“Eleven and a fifth,” Frenchy Schwartz said. “Eleven and three fifths. Eleven and four fifths. Oh, what is he doing with this horse? This is time for a sprint champ. He’s supposed to be getting ready for a mile and a quarter. There you go again. Twelve and two … Thirteen … Twelve and four. This is crazy.”
Out on the track, Arcaro was a white piece of Nashua’s motion and as they moved the big crowd began to start a loud Oooooh! Then it became louder and now it was a roar as Nashua busted down the backstretch and into the turn. Arcaro kept him going and the people kept yelling until Arcaro eased up and Nashua slowed down for the rest of the work. You didn’t have to know a thing about racing. It could have been your first time at the races. It didn’t matter. You knew this horse was running like hell.
After the workout, Arcaro brought Nashua back to Mr. Fitz and he was not just a guy coming from a workout.
“How’d it go, Eddie?” Mr. Fitz called up to him.
Arcaro jumped down and almost shouted. “Wonderful,” he said. “Just wonderful, Mr. Fitz.”
He was a little excited now and he turned to the other people and said, “Maybe that other horse is a super horse, like they say. If he is, then forget it. But if he’s just another real good race horse, then he’s going to have some time with this dude.”
The grooms had a white blanket over Nashua and one of them was giving him some water to drink and the others kept shooing away flies. At the stable they would rub him down with liniment, cool him out, and treat him as if he were royalty. That was Mr. Fitz’s way to train a race horse.
Clockers and racing writers didn’t know about that. They thought Mr. Fitz had lost the touch.
“I don’t know what it is,” Bill Corum wrote, “but he is ruining this horse’s chance. He is training him for a six-furlong sprint and out in Chicago that machine from the Golden Slopes of the West is oiled up for the same mile and a quarter distance that found Nashua wanting in the Kentucky Derby.”
Mr. Fitz shrugged. On August 24, Nashua was put into a private car attached to the New York Central’s Pacemaker, with Mr. Fitz following a couple of days later.
There had not been a horse race in years to produce such interest. The track was filled with television people and newspapermen from all over the country in the days before the race. They talked about what the horses ate, what their habits were, what they did each day. But mostly they wrote about the new and the old of racing—the Ellsworth-Tenney way to take care of a horse and get him ready, and the old way of Mr. Fitz. They made a lot out of it and nearly everybody was picking Swaps to run off and hide. That was all right with Mr. Fitz. Two days before the race, when he looked at Nashua, he didn’t think there was anything alive which could beat him.
Al Robertson walked Nashua around the infield turf course and in front of the crowded stands that day for a rehearsal of their saddling procedure. The horses were to be saddled in the infield, in front of the stands, and Mr. Fitz wanted the horse to get used to the new surroundings. In the middle of the walk, Nashua stopped. He looked around. Then he went right up into the air on his hind legs, his mane tossing, his head high, tugging at Robertson’s grip on the reins. Robertson held him tight, then got him to come down. A few yards later, Nashua did it again. He came down, walked a while, then went up again. He did this four times and he had the groom scared stiff.
“If he does it again, he’ll go right over backwards,” Robertson said.
“That’s his idea of playin’,” Mr. Fitz said. “He rares up when he wants to play. I don’t like that. He could get hurt. Keep a good holt on him.”
When they got Nashua back to the barn safely, both Robertson and Mr. Fitz could relax. And smile a little. They knew what the rearing up meant. This was a horse who was so fit he was bursting with energy he had to get rid of.
The race was for Wednesday afternoon. It rained on Monday night and kept right on raining through Tuesday. On Wednesday, papers all over the country had stories about the race and it was all you heard of around Chicago. The tension was all over the track as the match race of the century was about to be held on a muddy track that was drying in spots.
At noontime, Frank Graham said to Red Smith, a columnist friend of his, “Let’s walk over and wish Mr. Fitz luck.”
“Oh, no,” Smith said. “Don’t go near him now. We better leave him alone. The last thing they’ll want around is people.”
“Just for a minute,” Graham said.
He and Smith walked quietly and solemnly to Barn A, went down the shedrow and stepped into the tack room at the end of the barn to see Mr. Fitz. They went as solemnly as if they were in a church. And Mr. Fitz, the nervous man who needed quiet, was sitting with John and they both were eating sandwiches and having a glass of milk. Mr. Fitz looked up at the visitors and said, “Why didn’t you tell us you were coming around? We’d of gotten a sandwich for you. Well, it’s too late for you now. I’m going to eat this and then I’m going to roll right over on that cot and take a nap for myself and you can take this damn match race of yours and do anything you want with it. I’m going to take a nap.”
Then he joked with Graham and Smith and they left. They thought it was hard to believe. And Mr. Fitz took his nap. Later, at 5 P.M., he was in the infield, Nashua alongside him. Eddie Arcaro came out and the two of them walked off by themselves a little and Eddie, his arms folded, listened to Mr. Fitz. They both talked about what to do.
“Just keep Swaps busy,” Mr. Fitz said. “If Swaps gets off first, you go right after him. Don’t let him take it easy at all. Run from the jump. You should be all right.”
Arcaro nodded. Then he unfolded his arms and went over and got on Nashua and Mr. Fitz tugged at his bowtie and started walking across the track to a box seat they had set up for him.
A little earlier, in the red brick convent of St. Benedict Joseph Labre Church on 118th Street in Richmond Hill, Long Island, the sister superior had mentioned to one of her nuns that Mrs. Dolan, who lived over on 114th Street, was sick and should be visited. The sister superior was a great believer in the corporal works of mercy. And while you’re going, the sister superior said, you might bring Sister Anella with you. She almost said, bring Sister Nashua with you, which is what everybody else in the convent was calling Mr. Fitz’s granddaughter.
Mrs. Dolan, on 114th Street, was most assuredly not well, but by the same token she also was not at death’s door. So she thought a little television might be nice while the two sisters from St. Benedict’s visited her. The best program being televised at this hour happened to be the Swaps-Nashua race from Chicago. So as Eddie Arcaro took his big guy to the post at Washington Park, Sister Anella sat on the floor in front of Mrs. Dolan’s TV set in the living room in Richmond Hill and held out her fingers so she could start snapping them the minute the race began.
On the parade to the post, Arcaro kept tugging at the reins, getting a feel of Nashua and then looking down at the track. There were paths in it. These are patches of solid footing you can find in a race track here and there among the rows of mud when a track is drying a little. He kept looking at the paths and thinking about them. Before this race, to most people, Arcaro had been taking a back seat to Willie Shoemaker, and if there is one thing that makes Eddie Arcaro go, it is pride. No man is going to take the play away from Arcaro if it involves riding race horses. He kept looking at those paths.
The starting gate was out on the track now and, as an assistant starter took hold of Nashua and led him into stall No. 2, Eddie looked at the ground. Stall No. 3 was empty. There was a path running straight out from No. 3. Swaps was in No. 4. Get out there first and grab that path, Arcaro said to himself.
Both horses got into the gate. The assistant starter crouched on the gate alongside Arcaro, then got out of the way. Nashua was fine. Arcaro hunched forward. He held his whip up in his right hand. The minute the gate opened he was going to bang Nashua and get him running from the jump. There wasn’t a sound in the stands as they waited for the gates to open
.
Then the bell rang and the gates were open and before the crowd could make noise you could hear Arcaro scream. He was shrieking at Nashua as the gate opened and he brought the whip down in a crack. Nashua banged out onto the track and Arcaro seesawed the reins and dropped Nashua’s head right over the good running path in front of stall No. 3. Shoemaker came out on Swaps and was amazed to see Nashua had broken first. He thought Nashua’s run would be strictly from behind and later in the race. Willie headed Swaps for the path, but Nashua was already there, so Willie had to swing his horse to the right a little. Then he had to go about the business of trying to keep up with Nashua. That was the hardest of all. For this was a horse as fit as human hands could make him and Nashua simply burned down the stretch the first time and Arcaro kept forcing Shoemaker to go wide. As they went into the backstretch Swaps came to Nashua. No good. Nashua pulled away. Farther down he came up again and they were even for a few strides but Nashua lowered his belly and drew out by three parts of a length. The pace was killing. They went five eighths of a mile in 58 seconds. They did three quarters of a mile in 1:10 2/5. This was the kind of time Nashua had been trained for and he was taking it all out of Swaps. At the head of the stretch Swaps came on again, but Mr. Fitz was watching the shadows of the horses as they fell on the infield.
“He ain’t closin’ much,” he said. “Them shadows ain’t together.”
Swaps did not close. Swaps was through at the head of the stretch and Nashua began to open it up. A length and a half. Then two. Then three, four, and now Arcaro had lost his head.
He was switching the whip from one hand to the other and slamming it into Nashua and kicking and riding as if this were a head-and-head duel. He was six lengths ahead and still whipping as he went under the wire.
“Excited,” Mr. Fitz said. “I did the same thing myself when I won my first race.”
Back in Richmond Hill, Long Island, everybody on 114th Street could hear a loud shriek which came from Mrs. Dolan’s house, where the two Sisters of St. Joseph were visiting.
“He won it!”
After the ceremonies in the winner’s circle, which, for once, Mr. Fitz had to be in on, he headed back for the barn and looked closely. Nashua was being walked in a circle inside a paddock and a boy was walking Swaps behind him.
“How’s your horse?” Robertson asked the boy with Swaps.
“Fine. Just got beat,” the boy said.
Mr. Fitz grunted. Later, when the story came out in the papers that Swaps had suffered a foot injury somewhere during the race, Mr. Fitz snorted. Anybody who asked him about it received a gentle play-by-play of how Swaps was well enough during the race to run 1:10 and 2/5 for the first three-quarters and he wasn’t getting ahead of Nashua. You don’t do that with a bad foot, he pointed out.
This race was in 1955. Since then both Nashua and Swaps have retired to stud and so has Mr. Fitz’s next big horse, Bold Ruler, and there have been more races and more horses since then. You thought about that last summer when Mr. Fitz was showing somebody the horses along the shedrow at Belmont Park. Mr. Fitz pointed to one and said, “This one’s named Tit for Tat. Colt by Swaps. Wish he were by Nashua.”
“Oh, yes,” the man said. “That was the big match race, wasn’t it? When was that now?”
“Back in ’55,” Mr. Fitz said.
Then Mr. Fitz took the man to another stall and showed him a filly named Auction Block.
“Always something the matter with her,” Mr. Fitz was saying. “We got her vaccinated to be a real good runner but so far it ain’t took. Keeps hurtin’ her back or one of her legs. But she’ll be all right. Only a little two-year-old, you know. She got time. Plenty of time. Later on this year. Should be fine for next year, too.”
Then Mr. Fitz walked away and he was thinking about next year. I don’t know whether there is going to be a next year and neither does he nor anybody else, but that’s all Mr. Fitz thinks about now and as long as he is like this you always have a good feeling when you are around him because you know he is everything that he always has been and that makes him one extra special human being.
3. The Man
YOU ARE NEVER SUPPOSED to find anyone who is famous living around the corner from a place like Harry’s, for Harry’s is a bar and grill on Cross Bay Boulevard in the Ozone Park section of New York City. Ozone Park is a place where working people live and Harry’s is a bar with twelve stools, a TV, and a picture window which looks out onto a bus stop. It does not seem to be anything special at all, but it is important because it is the place where you stop in and get cigarettes and a couple of drinks before going around to 91-41 Chicot Court, which is where you can find Mr. Fitz whenever he isn’t working at the track. Mr. Fitz has never really figured out what to do with success; he’s still working on the subject of what success actually means and when he has that straightened out he’ll take up the matter of how to live with it. So he sits to one side, around the corner from Harry’s, and when you get to know him, as we are going to try to do here, you will see that he is a beautiful person.
His house on Chicot Court is a small, six-room place that is the same as every other house on the block except for the color of its shingles, red. It has a cement back yard hardly large enough to accommodate a dice game. The narrow driveway defies you to bring a car in without scraping the house next door. Two tiny plots of grass border the brick stoop in front. The first time we ever saw him, we had been sent out to interview him for a newspaper story. He is one of the most written-about people in sports and it came as a shock to find the famous subject sitting in shorts in a smallish living room that was furnished no better and no worse than that of a cop working out of the nearby 105th Precinct. A Pontiac, four or five years old at the time, was in front of the house. His simple style of living was brought up during the interview; for the first few moments we had the crazy idea that we were talking to the wrong guy, that this was a retired city worker. Mr. Fitz gave a little snort when his circumstances were brought up.
“Let me tell you something, son,” he said. “Them fellas that flash things around don’t get anything out of it except a lot of bills. Doesn’t mean a thing. Doesn’t make you any better than the next guy, but it might go to your head and make you worse. Besides, what more does a man need than something to eat, a roof over his head, a family that loves him and a clean set of underwear every day?”
With Sunny Jim Fitzsimmons, it is always like this. He has a way of reducing anything down to a simple little bit of living. The bigger the thing, the smaller Mr. Fitz makes it. A cold, damp afternoon in Louisville, Kentucky, is as good a place as any to start showing you this.
It was the first Saturday in May of 1957 and by 4:30 in the afternoon, which was when Tom Young walked out in front of the stands at Churchill Downs race track, the sky had no color except flat gray. Young walked to the middle of the track, then stopped and looked at his wristwatch. When it was 4:37, he took the gray hat from his head, waved it, then brought it down and held it over his heart. A uniformed bandmaster, who was standing in the track’s infield, saw the signal. He held up his baton, gave the downbeat and the band started to play “My Old Kentucky Home.” As the music made its first sounds into the cold air, a red-coated outrider came out of the tunnel from under the stands aboard a chestnut pony and after him came the fifteen horses who were going to run in the Kentucky Derby. The music was loud now and you could hear people in the wooden stands singing. The horses had sleek coats and as they came out they would scuff the neatly raked dirt, then dance a little on their thin legs. The jockeys would sway with the motion and now it wasn’t a bad day at all because when the field for the Kentucky Derby comes on the track it is a thing that you never really can forget.
As this was going on, Mr. Fitz was walking from the paddock to the track. He was two months shy of being eighty-three on this day and bent with arthritis. Each year, the arthritis brings his head down a little more.
He was dressed in his best Kentucky Derby splendor:
an old gray hat; a covert topcoat decorated with a little fraying around the pockets; slightly baggy pants; and high-top black shoes. He was a little out of the ordinary in the paddock, where mink, expensive tweeds and large diamonds were the order. But everybody made a point of saying hello to him and touching his hand as he moved along and when they would say, “How you, MistFitz?” he would smile, “Oh, I’m fine. I hope the horse’s fit as I am.”
The horse was Bold Ruler, a beautifully put together dark brown colt who was out on the track now with Eddie Arcaro, the jockey, sitting on his back. Arcaro’s legs were drawn back, his shoulders were slumped and his hands were manipulating the reins while he studied Bold Ruler’s reactions on the way to the starting gate. The odds board in the center of the infield showed Bold Ruler was the 8-5 favorite in this biggest of all races. Mr. Fitz remembered his mistake with Swaps two years earlier and was on hand for this one.
For Mr. Fitz, this was one of the most important days of his life. He was at an age where people are not supposed to be useful, but he was getting another chance at winning a Kentucky Derby. So he picked, as usual, a totally impossible place from which to watch the race. He came on the track and sat down on a small green folding chair which was set against a wire fence at the edge of the track. While everybody else important in this Derby was sitting upstairs, in a box seat where you could see and with people who had names you know, Mr. Fitz sat and listened to Dogwagon, who is an exercise boy for Calumet Farm.
Calumet had a horse named Iron Liege entered in the race and Dogwagon, whose life is mainly one of financial calamities, was worried because he had gone overboard betting on Iron Liege.
“You goin’ take the bread out of Dogwagon’s mouth today, MistFitz?” he said.
“You shouldn’t bet, son,” Mr. Fitz said. He waved his hand at some others who were around him. “Nobody should bet. Lose your money that way.”
Sunny Jim Page 3