Native Dancer

by John Eisenberg

  Security guards were called in to cut a swath through the crowd so the Dancer could get to the track for the race. “When they went to move him, they had to rein people off,” recalled Daniel W. Scott III, the son of the man who had foaled the Dancer in 1950. The younger Scott was with his father at Saratoga that day. “He had become an icon, with mobs chasing him and people shouting,” the younger Scott continued. “It was like the scenes with the Beatles a decade later. Native Dancer had become as popular in the sports world in 1953 as the Beatles were in music in the sixties.”

  Evan Shipman, covering the Saratoga meeting for the Morning Telegraph, devoted his column to the remarkable scene. “If there was ever any doubt about Native Dancer’s popularity, it was dispelled Saturday when the record crowd greeted Vanderbilt’s champion with a warmth unequalled since the brave days of old Exterminator 30 years ago,” Shipman wrote. “He is the most popular thoroughbred of our time. Leaving comparisons as a racehorse out of it, we are sure Citation, Count Fleet and the others never had this… appeal. We have only one explanation to offer, of course, and that is television. More people have watched Native Dancer this season than have ever before seen a single horse.”

  The scene before the Travers had Biblical overtones, with thousands gathering to see and touch their idol and linger in his presence. The Dancer was just a horse, but the public clearly saw him as more, an alluring and profound figure. He embodied all the traits that humans attribute to a champion: stamina, grace, determination, beauty, ability, and charisma. Eleven weeks after his defeat at Churchill Downs, which had so devastated his fans and would, however unfairly, define him to some in later generations, his redemption was being fulfilled.

  Vanderbilt proudly presided over the horse’s triumphant sum-

  mer of 1953, the Derby disappointment temporarily forgotten amid the cheers and headlines. “Dad was just so excited,” Vanderbilt’s daughter Heidi recalled. “He talked about the horse all the time, and you knew he couldn’t wait to get to the barn. There was no mystery about how important it was to him, and how wonderful it all was.” No mystery, indeed. “He was so thrilled to have bred this kind of a horse, this great champion,” Dan W. Scott recalled. “And he was already commenting about how wonderful it would be to have him as a sire.”

  “Whenever Native Dancer was mentioned, Alfred’s face just lit up,” said Chick Lang, a former jockey who rose through the racing industry’s ranks and became the general manager of Pimlico and a Vanderbilt confidante. “Alfred bred the horse, remember, and raised the horse at Sagamore, so Native Dancer was just a great, great validation for him and his operation. And Alfred’s gratitude showed. When he spoke of Native Dancer, it was as if he was speaking of his own son who had won the Heisman Trophy.”

  Alfred Vanderbilt III said, “People are fascinated by horses, kids especially. Heidi and I grew up insane about horses. If I was left alone in a room with nothing to do, I played with horses. Hounds went through the bottom of the lawn at Broadhollow on fall mornings. We rode. Our father was a famous owner of horses. Horses were everything. And the most famous horse was in our family, I was young, but I remember seeing Native Dancer on TV. I remember everyone talking about him. He was the idol of all idols, and my daddy owned him.”

  The Travers was televised nationally on NBC, and the Dancer put on a typical show. He easily defeated four opponents as the 1-20 favorite, rallying as usual on the second turn and winning by five and a half lengths, despite giving away as much as a dozen pounds. It wasn’t a race so much as a platform for his obvious superiority, barely more taxing than his workout two days earlier. “What a pleasure it is to ride a horse like that,” Guerin said afterward. Winfrey confessed to reporters that he was no longer sure about his theory that the Dancer exerted himself only as much as was needed to win. The colt had won his most recent two races by a combined fourteen and a half lengths.

  The chain of events that led to Arcaro’s predicament in the American Derby started on the afternoon of the Travers. In the Saratoga Special, a race for two-year-olds run earlier in the day, Guerin, on Porterhouse, and Hank Moreno, riding Turn-to, were coming down the stretch together three months after they had raced to a photo finish in the Kentucky Derby. When Porterhouse, rallying along the rail, came up on Turn-to, Moreno’s horse veered in and initiated contact. Moreno immediately moved away, but Guerin’s horse veered out and forced another collision at the sixteenth pole. Porterhouse went on to finish first, but stewards placed him last and suspended Guerin for ten days after determining, with help from the film patrol, that Guerin hadn’t attempted to avoid the second bump and, in addition, had hit Moreno’s horse in the chest with his whip.

  Such suspensions were routine; even the best jockeys tangled with stewards now and then, especially now that the film patrol’s cameras were watching. But this suspension was hardly routine. Guerin was scheduled to ride the Dancer in the American Derby that Saturday, but Illinois stewards said they would respect New York’s ruling even though their bylaws didn’t prevent suspended jockeys from fulfilling stakes-race obligations already assigned. Guerin, who had ridden the Dancer in all of the horse’s eighteen races, was out of the American Derby.

  The racing world wondered what Vanderbilt and Winfrey would do as the Grey Ghost boarded the Empire State Express at Saratoga and headed for Chicago, traveling in a private car as five adults and a boy—Carey Winfrey, twelve, was making the trip with his father—tended to him. Winfrey and Vanderbilt obviously wanted a top jockey, so their options were limited. There was Wee Willie Shoemaker, the young Californian leading the nation in wins. There was Teddy Atkinson, the regular rider for Greentree and its fine handicap horse, Tom Fool. And of course, there was Arcaro, the best of the best.

  Before Winfrey boarded the train for Chicago, he told Vanderbilt he wanted Arcaro. Vanderbilt nodded. The Master had been the Dancer’s toughest critic and rival, but he was the right replacement. He was strong enough to handle the Dancer, and his superb command of pace and tactics would give the Dancer the best chance of winning the race. Vanderbilt knew the horse’s fans would howl, remembering how Arcaro had gloated after the Derby and steadfastly refused to concede that the grey deserved so much praise. The fans would take any jockey other than Arcaro, no doubt. But it appealed to Vanderbilt’s arch sense of humor to put the Master on his horse after all that had happened, and it was also a sound racing decision. Arcaro was the choice.

  There was only one problem: the Master had already agreed to ride Jamie K. in the American Derby, attempting yet again to knock off the Dancer. It didn’t matter that he was Winfrey’s and Vanderbilt’s first choice. He was unavailable.

  The situation simmered as the Dancer traveled all day Sunday and early Monday, attracting crowds a political candidate on a whistlestop tour would envy. At a stop in Buffalo, New York, fans threw open his car door to see him. In Ashtabula, Ohio, a crowd of two hundred came to the station for a glimpse. Two fans in Chicago fought over a piece of cardboard he stepped on while being unloaded; they wanted his valuable footprint. Marshall Smith and Howard Sochurek, a writer and photographer for Life magazine, were making the train trip with him, preparing a major story.

  As the Dancer rode the rails, a fateful twist occurred; the racing gods, it seemed, were intent on making sure the marriage of the Dancer and the Master came about. Jamie K., with Arcaro up, raced dismally in a prep event at Washington Park five days before the American Derby, finishing fourth, nine lengths behind the winner, Sir Mango. The Dancer’s Triple Crown rival had finished tenth, fifth, second, and fourth in his recent races, sharply off the form he had shown in the spring. James Norris decided to pull his horse out of the American Derby. Norris lived in Chicago and didn’t want the horse laying an egg at home.

  Arcaro was available.

  John Partridge met Winfrey with the news when the Dancer arrived at Washington Park on Monday afternoon.

  “We’re out of it, Bill—and Arcaro is available to you, if you want him,” Partr
idge said.

  “We can sure use him,” replied Winfrey. “Although Guerin knows the horse and is used to him, Arcaro is a pretty good substitute, don’t you think?”

  Arcaro’s agent, Bones LeBoyne, was also on hand to meet Winfrey, and a deal was quickly struck. “Eddie knew what he was getting into, but it’s worth noting that he took the chance anyway,” Daily Racing Form columnist Joe Hirsch recalled years later. “He knew that there was going to be heat and that he would feel it. Not every jockey would have signed on for that. But Eddie was one of a kind.”

  Lester Murray was skeptical, to say the least. The Dancer’s groom was a great believer in the horse’s intellectual powers, which, Murray felt, seemed to border at times on what a human might possess.

  “You got a new boy and you ain’t gonna like this,” Murray mumbled as he settled the horse in the stall after the long trip.

  Years later, Mary Appley, the wife of Claude, recalled, “Lester was extremely upset about Arcaro coming on. Lester knew what Geurin could do. It was like letting your kid go with a different baby sitter. Lester very much related to the horse that way, like a child. He treated the horse like a diamond ring and he didn’t want anything to change. He said to me, ‘I don’t know, Miss Mary. I don’t know about this new boy’ Eddie Arcaro was a ‘boy.’ ”

  The public’s reaction to Arcaro’s hiring was predictable. Telegrams, letters, and phone calls poured in from fans urging Vanderbilt and Winfrey to change their minds and choose any jockey other than the Dancer’s most vocal critic. The owner and trainer weren’t swayed. They had the man they wanted. After Everson jogged the Dancer on Wednesday morning, Winfrey scheduled a serious workout for Thursday morning with Arcaro up. The jockey and horse needed to get acquainted.

  Never, perhaps, had a routine workout attracted so much attention. Reporters swarmed the Dancer’s barn at dawn, spoke to Winfrey and Murray, and waited for Arcaro, who soon arrived wearing khakis and a dark polo shirt. Winfrey gave the Master a leg up and asked him to cover five furlongs in 1:05—an easy pace. Under a bright sun, Washington Park came to a standstill when Arcaro and the Dancer made their move, much as Saratoga had frozen during the Dancer’s work before the Travers a week earlier. Marshall Smith later reported in Life that the racing secretary’s office emptied, exercise riders stopped to watch, and “the backstretch was lined solid for almost a quarter mile with racetrack people.”

  Arcaro covered the five furlongs in exactly 1:05, proving that the old-timers might be right when they said he had a stopwatch in his head. Reporters surrounded Arcaro afterward, but the Master downplayed the significance of his first ride on the Grey Ghost. “It was just a workout, and actually, I just sat there and he moved along; I think Mr. Winfrey was breezing the jockey more than the horse,” he said.

  The Master fielded numerous questions about all aspects of his pending ride. How did the Dancer compare to Citation? “Come on, all I have done is work him out once,” the jockey said. Why had he been so critical of Vanderbilt’s horse? “He was a great horse all along; all I meant was he would have to show me he was the greatest before I rated him that way,” Arcaro said. “Now I’m on the spot where I hope he does show me—it’s money out of my pocket if he doesn’t.”

  The loss of money wouldn’t mean nearly as much as the blow to his reputation, of course. If he failed to win after Guerin had guided the Dancer to seventeen wins in eighteen starts, it would be “a terrible blot on Eddie’s record,” the Chicago Tribune’s Maurice Shevlin wrote. The pressure was getting to Arcaro by Friday night. “I wanted to ride this horse a couple of days ago, but now I’m not so sure,” he told Marshall Smith of Life.

  It was unlike Arcaro to doubt himself, but there was a mitigating circumstance: the jockey was injured, having wrenched his ankle in a fall and then watched it swell to the point that he had to cut a hole in his boot to relieve the pressure and continue to ride. Arcaro hadn’t spoken publicly about the injury, and few outside of his inner circle knew, but Morning Telegraph reporter J. J. Murphy broke the story a day before the American Derby. “Eddie has put a blackout on information regarding the injury, but we feel the story should be told,” Murphy wrote. “He’s been undergoing day-long and night-long treatments, with considerable pain involved, to keep the swelling down. There hasn’t been a moment between races in the past week that his valet hasn’t wrapped the ankle in hot packs with cellophane covering, and given it massages.”

  Arcaro canceled all of his mounts on Friday to rest the ankle, but the pain was still so severe on Saturday morning that he asked to have the ankle X-rayed, according to the New York Times. Presumably, he would have pulled out of the race if the X rays had revealed a broken bone. He kept the mount but was obviously still in pain. Years later, Carey Winfrey recalled Arcaro taking a shot of novocaine before the race. “I vividly remember Eddie being very worried about riding with no feeling in his leg,” Carey recalled.

  Bernie Everson took the Dancer out for a brief jog on the morning of the race, then brought him back to the barn and turned him over to Murray. The groom was palpably nervous about the challenge the horse would confront later that day.

  “You know it’s different this time, don’t you,” the groom said as he wrapped stall bandages on the Dancer’s legs for the horse to wear until post.

  Murray’s concerns were well founded. Though the Dancer was as predictable as the sunrise in some ways, never failing to turn on his motor in the stretch for a winning run to the finish line, he was also occasionally distrustful of strangers and, like many horses, wary of changes in his routine. As Murray saw it, the change from Guerin to Arcaro wasn’t to be dismissed; eighteen races with the same jockey had established a routine in the horse’s mind, and there was no telling how a horse as headstrong and intelligent as the Dancer would respond.

  “You gonna be okay, Daddy,” the groom said as he worked in the stall, using a nickname he had pinned on the Dancer in the spring after the Vanderbilt barn cat named Mom had delivered her litter of grey kittens. But Murray’s voice lacked its usual conviction.

  The American Derby had a long and glorious history. It had been one of America’s most important races late in the nineteenth century, more prestigious than the Kentucky Derby. E. J. “Lucky” Baldwin, the famed California pioneer and horse owner, had supposedly once said he would rather win the American Derby than become governor of California. (He won it twice with Isaac Murphy, the legendary African American jockey.) The Triple Crown events had surpassed it and all other three-year-old races in importance, and other second-tier events such as the Arlington Classic had larger purses,

  but it was still the culmination of the summer racing season in Chicago. Whirlaway and Citation were among the race’s recent winners.

  Vanderbilt had entered a horse in the American Derby only once before, finishing second with Discovery, behind Cavalcade, in 1934. Although he now had the favorite, his horse’s path to the winner’s circle appeared anything but easy once the field and weights were set. The Dancer would carry 128 pounds, more than any American Derby winner had carried. The seven horses opposing him in the one-and-an-eighth-mile race would carry from eight to fourteen fewer pounds. Sir Mango, second behind the Dancer in the Arlington Classic and winner of the prep race in which Jamie K. had faltered five days earlier, would carry 114. “He is ready for the race of his life,” Sir Mango’s owner, Harry Eads, said. A stakes-winning English gelding named Stan, making his dirt track debut after a career on grass, would carry 117. Landlocked, recent winner of two stakes races in New Jersey, would race closest to the Dancer at 120 pounds. Van Crosby, at 114, was expected to set the early pace, and a second Vanderbilt colt, Beachcomber, would also run at 114, coupled with the Dancer as a betting entity.

  The Grey Ghost was the class of the field, but the weight differentials and the ballyhoo over the jockey change produced an air of uncertainty all day Saturday. The third-largest crowd in Washington Park history gathered in a broiling haze. The fans were there not
only to bet on the Dancer, who was sent to the post at 1–5 odds, but also to see for themselves how Arcaro handled one of his most devilish assignments.

  As expected, hundreds gathered around the paddock and let the Master have it when he appeared in Vanderbilt’s cerise and white silks, last worn by Arcaro when he rode Social Outcast in the Wood Memorial. The fans booed him, hurled invectives, stood on the rail and shouted that he had damn well better win. Arcaro’s expression was grim. These were circumstances as harrowing as any he had experienced, quite a statement for a jockey who had started 16,274 races over twenty-two years and won 3,214. None of that mattered now. If he didn’t win, he would never hear the end of it.

  The horses were sent to the post at 4:59 P.M., with the Dancer in the no. 4 stall. He broke cleanly and dropped off the lead as Sir Mango, with a local jockey named Dave Erb riding, zoomed to the front from the far outside post as the pack headed for the first turn. Arcaro planned to follow Guerin’s usual strategy: race close to the front, but in the shadow of the leaders, until the second turn, then let the Dancer loose and hold on.

  Whatever hopes Arcaro had of a routine, uneventful ride soon evaporated. Passing the grandstand the first time, the Dancer refused to do what his jockey asked. It was as if he knew Arcaro had doubted him and wanted to make the jockey suffer. Arcaro asked him to press closer to the front as they entered the first turn, but the Dancer languished near the rear, in front of only one horse.

  Arcaro shouted at the horse as they came out of the first turn and headed up the backstretch, then shook the reins to try to convince him to run. Unmoved, the Dancer continued to lag behind, refusing to put out as he briefly slipped into last—last!—place, ten lengths off the pace. Arcaro, becoming desperate, shook the reins again, and the Dancer finally responded with a token effort, accelerating past a few laggards and moving into fourth on the second turn. But then he stalled again, his stride shortening. The crowd roared. Sir Mango was two lengths ahead of the pack. The fans were beginning to envision an upset.