Sunny Jim

by Breslin, Jimmy;

  Gallant Fox was retired to stud at the end of that year. Two years later, when Mr. Fitz and Woodward were inspecting the crop of yearlings and weanlings at Belair, they were giving special attention to a couple of foals, including the first sired by Gallant Fox. The other was by Sir Gallahad III. Woodward by now had a great ambition. He wanted to have a winner of the English Derby and had been sorting out hopefuls from his stock and shipping them to England, where they were trained by Captain Cecil Boyd-Rochford. Woodward and Mr. Fitz thought the Sir Gallahad III colt was the best of the lot. The next year, when the horses were gangling yearlings, the colt still looked best. Captain Rochford was in the country to look at the stock and he and Mr. Fitz agreed on the colt.

  “The Gallant Fox colt looks like he could be fine,” Mr. Fitz said. “Take another look at him so we’ll be sure.”

  They did. Both then decided on the other colt. Woodward had the horse shipped to England. The other, whom he named Omaha, was turned over to Mr. Fitz for racing. At two, Omaha was nothing to get excited about. He won only once in nine starts. But horses change from year to year and on the first Saturday in May of 1935 Mr. Fitz was standing in the paddock at Churchill Downs again and a blond-haired kid named Smokey Saunders came down from the jocks’ room, swung up on Omaha and went out to the track for the Kentucky Derby. As the horses headed for the post, a slim, dark-haired newcomer, Eddie Arcaro, was trying to settle his first Derby mount, the filly Nellie Flagg, who was having the kind of trouble fillies usually have in the springtime. The track was mud, but it didn’t bother Omaha. He was fifth at the half to something called Plate Eye, then he took over from Whiskolo at the three-quarter pole. At the head of the stretch, Saunders took one look straight ahead—the finish looked so far away I nearly fell off—then put his head down and didn’t lift it until he was a winner. Roman Soldier was second. Two weeks later, in the Preakness, Firethorn ran second to Omaha and then in June, in the Belmont Stakes, Firethorn chased him again and got nothing. It was Mr. Fitz’s second Triple Crown winner. You tend to dismiss a thing like this when you are dealing with him because he doesn’t think it important at all. But only one other who ever lived, Ben A. Jones, trained more than one Triple Crown winner.

  The colt they sent to England? “I forget his name. I know he didn’t get anything, though.”

  In 1934, when he was having trouble with Omaha, then a two-year-old, Mr. Fitz had a barn full of horses who could run. One was Faireno, owned by Woodward, and the winner of the 1932 Belmont Stakes. The other was Dark Secret, owned by Mrs. Phipps and Ogden Mills. Dark Secret was the outstanding distance horse in the country in 1934, and won 19 races in his career.

  On September 15, he took the track with Charley Kurtsinger on his back to run in the Jockey Club Gold Cup at Belmont, which is a two-mile race. There were only two other horses in the race. One was Inlander, which didn’t seem to fit in, the other Faireno, whom Dark Secret had defeated in a race at Saratoga—the Saratoga Cup—a month earlier. The sky was black and a sheet of rain covered the track.

  There was a crowd of 25,000. The big event had been the Futurity, won by Chance Sun. Omaha had finished fourth. Everybody was writing about that when the three horses came up to the starting gate for the Gold Cup. The gate opened and the horses began running. It was a match race from the start. Kurtsinger got Dark Secret out first, Tommy Malley had Faireno right on him. Inlander was out of it from the first strides. The two horses ran evenly around the huge, sweeping mile-and-a-half Belmont track, Dark Secret on the inside, Faireno, the outside. Mr. Fitz was in the grandstand, at the head of the stretch, watching his two horses run. Dark Secret and Faireno settled down into a duel of legs and lungs and hearts. These were two thoroughbreds out to do exactly what they had been born for, and there was to be no stopping. Dark Secret kept in front, now by a half-length, now by a length as Faireno held on. At the top of the stretch they started to pick up the pace. Malley’s right arm began to go up and come down as he whacked Faireno. The horse lowered his belly, as race people say, and came on. Alongside him, Dark Secret picked up. His stride lengthened and came faster. This was one hell of a race and the crowd started to pick it up. The roar started way up the track, when the people in the grandstand saw the two begin their charge. Then it rolled through the stands and now the whole of Belmont Park was roaring. The two horses came down the stretch, with Faireno’s nose now even with Dark Secret’s flank. Both had come nearly two miles, but they were running straight, and harder every step. Kurtsinger had his face buried in Dark Secret’s mane, his arms pumping forward with everything he had in his little body. He was trying to get home a winner and he was oblivious to anything else. But as they neared the wire Kurtsinger felt a lurch. Dark Secret had bowed a tendon in his right front leg. Dark Secret faltered. But only for a tiny piece of a second. So tiny only Mr. Fitz remembers seeing him do it. Then Dark Secret reached out with his injured right leg again and one thousand pounds of horse and Charley Kurtsinger’s 118 pounds and the saddle and the lead pads all came down on the torn ligaments. He swayed. He kept going. He was a race horse, and he was racing. He was not going to stop until he was finished with what he was supposed to do. His feet slammed into the mud, his body strained, his head bucked up and down and he kept even with Faireno. He had the kind of pain you do not live with. But with yards to go Dark Secret kept charging while Faireno flew. He had to catch the crippled horse. But Dark Secret did not stop until he had his nose laid out so everybody could see he was the winner. Then he stopped. His right leg shattered directly under the finish line. Kurtsinger tumbled off, picked himself up and looked.

  Belmont Park was silent. The rain beat down on Dark Secret’s back as he hobbled in the mud. The rain dripped from his coat. But he was up. He was up straight, looking up the track. And his head was high, as high as a proud thoroughbred can hold it. He had won the race.

  They got a van onto the track and a groom helped Dark Secret limp onto it. Then they took him to a barn where the veterinarian could look at him. When Mr. Fitz got there, Ogden Mills and Mrs. Phipps were standing with the veterinarian and the man was leaning over and looking at Dark Secret’s leg. Grooms held the horse tightly so he wouldn’t rear and kick out in pain. Then the vet straightened up.

  “The leg is completely smashed.”

  “Can I do anything with him?” Mr. Fitz asked.

  “He’d suffer too much,” the vet said. “Gangrene would set in. You can’t help him at all.”

  “All right,” Mr. Fitz said. The others nodded, too. There was nothing to talk about. The horse had run himself to death.

  The vet reached into his bag for a needle with which he would inject poison into Dark Secret’s blood stream. It would kill him immediately. Mr. Fitz didn’t even ask what it was. He asked the guy to wait for a minute. Then he started walking away. Mills called just a minute, to Mr. Fitz. He walked away, too.

  “Me and him, we just walked away,” Mr. Fitz says. “I wasn’t going to look at that.”

  In the newspapers the next day, Dark Secret got a couple of paragraphs at the tail end of the stories about the Futurity, which was a very important race because there was a lot of money in it for the winner. Dark Secret’s victory was only worth $6500 and that didn’t make him very important at all.

  In January 1935 the Wheatley Stable presented Mr. Fitz with a smallish two-year-old colt whose ancestry was Hard Tack-Swing On, so he had good folks, but that was about all. He was small and game, but couldn’t run with the best. So Mr. Fitz began to make a hard worker out of this horse, who was called Seabiscuit. Mr. Fitz ran Seabiscuit 35 times as a two-year-old. The horse won four times against nondescript company. Then at Saratoga, on August 3, 1936, Mr. Fitz put jockey Jimmy Stout on him in an allowance race and Seabiscuit won by six lengths.

  The next day, Mr. Fitz was sitting in a chair under a tree in the paddock at Saratoga when Ogden Mills walked over to talk to him.

  “What do you think of Seabiscuit?” Mills asked.

  “Nice
little horse, but not real good,” Mr. Fitz said. “I don’t think he’ll ever be much more than he is.”

  “Well, I have an offer from Charles S. Howard for the horse. He’d like to pay $7500 for him.”

  “Nice price for him,” Mr. Fitz said.

  Mills went away. Mr. Fitz heard nothing more of it. So he put Seabiscuit into a race on August 10. He won by four lengths this time. Later that day, he saw Mills walking toward the clubhouse.

  “Say, if you’re going to sell Seabiscuit,” Mr. Fitz said, you better get a little more than $7500 for him. “The horse looks like he might start gettin’ useful around here. Might pay some bills.”

  “No,” Mills said, “I gave Mr. Howard my word he could have him for $7500 and I’m not going to change it now. The horse is his for that price. In fact, I’m going in to talk to him about it now.”

  The rest is in the racing books. Seabiscuit simply became a great horse. Any sports fan who is over thirty-one years old now will remember listening to Clem McCarthy’s deep, thrilling voice coming over the radio as he called the great match race between Seabiscuit and War Admiral in November of 1938 at Pimlico race track. Seabiscuit, ridden by the late Georgie Woolf, the one they called the Iceman, won it by two lengths.

  And in all the afternoons spent sitting with Mr. Fitz at a race track, and all the nights at his house, and in all the newspaper stories written of him, Seabiscuit is the only subject ever brought up that draws a hint, the slightest hint, that Mr. Fitz wants to say something to make himself look good.

  “I raced him thirty-five times as a two-year-old, he was saying one particular night. That’s what brought the horse around. He never would have been anything if I hadn’t run him thirty-five times as a two-year-old. You could put that down as something good I’ve done.”

  All through these years, day in and day out, whenever there was a big race, a Fitzsimmons-trained horse was shooting for it. In 1936, you had Granville, another Gallant Fox colt. He was almost as jumpy and unpredictable as a human being. They tried every trick in the book to calm Granville down. At Louisville, Mr. Fitz had his feed held out in the morning, then had him walked to the paddock as if he were going to run in the next race. The colt took it quietly. But on Derby day he began to fret and his sides turned to lather and when he got to the gate he jumped around like a school kid. At the start Jimmy Stout went sailing off Granville’s back, landed on the seat of his pants and that was that. Two weeks later, in the Preakness, Stout was able to hang on, and got second money. By June, in the Belmont Stakes, Granville was rough. He slammed down the winner, then shipped out to Chicago and took the Arlington Classic. At Saratoga he won the Kenner, although he tried to fall asleep in the stretch, then took the Travers. On August 29 Granville ran a mile and three-quarters, for the Saratoga Cup, against the great Discovery. It was deep mud, but it didn’t bother Granville. He won by six lengths and after it everybody was saying that the great Gallant Fox had outbred himself in this one.

  Then in 1939 there was Johnstown, who could fly. He won the Kentucky Derby, ran out of the money in the Preakness, then came back to win the Belmont Stakes. Big victories were five cents a pound for Mr. Fitz. The horses, every one of them, could have lost, he feels.

  12. It Don’t Hurt None

  THE LITTLE GIRL WAS about four and she came running into the barn ahead of her father. She wanted to look at horses, but she stopped when she saw Mr. Fitz. He was a strange sight to her. He was leaning on a stick which he had in his right hand and as it was mid-day by now, his head was heavier than it had been at 5:30 in the morning and he was looking directly at the dirt floor.

  The little girl walked up to him, put her hands on her hips, and crouched down almost to the ground and looked up into Mr. Fitz’s face.

  “Poor old man,” she said. “Look at the poor old man.”

  Then she turned and ran away to look at horses. Her father, who had come in a step too late to put a hand over her mouth, hung his head. He looked like he wanted to die.

  Mr. Fitz kept looking at the ground. “Poor old man,” he was saying. “Poor old man.” Then he chuckled. He got a kick out of it.

  There was also a morning when he was standing in the infield at Washington Park, Chicago, waiting for a man to tell him he could start talking to the two television cameras which were set up in front of him. He was going to explain what he was doing with Nashua, who was out on the track for a final workout before the big match race with Swaps.

  One of the two cameramen stepped out from behind his camera and called to Mr. Fitz.

  “Say,” the cameraman said, “would you please pick up your head and look at the camera? I can’t get your face the way you are.”

  Mr. Fitz’s eyes brightened. “Son, if I can do that I’ll give you Nashua, he said. Everybody laughed. Mr. Fitz loved the line. He made sure to remember to use it again.

  This is how he has taken on the problem of having something wrong with his body that other people can see. Normally, this is a subject which can become deep and should be approached carefully. But this is preposterous when you are dealing with Mr. Fitz. For one thing, the physical trouble is totally unimportant as far as he is concerned. For another, he is a man who tells you what you want to know when you ask him something and he has little patience for delicate questioning, the kind where you get a person to talk about something without having to bring up the subject yourself.

  One evening last winter in Miami, then, we were sitting with him on the porch of his house in Miami and we simply asked him what it was like to have little children come up and ask him why he doesn’t stand up straight and to have adults, particularly if they do not know who he is, stare at him wherever he goes.

  “Only one thing about it bothers me,” he said softly. “You see how my head gets so far down? Well, I’m always afraid I’ll be going along and I’ll pass right by some nice fella and I won’t even see him and say hello. He might think I’m givin’ him the go-by. You know, sometimes when I got my head down I don’t hear a fella say hello and I go right by him. He might think I’m kind of sluffin’ him off. That bothers me a lot. I just wish I could see up enough so’s I could say hello to all the people I’m passing.”

  He comes along on this kind of a road.

  He expects everybody else to do it, too. In 1945, his grandson Jimmy, who had been taken apart a little by a shell in France, was brought in a wheelchair to Jamaica race track from an Army hospital where they were to spend two years trying to fix up his left leg.

  Jimmy wanted to go over to see his grandfather, who was sitting in a car on the first turn, so he maneuvered out of the box seat they had him in, got out of the stands and then started over toward his grandfather. A guy from the race track, Larry Burke, came over to give him a hand. He pushed the wheelchair over alongside Mr. Fitz’s car, then leaned in and spoke to Mr. Fitz.

  “He’s all right,” Burke said. “Doesn’t bother him at all. He’s the same kid he was when he left here.”

  “Well, he wouldn’t be a Fitzsimmons if he was around complainin’,” Mr. Fitz said.

  Physically, Mr. Fitz’s trouble is that the vertebrae from the middle of his back to his neck have jammed together and ossified. This has taken all movement from his head. He cannot turn it from side to side. The best he can do is hold it up so he can see where he is going. This requires a lot of effort, so most of the time he looks down when he walks. When he goes to bed, his head is a full foot off the mattress because of the hump in his back. So Mr. Fitz puts an old lavender-colored jockeys’ cap on his head, curls over on his side and sleeps like a bear.

  Mr. Fitz, except for personal conjecture, never has been exactly sure of what his trouble stems from anyway and he has no idea what it will do to him in the future. This is because his relationship with doctors, except those doctors he talks horses with at race tracks, has been at best sketchy. In Miami last winter he had a supply of pills given to him by a doctor for some reason or another. The exact facts really don’t matter bec
ause the pills, when last seen, were being taken by Ann Martin, his housekeeper. She figured they were for older people and since Mr. Fitz certainly wasn’t going to bother with them she gave them a whirl. In recent years, Mr. Fitz has used two doctors, one in Florida and one in Ozone Park, but after handling the ills of race horses for seventy-six years he has a little bit of a notion that he can figure out humans, too, so he is not what you would call the perfect patient. He always put more stock in steam baths, light eating, no drinking or smoking and fresh air than in sessions with doctors.

  “One thing the doctor down in Florida tells me, he was saying one night, is the shape my heart and lungs are in. He says I’m as fresh as a fifty-year-old man. He figures the same way I do—I’m good for another twenty-five years.”

  Now, as for Mr. Fitz’s old age problem. Apparently, this thing can be a whopper. A book written by a lady in Boston based on an old age center’s study seems to indicate this. The book insisted that when a child reaches the age of four he does not, as we have always believed, simply stop biting people. Instead, he begins to establish a prejudice toward the aged. This gives you some idea of how tough it is to be old, because as everybody knows, it is really something to have four-year-olds hating you.

  Mr. Fitz doesn’t happen to be exactly in love with old people, either. As long as they revert to living in the past, he wants out. Late one Saturday afternoon back in 1957, he was sitting on a bench in the big waiting room at New York’s Pennsylvania Station while they were making up the Cincinnati Limited. He was taking it to Louisville for Bold Ruler’s shot at the Derby. For the trip, Mr. Fitz had on a dark blue suit, magnificent cowboy hat and a big bow tie. An old man in a black derby and string tie took the seat next to him, introduced himself and started to talk about the long, long ago. It seemed the most natural thing in the world for two old men to do, and Mr. Fitz looked like he was enjoying it. They were a wonderful study, these two old men sitting side by side, with the cowboy hat and the derby. But when a station agent came over and said it was time to get on the train, Mr. Fitz was muttering as he headed for the gate.