The Horse God Built

by Lawrence Scanlan

  Only a few days into my stay in Lexington, I was having supper in a Ruby Tuesday, across the road from the accommodation I had settled into. The Springs Inn is a sprawling place that also features a quiet and separate back section well away from the road. Not the quiet of Père Lachaise cemetery, but close enough.

  I had in front of me at the restaurant a great sheaf of articles photocopied in the library of the Keeneland Race Course. I was wading through the pile, pen in hand, sifting for gold nuggets. My waitress, meanwhile, had spotted the name Secretariat on one of the headlines and said she happened to have served a couple the day before who had driven all the way from Texas just to see Secretariat’s grave at Claiborne.

  “They had always been fans,” my wide-eyed server told me, certain I would want to know. My waitress was six years old when Secretariat ran, but she knew the name nonetheless; just about everyone in Lexington does. The Texans had apparently spent a lot of money on a limited-edition print of Secretariat crossing the finish line. I know the one: All four feet are off the ground and the horse looks to be flying. The couple’s pure delight in their purchase, a delight they had cheerily shared with their waitress, had remained with the young woman, and she was passing it on to me.

  A few days later, I was myself at Secretariat’s grave site. Claiborne Farm is technically closed to the public, but if you call ahead and arrange a time, one of the stud-farm managers will show you the horse’s old stall (with his name in brass alongside those of Easy Goer, Unbridled, and Bold Ruler), the ample paddock he used to gambol in, and the spot where he is buried.

  Some who bury their horses obey a time-honored ritual that sees head, heart, and hooves (and, in the case of mares, the ovaries) placed in the grave. On learning this, I chose not to dwell on the mechanics of how these body parts are separated from the whole (the awful business, someone later told me, is accomplished through instructions passed on to the slaughterhouse). In any case, what remains of the horse’s body is typically sent off to the rendering plant. Even in death, horses serve.

  On the morning Secretariat died at Claiborne Farm, groom Bobby Anderson clipped a shank on him and led him into a two-ton van. “Big Red,” Anderson whispered to him in the van, trying to soothe him. “Big Red.” The horse was then given a lethal injection of barbiturate. Anderson called it the saddest day of his life.

  It was thought that Secretariat would continue to cover mares well into the 1990s, but laminitis hastened his death at 11:45 a.m. on October 4, 1989. Laminitis is a horseman’s nightmare. Still something of a mystery but often blamed on excess grain or lush grass in the horse’s diet, obesity, hormonal imbalance, or toxemia, it comes on like a wasting disease. The hoof can literally disintegrate in a matter of days, the pain is agonizing, and the horse can no longer bear his own weight.

  Laminitis is not always a death sentence for a horse. But Secretariat had the disease in all four feet, and it must have been heart-wrenching to watch his precipitous decline. He was nineteen years old. Many remember the day Secretariat died, how flags in Lexington flew at half-mast, and the genuine grief in Kentucky and around the world that marked his passing.

  Peel back any story, and you find layers. Some stories peel like an onion, and you almost wish you had not gone that extra layer.

  I asked Penny Chenery if she was there when they buried Secretariat at Claiborne, and she told this story: “When Secretariat died, I was living in New York. I was unprepared. Seth Hancock had called me on Monday afternoon to say that Secretariat was in bad shape. On Tuesday morning, a reporter called me to ask how I felt about Secretariat’s death. I said, ‘It can’t be. Seth would have called.’ But poor Seth, he was overwhelmed. What a blow to Claiborne. Later, I heard how they had made Secretariat walk into the van where they euthanized him. He was in so much pain.”

  “What should they have done?” I asked Chenery. “What would have been better?”

  “They should have put him down at his stall,” she replied, “then used a winch to haul the carcass into the van.”

  Gus Koch, Claiborne farm manager, was shocked that Penny Chenery had such an image in her head all these years. “I was there,” he told me. “Secretariat’s hooves were not ‘practically falling off,’ as some stories suggest. It did not cause Secretariat discomfort to walk into the van, which we brought right to his stall. He’d suffered a relapse and we did the right thing by the horse. It was the most dignified thing to do. He was always handled with the utmost respect.”

  If Secretariat’s last day at Claiborne bothered Penny Chenery, so did his first day there in 1973. “Their means,” she said, “of keeping a horse off the track from being too active in his paddock is to pare his feet to where it hurts to walk. Someone took a picture of me that day at Claiborne when we gave him over. I’m walking up a hill; my back is to the camera. I couldn’t bear to watch him being led to his paddock. They could have tranquilized the horse, introduced him slowly to the paddock.”

  Gus Koch, though, says Secretariat simply had his shoes removed, and his hooves were rounded up with a rasp. To a horse who had worn shoes all his life, he says, it would have been a new sensation—like walking barefoot.

  Penny Chenery had asked Eddie Sweat if he would accompany Secretariat on the plane that day. She was in the hold of the plane; she watched as Ray Woolfe took that unforgettable black-and-white photograph of Eddie and Big Red nose-to-nose.

  “Eddie,” she said, “had a temperature. He was sick with a cold. He made the trip because I asked him to. It was a great gift.” Both Riva Ridge and Secretariat were nervous on that flight, and Eddie never once left them, moving from one to the other to comfort them.

  Later, when Ray Woolfe’s book was published, someone saw that other photograph—the one of Eddie shot from behind, weeping— and sent Chenery a poem called “Alone on the Wall.” Penny Chenery had told me about the poem and offered to send me a copy when I expressed interest in seeing it. A search through her papers proved fruitless at first. Moving from Kentucky to Colorado, she wrote in a note, “messed up my poor filing system.” But eventually, the poem did turn up.

  The thirty-two lines of rhyming couplets, by Joyce Embrey Patci, pay homage to Eddie Sweat, his artistry as a groom, and his grief that day. Woolfe’s photo speaks of a love story between a man and a horse, and Patci had clearly been moved by the image. Moved enough to compose the poem and send it to Penny Chenery in 2002. That poem, Ed Bogucki’s bronze, this book: All owe something to that photograph.

  Secretariat was like no other horse and he was accorded a rare honor: He was buried entire in a six-foot-by-seven-foot oak casket three feet high and his body was wrapped in a bolt of felt—the color of Claiborne’s yellow racing silks. The burial was a private ceremony, with about twenty people present—farm president Seth Hancock, his sister, and certain farm employees. One who was there likened it to “a death in the family.”

  Gus Koch was then the stud manager at the farm, and he stayed that night until eight o’clock, handling calls from radio stations all over the United States, Canada, and Europe. “By nightfall,” he said, “the whole area around the grave, inside the hedge, was covered in flowers. It was an amazing sight.” I could imagine the scene, an area maybe fifty feet by fifty feet thick with funereal flowers. When Secretariat was alive, some ten thousand visitors a year went to see him in his paddock. A steady stream continues today to visit his grave site. The flowers, likewise, have not stopped coming, but the bouquets are especially frequent on anniversary days: the day he was born, the days of each Triple Crown race, and the day he died.

  Eddie Sweat, meanwhile, was shattered by the death of Secretariat. “He was so out of it,” his sister Geraldine Holman remembers. “He said it was like he had lost his best friend. ‘I can’t believe my baby’s gone,’ he told me.”

  She once reproached her brother for the way he treated Secretariat. “Eddie, he’s not human,” Geraldine told him. “Yes he is!” Eddie insisted. Eddie was convinced that the horse knew what hi
s groom was telling him, and Eddie always spoke to the horse as if he did fully understand.

  When Secretariat died, Eddie cried a long time. He wouldn’t eat and went into an extended period of mourning. “He loved that horse so much,” Geraldine told me. “Secretariat was his heart. I never saw a grown person cry over an animal like that.”

  Only on autopsy was an astonishing fact revealed: Secretariat’s “great heart” was not just a turn of phrase to explain his many dramatic come-from-behind wins on the racetrack, but an anatomical fact. The horse’s heart was twice the normal size and a third larger than any horse’s heart the veterinary surgeon had ever seen.

  Dr. Tom Swerczek, research and diagnostic pathologist at the Gluck Equine Research Center at the University of Kentucky in Lexington, did the autopsy on Secretariat. “The heart was perfect,” he said at the time; “there were no defects. It was simply the largest heart I’ve ever seen. We didn’t weigh it but we visually estimated it at between twenty-one and twenty-two pounds.”

  In 1993, Dr. Swerczek did an autopsy on Secretariat’s old rival Sham from the 1973 Triple Crown races. Sham had died on April 23 of that year in his stall, the victim of an apparent heart attack. This time, Dr. Swerczek did weigh the heart. At eighteen pounds, it was the second-largest equine heart he had ever seen. Said the pathologist, “I thought it was ironic that Sham was still finishing second to Secretariat.” Poor Sham was second to Secretariat in the Derby, second to Secretariat in the Preakness, and second to Secretariat in one pathologist’s heart-size stakes.

  When Secretariat died, the New York Times ran his obituary, with cameo photo, on the front page. The writer observed that the horse had become “a symbol of brilliance and beauty beyond his breed.” But if the newspaper of record noted his passing, so, too, did the popular press. In its obituary, People magazine answered the complaint that Secretariat’s offspring were merely good, not great. Such critics, the magazine declared, “asked the impossible, for that was a task for the gods.”

  After Secretariat’s death, Penny Chenery was inundated with letters expressing condolence. “There were people who wrote to me,” she later said, “as if I had lost a son. True bereavement letters, from close friends as well as from people I’d never met. I think people understood how important this horse was to me.” When she visited the grave site not long after Secretariat was buried, there were a dozen visitors there. “It was as if they were viewing a body lying in state. Nobody caught my eye, or poked each other and said, ‘There’s the owner.’ It was as if they were on a pilgrimage.”

  Secretariat’s marker is a plain stone slab, the gray fading to white under the hot Kentucky sun, with the name Secretariat in bold type above and his years below: 1970–1989. The ground has settled a little around his grave, as if he were down there playfully pulling the earth toward him. On the day I was there, a small bouquet of white and blue silk flowers lay just to the right of the stone.

  “Did someone at the farm put those flowers there?” I asked Joe Peel, the Claiborne employee who had been the guide on my personal tour.

  “No,” he replied. “A couple were here just the other day. It was an extraordinary thing. They had come a long way and the woman just broke down at the grave. She lay over that stone and wept, just shaking and trembling. You would think her own son was buried in the ground below.” Claiborne staff are used to such outpouring of emotion, and everyone who has ever worked at this sprawling farm, with its ponds and white swans, its century oaks and gracious stone entryway, has stories to tell of men and women unraveling at Secretariat’s grave site. But this episode had clearly left its mark on my guide.

  “Was the couple from Texas?” I asked him.

  “Yes,” he replied. “I believe they were.”

  Big Red, they called Secretariat, but he was not the first big chestnut to bear that appellation. Another horse had come many decades before him, and some still call him the greatest racehorse who ever lived, greater even than Secretariat. Horse-racing sages endlessly debate the point, in the way that boxing aficionados joust over who was the greatest boxer of all time—Muhammad Ali of the modern era, or his counterpart from the 1930s and 1940s, Joe Louis.

  Those on the Man o’War side argue that the horse wore heavy iron shoes (lighter aluminum shoes came later), was handicapped by excessive weights, and ran on slower tracks. The Secretariat camp insist that their horse faced much tougher competition, recorded better times, and left a bolder legacy.

  Though the horses differed in temperament (Man o’War was tempestuous before races, while Secretariat was agreeable), there do exist some striking similarities between them. Both bore the nickname Big Red, both were tall and massive chestnuts with similar markings, a huge stride, and a voracious appetite, both were claimed to be the Horse of the Century, both had won races by staggering margins (Man o’War by one hundred lengths, Secretariat by thirty-one), both had a deep and abiding affection for their black grooms, both ended their careers by running their twenty-first, and last, races in Canada, both would ham it up and pose for photographers, and both horses were adored and accorded heroic status. It has been variously estimated that one to one and a half million people went to visit Man o’War during the twenty-seven years he lived at Faraway Farm outside Lexington. Fifty thousand people a year went to see him and to be entertained by the horse’s groom, Will Harbut, who became a celebrity, as would—albeit in a quieter way—Eddie Sweat.

  Though his bones were later disinterred and reburied under a massive statue at Kentucky Horse Park, Man o’War was first laid to rest at Faraway Farm, in what was surely the most remarkable funeral ever accorded a horse.

  A crowd (one estimate put it at two thousand people) gathered at the farm on that cold gray day of November 4, 1947. The great horse had lain in state for several days in a six-foot-by-ten-foot oak casket lined with the farm’s black-and-yellow racing colors. Man o’War died with an enormous erection, and the cloth discreetly covered that fact. The big stallion was thirty years old when he died. A picture of him taken that year ran with one of the obituaries, and what struck me was how fit he looked. Man o’War was frolicking in his paddock like a colt, and his coat had a fine sheen.

  Because the horse had to lie in state inside the farm’s stallion barn for several days, preservation became necessary, so farm staff did what few people have ever done: They embalmed the horse. The norm for humans is two pints of embalming fluid; Man o’War required twenty-three.

  Past Man o’War’s open coffin, hundreds of people slowly filed. One newspaper report noted that “some reached down quietly to touch him; others leaned far down to pat his neck or stroke his flank. Others just looked, or hoisted children high in the air to see the magnificent Thoroughbred in repose.”

  The death of Man o’War was front-page news around the world. In Kentucky, merchants wreathed their storefronts in black and teachers had their students memorize the tribute to war horses in the Book of Job: “the glory of his nostrils is terror. He breaketh up the earth with his hoof, he pranceth boldly …”)

  The funeral was broadcast live on radio nationwide, with the prominent Kentucky horseman Ira Drymon serving as master of ceremonies for the thirty-minute service. “Truly,” he told his rapt and silent listeners, “Man o’War was a memorable horse. Almost from the beginning he touched the imagination of men and, though they saw different things in him, one thing they will all remember is that he brought an exaltation into their hearts.”

  Man o’War had done for Americans of the 1920s, who were desperate for a hero after World War I, what Secretariat later did for Americans in the 1970s, when they needed respite from Watergate, Nixon, and Vietnam. Two generations fifty years apart pined for something to believe in. And those in both eras had chosen to believe in a brilliant copper horse called Big Red.

  Cameron Lawrence, writing a few years ago in The Backstretch magazine, had a nice line to describe Man o’War: “the colt the color of sunlit rum.” Joe Palmer, a great turf writer of the day
, said of Man o’War that “he was near to a living flame as horses ever get and horses get closer to this than anything else.” The starter of the Travers Stakes called the horse “so beautiful it almost made you cry, and so full of fire that you thanked your God you could come close to him.”

  When Man o’War was retired to stud in 1920, the Lexington Chamber of Commerce announced a plan for local schoolchildren to strew flowers in his path from the railway siding through town and along the route to the farm. Man o’War’s owner, Samuel D. Riddle, nixed the plan with a terse telegram: “He’s only a horse.”

  The horse, who retired as a three-year-old after setting five world records, would know only one groom, Will Harbut, for the last fifteen years of his life. Theirs was an extraordinary relationship. Man o’War died just a month after Harbut died, and many at the time believed that grief had hastened the old horse’s death. Harbut, almost surely, would have seen it as a blessing not to have witnessed the passing of his great friend. Harbut’s obituary in The Blood-Horse magazine listed among his survivors a wife, six sons, three daughters—and Man o’War.

  Those who met Will Harbut remarked on his smile, his rich baritone voice, his rumpled felt hat. In his character, in his joy, in his feeling for his charge, Will Harbut sounded for all the world like Edward “Shorty” Sweat. Will’s son Tom, who still lives in his father’s house outside Lexington, says that his father treated everyone—from the rich and the royal to the so-called common man—with the same respect and dignity. And everyone I talked to said the same thing of Eddie.

  It so happened that when I was in Lexington, the History Center was winding up an exhibition of Man o’War memorabilia. A kind and trusting curator let me in just as the place was closing for the day, and he left me alone in that expansive room, urging me to take my time. “Just close the door behind you when you leave,” he said; then he left the building.