The Horse God Built

by Lawrence Scanlan

  This is how it is on the track. There is benevolence in track society, and there is its opposite, and those on shed row cannot know which will come their way. The image of an owner handing out fifty-dollar bills—or a jockey a thousand dollars in cash twice over—is an arresting one, but it points ultimately to the variable and patronizing nature of the rewards system on the backstretch. There are always shouts of glee when loaves of bread are cast to the poor or candies are tossed at children, but the scramble that results is often rough-and-tumble. And always, it lacks dignity.

  Bill Nack finds it hard to believe that Eddie Sweat died a sour man. Nack finds the assessment too blunt, too simplistic. He is a fine writer, one with a sense of life’s complexity, and he would argue that opposing truths can coexist: that a man can feel hard done by and privileged on the same day, even in the same breath.

  “I knew Eddie thirty years,” Nack told me from his home in Washington, D.C. “I’m sure there were moments in his life when he looked back and wondered. Lucien Laurin was like a father to him. He loved Lucien. So Eddie must have been conflicted at times, because the father didn’t look after him.” Nack said he had heard both Eddie Sweat and Charlie Davis say that they never got out of the Secretariat experience what they deserved. But neither man wanted to see that complaint in print.

  Bill Nack reported in an updated version of his biography on Secretariat (published in 2002) that Eddie Sweat died “virtually penniless.” The Jockey Club Foundation, which administers a fund to help track hands down on their luck, helped pay for Sweat’s funeral. Roger Laurin paid the airfare so that Eddie’s widow and children in New York could attend. “The man,” wrote Nack, “had spent, given away or lost what money he had saved from his heyday as a groom.”

  “The fate of Eddie Sweat,” Bill Nack told me, “is one of the great shames of the track. When I wrote my piece in Sports Illustrated on grooms [“Nobody Knows Their Names”], that was my statement. And I was really criticized by the racing establishment for that story. When grooms started to organize back in the 1960s, you’d think it was Lenin out there organizing workers. The reaction by rich owners was that severe. The haves don’t want to share anything. Why didn’t someone set up a trust fund for Eddie? One cover by Secretariat would have done it.”

  Nack has devoted his life to writing about the track, and if the racetrack’s romance pulls him in, its cruelties wound him. “Are you a little conflicted about the track?” I asked him, “or a lot conflicted?”

  “The latter,” he replied.

  “When Ruffian broke down on the track in 1975, that was a seminal experience for me. It was disillusioning. I’m not saying that Ruffian got cortisone, but it was around that time that trainers started using cortisone on horses. And the cortisone set up breakdowns because it dulled the pain. Go For Wand broke down. Prairie Bayou. Horses were dropping all over the place, and it took the romance out of it for me.”

  Nack understands why writers are drawn to the track, where the affluent stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the downtrodden. “That color, those kinds of contrasts, made the track so attractive to Damon Runyon,” he said. “Hemingway loved the track, and Red Smith said he loved the track because it was so full of stories about poor people. And poor people are more colorful: They wear their hearts on their sleeves.”

  Nack does not remember Eddie drinking in all the time he knew him. What Nack remembers of his friend is his feeling for horses: “He was a horse whisperer before that term was even invented.” Nack remembers how clean Eddie was, always, and what a snappy dresser he was on race day. Nack has a memory of Eddie dancing in a disco at Saratoga Springs one time. The great groom, it seems, was also a great dancer.

  Eddie Sweat was what a friend of mine calls “a forelock tugger”— someone convinced of his own peasant stock and just about everyone else’s blue bloodlines (especially if they were white folks).

  Shirley Bogucki, the wife of the sculptor Ed Bogucki, picked Eddie up at the airport in Milwaukee once early in 1991. “He seemed,” she told me, “like a really nice person. Well dressed in a suit and tie, very polite, and really into horses. We are all very horse-oriented in our house and we could talk to him forever about horses, especially about Secretariat. He was so pleased to be talking about Secretariat.”

  But despite Ed Bogucki’s best efforts to dissuade him, the groom kept saying to him, “Yes, boss. Yes, boss.” “I find it heart-wrenching,” Shirley said, “to think of what he had to do to ensure he was ‘keeping his place,’ so to speak. He was astonished to see himself in that statue. He never imagined he’d have that recognition. And I know he got a lot of satisfaction at being close to Secretariat.”

  Eddie Sweat gave an interview to Canadian Horse magazine when he was in Toronto in 1973, and the magazine subsequently ran both its writer’s questions and his answers. Readers of that piece got a real sense of the man’s voice, his dignity, his professionalism and generosity. Eddie was asked, for example, about how he handled all the fans and reporters coming around, first to Riva Ridge’s stall and then to Secretariat’s. “It’s something I’ve got to put up with,” he said, “because they both are champions. But I helped them to be famous, and they helped me be famous. You have to put up with the people asking you all kinds of questions. You don’t want to get snotty with people ‘cause people are people, and I love people.”

  The reporter had earlier noticed Eddie giving a woman a few strands of Secretariat’s mane hair. “Actually, I shouldn’t do that,” Eddie said, “but she asked me so kindly… .” Another woman asked for Secretariat’s droppings, said she was going to enclose the precious stuff in glass, and, of course, Eddie obliged when the horse did.

  The magazine asked Eddie about his finances and whether he was better off having won—with Riva Ridge and Secretariat—five of the six Triple Crown races in 1972 and 1973. Eddie sidestepped the question and alluded only to getting a higher salary than usual, but he seemed not too concerned then about wages. “Aside from money,” he said, “I’ve met more people and people respect me more now than when I was rubbing the other horses.. .. Wherever I go, there’s always someone who knows me or read about me and all that has made me feel very proud of myself, to know that there are people all over the world saying nice things about me. It’s really something to have somebody come up to me and say, ‘Are you Ed Sweat?’”

  Heady stuff for a boy who grew up picking cotton and tobacco in backcountry South Carolina. He was a posthole digger and a construction worker. Then he got close to the greatest racehorse of our time, maybe of all time, and many looking on envied him. His loyalty to his horses was deeply felt and unassailable: During a wildcat strike by backstretch workers in 1960 at Aqueduct and Belmont (bricks were tossed and one man was killed), Eddie refused to join in and looked after seventeen horses by himself. He explained then that he didn’t attend union meetings for one reason: no time. Eddie put the horses’ welfare before his own and that of his fellow workers—which is either admirable or deplorable, depending on your point of view. Undeniable is that for several years he was a celebrity groom.

  “Did it compensate?” is my question. I hope that proximity to equine greatness did compensate in some way, but I wonder if that always sustained him near the end. Eddie Sweat was working for Roger Laurin and sounding tired when he talked to the Daily Racing Form late in 1992. He had five and a half years left to live, but he was already struggling in every way.

  “Right now,” he said, “I’m just hangin’ in there; I got no choice. I’m fifty-four years old … gettin’ old, gettin’ old. I’ll take a horse over to the paddock and I’ll be out of breath half way there. But who knows? Maybe one day I’ll get lucky and come up with another big horse.”

  Ever the horseman, Eddie was hoping that luck—or a great horse—would rescue him. But if Secretariat and his long legacy could not do the job, no horse could. Eddie told a Louisville newspaper, the Courier-Journal, in 1993—just before the running of the 119th Kentucky Derby—that he h
ad earned a 1 percent take of Secretariat’s $1.3 million in track earnings. (Eddie’s friends—Jimmy Gaffney, Charlie Davis, and Gus Gray—all scoffed at this when I put it to them.) If so, that still only comes to thirteen thousand dollars. But Eddie groomed, remember, many winners over his almost forty years on the racetrack. Whatever he took home, it was enough, Eddie said then, to help him buy a house between the Aqueduct and Belmont racetracks, in Queens, New York.

  One room in that house, he said, had been set aside as a shrine to Secretariat, with memorabilia, photographs, trophies, plaques, and newspaper clippings. A china cabinet, his sister Geraldine remembers, was chock-full of silver plates, medallions, and four or five models of Secretariat. And for safekeeping, he had folded into a trunk the duds he had worn to the Derby in 1973: the plaid pants (the vivid white-black-and-red pattern that had raised the eyebrow of Penny Chen ery), the white jacket with the blue shoulder patches, and the sporty white hat. Eddie loved his lids: tweed caps, porkpie hats, floppy hats, fisherman-style hats. For twenty years, he had kept pinned inside his tack box—the one that followed him as he roamed from track to track until the life ebbed out of him—a color photograph. It was dogeared and fading, but he must have been proud of it, for he showed it to the Louisville reporter that day in 1993. The photo showed a proud groom leading the winning horse from the track on Derby day.

  “Only way that horses will win,” Eddie Sweat once told Bill Nack, “is to sit there and spend time with ‘em. Show ‘em that you’re tryin’ to help ‘em. Love ‘em. Talk to ‘em. Get to know ‘em. Now, that’s what you gotta do. You love ‘em and they’ll love you, too. People might call me crazy, but that’s the way it is.”

  This was, as far as I could determine, the man’s essential philosophy on horsemanship. Eddie had also predicted to Nack, “They’ll take me to my grave with a pitchfork in my hand and a rub rag in my back pocket.” And he was not far wrong about that.

  “My wife and I,” Eddie said in Toronto in 1973, “have a very good understanding.” He talked about how proud she was of him, how she would take the silver plates home and put them on the mantel. But think about it: Her husband enjoyed fame but not fame’s wages. If Linda Sweat, or his children—Marvin, Michelle, Tiffany, Eric— wanted to see him, often their best bet was to turn on the TV or read a magazine.

  A line leaps out from that interview in Toronto: “She’s taken it pretty well.” It sounds like some unfortunate circumstance, a death in the family, some malady requiring fortitude. Was Eddie talking about his fame? Or about his absence from hearth and home?

  His family insists that his absence was not an issue. “He was always gone,” his sister Geraldine told me, “but even his kids didn’t object. He kept in touch; he sent money home. They loved him.” When his stepdaughter, Michelle, had a baby, she named him Edward.

  Shorty Sweat had worked almost every day of his life, even into his last year, when several illnesses were consuming him. When he died at North Shore University Hospital in Manhasset, New York, on April 18, 1998, he was fifty-eight years old. There would have been, in any case, little by way of pension or benefits to look forward to in his old age; certainly no golden handshake.

  “What hurt us,” Geraldine Holman told me, “was that we was looking for someone from the track to say something at his funeral. Nobody showed up. They sent flowers, which was nice. But he had devoted his life to the track, and we expected something back.” Maybe, had a formal invitation been extended to certain owners, trainers, and jockeys, emissaries would have come. It would have meant the world to the family to have Eddie’s worth recognized, to see some respect paid, but the emissaries did not come. Rock Hill Church’s pastor gave the eulogy at Eddie’s funeral.

  Eddie’s death, said his sister, “took a toll on me. He was everything to be proud of. My brother was a kind man. He’d give you the shirt off his back. We would watch the races and we would see him. We were thrilled. We couldn’t believe that our brother was on TV!”

  The Secretariat Center—a twenty-two-acre farm for retired racehorses—opened in 2004 at Kentucky Horse Park in Keeneland. In a perfect world, there would also be Eddie Sweat Place, a retirement home for distinguished grooms who have given their lives to horses. The two places would be close by each other, the retirement home high on a hill so old grooms could watch the foals gambol in the fields of bluegrass and clover down below.

  I think of something that Ted McClain, the former trainer, told me, about how practically living with a special horse—as Eddie did with Secretariat—would force a reaction. “You’d either hate each other or love each other, one of the two,” McClain said. “You’d be so damn glad to see him go, or it would kill you.”

  When Eddie Sweat and Charlie Davis, Secretariat and Billy Silver flew to Louisville in late April of 1973 before the Kentucky Derby, Eddie was well aware that he was taking on a huge task. On the road to the Triple Crown, Eddie worked virtually round the clock— groom by day, watchman by night. He would rouse himself every half hour. “Down here,” he said at the time, “I want the job done right, so I’d just as soon do it myself. Not that I don’t trust ‘em” [hired security] but it’s my horses, and if anything went wrong, it’d be my responsibility.” My horses, and, in a way, they were his horses.

  Eddie Sweat once talked about the pressure, the lack of sleep, and the worry that were part and parcel of grooming a six-million-dollar horse. “At Louisville and Baltimore,” he said, “I was never more than twenty yards away from him. The only time I would leave him alone was when we came back here for the Belmont. Even then I’d get up at all times of the night, hoping daylight could come so I could go to work.”

  He told the Daily Racing Form in the fall of 1996, not long before he died, “I guess you could say I was his main man.” Eddie’s fondest memory of Secretariat was the last time he saw him, about 1983. Eddie told a reporter with the Lexington Herald-Leader that he had gone to Claiborne to say hello and he remembers being at the paddock fence and making the duck sound that was always part of the chatter between them. Secretariat trotted over to him and listened as Eddie spoke softly to him.

  “Do you remember when you won the Belmont by thirty-one lengths?” the groom asked his old charge. Secretariat’s response was to continue biting his wooden fencing. Eddie smiled as he told this story. He remembered aloud how, on Derby day, he had trouble getting Secretariat over to the paddock to tack him up because all the horse wanted to do was stand and pose for pictures. Eddie told the reporter that Secretariat was “an old, big ham” and “a rascal.”

  I have the sense that Shorty Sweat got a taste of something extraordinary when he was grooming Secretariat, a kind of exultation in his bones. The source was that magnificent chestnut horse and the heat and light he seemed to cast on everyone, but especially on those who got close to him. No one got closer than Eddie in 1972 and 1973. During the twenty-five years that followed, until they laid him in his grave at Vance, South Carolina, Eddie yearned to feel once more that special warmth on his face, but he never did. Some might say that a great horse is a curse, for a groom can spend the rest of his life trying to recapture the experience.

  I put to Gus Gray one night in a restaurant in Ocala, Florida, much the same question I had put to David Walker, Eddie’s nephew. Is the Eddie Sweat story a sad story or a feel-good story? “It’s both,” said Gus. Charlie Davis piped in with this thought: Long after Eddie had given up Secretariat, the groom would be nodding off to sleep at night and the face he saw in the dark was Secretariat’s. Big Red was in Eddie’s head and there was no letting go.

  There is an old saying around the racetrack: It is not what the people do to the horses that is interesting; it’s what the horses do to the people. As Gus Gray so eloquently put it, a great horse had passed through Eddie Sweat.

  THE THOROUGHBRED STALLION

  A stallion is not like other horses you can turn out with the herd so he can form his own allegiances and find his place in the hierarchy. A stallion turned out
with another stallion would fight to the death. The only contact a stallion ever gets with another horse is when he brushes the competition in a race, enjoys the company of a track pony before and after the race, or when he covers a mare at the stud farm.

  The Thoroughbred stallion, especially, is simply too valuable to risk being put out in a paddock—even with an aged gelding or two. He will never stand, as horse pals do, head-to-tail with another of his species so they can swish each other’s flies. He will never enjoy mutual grooming, each horse working the other’s body with bared and careful teeth.

  The stallion, then, is ever alone, with fences and stall boards between him and his horse brethren. He can see, smell, and hear them, but six-foot-wide pathways typically separate a stallion paddock from other paddocks, so touch is a fleeting pleasure. The stallion is a herd animal deprived of the herd.

  The Thoroughbred stallion, then, whether still active in racing or retired to stud, must find friendship, if he can, with his groom.

  8

  PILGRIMAGE

  FEBRUARY 19, 2005. At noon, I cross the border between the United States and Canada at Niagara Falls and start heading east, following the green highlighter line I have drawn on my map of New York State. Another odyssey has begun; the course is set—east, then south, to the sacred places in the lives of Secretariat and Edward “Shorty” Sweat. Every map of every other state along the way—Pennsylvania, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Florida—has been assigned its own lime green line for me to follow.