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Sunny Jim

Page 18

by Breslin, Jimmy;


  It was, eighty-year-old Max Hirsch says today, a strange thing from the start. Rothstein had no plan. One minute it was just going to be a hot, humid day at the races. Then men forgot the heat because the biggest betting splurge of all time was taking place. It was typical of Rothstein.

  Rothstein went into the clubhouse at Aqueduct on this day and started to dispatch his betting commissioners to get down on Sidereal for him. While Rothstein was doing this, Max Hirsch was on the telephone. There was a rule in racing that a horse must be in the paddock 30 minutes before post time or be automatically scratched from the race. It didn’t leave Hirsch much time at all to get the horse from its barn at Belmont Park, six miles away from Aqueduct.

  Max is a man who had been through all the thrills and disappointments and tense moments of racing, but this one was murder. With Rothstein’s men out sending in money in alarming amounts—a guy named Morris the Boob leading them—Hirsch couldn’t get anybody from his stable at Belmont Park to answer the phone. He kept hanging up and then calling again and then hanging up again and trying it once more. There was no dial system and the telephone company offices had no air conditioning. The operators, sluggish in the 94-degree heat and high humidity, were slow about putting calls through. Hirsch was starting to get the shakes. Then he thought of his wife, who was at home, near Belmont. He got her on the phone, told her to get over to the stable and get the foreman to load Sidereal on the van and hustle him to Aqueduct.

  Above Hirsch, in the stands, there was panic. Bookmakers kept scrubbing out the numbers next to Sidereal and putting smaller ones and finally when the price hit 5-1 and the late rush of Rothstein betting commissioners was on, most of them took the horse off the slate. It was getting too big for them.

  Rothstein and his wife were sitting quietly in a box seat. He talked of the heat, a show on Broadway, a man he knew. His face showed nothing.

  After the second race, the horses for the third were brought over from the stable area for saddling. Sidereal was missing. He was not on the grounds yet.

  “Where’s your horse?” Jimmy McLaughlin, paddock judge, asked Hirsch.

  “He’ll be right here,” Max said. He had no idea whether his wife had gotten to the barn. But he did have a good idea of what the trip would be like for a horse van coming from Belmont Park on a holiday such as this. Two drunks driving from a swim at Valley Stream State Park could get in front of his van, start dawdling, and it would be good-by betting coup. And by now Hirsch knew all about the betting. He hadn’t spoken to AR for a couple of hours, but all he had to do was listen to the moaning and questioning going on among bookmakers and he knew a big smash-up was being put together by his boss.

  Hirsch stood nervously by the saddling stall assigned to Sidereal. All he could do was wait. Jockey Billy Kelsay, in Rothstein silks, stood beside him.

  “Give you another minute, Max,” McLaughlin said.” Then we’ll have to scratch him.”

  The minute went by. Then there was a wave from the other side of the track and here came Sidereal, led by a groom. Kelsay was swung up on the horse, wheeled him into the post parade and Hirsch walked over to the rail and leaned against it. He was shot. And it was out of his hands now. Upstairs, Rothstein put his field glasses on Sidereal and watched the horse as he went to the post. Sidereal had a fine head, it was stuck up there proudly. The sun broke on his curried coat and glared back at Rothstein’s field glasses. The horse was in top condition.

  The gambler never changed expression. The big ones never do. He stood there with his glasses on the race, his lips together, his hands without a quiver as the 13-horse field broke from the barrier in the five-eighths of a mile race. Ultimo, owned by Charles Stoneham, who also owned the New York Giants, took the lead. Northcliffe, second. Harry Payne Whitney’s Brainstorm third. It went that way around the turn and into the stretch. Then Sidereal moved on the leaders. At the eight pole Sidereal hooked onto Ultimo. They came down together in one of those things where the horses keep nodding their heads up and down and the one who has his head up at the finish will win. If you have two dollars on one of these kind of races it does something to you. Not Rothstein. The binoculars never wavered. The lips stayed closed. Then with 20 yards to go, Sidereal got his head out. Then he gained with each lunge and went under the winner by a half-length. The time for the race was 59 2/5. The winner’s purse was $1172.94.

  Rothstein took his glasses down and sat down. Morris the Boob and his other betting commissioners came to him, whispered, then walked away. Rothstein nodded his head. It was all right, this one. But not right enough. He had won $850,000. It still wasn’t a million.

  It was this kind of an era. And in the middle of it, Mr. Fitz came within a wave of the hand or two of getting his hands on what still is considered the greatest horse ever to step onto a race track. He saw the horse the first time on a hot August morning in 1918 at Saratoga. August Belmont was selling his yearlings, and now, two days before the auction, Mr. Fitz was walking along the shedrow of Belmont’s yearling barn, looking over the stock carefully. They were all well-bred, good-looking animals, but one of them caught Mr. Fitz’s eye. The colt was a chestnut and he was going to grow into an outsized animal, too. The tag posted on the green-painted wood alongside the stall said the horse was by Fair Play out of Mahubah.

  That night, he called Johnson in New York and told him about the horse.

  “If you’re going to come up and buy anything, that’s the one I’d take,” he told Johnson.

  But the day of the auction, Johnson was stuck on business down in New York and he told Mr. Fitz to go out and do the bidding. Which helped bring about the crime of the century. For if Johnson were on the scene and his trainer liked the horse, he would have gone for the works and gotten the horse with little trouble.

  Mr. Fitz, however, had total caution when it came to spending somebody else’s money and when a groom wearing a white dinner jacket led Belmont’s big yearling into the sales ring at the auction, Johnson’s money was in safe hands. Too safe.

  The auctioneer announced the horse’s background, then started the bidding at $2500.

  Mr. Fitz waved his program and the auctioneer caught that and it put him in the bidding. A man named Samuel D. Riddle got in, too. There were many others, but they dropped out and there were only a couple left as the price went up to $4000, then $4200 and $4400 and finally, at $4600, Mr. Fitz stopped.

  “If it were my money it’d be a different thing,” he said when he got out of the bidding. “But I don’t like throwin’ Mr. Johnson’s money around with him not here. That ain’t my kind of a game. I know one thing. If Johnson was here and he knew I liked the horse this much he’d start biddin’ and get him in a second.”

  Riddle was getting a little touchy about it right about here, too, and before they got him to $5000 and knocked down the horse to him, Riddle did considerable seat-writhing. When he got the horse, Riddle went home and started writing out names. He came up with one he thought was good. The Jockey Club allowed him to register it. The name was Man o’ War and there are old men around today whose eyes water when they tell you of this horse. Big Red, they called him, and he started 21 times in his life and was beaten only once and he became a part of American lore. His groom, Will Harbut, retired to Kentucky with the horse and spent his time proudly bringing out Big Red for visitors and telling them, “Dis de mostest horse ever.”

  One year later, and again at Saratoga, Mr. Fitz took another loss with the big horse. For some reason which he can’t account for now, and probably has bawled himself out for over the years, he was standing around before one of Man o’ War’s races, took a look at the price, 1-2, and decided to get a little easy money. He bet a hundred on Man o’ War. It was a day that was to become famous in racing history for other reasons than Fitzsimmons betting $100. Man o’ War’s regular rider, Clarence Kummer, came up sick at the last minute and jockey Johnny Loftus was put on to replace him. Actually, Loftus did not feel too well himself. Anyhow, when they left
the post, Willie Knapp, on a horse called Upset, had a big lead. Too big. Man o’ War came on with a tremendous rush at the end, but he had too much to make up. He was second for the only time in his life.

  “I could have just as easy bought the horse and he could have turned out to be nothin’ much at all,” Mr. Fitz figures. “He was just a nice-lookin’ kind of a colt. Never worried me that I didn’t get him. But the bet, that’s a different thing. I must of lost my brains. Hasn’t been a horse yet worth a hundred-dollar bet.”

  The little Man o’ War item put aside, Mr. Fitz was a natural in the business of buying race horses. Now at times, and particularly at all times, this can be a hazardous business.

  There is something that happens to a Kentucky breeder when he stands next to a horse of his and talks to somebody who wants to buy the horse. The barn can be quiet and the sloping, fenced-in fields around it can be a beautiful sight. But when a breeder is selling a horse you can hear him saying to himself the principles of his trade, as set down by David Harum: “Do unto the other fella as he would do unto you —only do it furst.”

  You get a belly full of fried chicken when you go to a horse farm with money in your pocket. You get bourbon. All the bourbon the man can get you to take. After that, you’re on your own. The horse is alive. You can be sure of that. They’ll put a mirror in front of his nostrils to prove he can breathe. After this, just duck.

  Mr. Fitz never had any trouble with this part of it at all. He and Johnson made a couple of trips to Lexington and didn’t come close to making a bad move. In 1919, Mr. Fitz prowled breeder Arthur B. Hancock’s Clairborne Farm for a couple of days, watching the yearlings closely. He picked out twenty-two. Johnson purchased them for a package price of $40,000. The horses were shipped up to Mr. Fitz at Gravesend and within a year, Max Hirsch, dealing for Rothstein, had bought seven of them for $72,000 and still in the barn was a horse called Knobbie and another called Playfellow, who was a full brother to Man o’ War. Knobbie later was sold to Trainer Sam Hildreth of the Rancocas Stable, owned by Harry F. Sinclair, for $60,000. In 1921, Hildreth came around again. He wanted to look at Playfellow.

  Playfellow, a huge animal, had been a bust as a two-year-old and looked to be nothing at three. But he suddenly broke out with two races at Aqueduct that had everybody talking about him. The horse, they said, was just a big, strapping thing that had needed time. Now he was ready to run like a great one, they said. The hysteria over Man o’ War made Playfellow, Big Red’s full brother, a headline animal.

  Sinclair wanted Playfellow. He had Hildreth make several visits to Mr. Fitz’s barn to look over the horse. Then he offered Johnson $115,000 for the horse. Mr. Fitz thought the horse was going to be a big winner, but it was too much money for Johnson to turn down. He took the offer. He was now playing in big money with Harry F. Sinclair, a man who was to rock the country with maneuverings that history books call the Teapot Dome scandals. People usually didn’t do well playing with Sinclair. Johnson found that out. He left racing because of it.

  Playfellow was a huge horse who ate as much as you would give him and needed a lot of work to stay in shape. Hildreth was a trainer who was not known for working horses too strenuously. So Playfellow settled down in the great Rancocas barn and loaded up on more food than anybody had ever seen and Hildreth worked him lightly. When Hildreth put the horse in a race, Playfellow ran like a bartender. He was third in his first start. A bad third. So bad that people were laughing at Sinclair. The papers put it in headlines; the sharpsters, Sinclair and Hildreth, had bought a $115,000 lemon.

  Sinclair sat down that night and began to think. He wanted an angle. When Sinclair started to think of angles he usually was good. This time, as Mr. Fitz found out, he was very good.

  “Fitzsimmons and Johnson sold us a horse that is a wind sucker and a cribber,” Sinclair announced the next morning. “We are going to court to get the money back.”

  A wind sucker is a horse that makes a funnel of his tongue and draws great rushes of air into his stomach. This is supposed to load him up with so much air that he cannot run properly. A cribber is along the same lines. He sinks his teeth into a piece of wood, a railing or the feed box, and then sucks in air. Both these habits are not good and many times can’t be corrected.

  Mr. Fitz thought it was a joke. There had been nothing wrong with Playfellow when the horse put together his two big races for him.

  It was an honest sale, and he was a good horse when he left this barn, Mr. Fitz said. Hildreth should’ve worked him a little harder, that’s all.

  This was enough for the people who knew Mr. Fitz. But they were people on a race track. They were not people in a courtroom, which is a place where money has accomplished many things. In March of 1922, the suit of Harry F. Sinclair vs. James Johnson was opened in Brooklyn Supreme Court: It was a joke. First, Mr. Fitz’s night watchman, George Travers, took the stand. He was a man who couldn’t hear a fire bell if you put it next to his ear, but on the stand he was by Sonotone out of Zenith. Yes, he said, he knew the horse was a wind sucker. He heard the horse sucking wind every night in Mr. Fitz’s barn.

  Then Snapper Garrison appeared. Mr. Fitz wondered what he could know about Playfellow. It turned out Snapper knew a lot. Why, he testified, he had been in Mr. Fitz’s barn at ten o’clock one morning and he had seen Playfellow cribbing on a feedbox in the stall. He also claimed that nobody was on the premises—something that hasn’t been true of a Fitzsimmons operation in seventy-six years.

  The jury took the case, stayed behind closed doors throughout the afternoon, and then returned with a verdict in favor of Sinclair. Johnson had to give back the money. Later he tried an appeal, but got nowhere.

  The Playfellow suit disheartened Johnson. He started to sell off his horses and get out of racing. He didn’t like games where rich men could cheat and get away with it. Mr. Fitz had no trouble picking up more horses to train. More important to him, he had no anger in him at all over the lawsuit.

  “Hildreth? He’s a fine fella,” Mr. Fitz said. “Garrison? Oh, Snapper, I like him. We always had good times together. The watchman? He was a real good night watchman.”

  10. The Big Years

  ON A SATURDAY AFTERNOON in November of 1923, Mr. Fitz was coming into the paddock at Pimlico race track just as a man named William Woodward was leaving. Woodward was a quiet, austere man who had a mustache, straight, matted-down hair and a checkbook in his inside coat pocket that no fountain pen would ever whack out. Woodward was connected with a little business establishment in New York known as the Hanover National Bank, and he owned a tremendous racing establishment known as Belair Stud Farm. Mr. Fitz never had met Woodward, except to nod hello around a race track, but this time Woodward came right up to him.

  “Fitz, I’d like to speak to you,” he said. “Would you like to train my horses?”

  “Love it.”

  “Fine. Supposing you come out to my farm tomorrow and we’ll talk about it.”

  The next day Mr. Fitz and Woodward spoke. They used few words. Did Mr. Fitz want a contract? No. He didn’t believe in them things. Fine. Was there anything else? Oh, yes. Those few horses owned by Maxwell and Pratt. He wanted to keep them. Oh, that can be arranged. Anything else? Nothing.

  Mr. Fitz left the rolling Belair Stud Farm that afternoon with everything. After thirty-eight years, it all fell into place. You could take all the worry and heartache and patience it took to last and throw them out because now there were going to be only big days for Mr. Fitz. He had a ton of hard-gained ability. All of a sudden, in one afternoon, Mr. Fitz had the whole thing beat.

  He went back to Pimlico to check on his horses, then went to a movie. Monday morning he was making arrangements at Aqueduct for additional barn space. He was going to have new horses moving in, he told the track officials. After thirty-eight years of trying to get there, he was a little out of the range of excitement.

  From then on, he was a part of some of the biggest days in American racing history. A year l
ater, a quiet, gentle woman named Mrs. Henry Carnegie Phipps and her brother, Ogden L. Mills, who would later become Secretary of the Treasury in President Hoover’s Cabinet, came to him and asked if he could handle their Wheatley Stable. Woodward said it was fine. Mr. Fitz took their horses on, and between Belair and Wheatley he was to have as close to a corner on the racing market as you could get.

  The first year with Belair, Mr. Fitz had a horse called the Aga Kahn who could run with anything on four feet. The Wheatley Stable’s first big horse came a couple of years later. It was Dice. He won five starts as a two-year-old and looked like he could be just about anything you wanted to say about him. But one morning at Saratoga the horse broke a blood vessel while he was working out and when he got back to Mr. Fitz he was in distress. Nobody could figure out why. By the time the veterinarian found the trouble, the horse had bled to death internally. It was the worst kind of luck you can have, but it didn’t get Mr. Fitz down.

  Part of Mr. Fitz’s arrangement with Belair called for him to check the farm during the spring and fall and look over the horses Woodward had bred and was raising down there. Young thoroughbred horses on a high-class breeding farm all seem to look equal if you are an outsider. And even the best horsemen can’t see too much difference in them. With a race horse, just as a human being, you have to throw him into the game and let him go at it. You can never see things like courage simply by looking.

  One afternoon in the spring of 1928, Mr. Fitz and Woodward hung over a fence at Belair and took a look at a group of yearlings which would be sorted out, the best of them to be broken for racing and put on the track under Mr. Fitz’s care the next year. One of them was a blaze-faced colt sired by Sir Gallahad III, an imported stallion. Woodward was a man whose greatest delight came in the tedious, nebulous business of figuring out which stallion and which dam would produce the best offspring. He leaned heavily toward Sir Gallahad III as a sire, so he was more than ordinarily interested in the colt. He regarded the colt as a possible proof that his notions on how to tinker with the family tree of a horse were correct.

 

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