“Mah bill collectors know all about that,” Dogwagon said.
“Are you a little nervous?” another who was standing alongside Mr. Fitz asked.
“Yes, I’m worried about how much drinkin’ you been doing down here all week. I’m afraid that wife of yours is going to throw you out of the house.”
Far up the track, to the left, flashes of color started to appear in the starting gate. They were the bright silks of the jockeys who were already in the gate with their horses. Khaki-wearing assistant starters were hustling around, leading the horses into the gate, then hopping up onto it to help the riders keep their horses still so they would be standing straight when the gate opened and the race went off. The track announcer’s voice on the loudspeaker said, “It is now post time,” and the big crowd was quiet because the horses would be coming out on any breath now. Then the gates opened and the horses flashed onto the track and the crowd put a blanket of noise over the place.
From where Mr. Fitz sat it was impossible to tell who was in front until the pack came almost up to him. When they did, Bold Ruler was on the lead, with a horse named Federal Hill a head behind and on the outside Bill Hartack, the jockey, was pushing Iron Liege into close quarters with the other two. Then the horses were gone and far down at the end of the straightway they went around the first turn and there was no way to see after that. The crowd of ten thousand in the infield blocked all view of anything that was happening on the other side of the track.
Mr. Fitz turned and watched the pari-mutuel board and tried to listen to the race track announcer’s call. But when the lights started to blink and showed that first Federal Hill and then Iron Liege took the lead the crowd made so much noise you couldn’t hear the announcer. Then Mr. Fitz turned and strained his neck to look up the track again where the horses would be coming into view again as they entered the stretch.
You could make out Arcaro’s purple and yellow silks right away when the field came off the turn. Arcaro’s right arm rose and fell in a steady motion as he hit Bold Ruler with the whip, but it was no good. Bold Ruler’s legs were moving as if he were on an escalator.
It is as bad a moment as you can ever have in sports. When a horse comes around the turn in the Kentucky Derby like this you can forget all the hard work and hope and money because the horse is going to do nothing but make your stomach empty. But Mr. Fitz just looked at the horse for a moment, then his blue eyes had the light of a smile in them and he turned to Captain Edward Byrne, who had come down from New York with him and now was standing next to him.
Cap’s mouth had sagged open and his right hand was sticking into a pants pocket that was filled with pari-mutuel betting tickets on Bold Ruler.
“Got your carfare home, son?” Mr. Fitz said.
The two horses who were leading went by in a gunshot of noise and motion. This was Gallant Man and Iron Liege hooking up for one of the most famous Derby finishes of all. But down on the track they went by so quickly you couldn’t tell who they were. The dirt flew in big pieces as their hoofs pounded the track and there was tremendous noise from the stands, but you still could hear the whack-whack-whack as the jockeys slammed away with the whips. A full sixteenth of a mile down the track they passed under the finish line and there was no way to tell who had won.
But Mr. Fitz said quietly, “See that? Gallant Man’s jockey lost the race, right here in front of us. He took this pole here, the sixteenth pole, for the finish line. Stood up in the saddle and he loses it.” The jockey was Willie Shoemaker. Iron Liege won the race and Dogwagon was screaming.
Bold Ruler had finished fourth and Arcaro stopped the horse in front of Mr. Fitz, flipped his baton to a valet, jumped down and didn’t look one way or the other as he walked off to the jockeys’ room.
Snag, who is a groom, was holding Bold Ruler and Bart Sweeney, the stable foreman, was putting a blanket over the horse’s back when Mr. Fitz got up and walked in front of the horse and looked at him closely. Bold Ruler was breathing heavily, but evenly.
“Nothing the matter with him,” Mr. Fitz said. “Just got beat, that’s all.” Then he smiled. “Well, let’s get out of here. We got no time for foolin’ around. We been down here havin’ a vacation with one horse. I’ve got twenty-nine of them back in New York and I have to be up a little after five o’clock Monday morning to work ’em.”
Then he walked off surprisingly fast for one in his condition. It was the craziest way to lose you ever saw. On this dark afternoon he had reduced the big, storied Kentucky Derby to a simple matter of sitting on a chair and watching a horse lose.
That night, New York’s Idlewild Airport was a tangle of purple and red lights and the plane circled over it, then began to come at the blackness between two rows of the purple. The plane hit the runway with a bounce, the engine exhaust flaring orange, then purple, and then it taxied up to a terminal gate that was, mercifully for the Derby passengers debarking, only a few steps away from one of the airport bars.
The bartender had the early editions of the Sunday tabloids in front of him and as he tumbled Scotch into glasses he talked about the race.
“That Shoemaker,” he was saying. “He done something, didn’t he? Imagine a top boy like that forgettin’ himself. That was something.”
“Shoemaker?” we said to him. “What did he have to do with it?”
“What did he do?” the bartender said. “Well, if you was in Louisville today and you don’t know what Shoemaker done, then you must of been down there to visit relatives because everybody around here even knows what he done.”
“No, I saw the race,” we said to him. “It’s just I was so busy watching Fitzsimmons I’m still thinking about him now. Tell you the truth, I forgot all about Shoemaker.”
Mr. Fitz does that with all the other things that you usually think of as being important in life. The matter of being old, for example. With him it comes down to nothing more than a numbers game. His birthday, celebrated at two or three convenient times during the summer, comes in July. At eighty-seven, he feels he could be twenty years younger or older and it wouldn’t make any difference. He is a man who learned to read and write and sharpen his mind by himself over the years and he has refused to let time do anything to change this. They make a big business of old age in this nation, but Mr. Fitz makes a shambles of the subject by working six days a week, fifty-two weeks of the year and snorting if you mention a vacation or rest.
One morning in 1960, at about the time of his eighty-sixth birthday, Mr. Fitz was around his horses at Belmont Park and a visitor was busy reading one of those “Golden Years” columns of advice to the aged which was in one of the papers.
“Did you read this?” he asked Mr. Fitz. “It’s filled with advice for people who get old.”
“Does it say in there that they should get off their fannies and go do a day’s work?” Mr. Fitz said. “If it don’t, it’s wrong.”
He has a bad physical affliction which has deformed his once stick-straight body and while most human beings react badly when something like this happens to them, Mr. Fitz has always considered it to be meaningless. Little by little, over the years, the arthritis has caused his stoop to be more pronounced, but it has never kept him from a day’s work and, as he keeps saying, “I’m kind of lucky on it. I hear that some fellas that get it have a lot of pain and I don’t know as I’d like that too much. I don’t have any pain from it at all and it don’t keep me from workin’. So there’s no sense worryin’ about it.”
In his years he has seen about everything, and in his business, he has been with names which have become legends in financial and sports history, and he has been around some of them, such as Frank James of the James boys, who do not stand so well. But with an approach to life that you seldom find nowadays, Mr. Fitz doesn’t think much of this at all. There are things that never show in the newspapers that he thinks of as far more urgent.
These problems keep him well occupied and thus unable to regard himself as famous. There is the matter of
his family, for example. Mr. Fitz has two brothers, a sister, five children, seventeen grandchildren, and approximately thirty great-grandchildren. This number cannot really be kept accurate because as the founder explains, “Somebody’s always foalin’.” Now this Irish-American answer to the Ming dynasty has a way of staying together which makes even a casual family gathering look like a protest meeting. Once, for a television program called “Person to Person” which was coming from Mr. Fitz’s Sheepshead Bay house, the entire Fitzsimmons clan was gathered, but between the cameras, cables, technicians, and family there was no way to fit everybody in at the same time. So the family was outside, bread-line style, and whenever a camera moved out of the way a few more were dispatched inside to put their best scrubbed faces forward into living rooms around the country.
The family also has a way of enveloping outsiders which at times makes it difficult to determine anybody’s status. When one person meets a Fitzsimmons he almost immediately meets all Fitzsimmonses and it is not long before he is being taken for some part of the family. There was one gloomy morning a few years ago at New York’s Aqueduct race track when Cap Byrne was found outside the Fitzsimmons barn talking about this. The Cap, a retired New York City police captain, died in 1958. On this day he was, as usual, out at the track to be with his old friend Mr. Fitz for the workouts. But Mr. Fitz at 6:30 or so in the morning is much more like an old foreman than an old friend, and on this day he had given the stable crew, including sons John, sixty-five, and Jim, sixty-three, a general bawling out. The Cap was generously included.
“I finally had to tell him,” Byrne muttered. “I had to tell him, ‘Listen, I’m not a Fitzsimmons. Yell at them, not at me.’ ”
Mr. Fitz, since getting his first job on a race track seventy-six years ago, has done nothing else for a living. And during this time he has gotten the idea that there is little difference between horses and people, except that people talk, which many times would seem to give quite an edge to horses. Since the string of horses he trains, numbering anywhere from twenty-nine to forty-two, are considered by him to be the same as his family, he does not know their names. But, as he insists, he knows the breeding. So horses usually are called by their sire’s name, such as the “Nasrullah colt.”
He proved this one summer afternoon at Belmont Park when a groom came by, leading a horse from the tree-lined stable area out to the paddock to be saddled for the next race.
“Let me get a look at her, will you, son?” he asked.
“Sure thing, boss,” the groom said. He stopped and tugged at the horse to keep its head up.
The old man was off to one side and his face crinkled into a little smile.
“Oh, I know this one all right,” he said. “She’s an Apache mare. I had her father. Ran him in the Kentucky Derby one year … 1940, I think it was. Well, I hope she does all right, son. I like to see horses do good and she’s from a nice colt.”
“How’d you do with ’Pache, MistFitz?” the groom asked.
“Oh, no good. Didn’t get much of anything. Finished way up the track in the Derby.”
“Then you worryin’ ’bout this one? Ah’d be cussin’ her and her father.”
“Oh, I just like to see people I know do good. Well, good luck, son. Hope she wins the race.”
“You want to know her name?”
“Oh, I’d only forget that. But don’t worry, I know who she is.
Because of Mr. Fitz’s outlook, it also is impossible for him to become excited when he wins a big race. In February 1955, for example, he sent Nashua out to run in the $100,000 Widener Handicap at Florida’s Hialeah Park and it turned into a tremendous race.
Nashua, the big, strapping chunk of power had been purchased the year before by a syndicate headed by Leslie Combs II for a record price of $1,251,200. The Widener was Nashua’s first start since the sale and the job of caring for over a million dollars’ worth of horse, and trying to win some of the money back for his owners, should have been nerve-testing at best. Then there was the problem of bringing Nashua along without the benefit of a race and sending him into the tough Widener in the kind of condition that wins six-figure race purses. It looked like a tough order. Which it was. Nashua had to come on and win the way only the big ones do. In the last strides of a head-nodding, four-horse finish he got his nose in front and kept it there at the wire and knocked everybody dead with the kind of finish you don’t forget.
The late John McNulty, one of the finest of writers, watched this race over television at his New York apartment and Nashua’s finish murdered him. There is always a tingle of excitement to the finish of a good race. But McNulty, at the time, was writing an article on Mr. Fitz for Colliers magazine and his particular interest in the race caused Nashua’s finish to hit him like a thrown brick. Several cans of beer did nothing to quiet McNulty’s nerves and that night he put in a long-distance call to Mr. Fitz, who was in his cottage near Hialeah.
“How are you, Mr. Fitz?” McNulty asked.
“Oh, I’m fine, son. How are you?” Mr. Fitz said.
“That was a wonderful race. What are you doing now?” McNulty asked.
“Oh, I’m mixing the breakfast batter right now,” Mr. Fitz said. “I mix it half buckwheat and half pancake and then let it stand that way in the refrigerator overnight. The kids like it that way when I cook breakfast for ’em in the morning.”
The kids were sons John and Jim, both of course, in their sixties. The proper pancake batter for them was quite important. McNulty went heavy on the beer that night trying to put the whole thing together.
For Mr. Fitz, everything starts at 6:15 each morning, whether in Florida or New York. Having made breakfast just for himself when he’s home, Mr. Fitz starts down the walk at Chicot Court as his son Jim pulls to the curb in a car. At this hour, Mr. Fitz is dressed in two thick gray vests which, because of his stoop, hang down to his knees. A green nylon rain jacket is over them. His magnificent gray hat, the brim turned up now, covers his bald head. He always gets down the stoop, then turns around and fumbles with the mailbox. Finding it empty he turns and starts to the car—a little grumpily, because he feels people have become so lazy these days they don’t even deliver the mail until half the morning is gone. Then he slips into the front seat of his son’s 1956 Pontiac. Mr. Fitz, since his wife’s death, lives during the week with a housekeeper in the Chicot Court house because it is only a couple of blocks away from Aqueduct and a twenty-minute drive to Belmont Park. His son John lives in the family homestead in Sheepshead Bay, Mr. Fitz’s birthplace. His sons John and Jim take turns picking him up in the morning and the routine always is the same. The old man gets into the front seat, picks up the racing paper, The Morning Telegraph, and reads it during the short drive to Belmont Park.
It was this way one morning last fall. As the car swung into the stable entrance at Belmont Park, the Pinkerton guard on duty waved and walked over to the car to say hello. At the end of the short, tree-shaded street, Jim slowed the car and started to pull it into a parking space alongside a small wooden cottage which serves as the Fitzsimmons stable headquarters. The car was still moving but Mr. Fitz was fumbling with the door handle and Jim had to stop the car abruptly because Mr. Fitz was getting out whether the car had stopped or not.
“He never waits until I stop the thing,” Jim said.
“I got to go to work,” Mr. Fitz said. Then he was moving across the blacktop road to a long, green-painted Barn No. 17, which was alive with horses and men about to start a day of training for races.
Mr. Fitz has been getting up like this all his life. In his years he has come to handle some of the great race horses. In 1930 there was Gallant Fox, a horse which would run over anything in its way and won everything. He is still Mr. Fitz’s favorite. Or, later in the ‘30s, there was Johnstown and Omaha. Then in recent times there was Nashua, who became such a favorite with the public that they wrote fan letters to him. And after Nashua was Bold Ruler, who didn’t lose much else after that Kentucky Derby.
In his time, Mr. Fitz has won three of those Derbys, along with some 225 winners of 95 other important stakes races. The total winnings come to something like $6,500,000 from those special stakes races alone. His numbers of winners in ordinary races is staggering. His record puts him one-two or thereabouts as the most successful trainer of horses in racing history.
Mr. Fitz today trains horses for four people, all of whom, or their families, have employed him for well over thirty years. The largest string of horses under his care is owned by Mrs. Henry Carnegie Phipps, a gentle, gray-haired lady in her seventies. Her son, Ogden Phipps, has a string of horses under Mr. Fitz’s direction as do Whitney Stone and Mrs. Thomas Bancroft, a daughter of the late William Woodward, Sr., whose Belair Stud Farm was Mr. Fitz’s biggest responsibility for twenty-nine years.
These people have money, which, if you want to own race horses, is as urgent as gin in the summer. The bills for horses in training under James E. Fitzsimmons come to about $400,000 a year. And the cost of breeding and raising these thoroughbreds on sprawling Kentucky and Virginia horse farms can be frightening. Mr. Fitz charges $14 a day for each horse he trains. Out of this he pays feed bills, stable salaries and the like. His personal income from this is negligible. Mr. Fitz’s money comes from a 10 per cent cut of all money his horses earn. This arrangement can result in a warming bank balance when you handle the kind of horses Mr. Fitz has had. In three years of racing, for example, Nashua earned $1,288,565 and his trainer’s cut was what many would consider a living.
There was for example the bright afternoon of October 30, 1956, when it seemed Mr. Fitz had come up with a way to solve recessions.
At a little after 3:30 that afternoon, Mr. Fitz leaned against the front of a car parked on the grass along the first turn at Belmont as Eddie Arcaro broke Nashua out of the gate in the two-mile Jockey Club Gold Cup. First money in the race was $87,500 and Nashua’s brutal strength wore out everything trying to run with him and he set a new world record for the distance. As they led Nashua off the track, Mr. Fitz made his way back to the paddock where he watched closely as they put a saddle on Bold Ruler, who was to run in the next race, the historic and always rich Futurity. Mr. Fitz again stationed himself against the automobile and watched as Bold Ruler came out of the gate with a rush. There seemed to be no motion to his body at all as he fled from the field. He was one of the smoothest-running two-year-old horses ever seen and he had no trouble getting there first and taking down first money of $91,000.
Sunny Jim Page 4