The Horse God Built

by Lawrence Scanlan

  Willie Perry remembers, and he smiles a lot as he does. “He was a good man, I tell you what. Every time you see him, he laughin.’ When he come down here, he loves everybody. He just was a good person, real good. He loved his work, definitely, and it was shockin’ to everybody when he died. I ain’t never seen him mad. No suh. Never. He talked about Secretariat all the time, all the time. That was his big horse. He said it was his horse; he loved that horse. That was all he could talk about when he come down here, was Secretariat and Riva Ridge. My uncle thought he was a lucky man, and he never complained. Never.”

  Willie Perry, a shy, short man in his fifties, looks on as I continue flipping the pages of a book he has never seen. He is a mechanic at the garage in Vance, and he has taken the morning off to accommodate me and my project. (Charlie Davis, Secretariat’s old exercise rider and one of Eddie’s best friends, had previously given me his daughter’s telephone number in Vance, and she, in turn, gave me a number for Willie Perry and told him I would call. “The Holly Hill gang,” as Ted McClain put it, had kicked into gear.)

  “What goes around comes around” is a tired expression, but one that conveys a time-honored truth nonetheless. It occurs to me that all the people I talk to on my journey are not just being kind, though they are that, too. They know I am going to write about Eddie, so a kindness to me is a kindness to him. My hunch is that he earned in his lifetime among friends and relations a great stack of IOUs, and that seven years after dying, he is still calling them in.

  Willie Perry—destined to die of a heart attack in August 2006— this day wears blue jeans and a purple sweatshirt and smokes cigarettes on his porch. He is a man of few words, but he speaks with great affection about his maternal uncle. The man on the porch always thought his uncle had money, and if he dressed with flare, it was “for the horses.” If Shorty had a genius with horses, “he learned if off his own.” Eddie taught Willie some of what he knew, as well as Willie’s brother, Johnny, now a foreman at Belmont. “Shorty was the best, man,” says Willie Perry. “The best.”

  Holly Hill Training Center is as neat and polished as some trailer homes on these back roads are swaybacked and crestfallen. Home to almost one hundred horses, the farm’s several outbuildings and barns feel unified by their Lincoln green–colored steel roofs and the black horse weather vanes on top. The track and starting gate across the road are classy; the farm’s iron gate opens and closes to those with security passes; even the chain on the horse gate, I notice, has recently been oiled.

  This is where Eddie worked, when Lucien Laurin ran the show. Willie Perry worked here for a year and gave me some names of men who had worked with Eddie. More members of the Holly Hill gang.

  Pedro Olin is one, and I happen to meet him by the farm gate. He cannot chat long, for work on the farm tractor beckons, but he does tell me that “Eddie really loved his job and his horses. He was happy in his work.” But the man I want to talk to, Olin tells me, is Randy Jenkins, and he points out his whereabouts.

  In the ample tack room, amid the saddles and bridles, I find Jenkins, a distant cousin of Eddie’s, who worked with him before and after Secretariat. “He taught me a lot,” says Jenkins, who puts down his sandwich. “He was one of the best. A good man, a good, kindhearted man. Laughin’ all the time, never sick.”

  Randy Jenkins is a quiet man in his mid-fifties. He used to ride with Eddie in that red van and he remembers softball games and barbecues with Charlie Davis and other men from around Holly Hill. “The homeboys,” as Jenkins puts it.

  He says that Eddie had a scar on his shoulder where a horse called Bold Marker bit him: “He was a tough, rough horse. Used to tear Eddie’s clothes off all the time. That horse had bad legs, but Shorty worked on him … good leg man.” Randy keeps returning to that compliment, as if it were the nicest thing that one groom could say of another. Eddie did not repay Bold Marker’s violence with his own; he rubbed the horse’s legs and gave him back his speed.

  Randy Jenkins had heard that Eddie suffered a severe beating at the racetrack, and Eddie’s nephew David Walker later confirmed the story. It was early in Eddie’s career; he and some other backsiders were leaving the track in New Orleans to celebrate a win, when they were set upon by a group of men, robbed, and savaged. One minute, Eddie was elated by victory and had some cash in his pocket; the next, the pocket was empty and he was licking his wounds.

  I think of something Raymond Woolfe once told me, about his book on Secretariat. “The general public wants a fairy tale,” he said, “and I gave ‘em one. If I had put in all the crap I knew … I rode steeplechasers for fourteen years and I had my heart broken so many times. Horses dying, getting killed needlessly. The racetrack is an incredible theater of life. It’s a hypnotic place to many people. It’s hypnotic to me, for God’s sake. I’ll always feel like the track is home.”

  But there is a dark side to the track, said Woolfe. I had many conversations with him on the phone, and I would think he was just about to sign off, and then he would set some new course, but always come back to Secretariat, Eddie, the track, the backstretch. Thoroughbred racing both repulses and attracts, and I sensed in Ray Woolfe a genuine sadness and anger about the fate of Eddie Sweat, as if the track itself had swallowed a happy man—”always laughin’ “—and spit him out.

  But I cannot be sure. I am gathering a kaleidoscopic picture of a dead man, relying on the testimony of friends and relations who loved him. Not many of us speak ill of the dead, in any case. And if Ray Woolfe peddled a fairy tale, what mythology am I pursuing about a chestnut horse and his black groom?

  Jimmy Gaffney rode Secretariat during those dawn workouts throughout 1972 and into the summer of 1973. But during the Triple Crown run, Lucien Laurin and Gaffney had a falling-out. The rider thought the trainer was stinting in his bonus money; the trainer accused the rider of grandstanding on Secretariat. So Laurin turned to his most trusted exercise rider, the one who had ridden Riva Ridge— George (Charlie) Davis.

  I knew that Charlie Davis was a Holly Hill alumnus, that he had been as close to Eddie as anyone, but for a long time I had trouble tracking him down. My queries to the Jockey Club and like agencies led nowhere. Then the same luck that produced Ted McClain turned up Charlie Davis early in 2005.

  A friend of mine, a trick-horse trainer in Ocala, Florida, named Carole Fletcher (we had worked together on her memoir, Healed by Horses), said she would put out the word. And word came back almost immediately. Her friend and fellow trainer Danny Jenkins is a starter who also certifies horses for the starting gate. Jenkins, it transpires, is pals with a horseman in Ocala named Gus Gray, who is fast friends with Charlie Davis, who also works in Ocala. Ocala, then, will be the last, and, in some ways, the pivotal stop on my journey.

  I link up with Gus Gray at a gas station in Ocala, but I am late for our meeting—I got lost, of course. A big, round-shouldered bear of a man with a beaming smile, Gus Gray is the yearling manager at Double Diamond Farm in Ocala. He is devoting his lunch hour to hooking me up with Charlie Davis, and I follow Gus’s red LeBaron convertible to Charlie’s house (no one home) and then to the Ocala Training Center, where Charlie works and where we finally find him. As we arrive, he is supervising a small crew using a forklift to relocate a round feeder. “The number-two boss man,” as he calls himself, Charlie Davis also oversees foaling at the center.

  He is sixty-five, a grandfather to twenty-eight grandchildren and a great-grandfather to three others, yet he seems as loose and nimble now as when he rode Secretariat. I watch his face and sometimes see a toll there from a hard life; other times it strikes me that a small electrical current runs through him, as it did when he was a boy. He weighs 122 pounds, just three more than his riding weight from 1973, and his hands are big, all knuckles. Lucien Laurin, a former jockey, thought the world of him as an exercise rider and would tell all who would listen, “Watch his hands; watch his hands.” In his youth, he galloped all of Laurin’s good horses—Riva Ridge, Upper Case, Spanish Riddle, and
, of course, Secretariat.

  Davis is dressed youthfully—white ball cap, a red-checked shirt over a blue-checked shirt over a white T-shirt, with charcoal pants and new white running shoes. He has high cheekbones, a wide black mustache, shining coal black eyes: an eager, open face. And he can talk all day about Secretariat, the tales all told in his rich South Carolina dialect. Charlie will arch his upper body back and squint his eyes to make a point; he will fall into pantomimes to create pictures, make sounds to add audio to the video.

  Charlie leans against a tree near the stables at the Ocala Training Center and tells story after story. “And so, and so …” he says, linking the stories. He has two listeners, and it is hard to tell who is enjoying this more—the animated narrator or the rapt audience. I begin to worry about Gus getting back to his job, for his lunch hour is surely past.

  “Am I keeping you?” I ask Gus, who is from Alabama.

  “Oh, thas okay,” he says, delivering his one-hundred-watt smile. “I just love to hear Shorty talk.” Charlie’s nickname is one he shares with Eddie, and eventually I get my Shortys (Charlie is five four; Eddie was five five) all straightened out. Later, I will hear Charlie referred to as “Choo-Choo Charlie.” The track, it seems, has no time for real names.

  Charlie vividly remembers his first moments on Secretariat, and his impression—as he walked the horse onto the track—was of a colt who was either slothful or lame, or both. “I hear trainers sayin’, ‘That horse is sore.’ I thought he was sore. He was lazy, laid-back. When he first came from the farm—the Meadow—he was muscular, big. At Hialeah, we wanted him to see the flamingos in the fields.” Many horses spooked at the sight of these strange luminous sticks exploding by the hundreds into pink flight, swirling and turning like a fan. The idea is to expose a young horse to all sorts of unnerving distractions.

  “Secretariat,” said Charlie, “went out there like he been there ten years. I take my stick, he swish his tail. He in no hurry for nuthin. Other two-year-olds, they all down the track. I say to myself, ‘What Lucien Laurin doin’ bringin’ this big, fat, lazy son of a bitch down here for?’ Second day, same thing”—and here Charlie does a mime of a man with his eyes half-closed, as if just roused from sleep. “Only time he move when you put his feed in the tub.” Charlie makes a drumming sound with his mouth to imitate Secretariat frantically rooting around in a plastic feed pail.

  Secretariat, Charlie says, was a very smart horse. Still a baby, he nonetheless knew that a morning workout was just that—a workout, not a race. The horse was saying, as Charlie puts it, I can’t make no money in the mornin.’

  Secretariat would gently drop his head if he wanted Charlie to loosen up on the reins. Other young horses would have shaken their heads, pulled and protested more loudly. Secretariat, in a quiet, assured way, was telling his rider to relax, to take it easy, and reminding him who was in charge. Charlie will tell me over and over again— and we will get together four times when I am in Ocala—how much he wished that Secretariat could have talked. Charlie is sure the horse would have told him, I am the pilot. You is de copilot.

  Riding Secretariat, says his old exercise rider, was like riding a plane. “But not a DC-ten,” Charlie insists, “not even a seven forty-seven. He was the Concorde. When he drop that head, he comin.’”

  Charlie remembers sitting on the back of Billy Silver, Secretariat’s track pony, when Secretariat made his late charge in the Kentucky Derby. Charlie was standing in his stirrups, hand-galloping, scrubbing away, and the Appaloosa gelding did not flinch. He knew his rider was elsewhere, that his body was not to be taken seriously. Charlie also makes the point that—contrary to what has been written—Secretariat did not shun Billy Silver’s affection. They were good friends and would often graze together on the grass behind the track at Belmont.

  Charlie Davis remembers, too, walking Secretariat before the Belmont Stakes and hearing someone nearby rattle a pail. The horse rose up on his hind legs, pawed the air, then landed before circling majestically, kicking dirt and stones against the nearby sheds. A little show of power, like a wizard setting off fireworks by winking.

  Later, at Carole Fletcher’s house, I sit beside Charlie as we feast on barbecue pork and watch his old Secretariat videos. We are sitting together on a little bench, Charlie’s left leg touching my right leg, and his limb is hammering like a piston. On the screen, Secretariat is starting one of his patented charges, and Charlie makes that eeeeooooooooowwwww sound—the sound of a Spitfire, say, as the fighter plane banks and plummets to the attack. Some nights, he tells me, he will go home and pop those videos in his machine. He never tires of seeing that horse run, of reliving that extraordinary time in his life. That night at Carole’s, he arrived with his videos and Ray Woolfe’s book in its special cardboard sleeve, both items tucked under his arm as a preacher would tote his Bible.

  “Do you have every race in your head?” I ask him.

  “Yessss,” he replies.

  “Every race?” I say, pressing him.

  “Oh-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho,” he says, as if daring me to test him. The race at Garden State, November 18, 1972, for example, showed Charlie Davis what a great horse Secretariat already was and gave him an inkling of what was to come. The record showed Secretariat last of six horses at the quarter turn, fourth at the halfway point, and third three-quarters through the mile-and-a-sixteenth race. The Daily Racing Form said he “rallied boldly around horses on the final turn.” Charlie Davis has his own language to describe the move: “Excuse me, ladies and gentlemen, Secretariat is gettin’ in gear!”

  “I thank the good Lord,” Charlie tells me, “that I got on the greatest. He be my boss man! He was the horse of the century!”

  Despite their apparently modest places in the world, people like Charlie Davis and Gus Gray do not lack for confidence. They walk with a big stride and fool you with their hat-in-hand manners. Charlie says, without boasting, that he was “one of the best” exercise riders of his day. Maybe not the best, but among them. Gus boasts that he is the only black groom ever to have a race named in his honor—the Gus Gray Handicap was run, only once, at Gulfstream several years ago. Gus has written a book about his life as a groom for the legendary trainer Fred Hooper, who died in 2000 at the age of 102. (Self-published, They Call Me Gus, authored by Gray and a ghostwriter, sold some five thousand copies.)

  A self-made, self-taught man, Fred Hooper had made a fortune in the construction business and had won his first Kentucky Derby in 1945 with the first Thoroughbred he had ever owned, one called Hoop Jr. His horses would win one hundred stakes races and $55 million at the track.

  Gus left us to go back to work, but not before telling me that I should write a book about grooms—not grooms and horses, just grooms. Charlie and I went off to a modest little restaurant, where he tucked into one of his favorite meals—liver and onions—and we talked about Eddie Sweat.

  “We been through somethin,’” Charlie said. “We were like brothers.” Charlie grew up at Eutawville, a few miles northeast of Holly Hill, where his father broke horses and grew potatoes, corn, and cotton. Charlie’s friendship with Eddie dated back to 1957, when both were teenagers and working for Lucien Laurin at Holly Hill. Later, at Belmont and on the road at tracks all over North America, they would eat together, bunk together in rooms the size of a horse stall, go to the races together in the afternoons.

  “We always keep a hot plate,” Charlie said. He was the designated chef (and still fancies himself a good man in the kitchen). “And when we were short of money, we’d buy a can of beans, three or four hamburgers, a bag of rice and cook up a big pot.” He looked back fondly on the memory. “That was the good old days.”

  Both Gus and Charlie remember a time in the fifties, sixties, and early seventies when the backstretch was the domain of black people from the American South. Some trainers, perhaps superstitiously, hired only men from a certain state. Fred Hooper hired blacks from Alabama; Lucien Laurin was partial to blacks from South Carolina, and es
pecially his old haunt of Vance. Gus and Charlie saw the backstretch as a family then, and you could leave your room unlocked and everything would be there on your return. Now there are double padlocks on the doors, and the black men are mostly gone, replaced by white women and Hispanic men.

  But if the backstretch was ever a family, it was a dysfunctional one. Both men remember beatings. Gus was fifteen and working at Aqueduct when an older man held a butcher knife to his neck after Gus had refused to give him “a loan” of ten dollars. “You gonna need a friend,” the knife-wielding man said, and the scene sounded like something out of a prison movie, where the tough old con offers the younger con “protection”—for a price. Only the intervention of another racetracker saved Gus’s life.

  Fair to say that on the backstretch, you do need a friend. Charlie Davis and Eddie Sweat, two home boys from Holly Hill, were like two peas in a pod. Charlie could remember only one time when he and Eddie got angry with each other. They went to the races and did not talk for a whole day. That night, Eddie acted like nothing had ever happened. The reason for the stony silence has long since slipped Charlie’s mind.

  What he will not soon forget is Eddie’s dutiful grooming. “To Eddie, the horse was his child,” Charlie explained. “Before he go home, make sure the hay last all night. Another flake, clean water. He wash all the feed buckets like he washes dishes.” Above all, said Charlie, he set an example for the others, Charlie included, to follow. “He made me think,” said Charlie, pointing to his head. He is full of admiration and affection for his lost mate.

  “How important was Eddie to Secretariat?” I asked.

  “Eddie was his father,” said Charlie. “Any time Eddie walked that shed row and Secretariat or Riva Ridge heard his voice, the heads would come up. Both heads would come through the door.” There was magic in Eddie’s hands, and the horses knew it. Charlie made a curling, lifting motion with his right shoulder to show how Secretariat would lean into Eddie’s massage. It was “like you rubbin’ your cat at home,” Charlie said. The magic came through his fingers and that sponge.”