A year later, Eddie happened to be back at Claiborne to pick up a foal for Lucien Laurin. “And don’t you know they remembered me,” he told a reporter. “Secretariat, he came over and pulled on my shirt, just like he always did. And when I made a noise at Riva, he came up to that fence so fast he almost slid down.” Remember him? They adored him.
Edward “Shorty” Sweat had far more contact with the racing Secretariat than anyone, and no one could claim a fuller understanding of that horse. No one felt that horse’s defeats as he did, no one reveled more in his victories, and no one suffered more when it all came to an end than Eddie Sweat.
A black man had bonded with a racehorse. And while much about the man, the horse, and their relationship was extraordinary, the track has seen the like before. Many black grooms who worked at the farm in Virginia where Secretariat was born once lived at nearby Duval Town—built after emancipation to house freed slaves.
The tie between Thoroughbred horses, on the one hand, and black riders and grooms, on the other, goes back a long way. In his book The Great Black Jockeys, Edward Hotaling points out that in the first Kentucky Derby, held in 1875, thirteen of the fifteen jockeys, including the winning rider, were black. Before the Civil War, slave owners had used slaves as riders and had given them cause to ride hard and fast: A losing jockey could see his family sold as punishment. Consequently, the best riders in the South, long before and long after the war, were black. And though racetracks were segregated until well into the 1960s—with “colored” people forced to use separate entrances, washrooms, and seating—the track’s best and most devoted grooms, for all of the nineteenth century and most of the twentieth, were black.
Hotaling describes raids by British cavalry on South Carolina Thoroughbred farms in 1780, during the American Revolution. Lt. Col. Banastre Tarleton had set his sights, in particular, on an imported English racer and sire named Flimnap, but each time the Brits got close to him, his black grooms hid him in the swamps. The raiders captured one such groom and offered him a huge reward to reveal the horse’s whereabouts, but the man refused. Even after being threatened with death, he would not betray the horse. The troops strung the man up on a tree and left him to die. (Servants at the manor later rescued him.) I thought of Eddie Sweat when I heard that story of loyalty to a horse.
And I thought of him again when I read, in The Great Black Jockeys, the obituary of Austin Curtis published on January 5, 1809: “A colored man, aged about fifty years—well known for many years past, as keeper of race horses; in the management of which useful animals, he particularly excelled.—His character was unblemished; his disposition mild and obliging—his deportment uniformly correct and complaisant—he possessed the esteem of many—the respect and confidence of all who knew him.”
In his book Secretariat: The Making of a Champion, Bill Nack points out that Charles Hatton—the great racing writer of the twentieth century, who never tired of extolling Secretariat’s virtues—owed much of his expertise to the tutelage of Billy Walker, a former slave and retired jockey. The old black man had taught a young white man the secrets of horse conformation, how a horse’s assemblage can presage his speed and endurance. Here was a refrain I would hear often on my travels and in my reading: “An old black man taught me all I know. .. .”
In the winter of 2005, I traveled to Eddie Sweat’s birthplace and grave near Vance, South Carolina (as I had the previous summer gone to Secretariat’s birthplace in Virginia and his grave in Kentucky). I talked to Eddie’s siblings, his son, nephews, and nieces, his closest friends and fellows, all the while marveling at this extraordinarily humble man and his connection with perhaps the greatest racehorse who ever lived. Every person had a slightly different take on Eddie, each had stories to tell, until a kind of mosaic of the man began to form.
As I learned more about him, the huge affection that his comrades and relations felt for him became genuine for me, too. I began to fathom how the love of a great horse could sustain a man, and how such a love lost might break a man.
Often on the scene when Eddie Sweat groomed Secretariat was Ted McClain, then barn foreman for Lucien Laurin, the horse’s trainer. I had heard that he lived in Paris, Kentucky, and that he had left the track and gone into his father’s insurance business.
Ted McClain was not, at first, welcoming of my inquiries. “How did you get my name?” he asked. “And my telephone number?” This, I thought, is going to be a very short telephone conversation, and my hopes of an in-the-flesh interview had about the same chance as a forty-to-one long shot in a claiming race.
I told him I knew about his association with Secretariat and had found his name in the phone book. The truth was a little more complicated than that. In the late 1980s, I had made several trips into outback Wyoming, riding a horse on weeklong treks as part of research for a book called Wild About Horses—a book about the horse–human connection through time. On those rides, I met several New Englanders, one of them a former equine nutritionist in Lexington, Kentucky. When, years later, I wrote her and pressed her for Kentucky contacts as I researched this book, she gave me the name of another equine nutritionist, Amy Gill, who, in turn, introduced me to several useful contacts and gave me an insider’s view at a yearling sale.
“You know,” Gill said on the phone one day when I was still in Lexington, “I used to be married to Lucien Laurin’s assistant. He worked with Secretariat. He was there. You should talk to him. Just don’t tell him I gave you his number.” It seemed great good luck— one of those “six degrees of separation” stories—to have found him in this way. Finding him and getting him to talk, though, appeared to be two different things.
But when I told Ted McClain that I was especially interested in the relationship between Secretariat and his groom, Eddie Sweat, everything changed. There was a long pause, clearly an emotional pause, on the other end of the telephone line.
When McClain had gathered himself, he simply said, “Eddie was a prince.. . .” We chatted a little more, and it was apparent that the icy line had dramatically thawed. Suddenly, I was welcome to see him in his office (I would interview him there twice), and he later lent me a cardboard box full of articles and clippings. All because I had uttered two words. Eddie Sweat.
When we did talk in person, in the summer of 2004, McClain admitted that my mere mention of Eddie’s name had almost brought him to tears. For months afterward, I could not think of Eddie Sweat’s name without hearing in my head Ted McClain’s words, like something you would include in a eulogy or etch onto a gravestone: “Eddie was a prince. . . .”
In the flesh, Ted McClain is warm, with a dry, self-deprecating humor. He was then a youthful fifty-five, a Kentuckian born and bred, and so the words come slowly, each syllable stretched out like dough under a hot summer sun. We chatted at first in his office, with its view of Main Street, Paris, Kentucky. Behind McClain’s desk is a massive framed painting of the great red horse, so clearly the ex-horseman remains proud of his connection. Who would not be? No doubt clients think better of their broker upon seeing that horse looking over his shoulder, as if blessing their business.
Ted McClain dresses the part of insurance salesman—long-sleeved white shirt, red tie with elegant blue stripes, gray suit, and— the kicker—a pen stuck behind his right ear. But the body of this imposing man—six two, solid frame, a square, handsome face, a full head of hair tinged with gray—says middle linebacker, but a gentle sort of one. Later, poring over old newspaper clippings at the Keeneland Library, I would spot him. Photos showed him always wearing a cloth cap as he walked Secretariat, as he looked up from a bucket, as he smiled at the camera. Big horn-rimmed glasses gave him a slightly geeky look then, and whenever he was lined up with Eddie Sweat or Lucien Laurin, he towered over them: a giant cast among the little people.
McClain described what an indifferent student he had been at the University of Kentucky—“I wasn’t hittin’ the ball real hard,” he drawled—before setting out for Long Island’s Belmont racet
rack with little more than a love of horses in his pocket. “I was just going to land wherever I landed,” he said, but a client of his father’s had lined up a job for him—at the barn, as it turned out, of Lucien Laurin. (It was a name he pronounced as Kentuckians do: Lush-en Lore-en) McClain started, as they all do, as a hot walker, then became a groom, then barn manager.
I asked him what relations were like among Secretariat’s owner, trainer, jockey, and groom. Was it a happy family or a dysfunctional one? McClain corrected me. “It was owner, trainer, jockey. And everybody else was... a grunt.” Though McClain would go on to become a trainer, he put himself squarely on the side of the grunts. Everything he learned about horses, he learned from Eddie Sweat and other black grooms from Holly Hill, South Carolina. “The Holly Hill gang,” he called them.
This man was seemingly a bit player in the Secretariat story, but he got close to the horse and close to his groom. “Other than the night watchman and Eddie,” he said, “I spent more time with that horse than anybody in the organization for the twenty months that he was in the stable at Belmont. I was around him a lot.”
McClain has had three decades to think about why this horse still matters to so many. He observed that more recent horses, such as Funny Cide and Smarty Jones, were “feel-good stories” that naturally appealed. Funny Cide was a New York–bred horse, bought as a lark by longtime pals in the small town of Sackets Harbor. He was the little horse that could. Then his jockey—trying for a comeback—was falsely accused of cheating, which only made him, and the horse, more friends when he was cleared. Smarty Jones, meanwhile, overcame a horrific starting-gate accident en route to his success, and the horse’s jockey had battled back from alcohol addiction. Everyone in racing wanted these horses to win the Triple Crown. Neither did. The horses became footnotes.
Secretariat, on the other hand, will always be remembered. “He was,” said McClain, “the biggest, strongest, most attractive and powerful animal you could ever lay your eyes on. He was a heartthrob. What he did in the Belmont, to this day every time I see a replay of that stretch run—I’m sure it’s the same for everybody—I get chills. The country was in rough shape then and he just took our breath away. He was a man. He was John Wayne and all the movie stars rolled into one, the toughest athlete around. He had presence and he commanded respect and attention. That’s my thought on why he’s endured the way he has.”
Ted McClain has a vivid memory of Charles Hatton, the grand old man of racing journalism, coming around to see Secretariat in the fall of 1972. McClain had grown up reading the Daily Racing Form, in which Hatton had a column. A visit from Hatton—“a wordsmith of the highest order,” McClain called him—was like a visit from Hemingway. Hatton, back in the 1930s, had coined the name Triple Crown to denote the three grand races of Thoroughbred racing in America.
On that day, Hatton walked down the shed row at Belmont Park, Barn 5, stall number 7, then home to the young Secretariat. “He just stood there,” said McClain. “I guess he looked at Secretariat for five minutes and never said a word. He was in awe of him. He had already written enough about him. To Charlie Hatton, they need not make another racehorse. He was it.” Someone later told McClain that Hatton never visited the backside, which may or may not have been the case, but what impressed McClain was that this esteemed writer had gone to see the young chestnut horse who was making such a splash. And the horse had stunned Charles Hatton into silence, though not for long, because Hatton wrote about him constantly and always found new ways to praise him.
Hatton was among the first to recognize Secretariat’s potential greatness. The “dean of American racing writers” loved his coloration—“a scarlet colt, star and narrow stripe, and three white stockings . . . He looked to be coming up the stretch with flags flying.” Hatton loved, too, how Secretariat won so many of his races with come-from-behind surges: “He swooped down on his hapless foes with a paralyzing burst, like a hawk scattering a barnyard of chickens, and pandemonium rocked the stands.”
Hatton had clearly been watching the horse carefully, and he even spotted what he took to be minor flaws—the neck a little too straight and heavy, the knees not set perfectly. But he loved the way this horse moved (“his extended action had floating power”), he loved his conformation (the particular way his body parts were assembled and conformed to the ideal), he loved the horse’s legs (“simply perfection”). Hatton would die in 1975, and maybe he realized as he scrutinized Secretariat that day at Belmont that this was the horse he had waited all his life to see. Secretariat is, wrote Hatton, “the most capable horse we ever saw, and geriatrics [Hatton’s own] defeat any thought of seeing his like again.”
McClain remembers, too, the day that Secretariat arrived at Barn 5 from training at Florida’s Hialeah Park. It was April 3, 1972. For Lucien Laurin’s staff, this was their first glimpse of him. The horse, some opined, was too fat, but he was also the most stunning horse they had ever seen. “The fella in the barn next to us,” McClain said, “an old-time hardboot trainer named Henry Forrest”—he had won the Kentucky Derby twice, with Kauai King in 1966 and Forward Pass in 1968—“I’ll never forget it. He took one look at him and said, ‘My God, that looks like a big old shiny red apple. He is absolutely gorgeous.’”
But the wisdom in the barn, once they learned that his sire was Bold Ruler, held that he was a sprinter at best, not a stayer. He would not go the distance, and besides, he was a chestnut, and Bold Ruler had never sired a decent chestnut.
One thing I was curious about was Secretariat’s temperament. In all that has been written about him, there are as many stories of his testiness as there are of his kindness.
It was only when he was being groomed, McClain remembers, that he might bite or kick. “Eddie,” he said, “had a way of talking to him, not necessarily to calm him down, because he was always on the muscle and ready to do something. But they had a mutual respect for each other. Eddie wouldn’t have had it any other way. He liked it that Secretariat was tough.”
But there must have been another side to Secretariat that writers either knew nothing about or chose not to report. McClain had just finished telling me that “there was no meanness in the horse,” when a story came to him, a story contradicting what he had just said.
“I’ll never forget this as long as I live,” he began, smiling as he settled into his tale. “I think Secretariat had already gone to the Derby and the Preakness, and while he was gone, we cleaned out his stall and aired it out. And a cat had had a litter of kittens in his stall, maybe four or five. As cute as they could be. And they were underfoot, you know. And one day, Eddie was leading Secretariat outside and the horse saw one of those little kittens out of the corner of his eye and he did that.” McClain brought a closed fist down hard on the table in front of him. “He sure did. That was the only bad thing I ever saw him do.” As for Scooter, the six-toed kitten that found his way into the record on Secretariat, McClain was laughing when he said, “Secretariat spared him.” The cat would enjoy a brief sojourn as the Derby cat, Secretariat’s good-luck charm, before someone stole him.
When Ted McClain left the stable two weeks after the Belmont— I had the impression he didn’t much like Penny Chenery, the horse’s owner, and felt about to be caught in the continuing cross fire between owner and trainer—he knew he would miss everyone there. But the man he would miss most was Eddie Sweat.
“He taught me so much about horses,” McClain said, “about how to keep on an even keel, how to be on time, how to be dependable. He taught me the importance of regimentation, that there’s an order in the way we do things to get ready for the day, to get through the day. In the fifteen years I trained horses, I had only two people working for me who were similar to Eddie. If he had a philosophy about working with horses, it was his own. You didn’t have to tell him anything; he knew what to do. I don’t think you learn to be a horseman. Either you are or you’re not, and Eddie just was. I never saw him upset or what you could call mad. He just took fant
astic care of his horses.”
I knew that Eddie had grown up with horses and mules on the farm in South Carolina, but surely he had to learn the groom’s craft. I asked McClain about that “Yeah,” he replied. “He had to learn which brush to use and how to pick a horse’s feet; we all have to do that. But his identification with them—you don’t teach that. You don’t give this guy a shank and say, ‘Go walk that horse.’ Either he’s going to have a comfort level and the horse is going to have a comfort level with him or he isn’t. I’m not saying I’m any great horseman, ’cause I’m not, but you can tell who belongs and who doesn’t. With Eddie, it was like putting a hand in a glove.” (One trainer later told me that McClain was, in fact, a very fine horseman, with a deft sense for pairing stallions and mares.)
Kind but firm is how Eddie Sweat was with horses. “His temperature gauge,” said McClain, “stayed more level than mine would have. And he talked to the horses constantly. It was a personal thing for him. He was their protector. And he was very important to Secretariat’s success. I don’t think there’s any question. Secretariat was just a tuned-up machine, and the harder he worked, the better he felt. He reared up on me several times, just ’cause he was feeling good. But Eddie kept him level-headed, if that’s possible in an animal.”
What especially endeared Eddie to McClain was the respect that Eddie paid to horses and humans alike. This was why, in McClain’s mind, Eddie was a prince. “It didn’t matter who he was talking to, whether it was the owner of the horse or the groom down on his luck from the barn next door or the hot walker; he treated everybody with dignity, whether they were above him or below him. He sort of took me under his wing, some dumb kid from Kentucky who didn’t know squat. He put up with me; he tolerated me. He was a snappy dresser, always neat and clean, and he made sure his horses were neat and clean. And though he wasn’t educated, he was smart.”
The Horse God Built Page 11