The Horse God Built

by Lawrence Scanlan

  He pinned you with his look, for it struck everyone who saw him that he was a glory of creation. The Pimlico track official who watched Secretariat run, the Texas sculptor who cast him in bronze, and the jockey who rode him for almost two years all had the same notion: that God had set out to make the perfect horse, and Secretariat was the result.

  Eddie Sweat saw him from the ground, and he saw perfection in the horse’s feet, which he proclaimed “one of the beautifullest set of feet of any horse I ever rubbed.” There were no chips or cracks in Secretariat’s hooves, Eddie told Raymond Woolfe: “His are smooth, just smooth all over. But you know, he’s perfection all over.”

  In his book Blood Horses: Notes of a Sportswriter’s Son, John Jeremiah Sullivan describes Secretariat “not as the greatest horse, nor as the greatest runner, nor even as the greatest athlete of the twentieth century, but as the greatest creature. The sight of him in motion is one of the things we can present to the aliens when they come in judgment asking why they should spare our world.”

  A GIFT

  Roger Broomes is using a pitchfork to lift and drop straw in a just-vacated stall. His motion is practiced and circular as he deftly separates clean from sullied and forms small piles, the good stuff in one corner, the vile in another. The ammonialike whiff of horse urine comes in waves, and some grooms here wear surgical masks, but Broomes is not among them.

  I’ve been on the backside at Woodbine racetrack in Toronto since 4:00 a.m., up with the keeners and the early early risers. Now it’s eight o’clock: rush hour. Outside the stall flows a lively traffic of men, women, and horses. Everyone calls to one another amiably and warmly, like Shriners at a picnic.

  The birds are yahooing over spilled grain, the stall fans droning, hooves clip-clopping on asphalt. On the grassy boulevards, sweaty horses are being soaped up and hosed off, and it’s good to smell water and soaked earth during what has been a long, drought-plagued summer.

  Broomes—the word strapping leaps to mind when I first see him—is wearing denim coveralls over his almost six-foot frame and a fashionable red pirate’s kerchief over his long black dreadlocks. There is a palm-wide piece of white tape halfway down the handle of his fork. Offering comfort and grip for the lower hand, the tape has been worn almost black from use and the wood owns a fine sheen of dirt and sweat. Like an old bat in a glass case at Cooperstown.

  Roger Broomes was born in Barbados. There’s a singsong melody to his words, and his laughter is easy, his mouth wide, his manner calm. He knows full well what he brings to the table to keep a horse happy and healthy and eager, and he is not pleased that grooms get no credit. “Apart from Eddie Sweat, I don’t think any grooms ever got it. Seabiscuit, Northern Dancer, Phar Lap. Nobody ever talk about the groom.” I haven’t the heart to tell him that even Eddie Sweat, “groom of grooms,” got sparse credit.

  Just then, a trainer and rider named Victor Ramos (“Famous Ramos,” they call him; he is the nephew of jockey Avelino Gomez) walks past. He looks me in the eye, points at Broomes, and says, “He’s the best.” So Broomes’s everyday professionalism is noticed, much as Eddie Sweat’s professionalism was noticed, at least by some.

  In 1990, in only his second year in Canada and still very much a rookie at the track, Broomes heard that Sweat was coming to Woodbine. Broomes hoped to meet him and could not believe his good fortune when he learned that Eddie and his outfit had set up shop in the stalls next door.

  “It was like a gift for me,” Broomes says of the pairing. “I saw him every day, from April to November, that year. I was so fortunate. To see him handle a horse, only then would you understand. The horses he had weren’t great, not stakes winners or anything, but they were classy because of the way he handled them.”

  I wondered what he saw in Eddie. “What set him apart?” I ask.

  “It was an honor to know him and watch him work,” Broomes says. “Applying a bandage, for example—I’d look at what he had done and I’d say, ‘Why doesn’t my bandage look like that?’ Or giving a horse a bath. His horses were so quiet. They would stand until he was finished. My horses would be playing around and I’d be soaking wet by the end.”

  Watching Eddie work around a horse, Broomes says, was like watching a master carpenter build a cabinet. “He seemed a natural at what he did.”

  Eddie talked all the time about Secretariat. A small circle of shed-row workers would gather around him to hear these stories, sometimes over a beer or a cigarette. But somehow, Eddie was never seen to brag.

  “Yeah man,” says Broomes, “I really admired him. He was so down-to-earth, so full of goodwill. There were no airs about him. He was a humble man, laid-back and quiet. Always classy. He was legit. And you won’t find anyone who says different. No one on the backside had a bad experience pertaining to him. He was confident and he knew he made a difference to any horse he looked after. He was one of a kind.”

  “Was he happy?” I ask.

  “Always, always, always. I can’t recall a moment when I didn’t enjoy his company. He was always cheerful.”

  “Did he talk to his horses?”

  “Always. And maybe it was what the trainer [Roger Laurin] called for, or maybe it was Eddie’s idea. But every night he’d cook up his horses a warm mash of oats and corn. It was little things like that. He was a great man, a horse man. His work was his passion.”

  Eddie would talk about how relaxed Secretariat was, how confident. “Like the groom,” Broomes says. “I credit Eddie’s attention and good care. They both had each other.”

  Eddie spoke of Secretariat as a proud father would speak of his son. “And that’s how a groom should feel,” Broomes says. “I dream of that. That kind of fame. To be around a great horse. I don’t begrudge Eddie, but I wish it was me.”

  6

  CATCHING A GLIMPSE OF GLORY

  PUNCH IN “I SAW SECRETARIAT” on an Internet search engine, visit Secretariat.com, or spend time at Keeneland Library reading its many thick files on Secretariat, and you will find myriad tales from individuals who were on the scene in the early 1970s, when the awesome chestnut ran—at Churchill Downs, Pimlico, Belmont, Saratoga, Aqueduct, Woodbine, Arlington—and, later, when he stood at stud at Claiborne.

  Take Jean DellaRocco, for example. Her memories of Secretariat are intertwined with those of childhood and simpler times, when the track was a family gathering place. “It seems,” DellaRocco wrote in a note to me, “like most of my childhood was filled with ‘horse heroes.’ Why this is I can’t be sure. I’ve loved horses for as long as I can remember, and Secretariat was the first of my heroes. He was so beautiful andstrong, and seemed so invincible, even to a young child of five.” The horse struck the young girl then as almost mythological—”the real-life version of a storybook horse.”

  DellaRocco saw Secretariat in the flesh, but her memories are bittersweet. She spent summers as a child at Saratoga Springs, in the rolling horse country of upper New York State. The track at Saratoga is to Thoroughbred racing what Fenway Park is to baseball: sacred ground. DellaRocco’s parents, her sister, her aunt, and her grandparents went every weekend to see the stakes races. Seeing the Whitney Stakes of August 4, 1973, is one of her earliest childhood memories, but if DellaRocco can truthfully say “I saw Secretariat,” she must add one word: lose.

  “I was so upset to see him lose that day,” she wrote from her home in Latham, New York. “The fact that my grandfather had bet on the winner, Onion (and thus against the entire family) established this story as the kind you pass on for generations. I still remember my grandmother admonishing him for doing that and making me so upset.”

  A trainer (the appellation Triple Crown Chick forms part of her E-mail address) has posted a message at Secretariat.com calling Secretariat the pinnacle of beauty and grace, speed and heart. If she were to train a horse who had even one-quarter of his gift, she wrote, she would consider herself truly blessed. Other correspondents confessed to shedding tears—at seeing Secretariat’s trophies and bridles on
display at Kentucky Horse Park, at seeing him race, at visiting his birthplace or his grave, upon giving him mints one crisp fall day. This particular horse moved them, and still moves them, in a way that someone without affection for horses might find incomprehensible, even nonsensical. The word hero crops up a lot in the testimony of those smitten by Secretariat.

  Then there is Cindy Tunstall, who reprised in Equus magazine her encounter with Secretariat at Claiborne Farm in 1985. Farm manager John Sosby had apparently given this clearly devoted fan one of the champion’s horseshoes. “To this day,” she wrote, “I don’t know of anything that has moved me more.” Then they went out to see the horse, who was grazing at one end of his paddock but galloped to the fence to meet them. Tunstall recalled that he was older “and more than a few pounds heavier than in his days of glory,” but he still looked the part. She ran her hands over his neck and shoulders and chest—strong and broad and muscular were the adjectives she used to describe each. A wall in Tunstall’s home has become a shrine to Secretariat. She has the horseshoe mounted on a plaque, and several photographs of the stallion (including one with Tunstall beside him, and one taken the day before he died) hang there. “He lives on that wall,” she wrote. “And in my heart.”

  That same year, Bob Swisher of Paducah, Kentucky, was with his wife in Lexington for a ten-kilometer run—and a surprise encounter with Secretariat. (He would later tell the story in a letter to the Louisville Courier-Journal in 1998, when readers were asked to submit stories to mark the twenty-fifth anniversary of Secretariat’s Triple Crown victory.) On a whim, the Swishers drove out to Claiborne. “Could a man who just drove two hundred and seventy-five miles see Secretariat?” he asked the foreman, stretching the truth a little.

  The foreman obliged, and he took Swisher and his wife to Secretariat’s stall for photos. Then the foreman asked him, “Would you like to walk him to his pasture?” Naturally, Swisher was thrilled, and when the foreman turned Secretariat loose in his paddock, the champ, wrote Swisher, “turned two laps at top speed around his playpen. What a spectacle! The world’s greatest athlete ‘doing his thing.’ And I was there. That’s how it was the day I walked Secretariat to his pasture.”

  After I put an ad in the Daily Racing Form requesting stories about Secretariat, one woman wrote me to say that in 1973 she was fifteen years old and taking a course at school on the care and training of the Thoroughbred racehorse. The students gathered one morning at Belmont, and the closer they got to Barn 5, Lucien Laurin’s barn, the louder was the banging. When they asked the trainer about all the commotion, he said, “ ‘Oh, that’s Secretariat wanting to go out.’ Seemed Big Red demanded that he go for a jog at least every morning. He was the king in the barn.”

  Another woman called a National Public Radio program in 2002 when the subject was television’s most unforgettable moments. For her, the most enduring moment was the first time she saw Secretariat run. She had been walking to her seat in a restaurant, she recalled, when “I saw this animal run and I realized I was seeing something I would probably never again see in my life, the way that animal moved and owned the racetrack.”

  When Secretariat went to Arlington in late June 1973, an elderly couple waited four hours at O’Hare Airport in order to catch a ten-second glimpse of him walking down the ramp from the turboprop to a horse van. Mrs. Ray Kling was asked by George Plimpton—who was on assignment that day for Sports Illustrated—if the long wait was worth it. “Yes, heavens yes,” she replied. “This is much more exciting than Lindbergh’s landing. And I was there.”

  Even the jockeys who lost to him that day in Chicago (Secretariat Day, as Mayor Richard Daley proclaimed it) seemed jocular after the event. There was joy in simply being close to this horse, even in eating his dust. George Getz, the trainer of Blue Chip Dan—last at the first turn, last at the finish—said cheerfully before the race that his horse was David to Secretariat’s Goliath, except “my horse doesn’t have a slingshot and a rock.” There were only four horses in that Arlington Invitational, and yet some twenty jockeys in their silks were on hand in the saddling area to watch Ron Turcotte hop on board the people’s horse. “There’s not a pimple on him,” said jockey Larry Melancon, staring at him as he spoke. “I’ve never seen anything like him.”

  A neighbor of mine is typical of another sort of fan. Never an aficionado of racing, he was nevertheless drawn to Woodbine that bitter day in Toronto to see Secretariat’s final race. The neighbor put two bucks on him to win and never cashed in the ticket, but kept it as a memento—which he still has in a drawer.

  Another friend, who worked one summer for the Daily Racing Form and who still bets the ponies, remembers being in a small-town bar in northern Ontario for the June 9, 1973, running of the Belmont. David Carpenter is a collegial sort, the type who will organize an impromptu and friendly draw in a bar full of strangers as post time nears. I have seen him at work, writing down the names of the entries on pieces of folded paper, dropping them into his blue Leafs ball cap, looking like a supplicant as he makes his rounds and the patrons drop a hand into the cap to see which horse is theirs. A teacher and a writer (of mystery novels), David sometimes plays the role of the barfly who always talks to the guy beside him. On that day in June, the man on the next stool was a now-belligerent, now-chummy drunk who insisted on betting against Secretariat.

  My friend pleaded with him, tried to educate him on the folly of such a bet and the splendor of the favorite, but to no avail. Like oil and water, alcohol and logic do not mix. Each man put a dollar bill on the bar, with David taking Secretariat and offering the tinderbox beside him the rest of the field. And, after the race, when TV commentators prepared to show the replay of Secretariat’s thirty-one-length victory, the silly drunk seized on the thought that Secretariat was about to race a second time, and insisted on another dollar bet (it was either that, David recalls, or step outside). My pal escaped with the two dollar bills and counted himself lucky to have seen a great race and kept all his teeth.

  Some of Secretariat’s admirers got close enough to photograph him, and some even touched him. Judy Jones did all of that and more. She was a young equine artist on a mission in the mid-1970s when she visited the champ in his paddock near Paris, Kentucky, with two female friends while a groom held the stallion for picture taking. The visit would end rather dramatically, as she eventually explained.

  I had met Judy Jones in a happenstance sort of way. We were in line together at Kentucky Horse Park the day of the bronze unveiling in July 2004 and we started to chat. She is a native Chicagoan and has been an equine artist all her working life. Later, over coffee at the Springs Inn, she showed me two compelling prints: One was her pencil sketch of Affirmed, Seattle Slew, and Secretariat—Triple Crown winners in 1978, 1977, and 1973, respectively; the other was of John Henry, the irascible champion from the early 1980s. I bought both prints and am glad to have them and the stories Jones told me that day.

  Horse crazies—a term Judy Jones used to describe herself and her friends—will go to great lengths to fuel their passion, which is, at heart, a girl’s infatuation not dulled by time or age.

  The woman in the red print dress and glasses sipping coffee opposite me seemed shy and tentative at first, but she warmed to her stories. She was like a child opening up her toy box for a stranger and plucking out items, slowly at first, then quickly and at random. “I saw Secretariat race,” she said, “in the Arlington Invitational”—a race created specifically for him. The date was June 30, 1973, and Jones was three years out of high school. The headlines were all about the Watergate hearings, which had begun the month before, and pet rocks were the craze of the day, but another sort of mania had a grip on Judy Jones. “I was caught up in the whole Secretariat phenomenon,” she said. “I’ll never forget watching the Belmont Stakes race at home with my mom and both of us goin’ nuts as he came down that stretch. My friends were all horse crazies, too, so, of course, when we found out he was going to be at Arlington, that’s what we live
d for.”

  Jones remembered how crowded Arlington was—”packed to the gills.” She and her friends were familiar with the backside, having been there on many occasions for other things, and they actually got to talk to Eddie Sweat that day. One of Jones’s friends was handy with a camera, but her film did not advance for some reason and all her precious shots of Secretariat came to naught. Jones revealed the latter detail with anguish, still acute more than thirty years after the fact. She made a face and groaned as she spoke of the lost film.

  “What did Eddie say?” I asked her.

  “He just talked about the horse and we asked him some questions.”

  “Like what?”

  “Oh, it was so long ago.… Oh, I remember one. We asked if Secretariat had a special diet, and Eddie told us the horse drank Hinckley & Schmitt bottled water and they brought it with them.”

  The Arlington visit barely whetted the appetites of Jones and four other horse-mad young women for the horse called Secretariat. Jones made many trips to Lexington while still living in Chicago in the 1970s and 1980s—a round-trip of almost eight hundred miles—always to see Secretariat. She became a regular at Claiborne, saw Buckpasser and Hoist the Flag, Tom Rolfe and Nijinsky II—all horses now buried at Claiborne—and got to know one of the grooms who handled Secretariat in those days.

  “We used to feed Secretariat peppermints,” Jones said. “He loved peppermints. We had made an appointment at Claiborne—myself, Diane Viert, and Helen Hayse, we all went out there.” The groom showing Secretariat asked Judy if she would take a picture of him with his charge. The horse, meanwhile, had spotted the peppermints in Diane’s hand. “The groom was standing close to the horse,” explained Jones, “and as Diane showed the peppermint, Secretariat went like this with his head”—and here Judy Jones made a sudden lifting motion with her own head, though her motion surely had nothing on his.