Native Dancer

by John Eisenberg

  TV sports, flew to Louisville to oversee a forty-man broadcast team. A pipe-smoking former baseball writer for the Associated Press, Bailey told reporters the broadcast would cost “well into six figures,” making it the “most expensive half hour in TV’s brief history.” Four cameras would be used—one in the paddock, one in the infield, and two on top of the grandstand—and Field would call the race from a new press box above the finish line. An original “feed” of words and pictures would travel over the coaxial cable to WCBS in New York, where edits would be made, commercials would be inserted, and a finished product would be sent out. Viewers would see events one-hundredth of a second after they occurred.

  The announcer, Bryan Field, like Palmer, was familiar to racing fans, trusted to bring order and context to unseen events. He had started out as a general sportswriter for the New York Times, then became a racing expert in the late 1920s, not only writing adeptly but also developing a flair for calling races in a faux British accent. By the late 1930s, he was writing for the Times and calling races as a radio broadcaster and track announcer in New York, and as if that weren’t enough, he took on the job of director of public relations at Delaware Park, a track in Stanton, Delaware, in 1939. Soon he was running the track as its vice president and general manager, commuting back and forth every day from New York. He eventually had to quit his newspaper job as Delaware Park flourished and his prominence as a racecaller increased with TV’s rise.

  Hours before Field took the microphone to call the 1952 Derby, President Truman gave the nation a televised White House tour before millions of viewers watching on three networks. A trio of newsmen followed him from room to room and asked questions as he chatted about paintings, china, and the history of the famous house. The president was so relaxed he sat at a piano and played a portion of Mozart’s Ninth Sonata, leading Jack Gould, a New York Times critic, to label him “a born TV star.”

  Minutes after Truman went off the air, it was time for the Derby. The first fifteen minutes of the forty-five-minute show were broadcast on a “sustaining” basis—without a sponsor—and Gillette, the razor company, sponsored the race and its aftermath. Sam Renick handled the scene-setting, advertising pitches, and prerace interviews. Pete French, a Louisville broadcaster, interviewed several celebrities. Field called Hill Gail’s victory with one minor gaffe, initially claiming that a colt named Pintor had nosed out Master Fiddle for third when, in fact, Blue Man had run third.

  It was another of the major TV moments Americans were learning to share in their living rooms, or wherever they could find a set. The Associated Press reported that taverns in Buffalo were crowded with fans watching the race; TV sets in storefronts in Huntington, West Virginia, drew large crowds from a nearby high school band tournament; sportswriters and school officials turned away from a USC-UCLA track meet in Los Angeles to watch; management at Pimlico installed twenty-six sets in the grandstand so fans attending the races there wouldn’t miss the big event; and the “sporting gentry” in New York “flocked to bars for the teleview” and “jettisoned the Kentucky tradition of mint juleps in favor of cooling draughts of brew.”

  It was easily the most watched horse race in American history, and Jack Gould’s New York Times review was generally favorable. “The camera coverage of the race was excellent and Field’s commentary on the race itself was outstanding,” Gould wrote, “but the other announcers, in doing the color, indulged in the usual synthetic hoopla and contrived excitement. When will these tiresome children of broadcasting learn to shut up and behave as human beings?”

  Of course, the only review Corum cared about was the review of the attendance and betting figures, and there, too, the news was favorable. Even though the race was shown live in Louisville, the usual crowd had swarmed Churchill Downs and bet enough to establish a new record for Derby day wagering. With that news, racing officially entered its TV age, however belatedly. Now that the Derby was on TV, other tracks were bound to follow with their major races, bringing the sport into focus as a TV entity along with boxing, baseball, and football. A vast audience lay untapped in America’s hills and valleys, and the chance to introduce it to the sport was impossible to resist.

  In the coming months, CBS signed a three-year deal to broadcast the Triple Crown, and NBC agreed to televise ten major East Coast races from April through June 1953, with Gillette sponsoring the program as part of its popular Cavalcade of Sports anthology. Still unsure if racing would attract viewers, Gillette arranged to have a pony auctioned off during each of the hour-long broadcasts, with the proceeds going to the Damon Runyon Cancer Fund, a charity started by the late sportswriter. The races on the schedule included the Gotham Stakes, Wood Memorial, Dwyer Stakes, and Travers Stakes, all on the projected schedule for the Dancer that Winfrey and Vanderbilt had drawn up.

  On October 31, 1952, five months after the Derby telecast and nine days after the Dancer’s victory in the East View Stakes, Joe Palmer spent the day covering the races at Jamaica for the Herald Tribune. The early autumn weather was crisp, but no crisper than the prose Palmer batted out in the press box after the last race was over and the 15,687 fans had departed. “The weather was better than the racing,” he wrote, chiding track management for the quality of “what it probably believed to be a feature” race, the Sanford Purse. By the time his story hit the streets, Palmer had suffered a heart attack and died in a hospital, leaving behind a wife, two sons, and millions of fans. “It can be stated only as one man’s opinion, yet unquestionably it is shared by thousands, that he wrote better than anyone else in the world whose stuff appeared in newspapers,” wrote Red Smith, Palmer’s close friend and Herald Tribune colleague, in a tribute column.

  Sadly, racing’s best writer was dead, far too soon, and with him, fatefully, went an era. The information machinery of his lifetime would continue to publish and preach, wielding influence and telling the public what it should believe. But Americans were becoming addicted to the power of their own vision: the thrilling independence of seeing events for themselves and making their own judgments, instead of having events seen for them and translated.

  Native Dancer, as if on cue, stepped into this confluence of technology and societal evolution in the spring of 1953. Adult Americans, raised in the Depression, were accustomed to horses, yet many had never seen a great one coming down the stretch. Racing, a sport riding a crest of popularity, yet still a newcomer to national TV, was set to offer them the chance. And the public’s initial fascination with the new medium still hadn’t worn off. The Dancer, with timing as momentous as his talent, would be the one to test the new era’s limits of celebrity, like Milton Berle before him.

  NINE

  When Native Dancer raced for the first time as a three-year-old in the Gotham Stakes at Jamaica on April 18, 1953, the rest of the sports world stopped to watch. The undefeated Grey Ghost hadn’t raced in almost six months, and the public’s curiosity was boiling over with the Kentucky Derby now just weeks away. Fifty thousand fans were expected, and 38,000 still came in a chilling rain. Millions more watched and listened on TV and radio; the race was televised nationally on NBC, marking the Dancer’s first coast-to-coast exposure, and also broadcast nationally over ABC’s radio network.

  American horse racing had experienced swells of popularity before: the 1920s were a high time in the wake of Man O’ War’s career, and four horses—Whirlaway, Count Fleet, Assault, and Citation—had won Triple Crowns in the 1940s, drawing millions of new fans to tracks, particularly after World War II. But the sport had never been as popular as it was in the early 1950s. “Racing Now Virtual King of Sports, Topping Baseball in Gate Appeal,” read an April 1953 headline on the front page of the New York Times. That was hard to believe, given baseball’s long reign as the “national pastime,” but the Times supported its claim with strong evidence: Thoroughbred and harness tracks had collected more than 45 million paid admissions in 1952, surpassing by 5 million the total at major league and minor league parks. Moreover, racing’s
attendance was rising, and baseball’s was falling. The sport had struggled at times against persistent tides of skepticism and societal conservatism in the first half of the twentieth century, but it was booming now.

  “What used to be called the sport of kings is now threatening to become the king of sports,” the Times wrote, adding that fans were flocking to tracks because racing was “faster and more colorful” than baseball games, which “tend to drag,” and football games, which amount to “a confusing pile-up of players or a tricky sleight-of-hand game more easily watched on TV.”

  The increase in popularity was attributable to numerous factors. The nation’s sports calendar wasn’t nearly as crowded as it would become. Baseball, college football, and boxing were popular, but pro football and pro basketball were just beginning to attract larger followings, and college basketball was reeling from a point-shaving scandal. Television would turn the latter three into major attractions and America into a country of sports-mad couch potatoes within years, with pro football surpassing baseball as the nation’s primary sports obsession, but the public wasn’t yet dizzy with choices in the early 1950s and the old-guard sports still ruled. Racing was at the forefront of the old guard, with a history dating to before the turn of the century and more tradition than any sport other than baseball.

  Racing also still had the gambling market all to itself. Las Vegas was in its infancy, state-run lotteries didn’t exist, and backroom bookmakers were hurriedly closing up shop in the wake of the Kefauver hearings. With the judiciousness of off-track betting still being debated, a racetrack was the only place where a person could legally gamble, and millions of Americans were exercising their right to do so. “It seems clear,” the Times wrote, “that gambling blood runs strong in the veins of Americans.”

  That had not always been the case. Powerful voices had shouted down racing on moral grounds for decades, stunting its growth and occasionally even shutting it down. “There was always that Goody Two-Shoes stuff about it being a vice; it was equated with sin because of the gambling,” Clem Florio recalled. “Millions of people loved it, treated it in a healthy manner. But the church people really held it back. There was a time when you said you were a horseplayer, that was a stigma. It was like, ‘Uh-oh, we don’t trust this guy, he’s probably a killer and at least a degenerate.’ ”

  Such notions were outdated by the early 1950s. The voices shouting down racing had lost the war. Racing’s leaders had finally succeeded in refuting the long-held perception that their sport was a haven for cheats and shady characters. That perception had been warranted at times and still was in some cases, but the overall picture was far less murky. The Thoroughbred Racing Protective Bureau, organized by a coalition of major tracks in 1946, had created a powerful watchdog agency stocked with former FBI agents. The “film patrol”—teams of cameramen who filmed races from multiple angles to help stewards identify fouls—had spread across the industry in the 1940s and virtually eliminated jockey shenanigans. Pari-mutuel wagering, in which fans bet against each other, with the tracks holding the money, had become customary, putting bookmakers out of business and giving bettors the faith that their money was traveling through legitimate corridors. Racing would always have its share of dark corners, but in the early 1950s it was as well scrubbed and unpolluted as it had ever been.

  At Belmont, there was talk of increasing the seating capacity to 32,000 and ultimately 50,000. The Jamaica Racetrack, built in 1903 with seats for 12,000 fans, now strained to handle four times as many on weekends. Hialeah had opened a new clubhouse. Santa Anita drew as many as 75,000 fans for handicap races at the peak of the winter racing season. Although some customers were unhappy about being squeezed into outdated facilities, most came back for more. The combined wagering at America’s 127 tracks had totaled almost $2 billion in 1952, setting a record for one year and marking a 20 percent rise from the year before. The combined attendance of almost 29 million had set another record.

  Racing was especially popular in Florida and California over the winter, Kentucky in the spring, Chicago in the summer—and New York for much of the year. From April through November, the big city paused and paid attention every time the starting gate opened at Jamaica, Belmont, or Aqueduct, which rotated meetings. Much as the scores of afternoon baseball games in progress were whispered through offices and communicated among strangers on the streets, the results from the track were heralded through the teeming city of big yellow cabs, brassy chatter, and smoky bars. It was appropriate that the city’s nickname had racetrack roots—the Morning Telegraph’s John J. FitzGerald had started using the phrase “the Big Apple” in print in 1921 after hearing two black stable hands in New Orleans use it to describe the New York racing circuit—for the city and the sport were as intertwined as siblings.

  “They’d open up at Jamaica in April and get 50,000 people and handle $5 million [in bets that day],” said Tommy Trotter, an assistant racing secretary in New York in the early 1950s. “It seemed like racing was in the best years I can recall. Racing had been shut down during the war [for five months in 1945], and when it came back, everything was going right. We had big crowds, lots of interest, great newspaper coverage. We had a lot of papers in New York and they all gave racing a lot of coverage with articles and pictures.”

  Costy Caras was working for the Daily Racing Form in New York in the early 1950s, helping Don Fair, the racing paper’s legendary chart caller. Caras lived in Jamaica, where his father owned a restaurant located near the Jamaica track and popular with the racing crowd. “Jamaica was just a fantastic hotbed for racing,” recalled Caras, who was later the longtime track announcer at Charles Town in West Virginia. “People took a bus or the elevated line to get to the track; it was very easy to get to, easier than Belmont, which was a little farther out from the city. They might have 65,000 people on a Saturday at Jamaica.”

  Caras’s father’s restaurant, the Louis Restaurant, was located at Merrick Boulevard and Jamaica Avenue. “We had pictures of jockeys and horses on the walls. A lot of the big-name people came in,” Caras recalled. “We were near the Whitman Hotel, which was where the racing people who shipped in stayed. There was a lot of racing talk. I would bring in a tape of Fred Caposella’s calls of that day’s races, and we’d play it in the restaurant to warm up the supper crowd.”

  New York’s racing fever originated in Jamaica and spread throughout the five boroughs. Anyone who might have doubted the Times’s surprising claim about racing surpassing baseball needed only check the crowds at New York’s tracks and ballparks in April 1953. The first day of the Jamaica meeting drew 40,364 fans in chilly, overcast weather. The Brooklyn Dodgers and Pittsburgh Pirates drew 12,433 fans on opening day at Brooklyn’s Ebbets Field; Jamaica drew 20,767 the same afternoon. Several days later, a pair of afternoon ball games drew fewer than 12,000 fans combined (the Dodgers and Pirates drew 3,149, and the Yankees, on a streak of four straight World Series championships, drew 8,196 to Yankee Stadium for a game against the Philadelphia Athletics), and that night more than 30,000 crowded into a harness racing track in Queens.

  Although the tracks were outdated and dilapidated and fans were grumbling—the New York Racing Association would be formed in 1955 to address the condition of the tracks and unify them—the thirst for horses and racing was almost insatiable, it seemed. Native Dancer loomed over this unprecedented fervor, the horse of all horses, casting a giant shadow as the Jamaica meeting began. The other three-year-old Triple Crown contenders were sorting themselves out in prep races in Florida, Louisiana, Kentucky, and California, but the Grey Ghost’s superiority was so presumed that his odds were 7-5 in a popular Derby future book in Caliente, Mexico. Long-range bettors were already betting on him to win the Kentucky Derby at those marginal odds even though he hadn’t raced since October.

  His arrival at Jamaica’s paddock minutes before the Gotham was presidential, lacking only blaring trumpets. Hundreds of fans swarmed the enclosure for a closer look at the unbeaten colt. They
were stunned by what they saw. As a two-year-old, the Dancer had seemed coltish, immature, still lacking definition despite his size. That was no longer so. He stood 16.2 hands tall and weighed 1,200 pounds, with a powerful hind end to match his massive forelegs, which had seemed out of proportion when he was two. Other than the usual bulge in his right ankle, which Winfrey dismissed as insignificant, he was spectacular.

  Eastern horsemen had noticed the differences when he returned from California with the rest of Vanderbilt’s stable in March.

  Rumors about his condition had circulated for months after his ankles had been fired and he was taken out of training for twelve weeks, but it was clear, once he was back East, that he had benefited from the time off. He covered five furlongs in 1:02⅗ on a muddy track at Belmont on March 21, and his conditioning improved rapidly from there.

  The goal, of course, was to have him at his best for the Derby. Winfrey plotted a short, intense course of prep races, all at Jamaica: the Assault Purse, at six furlongs, on April 13; the Gotham, at a mile and a sixteenth, five days later; and the Wood Memorial, at a mile and an eighth, on April 25. That meant four races in nineteen days, counting the Derby on May 2. It was a vigorous reentry to racing after such a long layoff, but Winfrey had little choice. The Dancer’s training had been pushed back when his ankles were fired, and he was just getting into shape.

  Predictably, there was criticism. Some horsemen felt mid-April was too late to start giving a Derby horse a diet of prep races; it was already clear, they said, that the Grey Ghost wouldn’t be in peak condition in Louisville. Others felt Winfrey surely knew what was needed to have his horse ready, and the Dancer’s training seemed to validate their assumption. The colt worked a mile for the first time as a three-year-old on April 4, covering it in 1:41⅕ on a fast track, then worked the same distance in 1:39 on a muddy track four days later. The latter was an impressive work seen by hundreds of horsemen at Belmont, and “the workout combined with his unbeaten record, seems to have terrified rival trainers,” Morning Telegraph columnist Charles Hatton wrote.