“You saw him with my father,” Woodward said. “He’s by Nasrullah out of Segula. That’s the one my father wanted to send to England.”
“Oh, yes,” Mr. Fitz said. “Good-lookin’ kind of a colt. Good runnin’ action. Look at that. Uses two leads at this stage. Big, too. Gonna be extra big. Oh, you can see he could be a real useful horse. Course you don’t know what’s inside him. Heart, lungs. You don’t know that. But he looks real nice right now, don’t he?”
“We have him nominated for everything,” Woodward said.
“That’s good. You never can tell.”
Then they left and Mr. Fitz went back to New York to take care of his horses, but on the way back he was thinking a little bit about the horse. There was this one double-sized stall he had at Aqueduct. It used to be two stalls, but he had broken it into one for Johnstown. Remember that? Sure. Johnstown couldn’t fit in an ordinary stall. Still got that extra big stall. Yes, it would be a good place to put this colt when he came to the track. He’d need it. You could see he was going to grow into a real big-sized horse. He had wide hips. Good, wide head, too. Plenty of spirit to him. Looked like he wanted to take your shoulder off. He walked with a little swagger, too. Didn’t mope around, sloppy-like. Well, I’ve been wrong before lookin’ at horses like this. So has everybody else. There’s only one way to tell, though. Get him to racin’ and see what happens. You won’t know for a long time. This one seems to have something you could go to work on, though.
So he began to think ahead again, to the day when he would get this colt on the race track and see what could be done with him. This was 1953 and he was seventy-nine, but now he definitely had something to keep him going.
Woodward named the horse Nashua. You could stick your fist down the horse’s throat, down to where the jaw comes out of the neck, and there would be plenty of room for it because this was a horse with a big windpipe and he could take in enough air to run for a month. He was sent out to a Westbury, Long Island, horse farm owned by John (Shipwreck) Kelly. Bill McCleary, one of Mr. Fitz’s exercise boys, went out there to break the horse for racing. This was only the fall and it would be months before Nashua got to the races and the first year wouldn’t be that important because a lot of times a horse doesn’t come around until he is three years old. This is what makes being with horses beautiful. You are always waiting for something in the future and now, as Nashua learned how to get into a starting gate and how to run around turns, Mr. Fitz was waiting and looking ahead.
The stable shipped to Florida and in February, at Hialeah, he had Nashua on the track working. People saw the horse and they asked Mr. Fitz about him. The answer was what it should be.
“Like him?” Mr. Fitz said. “I don’t know whether I like him or not. He’s only a baby and we got a long way to go. He looks like he might be a good one, but how do I know? I can’t tell if there’s anything wrong with him. He can’t tell me, either. He can’t talk, you know. And I can’t see inside him to find out what kind of a motor he’s got. I hope he’s good. But I don’t know what he’s going to be.” He then kept on with an old-time Fitzsimmons monologue on horses and life and how little anybody knows about what’s going to happen. After he was through, he gave a groom hell for throwing out too much straw while mucking out a stall and he was making demands on everybody else around him and that crutch was banging onto the ground hard when he walked. He was not interested in what happened yesterday.
Later in the year, in October, after Nashua had won several races and had lost a couple because he was green and ran that way, Mr. Fitz was standing in the infield at Belmont Park with his son John and grandson Jimmy and far up to the right Eddie Arcaro was sitting quietly on Nashua after they finished a warm-up and the horse was walking toward the starting gate. The race was the Futurity. It was to be run on a strip known as the Widener Chute. This was a running strip which bisected the main track. The horses would come straight down it to the finish line, with no turns. Because of the chute’s angle to the stands, it was nearly impossible for anybody in the crowd to make out who was ahead in a race. Mr. Fitz had always watched Futurities down the chute and it didn’t bother him. He knew what to look for.
When the race went off, he saw what he wanted. There were good horses in this race … a horse called Summer Tan, another called Royal Coinage, a good sprinter named King Hairon, and he could be tough because the race was only for six furlongs. They all came down fast. Mr. Fitz stood quietly, with the crutch under his right arm. He watched the field as it moved along. Halfway down the chute, somewhere around the pole that said there were three furlongs left, Nashua let it go. His stride became longer. His head stuck out. He was working now. Running like a big one. The horses around started to slip back. Then a little growl came from the bottom of Mr. Fitz’s throat. Then he growled again.
“Look at how he lowers his belly and goes to work,” Mr. Fitz said. There was a spark in his voice. The years had no meaning to them now. This was Sunny Jim Fitzsimmons, age anything, and he had a big horse.
Nashua slammed down the chute and won by a long neck. Arcaro, a big grin on his face, brought the horse back to the winner’s circle. Woodward was there and so were the photographers and there were big trophies for everybody, and Arcaro was saying that this big dude is a real runner.
Mr. Fitz was walking out of the infield. A brown-uniformed Pinkerton swung open a part of the rail so he could walk through and as Mr. Fitz came up the Pinkerton said, “Congratulations, Mr. Fitz. Looks like a real good one, doesn’t he?”
“Thank you. Oh, he looked all right today. But we got a long way to go, you know. I want to get back to the barn and see what he looks like right now.”
Mr. Fitz walked through the gap onto the track and headed for the car in the parking lot so John could drive him back to the barn and he could have the groom walk Nashua around in front of him so he could look close and make sure the horse came out of it all right. Then he would sit down and watch them rub the sweat off the horse and cool him out with water and he’d have plenty of orders to give. No, he was certainly not going into the winner’s circle. The barn was his winner’s circle.
And as Mr. Fitz made his way across the track, Slim Sully leaned against the iron rail around the crowded winner’s circle and looked at Nashua. Then Sully pointed over to Mr. Fitz and he smiled.
“Look at him,” Sully was saying. In what other business could an eighty-year-old man win something called the Futurity?”
Everybody used the line the next day in the papers. It was more than just a line. Mr. Fitz, they knew then, had a future going for him after that race and because of this, when you talk to a friend of Mr. Fitz’s today about Nashua, the friend will smile a little and talk a lot about the horse and remember a lot of things about him. All of them will. Nobody ever will forget the part Nashua played in Mr. Fitz’s life.
2. A Mistake … and a Big Day
WITH NASHUA, MR. FITZ, at eighty, started what amounted to another career. It was to lead to what is, as far as winning a horse race goes, the most important single victory of life. It came in 1955, when Nashua was a three-year-old. And it started with Mr. Fitz making a mistake.
Nashua had rolled up the field in important races in Florida early that year, winning the Flamingo at Hialeah and the Florida Derby at Gulfstream. In April, at Jamaica race track, he hooked up with Summer Tan in the Wood Memorial, run two weeks before the Derby. Nashua nearly filled hospitals that day. With Eddie Arcaro suspended for a riding infraction, Ted Atkinson was on Nashua. Atkinson was on a lot of horses and in a lot of tough races in his years. But the ride he had on Nashua in the Wood Memorial was something he can recall today, step for step. It made that kind of an impression on him. When he retired and wrote a book, Ted spent a whole chapter telling of the race.
Nashua started off by nearly throwing Atkinson while they were going to the gate. At the start he boiled out first, then sloughed off, and Summer Tan, with Eric Guerin up, took the lead. A good lead, too. He had
a couple of lengths on Nashua. He wouldn’t give it up, either. The rest of the horses in the race meant nothing as Nashua chased Summer Tan around the turn, all down the backstretch, around the turn again and into the stretch. With an eighth of a mile left, it was Summer Tan’s race. With a sixteenth of a mile left, it was Summer Tan. Nashua started to pick it up a little, but it was too late. John Fitzsimmons was standing in the infield, behind the mutuel board, watching them come down. When they ran in front of the mutuel board and he couldn’t see them any more, he put his head down. That’s that, he said. There were only 70 yards left in the race when the horses went out of his view. There was no way for Summer Tan to lose. Even today, when you sit and watch a movie of the race, you would reach into your pocket and take out money and bet it that Nashua isn’t going to catch Summer Tan when they are 70 yards from the wire.
But he caught him. With about seven whopping lunges, Nashua cut down the distance between Summer Tan and himself. Each one of them edged that nose closer to Summer Tan. Then with one swoosh, Nashua went under the wire a nose in front. In the stands, people dropped cigarettes. Eddie Arcaro, watching the race up on the roof, yelped.
“He win it, didn’t he?” he shouted to people with him. “He win it, didn’t he?”
It was the same in the jockeys’ room. The little guys who ride horses and accept thrills as being commonplace were hopping around and shouting to one another. There had not been this kind of excitement over a horse race for fifteen years.
“He drew it kind of close, didn’t he?” Mr. Fitz kidded people. Then he had John drive him home. It was a great win. Now he proceeded to make a mistake that he always talks about. He wants to make sure he punishes himself for it.
Mr. Fitz made arrangements for Nashua, the sure champion, to be shipped to Churchill Downs for the 1955 running of the Kentucky Derby with groom Al Robertson, exercise boy Bill McCleary, stable foreman Bart Sweeney, and John Fitzsimmons. Jockey Eddie Arcaro would be down the day before the Derby. Trainer James E. Fitzsimmons would stay at home and handle the whole thing over the telephone. The trip to Louisville didn’t interest him at all. As he puts it, after all, what good can I do down there? The horse just needs a little breezing and then it’s up to him and Arcaro. I can see the race on television better than I can at the track down there. It’ll save me a long trip.
“I don’t ship too good any more,” he told everybody.
Mr. Fitz didn’t know much about the other horses in the race, but he didn’t see how that mattered. Summer Tan was the tough one. He had to be watched. There was this horse named Swaps from the coast, but fellows who were around horses told Mr. Fitz that Swaps was a good mile or a mile-and-an-eighth horse, not the kind of a horse who would be strong enough for the mile-and-a-quarter Derby. Distance, of course, was Nashua’s game. He figured to be strongest of all at the end.
The night before the race, Mr. Fitz was on the phone with Arcaro. “Cater to Summer Tan,” he said.
The next afternoon, in an office at Belmont Park, Mr. Fitz sat and watched the Kentucky Derby on television. Eddie Arcaro followed his orders perfectly. He stayed off the pace, which was set by Swaps, and kept looking for Summer Tan. He looked for Summer Tan on the backstretch. He looked for Summer Tan into the final turn. Willie Shoemaker, his rear end up in the air as he coasted along, had Swaps moving freely. He was saving plenty of the horse. At the top of the stretch, Arcaro looked for Summer Tan again. He still couldn’t find him. So he started after Swaps. He got to Swaps all right. He lapped onto him at the eight pole. Shoemaker, with plenty of horse under him, now set Swaps down. The California horse had a big kick in him. He simply ran away to win by a length and a quarter.
Down in Louisville, Mr. Fitz’s grandchildren, Kathleen and Jimmy, had tears in their eyes. But in Belmont Park, Mr. Fitz said simply, “I’m sorry for the horse that he lost. Don’t be too hard on him. You know, I figure I chucked it for him.”
Without making any long speeches he made sure everybody knew he had made a mistake. As bad as a man can make. Then he went home and watched television. But this was one loss, as they say, that he was not going to take easily.
After the race, Swaps was shipped back to California. Nashua went on to win the Preakness and the Belmont, but it didn’t seem to matter. All you read about was Swaps. This was the California wonder horse. He was owned by Rex Ellsworth, a cow rancher, and trained by Mesach Tenney. Ellsworth and Tenney wore Levis, said horses were stupid animals and all this extra treatment people give race horses is a waste because they don’t need it. This was completely opposite from anything Mr. Fitz ever had done. When Swaps came back from a workout, Tenney and Ellsworth were saying, they used a water hose on him, then let him dry in the sun and put him in the stall. Rubbing? That’s for humans. This is a dumb animal. All horses are.
“He has his hay and grain and a good bed to sleep on,” Tenney said. “The same as with humans, anything else you give him may be detrimental.”
Mr. Fitz said nothing. Swaps was the wonder horse, he was being trained in a new modern way, and he had beaten Nashua. What could you say?
In July, Nashua was shipped to the Arlington Classic in Chicago, which he won. Swaps was scheduled to come to Washington Park on August 20 for the American Derby. Since both owners, Woodward and Ellsworth, were not against shipping to Chicago for normal races, it gave a couple of people ideas.
One was actor Don Ameche. He had been at race tracks betting horses through most of his adult life. He knew Ellsworth from the Coast. He also knew publicity-conscious Ben Lindheimer, owner of Chicago’s Washington Park. It was a simple idea: put Swaps and Nashua in a match race. Lindheimer went for it. Ameche contacted Woodward and Ellsworth. Everybody agreed. The date was set for Wednesday, August 31. It would be $100,000, winner take all, at a mile and a quarter.
They unloaded Nashua from a train at Saratoga on July 18, a Monday, and Mr. Fitz was there waiting for him. He now had a little over five weeks to get Nashua ready for the race of his life. He talked quietly and never made much of what was going on.
Nashua was muscled up, as Mr. Fitz says, when he started working for the match race. So he simply had the horse lumbering along on the deep training track, called the Oklahoma at Saratoga, putting in a two-mile gallop, then another, then a mile gallop, with no particular time called for. Then in August he sent Nashua three-quarters of a mile in 1:17 2/5 and then another three-quarters in 1:15. These are racing times and most people don’t know what they mean, but as Mr. Fitz sat in his stable office and looked at the typewritten workbook for Nashua and checked the times each day and then planned for the next, the figures were his life. They meant everything to him. He was pointing the horse for one thing: he wanted Nashua to be screw-tight on August 31 and he wanted to have the horse throw the fastest first three-quarters of a mile possible. It was a match race at a mile and a quarter, but every match race he had ever seen in all his years on the race track was strictly a test of speed from the start. “Make the other horse crack,” he kept saying.
Arcaro agreed, even to the extent that his fellow jockey, Con McCreery, voiced wonder at the fact that Eddie was practicing starts as a green kid would in the week before the match race.
The arrangements called for Nashua to be shipped to Washington Park on Friday, August 26. On the Saturday before that, August 19, Mr. Fitz was sitting in a folding chair under a big tree in the paddock at Saratoga and only a couple of people were around him. The crowd walking around the treeshaded paddock was clustered about the horses who were being saddled for the next race, looking for betting information. When the horses went out for the race, the fourth of the afternoon, everybody followed them and the place was empty except for Mr. Fitz and a couple of sports writers who were talking to him. This was good, because then you could see, with no crowding, something you would remember all your life.
From the stable area, coming in the same way they bring a heavyweight champion into the ring, four grooms walked Nashua toward Mr. Fitz. Al Robertso
n led him. Then there was a groom named Chico and another one named Andy and exercise boy Bill McCleary. They all had towels and were waving them around Nashua to keep the flies away.
“The last time I saw anybody come in like this it was Dempsey getting into the ring at Chicago,” somebody said to Mr. Fitz.
“Well, he’s a nice horse and there’s a lot of flies around here and I kind of like to treat a horse right,” Mr. Fitz said. But he had a little smile. This is the big leagues, son, the smile said.
Eddie Arcaro, in a white T-shirt and riding pants, walked up to Mr. Fitz, leaned over and talked to the old man. Then he threw his cigarette away, put the toe of his boot into Robertson’s cupped hand and hopped up onto Nashua’s back with that little feather motion jockeys have.
Arcaro started walking Nashua toward the track. When the fourth race was over, Eddie and Nashua came on and Freddy Capposella, the public address announcer, said that Nashua was now on the track for his last public workout before going to Chicago to face Swaps in the match race of the century. Arcaro and Nashua lumbered along in front of the stands, moved around the turn, and on the backstretch Eddie’s rear end came down and his arms started to pump and Nashua took off. There is a teletimer on the mutuel board which gives the time for the race as it progresses and it started to click off as Nashua moved. Clockers were catching it, too. Only they were breaking it down into fractions for each eighth of a mile, and as Nashua moved, they caught him and after a couple of furlongs they started talking.
Sunny Jim Page 2