Native Dancer

by John Eisenberg

  Guerin waved his stick in front of the Dancer’s right eye a couple of times, seeking to keep the colt from easing up in the stretch. The threat worked. The Grey Ghost charged ahead purposefully along the rail, the 137 pounds on his back seemingly no hindrance. “He ran as if he had no more than a feather-stuffed pillow on his back,” Roach later wrote. The crowd stood and cheered as his lead widened to two lengths, four, six, even more. Guerin waved the stick again in the final furlong, and the Dancer raced hard to the finish. He was nine lengths ahead of First Glance at the wire, thirteen up on Gigantic.

  Though just a betless weekday exhibition, the race had given fans a glimpse of the Grey Ghost at his finest. His time of 1:24⅘ was impressive, especially considering the weight he had carried over a sloppy track. (A horse carrying twenty-one fewer pounds over a fast track had set Saratoga’s seven-furlong record of 1:23.) He was so decisive when he moved and so fluid and dominating in the stretch that it was hard to watch other horses after observing him. Even the best couldn’t compare with Native Dancer at the peak of his powers.

  The Oneonta’s tiny purse of $3,270 raised his career earnings to $785,240, fourth on the all-time list behind Citation, Armed, and Stymie. A few more major victories would make him the sport’s all-time money-winner, and Vanderbilt’s plans for getting him to that goal became the focus after the colt had cooled out without soreness in his foot. What was next? Vanderbilt said it was more likely that the Dancer would run in the Saratoga Cup than the Whitney, for which he had already been assigned 136 pounds, but no firm decisions would be made for a few days. “We should know more in a day or two,” Vanderbilt said.

  The colt resumed training, stopping traffic with his daily appearances at the Spa. He galloped one day, worked nine furlongs with Social Outcast the next, then galloped again. Vanderbilt settled on the Saratoga Cup as his next race, preferring not to make the horse carry 136 pounds. The victory in the Oneonta, dismissed by many as hollow, assumed a brighter cast when First Glance raced to a victory against a field of top sprinters a few days later. In hindsight, the Grey Ghost had destroyed a quality older horse under severe handicap conditions. Even though he had raced only three times in 1954, he was, it appeared, in midcampaign condition.

  Six days after the Oneonta, the Dancer worked ten furlongs in a slow 2:11 on Sunday, August 22. Winfrey and Vanderbilt watched the exercise, which Winfrey later termed “completely satisfactory,” and Vanderbilt left to attend a Jockey Club-sponsored roundtable, an annual Saratoga event at which panels of horsemen, officials, and journalists discussed racing topics. Winfrey remained at the barn to monitor the Dancer, then ate breakfast with several writers before heading over to the roundtable. When the panel broke briefly for lunch, Winfrey pulled Vanderbilt aside and gave him the bad news he had somehow kept to himself all morning: the Dancer had taken several bad steps while cooling out after his workout. He was lame again.

  The roundtable soon reconvened, and Vanderbilt found himself sitting at a table with several writers and Robert Kelley, the New York tracks’ director of publicity. Only Vanderbilt and Winfrey knew about the Dancer as yet, but Vanderbilt grabbed a pen, scribbled four letters on a piece of paper—N.D.N.G.—and gave the note to Kelley before leaving to huddle with Winfrey. Kelley read the cryptic note to the others, and everyone in the room immediately grasped its meaning: N.D.N.G. stood for “Native Dancer No Good.”

  Within minutes, Vanderbilt and Winfrey convened a press conference in a small office adjoining the president’s room at the Spa. They had a sad and stunning announcement to make.

  The Dancer’s career was over.

  “He pulled up fine after the work and he was fine walking off the track,” Winfrey said, “but after ten or fifteen minutes of walking outside the shed, he took a few bad steps. He was beginning to favor the right front foot. I imagine he would have become quite lame if we had continued to walk him, so he was put in his stall. It was quite surprising. He certainly didn’t feel any pain while he was working. Bernie didn’t feel that anything was wrong. There was no inkling of trouble. We thought we had a completely recovered horse.

  “So far as I can see, it is a recurrence of the recent injury. Since this happened after the Metropolitan and we gave him time [off] then, but the trouble has come back after appearing to be cured, we have decided that the only thing to do is to retire him now. If he was just another horse—say, if he was First Glance—we would probably try to go on with him, but since he’s Native Dancer, there doesn’t seem to be any point in not retiring him now.”

  Vanderbilt explained, “He was going to stud next year, anyway, and we just don’t have enough time left this year to stop him now and start again.”

  The announcement seemed abrupt to some. If there was any chance the injury wasn’t serious and wouldn’t take long to heal, why not wait it out and at least give the Dancer a chance to come back in the fall? “I think Mr. Vanderbilt was of the feeling that the horse was going to be carrying a great deal of weight, and perhaps he said, ‘I just don’t want to see that,’ ” recalled Tommy Trotter, then an assistant racing secretary in New York. “Sam Riddle retired Man O’ War for the same reason. Most of the races available for Native Dancer were handicap races, as opposed to weight-for-age races, and I imagine that had a great influence on Mr. Vanderbilt’s decision.”

  Costy Caras, who worked at the Daily Racing Form, suggested that protecting the horse’s reputation was also a factor. “I don’t know that the horse was badly hurt, but he was hurt to the extent that he was no longer the number one racehorse in the country,” Caras recalled. “He had gone out with Social Outcast one morning after the Oneonta and had some problems and couldn’t catch Social Outcast. When Native Dancer couldn’t catch Social Outcast, it was time to retire him.”

  Whatever its rationale, the retirement was final: Vanderbilt was not the type to change his mind after making such an important decision. The news rocketed through the sports world that Sunday and made headlines in Monday’s papers across the country. Horsemen and others in the racing industry were phlegmatic; as sorry as they were to see a horse of such caliber retired, these things happened in racing. The Dancer’s millions of fans took it much harder. For many, it was almost as if they had experienced a death in the family. The Grey Ghost had introduced them to the majesty of horses and the thrill of racing. Now their favorite racing “show” was being canceled. Other champions would surely come along, but the Dancer would always be the first.

  “His retirement leaves a void that may not be filled for a long, long time,” Evan Shipman wrote in the Morning Telegraph. “Champions, by definition, are rare, and Native Dancer was a true champion. Thanks to TV, he was known to millions, a public that had only dimly been aware of other greats such as Man O’ War, Citation and Count Fleet. The impressive grey was an ambassador for the sport to those who had never seen a race, and whose knowledge of horseflesh, in this era of the automobile and the airplane, was limited to his brief and shadowy appearances on the screen. This medium, however, for all its limitations, did in his case project a compelling ‘personality,’ his enormous popularity due to the intangible of equine character as much as to his almost unbroken string of victories.

  “Horsemen may argue concerning the exact place Native Dancer should occupy in the hierarchy of distinguished American thoroughbreds, but anything they say pro or con, is quite beside the point to the colt’s host of uncritical worshippers. They, for their part, are convinced that this is what a horse should be; this is the ideal. And no matter how it was arrived at, that intuitive conclusion may be correct.”

  Amazingly, there were those who still questioned claims to greatness made on the Dancer’s behalf, refusing to bestow such high praise on a horse who had set few records and seldom won easily. But the argument was moot at this point, seemingly sustained more by jealousy and general contrariness than any hard evidence. The Dancer’s record was beyond criticism. He had started twenty-two races and won twenty-one, bettering Man O’
War’s career performance of twenty wins in twenty-one starts, and missing perfection by a head in the Kentucky Derby. He had carried 137 pounds as if it were a pillow. Seventeen of his victories had come in stakes races. Overall, he had beaten 137 of 138 opponents over some twenty-four miles of racing, averaging thirty-seven miles per hour during a career in which he competed on eight tracks in four states. He had nothing left to prove.

  “It is safe to say that Native Dancer’s place among the famous horses of the American turf is secure,” wrote Morning Telegraph columnist Nelson Dunstan, who had been among the less willing to confer such greatness during the Dancer’s career. “Time and again we have seen lists of the ‘20 greatest American horses,’ and invariably the list includes Hindoo, Sysonby, Man O’ War, Exterminator and the undefeated Colin. We have no quarrel with the veterans but contend that the list must be brought up to date with Count Fleet, Citation, Assault, Tom Fool and Native Dancer. The grey’s record of winning 21 of 22 starts speaks for itself.”

  Such a horse couldn’t leave for the breeding shed without taking a final bow—on TV, of course—and a “farewell” appearance was scheduled. It was a spectacle. Six weeks into his retirement, the Grey Ghost was paraded through the stretch between races at Belmont on a sunny October Saturday redolent of summer. Thirty-three thousand fans were at the track, and millions across the country were watching on TV. Shortly after 4 P.M., just as CBS was beginning its coverage of the Woodward Stakes, the Dancer walked to the second turn and began jogging down the stretch toward the finish line. “Ladies and gentlemen … Native Dancer,” Fred Caposella intoned over the public-address system, not that a horse who had been on the cover of Time needed an introduction.

  He looked fit as he passed in front of the grandstand in the regal, upright pose he had cast in his post parades, eliciting a standing ovation from the crowd. His hair was braided, his step was lively, and Guerin was on his back dressed in cerise and white. Many other champions had seemed old and diminished in their valedictory saunters across the track, but this moment was underscored with raw temptation. The Dancer did, indeed, appear quite capable of running in the Woodward, and he would surely have handled the field with ease, even with a slight bulge in his belly, the first effect of retirement.

  Intuitive to the end, the colt almost seemed to grasp that this was his final run through the stretch. He raced fifty yards past the finish line, resisting Guerin’s gentle tugs, not wanting to stop. The crowd, too, kept cheering as he was finally halted, turned, and directed to the winner’s enclosure, where George D. Widener, the head of Belmont, presented to Vanderbilt and Winfrey a silver plaque listing the Dancer’s victories. Everyone shook hands as the horse eyed the crowd. Guerin excused himself—he had to ride another horse for Vanderbilt in the Woodward—and soon Harold Walker led the Dancer down the track, headed for the barn. Lester Murray placed a reassuring hand on the horse’s flank as they walked. The Dancer’s groom was unabashedly crying, his vision blurred as he helped the horse through an opening in the rail and beyond the view of the fans in the grandstand; as hardened as he was to the cycle of horses passing through the barn, Murray could barely stand the idea of the Dancer moving on. Maybe it was time for him to move on, too. He certainly would never have another horse like this. “Come on, Daddy,

  let’s go get you something to eat,” Murray murmured, knowing that his days in charge of the horse’s care had dwindled to a precious few.

  Two days later, there was a second farewell, as private as the first was public. As training hours began at Belmont, the Dancer was taken from stall 6 and loaded into a van outside Barn 20. Harold Walker led the horse away, with Murray too sad and emotional to take part. Arthur Daley captured the scene in a New York Times column that ran the next day: “In the ghostly half-light of yesterday’s dawn … there were few to bid farewell to the king of the turf. A sad-eyed Winfrey watched him go. The 250-pound Harold Walker, the only groom strong enough to hold him, led him by the shank down the road to the van. The huge grey reared and bucked. Maybe he didn’t want to quit the racing scene. At 5:51 A.M. he was in the van. It was his last post time.”

  A group of writers and photographers chronicled the horse’s arrival at Sagamore Farm later that day. As he was being led off the van, the Dancer stopped, raised his head, and pricked his ears as he surveyed his surroundings, then nodded as he was led toward the barn where he would take up residence as America’s most famous sire. Discovery, now a grand old man of twenty-one, had long occupied the first stall in the stallion barn, but he would move to the second stall to make room for his famous grandson. An arch would have to be cut into the doorway to enable the giant Dancer to pass back and forth without ducking his head.

  A crew from Omnibus, a popular TV program, arrived at the farm within days. Omnibus was a serious-minded magazine-style show that aired on CBS on Sundays, featuring segments on a wide variety of topics. Don Hewitt, who later became famous as the executive producer of 60 Minutes, headed the crew that came to Sagamore. On October 24, 1954, Omnibus began with the host, Alistair Cooke, detailing the episode’s schedule. The first and last of the four segments would consist of one-act plays performed by a repertory theater company Omnibus was starting. In another segment, Allen Funt, the host of another popular CBS program, Candid Camera, would interview the young sons and daughters of United Nations delegates. In the third segment, Cooke said, viewers would meet “the famous American racehorse, now in retirement near Baltimore … Native Dancer.”

  The Dancer’s segment opened with a shot of Ralph Kercheval, the manager of Sagamore, patting the famous grey in the stallion barn. “This is Native Dancer in the flesh,” Kercheval said. Over the next fifteen minutes, Kercheval, Winfrey, and Guerin took turns walking around the barn and discussing the Dancer’s breeding and racing career. Only one member of the horse’s human “team” was missing. “Mr. Vanderbilt can’t be here, unfortunately,” Kercheval explained, “because he is in Africa working in conjunction with the World Veterans Federation.”

  Guerin, dressed in racing silks, gave a voice-over commentary as viewers watched a replay of the Metropolitan. “I get scared to death every time I see that film,” said Guerin in his high-pitched Cajun accent. Winfrey, wearing a dark fedora and a white sports shirt with the collar open, replied, “You’re not the only one—I haven’t gotten over it yet.” The trainer then ran his hands over the Dancer and offered a detailed physical description as a camera closed in: “Native Dancer is a big horse… his tremendous power is back here across the loins… very heavy and very strong… up here on his shoulder he’s very thick and muscled… here you see a very heavy jowl—you’ll never see a jowl much heavier than that on a thoroughbred… a beautiful head, wide between the eyes, with an alert expression.”

  Native Dancer stood calmly through the physical, nodding occasionally, as if he agreed with the compliments. Upon finishing, Winfrey turned to Guerin and said, “I think we’re ready to give him a little go now, Eric, a little exercise.” The trainer helped the jockey up, and Guerin rode the horse around a corner and into Sagamore’s indoor training oval. Native Dancer jogged back and forth in front of the camera as Guerin spoke to him soothingly. “Hey, now… behave, boy… come on, let’s go.” The segment ended with Kercheval holding a microphone as Guerin dismounted behind him. “Native Dancer proved himself to be a champion on the racetrack, and we want to see if he’ll continue to be a champion as a sire,” Kercheval said. “That’s what we want to know now.”

  With the departure of Hewitt and the Omnibus crew, the Dancer’s time in the public eye was over. The roar of the crowd and the pomp of the winner’s circle were giving way to the serenity and abundance of a sire’s life. The waiting line to breed to him had started forming when he was two, and it was growing madly now. There was a rumor that he might service fifty mares in his first year, with each service costing $5,000. “The same indefinable genius that clings to his races is even more pronounced as one imagines his future as a stallion,”
Shipman wrote. “His masculinity is so pervading that if he fails to stamp his [progeny] with authority, one’s whole faith in the meaning of individuality will be in question. He is a superb male animal.”

  Kercheval was in charge of him now. It was the farm manager’s job to remake the Dancer into an effective sire, essentially breaking the horse again but teaching him to breed, not to race. Class was in session through the winter of 1954 and spring of 1955 as the Dancer was bred to his first book of mares. He had a lot to learn at first. “He wanted to rush and dive at the mares,” Kercheval recalled. Finally, Kercheval took the shank from the groom one day as a breeding session was beginning and tugged hard as the Dancer started to lunge again. The horse pulled back, reared, and flipped over backward, crashing in a heap.

  Kercheval was horrified. Horses that topple in such a manner can land on their heads and suffer brain damage. “I could already see the newspaper headline: Old Football Player Kills Great Racehorse,’ ” Kercheval recalled. Native Dancer was motionless on the ground for more heartbeats than Kercheval cared to count before finally stirring. Kercheval stood back, afraid of what he had wrought. “And I’ll be damned,” the farm manager recalled, “if that horse didn’t get himself up, take three or four steps over to me, and look me right in the eye. I’ve never seen another horse respond like that. I thought, What, is he gonna hit me or something?’ ”

  Stunned and relieved, Kercheval led Native Dancer outside for a lecture. “I said, ‘Do you know how to do things properly now?’ ” the farm manager recalled. “He went back in that breeding shed, walked over to the mare, got himself ready to breed, and damn if he didn’t look right over at me, like he was getting ready to show me that he had learned his lesson. I gave him a motion and said, ‘Yes, go ahead,’ and he went on and covered that mare perfectly, a beautiful job. It was like we had had a conversation. And I never had another moment’s trouble with him after that.”