Native Dancer (15 page)

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.

W
hen 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.