The Horse God Built

by Lawrence Scanlan

  I did take my time. I learned that Will Harbut was a native Kentuckian, born on Parker Mills Road, six miles from Lexington. I pored over the clippings, the framed art, the glass case full of Man o’War and Will Harbut memorabilia—a ceramic ashtray, a set of playing cards in a leather case, a Lucite paperweight, a tape measure, a commemorative stamp… . But I spent most of my time staring at the cover photograph of the September 13, 1941, issue of The Saturday Evening Post. There they were, Harbut on the left, Man o’War on the right, old friends embracing.

  Then twenty-four years of age, the horse has buried his head in Harbut’s chest and he has a soft look in his eye—like a baby curled up with his daddy. Harbut, then fifty-six, wears the tattered hat that was his trademark, and his smile conveys gladness and pride. (He once said that even were he offered the job of president of the United States, he would stick with grooming Man o’War—”the mostest horse,” as he called him.) There is between horse and groom all this: trust, affection, loyalty, comfort, understanding, and a level of knowledge and intimacy that many long-married couples would envy. Will Harbut was Man o’War’s valet, nurse, physical therapist, cook, caretaker, provider, lawyer, chauffeur, spokesman, and, most important, his friend.

  The world of racing has many such stories that express a heartfelt connection between one horse and the human closest to him—usually the groom. Dan Williams, groom to the tragic filly Ruffian, was undone by the horse’s death, Raymond Woolfe told me. “Dan loved Ruffian,” he said, “in the way that Eddie Sweat loved Secretariat.”

  The Ruffian story is one of the saddest in all of racing, a drawn curtain around an era in racing that featured the big three of Secretariat, Seattle Slew, and Affirmed. This stunning dark bay filly— Walter Farley once remarked that, her sex and color aside, hers was the image he had in his head when he wrote The Black Stallion series—broke her right front leg running in 1975 in a match race at Belmont, where she is buried. Ruffian was operated on, but the poor frantic horse compounded her injuries by her thrashing as she awoke from the anesthesia. Finally, her owner—shattered by the experience—asked the vets to end the filly’s suffering. Like some great Egyptian queen, her body was wrapped in white cloth and laid in a twelve-foot-square grave, her head pointing toward the finish line.

  Going into that race, Ruffian was undefeated, and in nine of her ten races, she broke or equaled track records. Her average margin of victory in those starts was a numbing eight lengths. The Daily Racing Form called her “invincible,” The Blood-Horse called her a “wonder,” and the New York vet who examined her before the match race called her the most perfectly conformed horse he had ever seen. Her opponent in the match race was Foolish Pleasure, a grandson of Bold Ruler, Secretariat’s sire.

  On a Monday evening, when the races of the day were finished at Belmont, three dozen or so members of what was called Ruffian’s “human family”—stable help, grooms, exercise riders, the jockey, the owners—looked on as a hydraulic lift gently lowered the filly into the ground. Hundreds of backstretch workers who had come to pay their own respects looked on from a discreet distance. The trainer, Frank Whiteley, fussed with two blankets laid on her body and smoothed them out. Someone tossed flowers into the grave, the ground was covered over, and a huge horseshoe wreath was laid over the top.

  Enter, stage left, yet another tall chestnut horse with star quality. He is Big Ben, the only great horse I ever got close to. And the human desire to get close to greatness, I would argue, may lie at the heart of the enduring magnetism of some horses, such as Secretariat, Man o’War, and Ruffian.

  Ben was 17.3 hands high, eight feet tall at the ears—so he was always looking down on humans from an imperious height. In the markings on his head, in his coloring, the expression in his eye, he looked a lot like Secretariat.

  Big Ben’s rider was the gifted Canadian show jumper Ian Millar. And no one would question Ian’s feelings for that horse or Ian’s sense of good fortune that this giant Belgian Warmblood—arguably the greatest show-jumping horse who ever lived—had come to Millar Brooke Farm, located near Perth, in southeastern Ontario. But it was Big Ben’s tiny groom, Sandi Patterson, who loved, and knew, the horse best.

  She slept, as a rule, in an apartment over Ben’s stall, the better to hear his rustling in the dark and the better to respond when his movements broke with routine. On the road, at competitions all over Europe and North America, Sandi sometimes slept on a cot in front of his stall as a security precaution (against someone inadvertently or strategically feeding the horse something that would show up on drug testing and cause his elimination). Sandi’s physical tasks around the horse were many, her hours killing, her devotion during the seven years she was charged with his care unstinting. But her most important task, and she had it round the clock, was watchfulness on a scale hard to imagine.

  I do not just mean vigilance about heat in the horse’s legs or a slight loss in appetite, or a change in mood or sleep patterns. All that is a given. What Sandi Patterson had to watch out for were signs, even subtle ones, of colic. The bowels of a horse are like a ninety-foot jumble of garden hose, and whatever the horse consumes must make it through that maze. A blockage, a twist in the bowel, can cause the same sort of stabbing, leveling pain that women feel at childbirth (or so some vets surmise). Colic is the number-one killer of horses, and in 1990, Sandi Patterson had to witness Big Ben’s first attack. One of the terrible aspects of colic is that one attack seems to invite more, as if nature has detected a flaw or weakness and feels compelled, sooner or later, to weed it out.

  Ten months later, there came a second attack, but Ben rebounded mightily from both surgeries. He was named Canadian show-jumping champion after the first one, and after the second, he won the most lucrative and hotly contested show-jumping prize in the world—the du Maurier International Grand Prix, at Calgary’s Spruce Meadows. (The event is now called the CNN International, with one million dollars in prize money offered.)

  In 1994, after ten years of competition, after consecutive and unprecedented World Cup titles in the late 1980s, after forty Grand Prix victories and $1.5 million in earnings, after representing Canada at three Olympic Games, it seemed that Big Ben had lost the desire to compete. For the first time in his life, the paddock beckoned to him more than the Millar Brooke horse van. Time was he would kick his stall boards if the van left without him. For five years, the old gelding enjoyed his retirement, his grass, snoozing in the sun.

  Finally, a third bout of colic killed Ben the morning of Saturday, December 11, 1999. He was twenty-three years old. A photograph in the Ottawa Citizen shows Sandi Patterson, Ian Millar, and his wife, Lynn Millar, at the grave site—a little hill overlooking the paddocks. The three are huddled together, huddled against cold and grief and exhaustion, and their eyes are red from crying.

  Ian had chosen a spot north of the house. Just as he could look out all those years and see Ben grazing in his paddock, now he would see his grave in the distance. As they dug with the backhoe that day, they were surprised to encounter the stone foundation of the original farmhouse, which seemed to them a fitting coincidence. One old foundation would join another. They laid over the grave a massive and rugged boulder the color of dark copper—Ben’s color in the rain. The stone had been picked beforehand in anticipation of this day.

  Twenty-three years of age is a full lifespan for a competition horse. But knowing that a great horse’s death is imminent and accepting it are two different things. “You know it’s coming,” Ian said at the time, “but the impact of it is fairly indescribable.”

  The night before he died, Ben had engaged in a boisterous game of tag around the jumps with Ian in the indoor ring. The yet-frisky old horse would rise up on his hind legs during these games, which were not for the faint of heart. Finally, play over, Ben grabbed Ian by the collar and gave him a friendly shake.

  Sandi, for her part, had been an integral part of a championship team for many years. But the intensity of the experience, the virtua
l homelessness, all that travel had put Sandi’s private life on hold. I wondered, Did she ever have second thoughts about the sacrifices made for a horse?

  When I asked her just that in the summer of 2005, just days after a life-size bronze of Ian and Ben was unveiled in a park in Perth, Sandi was unequivocal: “I would not give away one second of what I did with him. As far as I was concerned—because I loved him so much—I was the luckiest person in the world. I was close to greatness, and it’s still paying me back.”

  “How so?” I asked her.

  “I wanted to live up to his expectations,” Sandi replied. “My time with Ben made me a better person. Before I would do something, make some big decision, I would ask myself, Would Ben like this? Or would he be horrified?” Her answer gave me a frisson, for Tom Wade had told me virtually the same thing about Seattle Slew.

  Sandi has been back to Ben’s grave site only once; the spot still stirs up too much emotion. Six years after his death, she still grieves for him. Sandi remembers too well a dusk tribute at the site a month after Ben was buried. Farm staff had formed a huge horseshoe-shaped pyre of wood, which was lighted at dusk as a trio of female folk-singers from Perth sang “Wind Beneath My Wings”—a Bette Midler song that Ian had adopted years before as one that best captured their relationship. Hundreds looked on, each one in tears. Photos just inside the Millar Brooke farmhouse capture the moment’s dramatic colors—the yellow of the fire, the dramatic dark blue of the sky. When I first saw the photos, I thought they were aerial shots of a volcano erupting, not a mournful good-bye to a beloved horse.

  KNOWING HORSES

  “Who really knows horses? The people who work with them— workers. In 1875, the year of the first Derby, those workers were former slaves, the men who had been entrusted with the horses’ care back on the plantation, who had lived with the animals, in some cases slept under one roof with them, as Secretariat’s black groom, Eddie Sweat, slept with his horse the night before the Preakness in 1973. Today, in the United States, it is getting harder to find people of any color who know horses in this way.”

  —John Jeremiah Sullivan,

  “Horseman, Pass By” in Harper’s magazine, October 2002

  EPILOGUE

  IN PRAISE OF A BOND

  A GROOM’S-EYE VIEW of a champion horse; the Thoroughbred racetrack as seen from the lowest rung on the ladder—that’s a short, fair description of the book in hand (and, as far as I know, no one has written such a book), but it was not the book I set out to write. In the beginning, my focus was on Secretariat. But as I researched and wrote over the years, as I traveled—to Kentucky and Virginia, to South Carolina and Florida—I became as enamored of the horse’s groom as I did of the horse himself.

  Though I had written several horse-related books, I came to the world of Thoroughbred racing with much to learn. Mine was quite literally a journey of discovery. As I immersed myself in track lore, as my education on the blood horse continued, my focus began to shift toward the people of shed row. This was Eddie Sweat’s domain, his home away from home. I began to see Secretariat through the eyes of his groom, and Eddie Sweat as perhaps the horse might have seen him.

  I remember sitting in a strip-mall restaurant in Ocala, Florida, with Charlie Davis, Secretariat’s exercise rider and one of Eddie Sweat’s closest friends. He was getting teary-eyed as he talked about his old pal and their times on the road with Secretariat. Charlie’s hot meal got cold as he described Eddie’s love for that horse. Eddie, he said, was like a father to that red horse and that horse loved that man as a child loves his father.

  Charlie also said—and this would remain with me—that Eddie set an example for everyone on shed row to follow. Charlie had noticed that Eddie would wash the feed buckets as if he were washing dishes for his own family, and the care and diligence he brought to all his tasks as groom got Charlie to thinking. Maybe I can do better as an exercise rider, I understood Charlie to say. Eddie had that effect on a lot of people, and that list would come to include me.

  He lived his life with horses as if guided by a simple but profound mantra: Love your horse, and your horse will love you. I have thought of him countless times as I brushed my own horse. What would Eddie have done? is a question I often ask myself in response to my horse. One day while I was grooming him after a ride, Dal displayed petulance—as I lifted one foot to clean it, he shot the hoof back and forth a few times—when a second bran muffin was not forthcoming. On other days, I might have tapped him on the chest or spoken sharply to him; this time, I just gave him a look of disappointment and told him there was no need for that. His grumpiness was shortlived: I would head him off at the pass with praise whenever he refrained, and he soon stopped doing it altogether.

  Simply trying to emulate one of the finest grooms who ever lived has meant a small change in my relationship with my horse. I have had Eddie and Secretariat in my head for years, and the effect has been to raise the bar in my own stable. I am a more demanding horseman but a more considerate one, too, and I dare presume, as Eddie did with Secretariat, that Saroma Dark Fox Dali understands every word I say.

  When Ted McClain and Charlie Davis, when Ray Woolfe and Bill Nack spoke of the Sweat-Secretariat partnership, they sometimes found it hard to describe without emotion. And this is thirty-three years after the fact. A human and a horse had forged a rare bond, and its memory for these men is still keen and heartfelt.

  A small black-and-white photograph in Woolfe’s book shows Eddie leading Secretariat past the crowd and out onto the track for that last race at Woodbine on October 28, 1973. Eddie wears his porkpie hat and wild checkered pants, Secretariat a white cooler. And as they are walking, Eddie has turned to the horse and looks to be saying something, and the horse has turned his head to Eddie. They appear to be chatting. For man and horse, the onlookers arrayed on either side of them—many of them clapping and cheering—do not exist. The exquisite horse, his devoted groom, both caught in casual conversation.

  When Eddie Sweat died, his family hoped and expected that someone from the track—an owner, say, or a trainer who had employed him, a jockey or two, some white folks of stature—would come to Rock Hill Church, near Vance, South Carolina, and speak to the black congregation on his behalf. No one did. The racetrack seemed not to have noticed his passing.

  This book is not a eulogy to Eddie Sweat. I hope what I have written will be seen as a paean to the horse–human bond. Yet maybe in a small way, it is a eulogy. This book honors a man who honored a horse. A great man, a great horse.

  Acknowledgments

  Kevin Hanson in Toronto had a notion many years ago that the story of Secretariat should be revisited, and that I was the one to do the revisiting. While this book bears little resemblance to the book we talked about then, the project started with our chat over coffee, and I am grateful for his faith and persistence.

  Several people read various versions of the manuscript over the years, and I thank them for their diligence: my wife and perennial first editor, Ulrike Bender; my track-hound friend, David Carpenter; my eventing-coach cousin, Kathi Bayly; two trainers and veterans of the Thoroughbred racetrack—Kathie Roller-Stell and Sherrie-Lee Hawley.

  The book was also blessed to have two very fine editors—Ellis Trevor at Thomas Dunne Books in New York, and Jim Gifford at HarperCollins in Toronto. Each brought to the task his high standards, his creativity, and his enthusiasm. I owe a great deal of thanks to everyone at Thomas Dunne Books, including designer Rob Grom, production editor Frances Sayers, publicist Joan Higgins, and especially copy editor Carol Edwards.

  Librarians helped this book immensely, especially Phyllis Rogers at Keeneland and Jenifer Stermer at Kentucky Horse Park. It is astonishing what archival material resides in these libraries, and I hope all the clippers and keepers there go on clipping and keeping. Many newspapers and magazines helped me understand the lives of grooms and great racehorses, including the Daily Racing Form, the Blood Horse magazine, the Courier-Journal in Louisville, Kentucky
, the Herald-Leader in Lexington, Kentucky, Sports Illustrated, Time,Newsweek, Practical Horseman, Western Horseman, the Backstretch magazine, Thoroughbred Record, Thoroughbred Times, Mid-Atlantic Thoroughbred, Thoroughbred Daily News, the New York Times, Harper’s magazine, HorseCare Magazine, Canadian Horse magazine, Dressage Today, Equus magazine, the Associated Press, the Journal-News in Hamilton, Ohio, the San Francisco Chronicle, Kentucky Derby magazine, and Spur magazine.

  Anthony J. Schefstad’s Ph.D. thesis, The Backstretch: Some Call It Home, was invaluable for its detailed portrayal of the life of racetrack grooms.

  Bill Nack and Raymond Woolfe, Jr.—the two prime biographers of Secretariat—were very generous with their time and their insights. Ray Woolfe’s stunning images of Eddie Sweat and Secretariat helped shape this book, and I am grateful for their inspiration.

  Thanks to: Sonny Sadinsky for the loan of the photo showing Charlie Davis at Saratoga Springs; Amy Gill for showing me around at the Fasig-Tipton sale in Lexington; Ted McClain for loaning me his box of clippings, and Penny Chenery for sending along some of hers; Carole Fletcher for helping me track down Charlie Davis in Ocala, and Gus Gray for literally taking me to him; Jimmy Gaffney for the photos; Danny Jenkins for his lessons at the starting gate; Sherrie-Lee Hawley for letting me tag along for a day (make that a dawn) in her life and for the gift of an exquisite framed photograph of Secretariat being led by Eddie Sweat; Alison Woodbury for keeping me on track; Tonja Cota for the Sweat family genealogy, and the Bogucki family—Ed, Shirley, and Katherine—for all their help.