The Horse God Built

by Lawrence Scanlan

  “He was asking for the peppermint,” she said, “and he hit the groom right in the nose and knocked him out. He fell down, broke his nose. It wasn’t any meanness. Secretariat was just asking for the peppermint and the groom was in the way. Oh my God …” No Joe Louis uppercut ever had that kind of power, but the groom looked like he had gone ten rounds with the champ. He was down for the count and then some, and farm staff had to carry the bloodied man away on a stretcher.

  Jones, her friends, the horse—all were in shock. Jones grabbed the lead shank and held Secretariat while trying to stifle her own mortification, but Claiborne staff were gracious. “Accidents happen,” they told her, and all was forgiven. As for the groom, he later had to have surgery when his nasal passages failed to perform in the usual way. Moral of story: Do not stand between a great horse and his peppermints.

  “I was in awe,” said Jones, “that they let us get that close to the horse. I even have photos of one of my friends brushing him.” Here Jones put a hand to her mouth and looked dubiously at the tape recorder. She expressed the worry that the groom, now deceased, had surely overstepped the bounds in allowing such contact and that naming him might sully his reputation. Let the groom, then, go unnamed.

  But Jones will always be grateful to that groom for letting her touch a magnificent horse. “I especially remember,” she said, “how beautiful his head and eye and neck were. He had that ‘look of eagles,’ we call it. But the thing about him was he was a very kind horse. I’m sure he could have his moments, like any stallion, but he was a really sweet horse. He let us touch him and never ever laid an ear back or lifted a foot or anything.”

  The only thing that bothered Jones about these visits was the burgeoning weight of the horse as the years passed. “He had that big, cresty neck and they let him get too heavy. At the end, he looked almost quarter-horsey in a way. He was just chunky.”

  Jones and her husband—formerly a track photographer for the Ontario Jockey Club—moved down to Kentucky in 1989. John Jones had photographed Secretariat’s last race at Woodbine, but he never got to see the horse in the flesh in Kentucky. And when the horse died that fall, Judy Jones sent flowers to be laid at his grave. She got back, in return, a handwritten note from Seth Hancock, Claiborne’s owner.

  For Jones the artist, Secretariat was an inspiration. She spoke with awe and affection of his lovely face, his little ears, his chestnut color and those distinctive white markings—horse-show people call it “chrome,” Jones said, “and Secretariat had a lot of chrome.”

  To draw Secretariat, she would have had to measure him, and she had those details, too, tucked away in her brain. “Horses, ideally,” she explained to me, “if you were to measure from the withers to the ground, and then from the point of the shoulder all the way back to the end of their body—a perfect horse would be in an exact square. Secretariat measured a little bit taller than he was long. That’s because his legs were a little bit longer and he was short-bodied, very compact.”

  Jones spoke in a kind of rapture about his musculature, his desire, his heart and biomechanics. “He was just gifted from God,” she said, “as all great athletes are.”

  I am in the spacious trailer workshop of a saddler, watching him methodically take my saddle apart while a propane heater utters what sounds like applause in the background. The saddle elf has picked a cold day to make his rounds and come to my stable in southeastern Ontario. He wears a black toque with NEWMARKET in bold red at his forehead as he works. The hat was acquired on a trip to the English horse mecca.

  An English saddle should fit a horse like a leather glove fits a hand. But the insulating material inside the leather of a glove can shift and flatten; a saddle’s padding can do likewise. My saddle is in need of what the saddler calls “a fine-tuning.”

  After he has added stuffing where he thinks it warranted— imagine cotton candy being poked into a saddle’s recesses with a long shoehorn—he pauses to admire and feel the result. He smiles, admittedly amused by his own smugness. He tells me his wife teases him when he complains of the little aches and pains his profession makes him prey to, saying he likely hurt himself patting his own back.

  I give him a line uttered by an erstwhile colleague at the daily newspaper in Nelson, British Columbia. I must have liked something I had written and said so in the newsroom. My fellow reporter offered a mocking, stop-the-press headline: reporter breaks arm patting self on back. Christian Lowe, my saddler, laughs robustly. We have been talking as he works about this thing that occurs between horses and humans. I tell him how torn I am—how one day I am convinced there can be a profound connection between some humans and some horses, and the next day a like connection smacks of something else.

  Under the latter category, I tell Lowe—a quiet, competent professional who is so genuinely nice and enthusiastic, you want to pass his business card around at parties—about a horse handler I met at Kentucky Horse Park, Tammy Siters. Her charge, and he had been so for years, was the aforementioned John Henry. (Kirsten Johnson, a horsewoman I’ll come to shortly, once saw John Henry being walked to his paddock in the company of several people. She was describing how some horses exude dignity and bearing. “John Henry would walk twenty feet,” she said, “then stop, and all the people would stop— until he wanted to go.”)

  Siters claimed that old John is conversational, that he understands much of what she tells him. And one day, just outside John Henry’s stall, she described to me a kind of negotiation she once had with the horse over the administration of a nasal vaccine. A park employee there to do the job was terrified of going into John Henry’s stall, and Siters had the following chat with the horse.

  “What’s it going to take?” she began. “A peppermint?” The horse shook his head.

  “Two peppermints?” Another shake of the head.

  “Three peppermints and a carrot?” The horse nodded. Tammy Siters assured the technician that a deal had now been struck, and the vaccine was administered without incident.

  I tell Chris that if the relationship between Secretariat and Eddie Sweat is one shining example of the depth of understanding between a horse and a human, surely this other example between John Henry and his handler illustrates just how naïve some horse-centric people can seem. And I want to know which camp he belongs to—the mystical bunch or the more clear-eyed.

  To my surprise, Chris chooses the former. He still works as he talks, his right pinkie encased in protective black leather while he drives a curved needle in and out of the saddle’s bottom and pulls the heavy black thread taut. He tells the story of a Thoroughbred stallion he once gentled when the horse was four. Chris had done some ground work with the horse, a black, almost sixteen-hand Thoroughbred called Sailor, and had been astonished at how easily it had all gone.

  “My experience with stallions at that point,” Chris tells me, “was nil, but I don’t think he was aware he was one, so no special precaution was needed when working around him. He was the type that never had to be shown anything twice and he seemed to be doglike in his need or want to please. If he had one habit, it was sucking on my boot whenever we stopped on loose rein. I don’t know what the horsemanship guys would say about it, but I lapped it up as a sign of affection.”

  And then one day, after just two weeks of working with him on the ground and when no one was at the stable, Chris got on Sailor. It was the first time anyone had backed this horse. Not a wise move, Chris now admits—best to have an observer there in case of injury— but this was a measure of his confidence in the horse. There was an indescribable connection between them, and nothing the horse would not do for him, and they soon began training for eventing. Chris did not own the horse, but he rode him with the owner’s permission and blessing. Kinship, it seemed, had nothing to do with ownership.

  But one day, six or seven months into the project, when Chris was away from the stable on a trip, the owners of the horse sold the stallion—”sold him out from under me,” is how he put it ten years after t
he fact. And, while the saddle business puts him on the road almost constantly, making the notion of getting another horse impossible, Chris has concluded that, in any case, there would be no point. He is sure he will never see that stallion’s like again, that no horse could possibly measure up to Sailor.

  There can be a bond between horse and human, I take him to say, and sometimes it soars. The connection—that is the word Chris uses— is unfathomable and, once felt, unforgettable. Eddie Sweat likely took that truth to his grave.

  Ten years after losing him, in his own private way Christian Lowe still mourns Sailor.

  I am sitting in the library at Kentucky Horse Park, which doubles as office space for the museum’s staff. Someone has dropped a piece of birthday cake and a cup of tea in front of me and is telling me about a certain volunteer—one of many working on preparations for the bronze-unveiling event slated for the weekend. The volunteer’s name is Vicki Blood and she is, says the librarian, an acknowledged Secretariat nut. Said nut happens to be in an office close by, and the librarian fetches her.

  Vicki Blood plops down beside me at a round table, where I have spread out my clippings on Secretariat. A lively, upbeat woman and a longtime volunteer at Kentucky Horse Park, she settles in like an old friend, for any friend of Secretariat’s is a friend of Vicki Blood’s.

  We eat cake and talk Secretariat. I want to know why she still cherishes the memory of that horse so long after he ran. “It’s something that stays in your heart, that doesn’t want to leave,” she says. “And it goes way beyond horsey people. Just say the name Secretariat. People stop and turn.”

  She was once describing to a friend in a gift shop an article in The Blood-Horse magazine on the details of Secretariat’s funeral—how Claiborne staff had fashioned the oak casket, then covered the horse in Claiborne’s yellow racing silks. And Vicki Blood became aware that all business in the shop had ceased and a small circle had formed around her as she talked.

  “He’s in my heart; he’s always going to be in my heart until I die. And if I should die,” she says, as if death for a horse lover were only a possibility, “I’d like to get permission from Claiborne Farm and have my ashes sprinkled over his grave.” But she laughs long and loud after saying this, so I cannot be sure if she means it or is just mocking her own besottedness.

  You can’t have just one nut, right? The phone rings in my room at the Springs Inn in Lexington. A woman named Janie Hinson has heard I am looking to interview ardent fans of Secretariat, and she is sure that describes herself.

  We talk, and later we run across each other at the bronze unveiling. She has Vicki’s horse-centric good cheer, almost a giddiness, the kind of zeal an evangelist loves to see from the pulpit. All the tents hawking Secretariat stuff, the clubbiness of it all, the shared sensibility: A Secretariat party is Janie Hinson’s kind of party.

  She was twenty-five when Secretariat was making his run at the Triple Crown. Hinson was living in Virginia at the time, and, because Secretariat was born in that state, some state pride kicked in. Kentucky always got the glory when the Derby came around; now it was Virginia’s time to shine. After Big Red won the Derby, then the Preakness, Hinson and her fiancé made arrangements to watch the Belmont at her folks’ house. “The TV went on the fritz,” she recalls. “I was beside myself. My mother got on the phone, ordered a TV, and it came just before the race. I remember Secretariat pulling away down the stretch and me screaming, ‘Run! Run!’”

  His pride, his beauty, his energy—all drew her to the horse. She began collecting Secretariat prints, and the album is now jammed— four inches thick. There are, she tells me, pictures of him on her walls, along with a plate signed by Ron Turcotte. Hinson has the magazines, of course, Newsweek, Sports Illustrated, and Time, with himself on the covers. She has bought photos of him on eBay. She bought the Secretariat chocolate bars and countless T-shirts, though she drew the line at the two-pound bobble-head doll—”too cartoonish,” she says.

  Hinson is thrilled with the Bogucki sculpture, and gets emotional just talking about it on the telephone with me. She remembers going to Kentucky Horse Park in 1997 and seeing the statue of Secretariat at the entrance. “Man o’War,” she says, “was looking so majestic down the lane. Then I saw the statue of Secretariat. I have never been so disappointed. It had no movement or spirit.” The new bronze, says Hinson, beaming, “does him justice.”

  One of the videos I saw at Kentucky Horse Park showed Secretariat getting a bath. Afterward, the handler at Claiborne circles the horse, and what is strikingly apparent is not just the horse’s power and beauty but his intelligence. The camera pans in close on his head, and the eyes radiate charisma and focus. He looks bright and curious and keenly interested in what’s going on around him.

  Heywood Hale Broun—the author, actor, sportswriter, and broadcaster, who died in 2001 at the age of eighty-three—once talked of the way Secretariat carried himself: like a champion who knows he is a champion. Broun said that horses in a race will often drift to the outside from sheer fatigue. “Secretariat,” he said, “is the only horse I ever saw who went wide out of centrifugal force, rather like those characters in cartoons. He’s going wide because he can’t hold himself in.” Broun apparently carried in his wallet only two photographs: one of his family, one of Secretariat.

  Bill Cooke is director of the International Museum of the Horse at Kentucky Horse Park, and when he sits at his desk, he can look across his ample office to the opposite wall and see a triptych of framed color photographs.

  The one on the far left shows a young chestnut rolling in his paddock, all four feet in the air. Happy, happy horse. The middle shot has him just starting to rise, his back legs beneath him, his front legs about to lever his impressive body up into the air. It is an image of power. Finally, the third shot: He is shaking his whole body and the dust is coming off his left side in a little storm. This is a gleeful, contented horse.

  It is, of course, Secretariat, at Claiborne. The photographs were taken by a doctor in Saratoga Springs, L. J. Hoge, who had become infatuated with the horse after watching him run in the Hopeful Stakes at Saratoga in August of 1972. There is, it seems, an innocence about the images. The horse is not posing; he is not about to work or to finish working. He is a relaxed horse, a horse at play—rolling in the dirt to satisfy an itch, to keep off the bugs, or just because it feels good.

  A horse will shake after a roll in the dirt and, by some biomechanics known only to four-legged animals, will employ just about every muscle in his body. A horse’s shudder is not like that of a dog, who will do something similar upon leaving the water. A dog’s shake starts at the head and works its way to the tail, the water being shed as the energy moves along his torso, as if the almost violent back-and-forth shaking of the head has sent ripples down the body.

  A horse’s shake does not start at the head. A horse’s shake is a whole-body shake, a shudder shake, as if every muscle in the horse’s body were doing the rumba. Imagine sitting on a washing machine during the helter-skelter spin cycle with the load unbalanced. A horse will shake after a roll in dirt and, sometimes, after a long hack (a trail ride). I feel good, I take the horse to say, and I’m glad to be home. The first time my horse shook with me in the saddle, his head down low like Secretariat’s, I thought I would pitch off. I cannot imagine the power of a Secretariat shake.

  Bill Cooke has witnessed that shake dozens of times. “I must have been out at Claiborne twenty or thirty times while Secretariat was there,” he tells me. “It was one of my favorite trips.” Sometimes Cooke went alone, sometimes with potential donors to the museum. “Never in all the times that I was out there did Secretariat fail to put on this wonderful show. You’d come up to his paddock and he’d see the cameras and the people and his ears would perk up. He knew he was the star and he’d do his victory lap around the paddock, come charging up to the fence right toward the people and kinda slide to a stop and then look noble for a minute. And always, after that, he’d go out to
the center of the paddock and find him a nice dusty or muddy spot— depending on the day—and do the biggest roll you could possibly ever do if you were a horse.”

  “Like that,” I say, pointing at the triptych.

  “Like that,” Bill Cooke replies.

  Snow, too, delighted Secretariat. Those who were at Claiborne when snow fell reported that he would prance in it, roll over on his back, and kick at the flakes as they fell.

  Cooke has seen many great horses in his twenty-seven years at Kentucky Horse Park, but he has never seen a horse with as much personality as Secretariat. Forego, John Henry, and Cigar all had it, but with Secretariat, said Cooke, it was amplified tenfold, for the horse knew he was special. “They are,” Cooke says, “these blessed beings that can do things their counterparts can’t even contemplate.”

  Cooke speaks in a deep baritone, a voice many broadcasters would love to have. It lends authority. He takes me into the museum’s basement, a wonderfully cluttered place full of saddles and sculptures and art—all pieces donated to the museum and either formerly on display or awaiting their turn. Housing dozens of paintings is a tall metal closet affair, with each piece of art in its own framed bracket so the art can be wheeled out and examined, then returned, like a book to its shelf. Cooke wants to show me the half a dozen or so Secretariat prints and photographs and paintings. Even here, in the museum’s basement, the horse continues to have a meaningful presence.