Laughing in the Hills

by Bill Barich

  When a group of Bay Area businessmen bought Golden Gate Fields in 1965 and formed a holding company (Bay Area Turf Club, later Bay Area Sports Enterprises) to disperse stock in the Pacific and Tanforan Associations, the future of racing in California seemed illimitable. In its first year of control the group pumped a million dollars into the decrepit plant (the only major overhaul they would make in fifteen years, except for the addition of a turf course in 1972), then sat back and raked in the profits. “The combination of an illustrious history and progressive new management has brought an exciting spirit of Renaissance to Bay Area racing,” the company flack wrote in a vintage press release. “Last year attendance at Golden Gate Fields was up eleven percent to lead major racecourses in this regard.” In 1966 Bay Area Turf Club stock split ten-for-one, and the corporation declared a five-dollar-per-share dividend on the new over-the-counter issue, which had a par value of a hundred dollars.

  About the same time, the California Horse Racing Board hired the Stanford Research Institute in Palo Alto to assess the overall economic condition of the racing industry in the state. The results of the SRI study, Project I-5329, are instructive. In order for the industry to continue to grow, said the report, it had to attract more members of the occupational and educational elite, as well as young adults with money to burn. Two factors currently kept such people away: The word racing had negative connotations for them, and the sport’s complexity, its terminology and arcana, put them off. SRI suggested that associations educate the market, clean up racing’s image, and simplify procedures as much as possible. In a subsection, “Other Market Findings Significant for the Formulation of Public Policy,” the report cited several business practices that might imperil the industry’s future. Racing associations, for instance, were not plowing enough money back into their tracks. Instead they chose to pay big dividends, double the going rate in similarly structured nonfinancial corporations. In some holding companies, curious accounting methods obtained—tax write-offs for depreciation were very high, while those for fixed plant and equipment costs were very low. Furthermore, fans were complaining about the quality of stock allowed to compete at racetracks. People wanted to see better horses, but associations were doing little to cater to this desire. “Horse quality,” said the report, “was found to be of critical importance for developing and maintaining widespread interest in horse racing. Improvement in the current quality of horses running at California race meetings would be likely to have more effect in increasing attendance in northern as compared with southern California.” The state’s breeding industry, “with a critical shortage of high-quality stallions,” was also in need of support, and again racing associations had been for the most part unwilling to help. The report’s final criticism was telling: Profits made by racing associations were too high, and purses these same associations paid to horsemen were too low.

  At Golden Gate a few efforts were made to educate the public—Saturday morning open house, more free handicapping information—but in general the SRI report, particularly its insistence on the necessity of upgrading the quality of stock performing, was largely ignored. Instead, racing associations attempted to increase their already inflated profit margins by requesting the right to run even more races per season. From 1967 to 1978 the number of racing days in California jumped from 633 to 996 a year. Where the horses for this expansion came from is anybody’s guess; why they needed to be medicated before running is not.

  When I mentioned the SRI report to Goodrich, he refused to credit its arguments. The associations weren’t to blame, he said. Competition from other sports (basketball, two baseball teams, soccer, hockey, harness and quarter-horse racing) had reduced significantly the potential Bay Area audience for thoroughbreds, but the state of California was the real villain. At California tracks in 1978, eighty-three percent of the money wagered was returned to the public via winning payoffs, while the other seventeen percent, known as the take-out, was divided among racing associations, horsemen, and the state. Over the last ten years, the state had been gradually appropriating a larger and larger share, $109 million, or forty-three percent, in 1977, which left the other partners short in the pocket. The substantial profits of the past had been whittled down to slivers (unions had helped with the whittling, Goodrich said), and associations were being “forced” to pass along escalating costs to the fans.

  Recently the California Horse Racing Board had decided to sponsor another study, to be undertaken not by SRI but by Temple, Barker & Sloane, Inc., of Lexington, Massachusetts, and Goodrich hoped that when it was completed, it would give the associations some statistical support for their lobbying efforts in Sacramento. He gave me a copy of the management summary of the new report as soon as it reached his desk. Indeed, “An Analysis of the California Horse Racing Industry” made a strong case against the state’s inequitable allocation of the take-out and proposed a model for redistribution, but it also reiterated many of the criticisms in the SRI report.

  Attendance declines are the result of many factors. Consumer research points to the quality of the racing, the quality of the facilities, the level of the take-out and the appearance or perception of race manipulation as factors that influence attendance.

  So in the end the directors’ complaints had about as much poignancy as a spoiled child’s on his first awareness of limits. What I was witnessing at Golden Gate was the penultimate act of a karmic melodrama, the chickens coming home to roost. I asked Goodrich what he planned to do.

  “We’re going to start lobbying more heavily,” he said. “We’ve got to get some legislative relief.”

  What about the stock running?

  “I don’t know too much about it,” Goodrich said.

  XI

  Cardinal Ippolito d’Este once commissioned Benvenuto Cellini to create for him a saltcellar more imaginative and elaborate than any saltcellar ever made before. He gave the sculptor two designs and asked him to choose between them, but Cellini, who was known for his pride, scrapped both and submitted instead a model so ambitious in conception that the cardinal balked. A friend told him the design was too complex to be executed, and the Este prelate withdrew his commission. Cellini, angered, swore that the cardinal would live to see the saltcellar completed “a hundred times more richly.” He was right. The finished object, of gold, studded with gemstones, depicted Neptune, triton in hand, guarding salt, and opposite him the figure of Earth, female and recumbent, guarding pepper. Other figures representing dawn and day, twilight and night, and the seasons were carved in bas-relief around the base. Looking at the photograph again, I was impressed by Cellini’s skill and audacity, but I thought at the same time he’d outstripped the object’s purpose and gone beyond it into decadence.

  XII

  In the evening I took a walk on the backstretch and ended up at Pichi’s stall. Nobody was around, not even Bo, and I was most conscious of the sound of animals, Bud Keen’s goat braying, dumb little Urashima Taro pawing, Dantero picking at his feed tub with his teeth. Pichi just stood there looking at me, immobile, showing neither affection nor distaste, and I listened to the slight sibilance of her breathing and studied the white blaze between her eyes. She stood there calm as salt, beating like a pulse.

  * Oxyphenbutazone, Tandearil, a bute derivative, is often used in its stead. Tandearil has nearly identical properties, but causes less gastric irritation.

  Chapter Nine

  In 1475 Francesca Buonarroti, who was pregnant, went riding in Caprese and fell from her horse. Her husband, Ludovico, was afraid she might lose the child she was carrying, but the townspeople assured him that the fall was instead a good omen. Shortly thereafter a son, named Michelangelo, was born.

  II

  All horses are descended from the so-called dawn horse, whose fossil remains were discovered in 1838 near Suffolk, England, and subsequently dated to the Lower Eocene epoch some seventy million years ago. Because the skeleton was small, measuring less than twenty inches high at the shoulder, scientist
s grouped it mistakenly among the ratlike hyraxes and named it Hyracotherium. By the time similar finds were made in northern Europe and the upper Mississippi Valley, Darwinian theory had gained a purchase in scientific circles, and the fossils in question were reclassified as relatives of the present-day horse. Charles Marsh of Yale contributed a new taxonomic label, Eohippus. Out of this little fox-sized animal the modern thoroughbred evolved.

  The evolutionary path was convoluted, though, winding intricately through several species before arriving at the modern horse’s true progenitor, Equus caballus. There was Mesohippus, the first horse adapted to grazing; Parahippus, about three inches taller and bearing stripes on its coat; Merychippus, whose humped withers and dentition provided another advance; and Pliohippus, taller still, with more delicate legs and toeless feet. Equus caballus flourished during the Pleistocene age; the animal was about fifty-two inches high at the withers, strongly built, and of a hardy constitution. The great Pleistocene floods wiped out the species in the Americas, but it survived throughout Europe and Asia. One herd disappeared into the Mongolian wilderness and was not discovered until the last century, when the Russian explorer who found the herd lent it his name: Equus przewalskii.

  By 4000 B.C. the first horses had been domesticated and were used for pulling carts. In Greece, circa 1700 B.C., the carts metamorphosed into the famous two-horse chariots of Ben Hur. Though these chariots were primarily instruments of war, Greeks did race them on occasion and bred special horses in the Peloponnesus to pull them. Columbus reintroduced horses to North America on his second voyage in 1493, leaving behind some representative Andalusian stock in the West Indies. Horses soon became part of the cargo on almost every ship bound for the New World, and Amerindian tribes in Texas and New Mexico were quick to latch on to as many of them as they could. Apaches and Comanches raided Spanish encampments and traded stolen horses to more northerly tribes, as did French and Spanish traders (though less flamboyantly), and by 1730 even the Yakima in Washington owned stock.

  The lightest, fastest, and in many ways finest descendants of Eohippus were by then to be found in North Africa. Two closely related types, the Arab and the Barb (for Barbary Coast, now Libya), had been inbred meticulously over centuries to maintain their purity and prepotency, that all-important ability to transmit signal characteristics to an offspring (called, in breeding terminology, stamping the get). In Africa the cult of noble blood was born. Never be hard on a fine horse, the Arabs said, for his nature will cause him to rebel. At night, out on the desert sands, the Arabs brought prized mounts into their tents and treated them like members of the family. Then there is the Saharan legend of the original horse breeder, Ishmael. A mare of Ishmael’s gave birth to a filly who was too weak to keep up with the caravan, but rather than destroy the foal—her blood was noble—Ishmael ordered his men to wrap her in goatskin and carry her along. This saved her life but crippled her legs. She became known as the Crooked One, but in spite of her deformity she achieved high honor as the taproot, or base, mare for an excellent line of females, the Benat el-A’waj, Daughters of the Crooked One, who in turn became the Kehila. In Arabic Kehila means purely or thoroughly bred.

  By the early sixteenth century horses were in short supply in England because so much stock had been lost during the War of the Roses. Henry VIII, a sportsman dependent on horses for hunting and tournaments, took measures to improve the situation. Primarily, he relied on neighboring countries for imports, which complemented an edict of his predecessor, Henry VII, who in 1496 had banned the export of stock from Britain. The accent was on speed and lightness, and away from the qualities embodied by a prior favorite, the great horse, a big strong animal bred for combat and capable of transporting a man-at-arms and sixty pounds of armor into a fray. Francesco Gonzaga, Marchese di Mantova, sent Henry broodmares and Barb stallions. Ferdinand of Aragon contributed two Spanish horses worth a thousand ducats; the gesture was so grand it caused speculation about Ferdinand’s sanity. Over the years more and more Arabs and Barbs found their way into the king’s stables at Greenwich. The Master of the Horse interbred them, and the offspring were raced in gentlemanly contests against horses from the stables of Henry’s friends and acquaintances. Gradually this racing fever spread to the populace. When municipal racecourses like those at Chester, Newmarket, and Croyden opened, the demand for animals bred exclusively to race increased.

  The problem of breeding such a horse fell to the wealthy and their studmasters. No real breakthrough occurred until by luck three exceptionally prepotent stallions arrived in Britain within a forty-year period. In 1688 Captain Byerley captured at the siege of Vienna a handsome “Turk”—actually an Arab courser who’d been bought or stolen by the Turkish officer riding him—and brought him home; in 1704 Richard Darley purchased from Syrian friends in Aleppo a four-year-old Arabian and sent him to his brother in Yorkshire; and in 1730 the second earl of Godolphin acquired from Edward Coke of Derbyshire an Arabian who’d been foaled in Yemen and had once purportedly belonged to the King of France. From the get of these stallions, the three great thoroughbred bloodlines were created. Characteristics of the Godolphin Arabian were disseminated by Matchem (foaled in 1748) and those of the Byerley Turk by Herod (foaled in 1758). But the most important line proceeds from the Darley Arabian’s relative Eclipse, born in 1764, the year of the great eclipse of the sun. Eclipse was a champion who won all his races without ever being whipped, spurred, or headed, and when he went to stud in 1771 he rode to the stables in a cart, so precious had he become. The moment was a triumphant one for E. caballus, reversing as it did the earliest images of domestication. The horse was in ascendance, fully pedigreed, the subject of oil paintings that hung above mantelpieces in the parlors of princes and magnates, captivating them just as its ancestors had captivated the cave dwellers at Lascaux.

  This, then, was the thoroughbred, an offshoot of human longing, a particle of nature molded to fit within a construct, derived from Arabian stock tainted only slightly in couplings with royal mares and a few mares of mysterious and perhaps humble origins. But the progress from concept to flesh was not so orderly as some track historians make it sound. Breeding went on all over Britain, without much supervision or control, and the genealogical records of sires and broodmares were often confused or faked and sometimes unavailable. Names of horses were changed frequently, almost always when ownership changed, and were abbreviated or misspelled or otherwise fudged—Matchem was actually Match ’Em, and Herod more rightly King Herod. Occasionally the same name was bestowed on two or three animals in succession, father and son, mother and daughter. The terms Barb, Arab, and Turk were used interchangeably, and not every mare billed as “royal” came in fact from the king’s stables. John Cheney, editor of An Historical List of all Horse-Matches Run, And of all Plates and Prizes Run for in England in 1727, the first known attempt at a stud book (a record of stallions’ bloodlines and performances on the track), couldn’t vouch for the accuracy of the pedigrees he included. A later competitor named Heber confessed in the preface to his Calendar that mistakes were unavoidable when cataloging genealogical data. Despite these complications the thoroughbred, simply by having been brought into existence, posed a new problem, that of refinement. How could breeders improve a horse’s speed and stamina? They started with blood.

  III

  The blood of thoroughbreds is thick and hot, with more hemoglobin and red cells and a higher cell density than are found in ordinary horses, but it isn’t the medium in which characteristics like speed and stamina are suspended or by which they’re transmitted to offspring. Breeders in the days before Mendel thought it was. For them blood held the resonances of generations, all the secrets, and they were engaged in a perpetual search for a master formula to guide them in their tinkering. Their approach was alchemical. How do you extract the gold of a perfect racehorse from the base substances of sire and dam? What are the correct proportions? How much sprinter in the mix, how much router, and from which family? Darley Arabian�
�s? Byerley Turk’s?

  Some breeders believed in telegony. In telegonic theory, a pregnant mare received infusions of the stallion’s blood from her developing fetus, through “channels as yet unknown to Science,” and retained even after foaling a few of the sire’s precious traits. She could then pass them along to subsequent foals even if they were the get of a different stallion. Her blood became twice-prized, hermaphroditic, offering breeders a double hit of male potency, a second set of masculine characteristics for the price of one. Colonel Vuillers’s dosage system was somewhat more sophisticated, but equally useless. Vuillers attempted to concoct a recipe for mixing blood in perfect ratio. He traced the history of each horse listed in the stud book of his day back through twelve generations, recording its four thousand ancestors. Patterns began to emerge, certain horses showing up time and again in the lineage of champions. Counting each ancestor as a unit of blood, Vuillers could then specify the right mix for, say, a speedy filly: combine 288 parts Birdcatch, 351 parts Touchstone, 186 parts Voltaire …

  Mendelian genetics brought to a close the era of corpuscular mysticism, but breeders continued to look for a definitive way to predict the outcome of pairings. Though broodmares were known to be more effective than stallions at passing along their characteristics, most systems concentrated on studs and their ability to stamp their get. An exception was the Bruce Lowe system, which still has currency today. Lowe, an Englishman, examined the pedigrees of the winners of three major English classics, the Derby, Oaks, and St. Leger, and traced them back in female line to their earliest known ancestors, as recorded in volume one of the stud book. The descendants of Tregonwell’s Natural Barb Mare had won most often, so Lowe ranked this family first in importance. The descendants of Burton’s Barb Mare were second-best at producing winners and became Bruce Lowe Family Number Two. In all Lowe ranked forty-three families. While his work was useful, pointing out the strengths and weaknesses of several lines, it was attacked immediately in the States. Americans protested the inherent bias against United States–born or –bred mares (their foals seldom competed in European classics even if they were outstanding racehorses), and other breeders with mares who’d been slighted criticized Lowe for devising a system bound to perpetuate itself. His “prophecy” was self-fulfilling. Top-ranked mares would be bred to top-ranked stallions and naturally produce superior foals. Later on, experts poked holes in Lowe’s research, but Lowe still has defenders in breeding circles, perhaps because he chose to focus on feminine principles in a world skewed radically toward the masculine.