In a little more than 35 minutes on the clock, Mr. Fitz had earned $17,800 for himself. With these kind of horses and purses, he has earned anywhere from $50,000 to $125,000 a year during the last thirty years. Now any time a person pulls in money of this sort you are going to see it or hear about it. It will come in the form of a new Cadillac or it will come with head-shaking and grimaces during a conversation about how much taxes have to be paid. But you are going to know the guy you are with makes money.
Mr. Fitz has a different way of handling this. “Money’s all right if you have it,” he says, “but I don’t see where it means so much as long as you have enough to live on. There’s things a lot more important.”
He was telling this to a person who has spent much of his life playing tag with the gas company, several barkeepers, a bookmaker or two, and the mortgage department of a bank. Coming from anyplace else, this financial advice would have been regarded as nothing more than platitudes. But when this simple, bent-over, little old man talks to you somehow it makes sense. Who needs a thousand dollars’ worth of carpeting, you figure, as long as he has a wife, kids in good health, and the inevitable clean set of underwear each day.
It is Mr. Fitz’s way and, if you were to be Mr. Fitz when he walks into Barn 17 at Belmont Park each day and see him, with his vests hanging to his knees and his age and his stoop from arthritis, you would know that his way gives him something precious.
There was a morning last fall when Chico, one of the grooms, was leading a filly named Oil Slick around the soft dirt of the barn’s shedrow and the horse was bothering him.
“Boss,” he called to Mr. Fitz. You take a look here. She walk no good. The right front foot. She keep leemping on it.”
Mr. Fitz came up to the horse, then curled himself up into a little bundle and bent down. He put his two strong-looking hands on the horse’s thin ankle. The filly put her head down as Mr. Fitz touched the leg, but he started to talk to her softly. “Come on now, nice little filly, pick it up. I ain’t going to hurt you. Come on, nice little filly. Lift it up. I want to help you.”
He kept pushing the leg and the horse finally picked it up and bent it and Mr. Fitz started to run his fingers over the ankle.
“Little fillin’ right here, Chico,” he said. “See where it is? It’s not too bad. Shouldn’t be hurtin’ her all that.” Then he let go of the leg and stood up again. “Leg paint and a wet bandage,” he said. “Don’t walk her no more today. Heat should go out of it in a day or so and she’ll be all right then.”
Then he walked away toward his car, which was parked outside the barn entrance. “That one’s a Royal Charger filly,” he was saying. “She’s only a two-year-old. I don’t know much about how good she’s going to do yet. It takes a long time to find out if you’re going to have a horse who can make it. You just got to be there with them every day and keep workin’ and maybe someday she’ll come around and start doin’ what we got her here for.”
Mr. Fitz got behind the driving wheel of the car. “If you’re afraid of drivin’ with me you better get out now and walk,” he said. “Lot of fellas don’t like driving with me.” He started the car and, looking through the steering wheel for vision, drove past a couple of stables and down a block to a small parking space alongside the track’s rail. He got out and climbed up the steps to a small tower which is used by trainers to watch their horses in the morning.
A race track at this hour is one of the few places where you can forget everything. In the afternoon, the place becomes crowded and people make noise, and money is the big thing. But in the morning a race track gleams from dew and sunlight and the track is alive with horses. They pass by in groups of three or four, moving at a gallop with exercise boys standing in the stirrups and talking or singing to them. Or they come alone, or maybe two of them, side by side, and they come fast, with the boys flat on their stomachs trying to get more speed from the animals under them. The steady clump of hoofs hitting soft dirt and the snorting of the horses moving fast are the loudest sounds you hear. It becomes very important to listen to these sounds and to stand there and look at the horses. Off in the distance you can see a parkway crammed with cars, their drivers heading for Manhattan and a day’s work. And every few minutes a commuter train of the Long Island Rail Road rushes into view for a moment. They are, if you look at them, reminders of the worry and bleakness and effort that goes into working for a living. But if you notice this it means you are not doing your job at the track correctly. The task at hand requires a man to listen to the horses as they pass and to look at them very closely. When you do this, the urge becomes strong to forget tomorrow’s business appointment, get a couple of old vests like Mr. Fitz wears and come to the track with him forever.
The old man took out a stop watch and Jimmy Fitzsimmons and Al Robertson, a stable foreman, came up to stand alongside him.
“There he is now,” Robertson said. He pointed across the track. The running oval at Belmont is a mile and a half around so a horse can be hard to see when he’s way over on the other side, but Mr. Fitz, without using glasses, made him out right away.
“He’ll break right from that pole,” Mr. Fitz said.
“Royal Record,” Robertson said.
“Ready,” Robertson said. “Okay, here he goes. Bing!”
The “bing!” means that the horse had started his run. Mr. Fitz’s thumb pressed down on his big silver stop watch.
Far across the track, Royal Record took off. The exercise boy was a shifting package of khaki work clothes as the horse reached out into a long, flowing stride. He flew by the white rail posts and, as he hit a furlong post, Robertson said “bing!” again and Mr. Fitz thumbed the stop watch.
“Thirteen,” Robertson said.
Mr. Fitz was looking at the watch. “Uh huh,” he said.
Now Royal Record seemed to be picking up more and at the next “bing!” it was 25 2/5 and at the third it was 37 2/5. Then the boy stood up and started to slow him down to a gallop midway through the stretch, but Royal Record was shaking his head and trying to fight the boy so he could keep going. When they passed the tower Mr. Fitz called out to the exercise boy, “Whoa, Tommy, bring him up now,” and when the boy had the horse settled Mr. Fitz left the stand and went back to his car.
Back in the cottage across from the barn Mr. Fitz sat down at the kitchen table, tucked an old piece of plaid cloth, once part of a horse blanket, into place as a bib and had a bowl of vegetable soup.
“That’s a two-year-old,” he was saying. “Horse hasn’t won yet. Had him in a couple of times, but we can’t tell much yet. You got to give him time. Young horse. That’s this business. I got to keep workin’ ’em and givin’ ’em time, son.”
In the third race at Aqueduct that Saturday afternoon, Royal Record started to come along. He broke well, then picked up the leaders on the turn and, with the crowd in the huge cement and steel stands roaring, Royal Record slammed down the stretch a length and a half to the good and never let anything catch him.
Mr. Fitz sat on a bar stool in a little space in front of the winner’s circle that the Pinkerton guards keep clear for him. He grunted a little as Royal Record began to pull away far up the stretch. His face showed no expression as the horse pounded past at the finish line. When they brought Royal Record back to the winner’s circle, Mr. Fitz got up and peered at the horse’s legs. “Come out of it all right,” he said quietly. “That’s the big thing.”
A few races later, Mr. Fitz walked out to the parking lot and John Fitzsimmons got behind the wheel and drove him home. As the car pulled in front of the house two little girls who were playing in front of the house next door ran over and each of them kissed the old man as he got out of the car. Then they ran back to their game.
“Belong to the neighbors,” he said. “Nice kids. Plenty of pep to ’em.
Then he went inside and flicked on the television set. He is a great television watcher and weekend visitors should be prepared for a session of watching Lawrence We
lk or several of those Sunday afternoon “arguin’ programs,” which is what he calls panel shows. This time Mr. Fitz put on a perfectly wonderful shoot-’em-up and while the Indians made one helluva run at the stage, Mr. Fitz commented on their mounts.
“That gray horse at the back there,” he said. “He should catch all those others. He’s got the best runnin’ action. Of course you can’t tell with these things. Somebody’s likely to shoot him and he’ll be out of the money.”
“Can you tell anything about Royal Record after today?”
“Nonsense,” he snorted. “I can’t tell anything more about him right now than anybody else. Except he won a race today. He’s just learnin’ now. Next year we’ll find out maybe. We’ll keep at him and then he’ll muscle up some more, get a little bigger and stronger, and then see how far he goes next year.”
Then he smiled a little bit. “But that’s the nice thing about it,” he said softly. “You’re always lookin’ ahead. Don’t have time for anything that happened yesterday. That’s gone. What’s ahead is what’s important. Makes livin’ nice.”
If you said that, because of a young horse like Royal Record, Mr. Fitz had, at eighty-seven, a reason to live for the future, he would gag and snort. That’s too fancy a statement for his tastes. But if you said that he would have to get up at a little after five o’clock in the morning to take care of the horse he would agree. That’s his style. Simple and beautiful.
4. The Business
THE SHEDROW WAS SHADED and cool, and up in the rafters a family of sparrows darted back and forth and talked to each other. An old dog, part Dalmatian, mainly lazy, stretched out on the soft dirt and went to sleep. This was at Mr. Fitz’s Barn 17 at Belmont Park late one afternoon, but it could have been at Hialeah or Fort Erie or Gloucester or any of the other tracks he has been on during his life because stables, and the people in them, never seem to change. There were twenty-six horses in the barn on this day, but only one of them, a dark bay, had his head sticking out of the stall. He was tugging at the bundle of hay and timothy hanging from in front of the stall. Mr. Fitz was sitting on a camp chair in the middle of the barn, looking out into the back where stablehands were busy taking care of a filly named Leix, who had just been brought back to the stable after winning a mile-and-three-eighths race that was a demanding, never-let-up contest every step of the way. There were four grooms around her. Three of them kept squeezing big sponges of water over Leix’s back and the horse gleamed like plate glass as the bright sunlight struck her wet back. The fourth groom held a big tub of water which Leix was drinking from. The chain on her halter kept rattling against the tub as she swallowed. When the grooms started to rub a liniment onto Leix, the horse didn’t twitch a muscle. She stood there as if she expected this kind of treatment.
“Good-looking animals, aren’t they?”
“They ain’t in a beauty contest, son,” the old man said.
Which they are not. Thoroughbred race horses are the athletes of the animals. They are high-strung and fragile and their business is speed, the kind of body-wrecking speed which calls for every bit of blood and courage their hearts can pump. The horses, and their speed, are Mr. Fitz’s way of life. He sees these animals as people who have a rare ability, but who must be cared for constantly or they will have no chance to show it at all. With Mr. Fitz, racing is a business that calls for you to take a horse and nurse him along and teach him the best way to do the thing for which he was bred and born—run, and never stop running and put so much into it that even a broken leg won’t stop the process.
To an awful lot of people, racing is a business of winning or losing, of tote boards and handicapping and money. The sport tells its story to them in the five-point agate type of result charts in newspapers or in stories filled with figures about the amount of money bet or the value of a big stakes race on Saturday. Running race horses before the public has come to mean, in these times, nothing more than a crap game with dice that have four legs.
It is different with Mr. Fitz. He has won in racing, and won as few ever have in any endeavor. But the more you are with him, the further away the business of winning or losing seems to get. And the animals become people and the fascination of tinkering with them is all that really seems to count. Get them to try to do their best. Get everybody around them to do the same thing. The result, win, lose or draw, is something that just happens. The effort is so much more important. It is his way, and it is something you have to know about if you are going to understand this man as he is.
After working with horses for all these years, Mr. Fitz has come to the conclusion that a horse is not any dumber, proportionately, nor burdened with any more poor personal qualities, than humans. In fact he has always felt that a horse gives more of himself in nearly every circumstance than do humans. This makes it rather hard to be a full-blooded Fitzsimmons because the old man constantly measures you alongside the performances given by his horses.
There was, for example, the afternoon several years ago at the Saratoga race track when Mr. Fitz was standing in the infield with grandson Jimmy while one of his horses, Cleve, came around the final turn well behind the pack. Cleve was a horse born a trifle slow and this unfortunate condition did not change. But he was still straining with all-out strides as he came around the turn and the sight of him doing this, while a good 15 lengths off the lead, caused grandson Jimmy to laugh.
“Look at Cleve,” he said to the old man. “Running himself right into the ground. He couldn’t catch those horses if he had help.”
Mr. Fitz didn’t take his eyes off Cleve. “Let me tell you something,” he grunted. “That horse that you’re makin’ fun of is tryin’ the best he can. Now if you go all through life and you try to do things right as hard as this horse is tryin’ right now; if you do that, son, then you’re going to be quite a man.”
Mr. Fitz left the track later that day and when somebody asked him how Cleve ran, he told them, “Fine. Did the best he could. Can’t ask more than that.”
Doing the best you can is a law of his life. You see this all the time. One night last winter, during the Hialeah racing season, Mr. Fitz was in the living room in the little house he keeps on Northwest 42nd Street in Miami, watching a television rerun of a $25,000 race in which one of his fillies, Warlike, had finished well up the track earlier in the day.
“We’ll get another look at this,” he was saying. “No, I don’t like watchin’ us lose another race. But I want to see somethin’ again.”
On the screen, Warlike was running a strong second going down the backstretch. Halfway around the final turn she slipped to fourth, but was still in the running. Then at the head of the stretch, with a horse named Indian Maid leading, a Calumet Farm horse called Teacation came on the outside of Warlike, ran with her, then pulled away and made a run at the leader. Warlike stopped badly.
“That’s where she got into trouble,” Mr. Fitz said. “That Calumet horse kept her packed in behind them other horses. The dirt got into her face. Horses in front of her kicked it up square into her face. She don’t like it none at all. If she was on the outside there, away from it, she’d of been all right. But the Calumet horse kept her tied in there.”
“Didn’t look as if she ran into that much dirt,” Allie Robertson said.
“She got enough to bother her,” Mr. Fitz said. “That’s what’s been holdin’ her down. She’s got to get over thinking that dirt is so bad. It isn’t going to hurt her none. We have to break her of that habit.” Mercifully, he turned the television off after the race faded out. “Could she have won the race without the dirt?” he mused. “Oh, I don’t know that. But I do know she could have run better. That’s the main thing. If she finished fifth and was doin’ her best, then we got no complaints. But she finished fifth or sixth or whatever it was and she wasn’t doin’ her best. That’s the big thing. You got to do the best you can with what you got, son.”
Mr. Fitz conducts his life under this philosophy while surrounded by the biggest uproar
of money, gambling, color, and noise a sport in this country has produced. To an awful lot of people, Mr. Fitz’s horse, as he fits into modern racing, is either one or two things. If the horse runs a bit slow, he is a reminder that six per cent interest, as compounded by finance companies, does more to break a man than a depression. And if the horse runs fast enough to win, he is a pretty sight, but one not to waste time on as long as a cashier’s window is nearby. This is anything but the attitude of a few. In recent years racing’s size has become awesome. Each year now, something like 45,000,000 people bet about $3,250,000,000 at race tracks. There are twenty-five states in which the sport is legal and they cheerfully get into the act. Last year they took $243,388,655 in taxes from racing and politicians have grown to love it. In New York, Governor Nelson Rockefeller said one day, “I am, of course, against gambling on moral grounds.” However, the governor was, a month later, conspicuous at the opening of a big new track, Aqueduct, and he made many references to the annual ninety million or so his state receives in revenues from racing.
This side of racing, the side where it is strictly gambling, is a world away from Mr. Fitz. You could see that one fall afternoon at Belmont Park in 1957. Between races he sits on a small wooden bench alongside the enclosure where the horses are saddled, and on this day he was happily ensconced on his bench a short while after the Futurity, a rich and historic race, had been run. The winner was a horse called Jester, owned by George D. Widener. Misty Flight, trained by Mr. Fitz, ran second. But a claim of foul had been lodged against the winner by a horse which had finished fourth. The jockey on that one said Jester had veered over and interfered with him. If the foul claim were allowed by stewards, Mr. Fitz’s horse would be listed as the winner and the many people standing around him holding winning tickets on Misty Flight would be in business. And Mr. Fitz would be the winner of a $90,000 stakes race.
Sunny Jim Page 5