in a column about Secretariat Day at Aqueduct late in 1973, to mark the horse’s retirement from racing— on Eddie’s puffy new cap, his mod jacket, burgundy slacks, and two-toned shoes.
A cartoon in the Daily Racing Form of November 6, 1973—just when Secretariat was making his final appearances at the track— depicts the horse at the center of a mock scene from Othello. Below the art is a line uttered in the play by the noble and brooding Moor: “Farewell the tranquil mind! farewell content! .. . Farewell the neighing steed . . .” The characters are all dressed in Shakespearean costume on a proscenium stage, and Secretariat (up on his two hind legs) holds forth while a grieving Penny Chenery clings to his neck as Lucien Laurin, Ron Turcotte, and Elizabeth Ham all blow into their hankies, and Eddie Sweat, with his eyes closed, plays a flute stage right. The cartoonist has him in plaid pants, so Eddie’s sartorial splendor must have been widely appreciated. What is off about the cartoon is that Eddie seems to be the only one not crying, and no one shed more tears on Secretariat’s retirement than Eddie Sweat.
Raymond Woolfe’s photographs are closer to the mark. In one of my favorite shots, Woolfe has caught Eddie at leisure: He is looking off into the distance, leaning on a stall board with his right hand, and his left arm is cocked and fisted into his waist. He is wearing a peaked cap and short-sleeved shirt, exposing his bulging forearms. The man looks youthful and vibrant and very much at home.
In another black-and-white photograph, which bears the caption “A serene Secretariat with Eddie Sweat
,” groom and horse stand in a grassy area behind the track. I am not sure the horse is all that serene. (But neither do I question Raymond Woolfe’s horsemanship; perhaps for Secretariat, this was serene.) The horse looks suspiciously at the photographer, who has snapped him from the side, so the viewer can admire the horse’s biceps and triceps, the muscle on muscle. It is Eddie who looks serene, though even now he has two hands on the lead—a relaxed right hand, and the left hand as a backup, just in case.
But the most telling of Woolfe’s photographs, for me, are the ones taken the day that Secretariat moved to Claiborne: Eddie leading him up the ramp to the plane; Eddie crouching low in front of the high wooden box stall inside the plane and, as always, watching Secretariat; the horse gripping Eddie’s jacket as the plane takes off and the jet engines’ roar begins to unnerve the big chestnut. In the latter photograph, Eddie is leaning into him, his eyes are closed, and I imagine him saying something like “It’s okay, Red, I’m here. I’m here.” And I read into Secretariat’s eyes gratitude and a little fear. I’m so glad you are, the eyes say.
Raymond Woolfe has been around horses and horsemen all his life and he had never seen a connection quite like that between Eddie Sweat and both Secretariat and Riva Ridge. “Never did this author,” he wrote in his book, “ever see horses and their groom more devoted to one another. ... It was nothing less than profound.”
The Horse God Built Page 10