The Horse God Built

by Lawrence Scanlan

  Cooke makes the point that, if anything, Secretariat has only grown in stature over time. He was the first Triple Crown winner in twenty-five years, and when that feat was followed in quick succession (though less dramatically, by Affirmed and Seattle Slew), those who follow horse racing began to minimize the achievement of winning those three spring races. What happened, says Cooke, is that three great horses came along in the same decade. The fallow years since have driven home the point that great horses are rare, and the Triple Crown is hard-won.

  The smell of a horse up close is always sweet. Where my dog, bless her, cheerfully breathes into my face her own vapors of old tuna and sour socks, my horse smells of green grass and red apples. (How I smell to my horse is another matter.) The only thing that smells better than a horse’s muzzle is a baby’s head.

  So I envy in a way those whose contact with Secretariat is not through videos or photos, paintings and magazine covers, but through his blood. They ride or own his offspring.

  In 1997, a plumber named Nick Corini purchased a small ranch near Hollister, California, and acted on a long-held dream—to breed a champion horse. In 2000, he bred one of his mares to Academy Award, a son of Secretariat, and got a chestnut colt. In 2003, he bred all four of his mares to Tinner’s Way, a son from Secretariat’s last crop (born just months after his death) and winner of $1.8 million on the track.

  “Why did I breed everything to a son of the champion,” he wrote me, “knowing that every expert states that His sons are below standard as breeders? Because I want to be a part of this great horse.”

  As he wrote, Corini said he could see on his office wall nothing but Secretariat: individual framed photographs, framed programs from each Triple Crown race, eight framed magazines with the red horse on the cover, the horse’s postage stamp, his commemoratives, news of his victories as a two-year-old—all in frames and under glass.

  Nick Corini is sixty years old now, and has ten grandchildren. And although he never saw Secretariat in the flesh, he and his three young sons watched and cheered as he won the Belmont Stakes. Now Corini is what he calls “a small breeder,” one with a dream. At the time he wrote me, three of his four mares were in foal.

  “I cannot contain my enthusiasm,” he wrote, “when I see these mares daily. Three grandchildren of SECRETARIAT”—whenever Corini wrote the name, it was all caps—”will be on the ranch this year. I am still part of the greatest horse that ever lived… .”

  Tobi Taylor was a horse-mad eight-year-old girl in 1973, and the one horse she loved most was Secretariat. She had posters of him in her room; she spent her allowance money on magazines featuring him on the cover; she even wrote a letter to the folks at Breyer, imploring them to mold a model in his image. (And maybe young Tobi planted a seed, for eventually Breyer did just that. Breyer manufactures six-inch-high plastic horses, models of particular champions and breeds, for kids and collectors.) By 1997, Tobi Taylor had owned several horses and was working for a dressage rider and trainer in Scottsdale, Arizona, who asked her one day to ride a chestnut called Twinkie.

  The chestnut, it transpires, was a son of Secretariat—out of one of the three test mares, this one a draft mare, bred in 1974. Twinkie (his registered name is the much more noble Statesman) was twenty-five when Taylor described all this in the March 2000 issue of Dressage Today. Statesman had been a stud, a jumper, a polo pony, and was then a kind of “steady Eddie” on the trail—a calming influence on other, younger horses. Children would stop the riders to admire “the pretty red pony,” the one, wrote Taylor, who had surely inherited his father’s enormous heart.

  Angela Crandall rides My Lucky Gem, a granddaughter of Secretariat’s. She was looking for a younger horse to take her on long hacks into the redwood mountains of Humboldt County, California, where she lives. Her first horse—bought when she left home and even before she had purchased a car—can no longer manage such treks. On the notice board at a local stable she spotted her dream horse: a tall, muscular dark bay “with a kind eye.” Only when she spoke to the owner did Crandall learn of the horse’s pedigree.

  She calls the mare “Lucky,” and cannot ride her without thinking back to the old man. “I feel,” she wrote me, “the importance of what Secretariat was to many whenever I saddle up to go on a ride, or whenever I just go outside our kitchen door to lay my head on Lucky’s silky shoulder.”

  Like Nick Corini, Angela Crandall hopes one day to breed My Lucky Gem, to keep alive “the famous blood.”

  Renee Attili says she will always remember where she was and what she was doing when she heard the news of Secretariat’s death in 1989. She had been planning a visit to Claiborne when the news came.

  “Secretariat,” she wrote me, “was the horse that made horses truly come alive to me when I was a young girl. Until Him”—yes, she capitalized the word—”my experience with horses had been limited to shaggy, sad (but still beautiful to my little-girl eyes) ponies at the local fair and petting zoo, photos and Breyer Horse models. He was the most majestic, noble, powerful horse that I had ever seen.”

  Attili went on to become an exercise rider, working with green Thoroughbreds at Buckland Farm in Virginia. She once rode a filly by Secretariat called Secretary’s Story: “I felt like I was riding royalty. Riding her was truly an honor. She had a similar beauty and air about her. She actually had been born missing an eye, but, like her sire, she ran because she loved it. She went on to do pretty well from what I heard. Even though she was of His blood, as were many others, none has compared to Him. He was simply His own horse.”

  Though Renee Attili never saw Secretariat in the flesh, she has seen the video of one of his morning workouts. As an exercise rider, she has a certain eye, and what she saw was “truly something not of this world. The way he worked with such power and at the same time easy, was simply awe-inspiring.”

  “That is why I cried at the news of His death,” Attili wrote, “why I still get the chills thinking of that early morning workout, hearing that BRRAAPP BRRAAPP BRRAAPP sound, and why after more than thirty years he still moves my spirit.”

  I cannot get John Henry out of my head. If Secretariat was the all American hero, John Henry is the bandit with his face on wanted: dead or alive posters all over the West. Even in old age (a remarkable thirty-one years old as I write this), he remains a dangerous horse, and yet the record shows that if you could get him on your side by dint of charm or courage, or both, then John signed on the dotted line and was sweet on you for life.

  At Kentucky Horse Park, I kept going back to the Hall of Champions just to peer into his dark stall. A sturdy ornamental grate—like the screening that separates priest and confessor in the darkness of a confessional—covered the inside of his stall door, ruling out any possibility of a child, say, putting her fingers between the bars and losing said fingers to the horse inside. A sign by John Henry’s door further warned visitors that horses may bite (all the stalls had such a sign), though they might have added, “This one more than most.” Age has not dulled the old sourpuss. Tammy Siters, his longtime groom at the park, told me he still gets frisky in cold weather.

  His race record is stunning. Between 1977 and 1984, he had a jaw-dropping eighty-three starts. John won thirty-nine of his races; he placed fifteen times and showed eight times. He was in the money 75 percent of the time over an unearthly span of eight years. All this from a gelding who once sold for eleven hundred dollars.

  John Henry was twice named Horse of the Year, the second time when he was a stately nine years old. No horse had ever done that, and up until he did, no horse had ever won $6.6 million. Small, at 15.2 hands, and decidedly plain, he had a particular way of going. George Pratt, the professor of electrical engineering and computer science at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, once examined John Henry’s stride, as he had done Secretariat’s. Pratt called John Henry’s stride “a thing of ice-cold efficiency .. . the changes of lead are wonderfully smooth—a Ferrari going through the gears.” And it was a massive st
ride, too: Red pole markers at Kentucky Horse Park put his stride (25.5 feet) right up there with the big boys—Man o’War (28 feet) and Secretariat (24 feet).

  Pratt’s comments were contained in an article in Equus magazine in 1985: A panel of experts—veterinarians, scientists, even a psychic—was assembled to fathom this notorious horse. An ultrasound imager determined that he had a huge heart—up to 25 percent larger than average. Linda Tellington-Jones, who has made touching a horse into both a science and an art, remarked on his sense of superiority and determination to lead. Veterinary surgeon Dr. Matthew Mackay-Smith, summing up the panel’s findings, called John Henry “self-confident, aloof, alert, studious, wise, and, it must be said, more than a bit theatrical.”

  But here’s the thing. In the book John Henry, by Steve Haskin, is an award-winning photograph of the horse with his racing groom, Jose Mercado. Taken when the horse was in his prime, the photo shows a burly groom in a checked short-sleeved shirt, a carrot in his right hand and John Henry—the very devil himself—leaning into the man’s chest, the horse’s visible left eye half-closed and dreamy, as if Mercado were a cherished uncle telling him his favorite bedtime story. The photo is very like others I have seen that capture the horse–groom bond: Eddie Sweat and Secretariat, Tom Wade and Seattle Slew, Sandi Patterson and Big Ben, Will Harbut and Man o’War.

  Mercado had passed the horse’s test: One of John Henry’s favorite tricks was to inch toward the stall wall during grooming, until he had the groom pinned. The horse was mean, said Mercado, “and I had to be a little rough with him at times,” but once he had the horse’s respect, he never lost it.

  Tammy Siters told me that John Henry has broken her nose with a cow kick, and once reared up on her and charged her. At the last second, she took the lead shank and smacked him over the shoulder, thus stopping the charge and perhaps saving her own life. Then it was John Henry’s turn to be petrified, and he shook in the corner of his stall until Siters made peace with some mints. He broke the toe of another handler by stepping on her foot, and, on another occasion, bit the same handler on the thumb, drawing blood. “It’s like he has a split personality,” Siters told Haskin. “He wants to be good and there is a real good side to him, but sometimes that evil John just has to come out.” (When I last spoke to Siters, just days before Christmas of 2005, she reported that John Henry was in fine form: He had bitten three park employees—though not Siters—in the previous ten days.)

  On the other hand, John Henry abides birds in his stall, and he got along very well with one trainer’s Labrador retriever, named Opie, who used to sleep close by the horse in the stall. They would nibble at each other and play. But when a goat, Ba Ba Louie, was offered as a paddock pal on John Henry’s arrival at Kentucky Horse Park in 1985, the horse almost killed the hapless creature. The park had to pay several hundred dollars in vet bills to stitch him up.

  And yet John Henry has embraced certain people in his life, and he has consistently been loyal to them. Between 1990 and 1997, Rosemary Honerkamp was the stud groom at Kentucky Horse Park. “Their relationship,” Siters told Haskin, “was something right out of Black Beauty. John truly loved Rosemary and never once even looked crosseyed at her.” (Siters later modified that story, telling me that John Henry did stomp on Rosemary’s feet a few times, but was otherwise a prince in her presence.)

  John Henry did not like the handler assigned to take him out to his paddock one day, and he let her know it by blocking the entrance to his stall with his own prostrate body. Honerkamp came along, said, “John, get up,” which he promptly did, and she led him peaceably outside.

  And I am left wondering, What does Rosemary Honerkamp possess that has enabled her to penetrate the horse’s aloofness? Is it pure confidence, or confidence disguised as kindness? What qualities does she share with Eddie Sweat, Will Harbut, Tom Wade, Sandi Patterson, and Jose Mercado that made Secretariat, Man o’War, Seattle Slew, Big Ben, and John Henry not just warm to them but enter into a pact that these horses would always honor, sometimes until they were put in the ground? Tammy Siters had called it “something right out of Black Beauty.” But what? Horses know, but we may never know.

  “Taxi for Scanlan!” the bartender shouts.

  I am watching—what else?—horse racing on the big screen of the bar at the Springs Inn, and sipping a Killian’s Irish Red, a beer with a horse’s head on the bottle.

  A gaggle of six Irishmen and one Irishwoman is in the bar, and they look comfortable, as if settling in at their local for evening pints of Guinness. I recognize the liquor blush, the brogue, the sharp tongues—they remind me of the Irish priests who taught me in high school. The Holy Ghost fathers specialized in clever sarcasm and cheerful mockery.

  Among the seven Irish are several Scanlon brothers (the spelling becomes clear when I chat them up). One Scanlon has called for the cab, and it’s now out front, but they seem in no hurry. I show one brother, the eldest, my driver’s license, thinking that a Scanlon from Ireland might be amused to meet a Scanlan from Canada. He is not. I suppose he thinks I’m tugging feebly at some distant Irish roots, and he has no time for Danny Boy nostalgia. He humors me, for a bit.

  “Are you here to buy horses?” I ask him.

  “Mebbe,” he replies coyly. “And why are you here?”

  “To write a book,” I say.

  “Ah, that’d be easier,” he replies. I take him to mean that they have come to Lexington to pan for gold, to find the next Secretariat, but gold and fool’s gold look much alike. The Irishman had it right: Anyone can write a book, anyone can memorize Thoroughbred bloodlines, and on auction day all the horses look gorgeous. One in a million has the right stuff.

  The next day, Tuesday, July 20, 2004, is the second day of the Kentucky Summer Yearlings sale at Fasig-Tipton on the Newtown Pike, just north of Lexington. Some five hundred Thoroughbred horses are up for sale. Seattle Slew was sold on these grounds. So was Unbridled. Every now and again, lightning strikes.

  Sales catalog (or “hip book”) in hand, I wander the vast grounds and, within minutes, spot the Scanlon brothers. The loud palaver from the bar is gone now. It’s solemn business buying horses. I have found the Irishmen by chance: I saw a horse listed in the catalog (a “hip number”—literally a black number on a white oval affixed to the horse’s hip—is often the only identifier) and went to see him back at one of the barns. The money this horse’s sire and dam had earned impressed me, as it did the Irishmen. One Scanlon, looking Joycean with his glasses perched on his nose, gazes intently at the young horse being circled in front of him.

  Does the man from County Meath like the movement, more graceful than that of any model on a runway? Does he like the horse’s princely bearing? The roundness at the rump, the way his shoulder comes off the body, the straightness of the legs? Or is he seeing a flaw in the horse’s assembly—at the knee, the hip, the neck? Is the shoulder too straight, the back too long or too short? I leave him to his pondering.

  Amy Gill, the equine nutritionist, has agreed to meet me here and help me understand the sale process. I gather that coming to the sale is common sport in Lexington—99 percent of the onlookers have come not to buy but to watch others buy.

  Amy points out the former governor of Kentucky, in a cowboy hat and holding court in the indoor walking ring. Outside, in the middle of the outdoor walking pavilion, is the trainer extraordinaire Bob Baffert, in his trademark sunglasses (he is allergic to hay and horses, and the glasses mask his chronically red eyes). Leaning on the rail close by is John Veitch, trainer of Alydar. There are men in cowboy boots, Japanese men in suits, Arabs in headdresses—and everyone is on a cell phone.

  These buyers, Amy informs me, have been going around to Kentucky horse farms, looking at prospects, for weeks. They have examined X rays and vets’ reports; they have pored over bloodlines and considered the recommendations of their own trainers and agents. They know exactly which horses they want. Or do they?

  The parade of horses unfolds in chronologica
l order according to hip number. Each yearling is walked several times over the rubberized brick pathway on the outdoor ring while a hundred or so onlookers lean on the rail and eye the passing horse. Then the horse is led into the indoor ring, where the filly or colt is again circled in each of the four corners, with more gawking and note taking. Finally, the yearling is led through the doors and onto the sales pavilion’s stage—an enclosed theater where an auctioneer in a high, polished pulpit takes bids as the horse is circled over pine shavings and finally sold, or not. All day long, the auctioneer’s voice is the music in the air and the dance is the dance of horses circling, always circling.

  The auctioneers’ “What am I bid?” prattle must be exhausting, for they relieve one another constantly, like tag-team wrestlers. Men in black suits roam up and down the aisles, catching bids. I cannot tell who is bidding, let alone by what means. I know only that I would love to take a young horse home, to be a player in this grand old game.

  The horses being sold are seventeen and eighteen months old. They have been preened and clipped, buffed and polished, like sports cars in a showroom. Some firms hire “preppers”—professional horse beauticians who paint the hooves, lay on the ShowSheen, and make the client gleam. I watch one groom as he gingerly, delicately, slowly plucks a bit of hay, as if it were nitroglycerin, from a young colt’s tail as he passes. Pity the poor grooms.

  These wide-eyed horses are truly babies, and should be forgiven their spookiness, but any outburst—any dancing, any swinging of the rear end, and, heaven forbid, any rearing—would offer prospective buyers one more reason not to buy that horse or to bid less. The blare of the auctioneer’s microphone, all these strangers and strange surroundings—a young horse would have cause.