Native Dancer (2 page)

Native Dancer was the perfect horse for the moment. Before the din and anarchy of the sixties, symbols of power were still
beloved and embraced; institutions were to be admired, not challenged. The sports world was brimming with them. Baseball’s
New York Yankees were in the midst of a run of five straight World Series titles. Notre Dame’s football team was a constant
in the top five of the college polls. Calumet Farm, racing’s dominant stable, had won the Kentucky Derby five times since
1941. Golfer Ben Hogan had come back from a crippling car crash to win a string of major championships. It was an age of winners,
and America itself was the biggest, bulging with prosperity. Native Dancer, a champion horse belonging to one of the nation’s
wealthiest families, fit seamlessly into the landscape.

A half century later, he was judged one of the greatest horses of the twentieth century by several panels of experts. But
judging him solely on his record and winning times misses the essence of his career. He was racing’s original pop star, the
equine Elvis Presley, an iconic marker of an easier but unsettled time and place. When American racing was at its best in
the early 1950s, its best was an indelibly charismatic horse known as the Grey Ghost. “It was a good time to be alive and
a great time to be a racing fan,” said Joe Hirsch, the longtime
Daily Racing Form
columnist. “When Native Dancer came along, he was more than just a horse. He was a happening.”

H
e was a sprinkle of light on a dark canvas, the only grey horse in a dizzy tumble of bays, blacks, and chestnuts coming down
the stretch. The 40,000 fans crowded into Belmont Park on September 27, 1952, could easily pick him out and see he was in
trouble, trapped between and behind other horses with the finish line fast approaching. Only days earlier, a columnist for
the
New York Morning Telegraph
, a newspaper that focused on horse racing, had wondered in print, “Is Native Dancer Invincible?” With two furlongs left in
the Futurity Stakes, one of American racing’s most important events for two-year-olds, the horse’s aura of invincibility was
being challenged as never before.

He had reached the finish line well ahead of his rivals in his prior seven races at New York tracks in 1952, his renown building
with every success. The sportswriters at New York’s seven daily newspapers had hailed him from the beginning as a young horse
to watch, and he had yet to disappoint. Muscular and riveting, with a gargantuan stride and an unyielding will, he had ambled
along in the middle of the pack in every race, constrained by his jockey, Eric Guerin, until he was told it was time to sprint
to the finish line; then, in a transformation as stunning as it was consistent, he lowered his head, lengthened his stride,
accelerated past his rivals, and left them behind, usually in just a few moments. He had won such races as the Youthful Stakes,
Saratoga Special, and Hopeful Stakes, and now New York’s hard-boiled racetrack crowd had turned out to see if he could win
a race that often determined the best two-year-old in America.

It was a typical racing crowd, composed mostly of men dressed in coats and hats, with a smattering of women and no children.
Belmont’s grandstand, opened in 1905, seated just 17,500, so every inch of the aisles, aprons, and terraces was filled. The
crowd was sweaty and testy, knowing and charged-up. Racing was at a spectacular zenith of popularity across the country, with
stables such as Calumet Farm and jockeys such as Eddie Arcaro as familiar to sports fans as baseball star Mickey Mantle and
heavyweight champion Rocky Marciano, and major tracks routinely attracting 50,000 fans for important races. The hordes had
come to Belmont for one reason on this sunlit September Saturday: to bet on Native Dancer in the Futurity, a mad dash of six
and a half furlongs down the Widener Straight Course, a straightaway chute cutting diagonally across Belmont’s main track.

The air had been electric in the saddling paddock before the race. Hundreds of fans surrounded the Dancer and shouted encouragement
to the familiar trinity of men responsible for the horse: Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt, the handsome millionaire who had bred
the Dancer and now campaigned him; Bill Winfrey, the youthful trainer who had yet to make a false move with the horse; and
Eric Guerin, the twenty-eight-year-old Cajun jockey who rode all of Vanderbilt’s top horses under a contract arrangement.
Long lines at the betting windows snaked through the crowd as the Dancer’s odds dropped in the tense minutes before the race.
He was 7–20 by post time, his allure so powerful that the Big Apple wise guys accustomed to angling for the slightest edge
had just shrugged and given in to getting thirty-five cents on the dollar.

The other nine horses in the field were supposedly some of the nation’s best two-year-olds, but they had received scant attention
from the fans. They were just the supporting cast in this star vehicle. The second choice, Tiger Skin, owned by Jock Whitney’s
Greentree Stable, had provided a modest challenge to the Dancer in the Hopeful weeks earlier at Saratoga before fading in
the stretch. A colt named Tahitian King had already lost three times to the Dancer but was being ridden now by Arcaro, the
king of America’s jockeys. Little Request was a California speedster expected to set a fast early pace. Dark Star was the
best of Harry Guggenheim’s Cain Hoy Stable. None were given much of a chance of beating the Dancer.

Winfrey offered Guerin a leg up with the advice he always gave: “Just ride him with confidence.” Wearing a white cap and Vanderbilt’s
silks of cerise and white diamonds with cerise and white sleeves, the jockey jogged the horse down the chute along with the
rest of the field. One by one, the horses were loaded into the starting gate as early evening enveloped the track and a slanting
sun cast lengthening shadows. After a brief pause, the gate doors opened and the horses came charging out. A roar went up
from the crowd. Was there a better sports moment than a fast horse’s reach for greatness?

Seen from the grandstand, horses on the Widener course started as tiny, vague shapes in the distance and grew larger and clearer
to the fans only as they neared the finish line in front of the grandstand. The crowd relied on track announcer Fred Caposella’s
distinctive nasal call, listening for any mention of the Dancer. Guerin settled the horse five lengths behind Little Request
as the Californian set the anticipated fast pace, covering the first half mile in 46⅖ seconds.

Races on the Widener course were often won by top jockeys, their skills especially valuable on the seldom-used track. Any
jockey could tell when he had covered a half mile or was turning for home on the main oval, but those markers were harder
to judge on a straightaway. Jockeys with less ability or poorer instincts often moved at the wrong time, and in a short race
for young horses, that was usually fatal. “Jockeyship often took effect on the chute,” recalled Hall of Fame trainer Allen
Jerkens, who began his career in New York in 1950. “You had to be pretty darn good to win the Futurity.”

Guerin had won it on Blue Peter in 1948, and after navigating an easy half mile on the Dancer, he inched the horse out of
the pack and toward the front. It was time to make the winning move the crowd had expected. But just as the Dancer’s ears
went back, Arcaro, a jockey so adept at measuring pace and timing moves he was nicknamed the Master, struck boldly. He drove
Tahitian King, a 10-1 shot, through a hole on the far rail, past Little Request and into the lead. The crowd screamed with
surprise as Caposella’s pitch rose and Little Request, suddenly fading, blocked the Dancer’s path and stalled the favorite
in the pack. The big grey had never experienced anything like this.

If any jockey could take a lesser horse and steal the Futurity, it was Arcaro. At age thirty-six, he was still in the prime
of a career that had included five Kentucky Derby victories and dozens of other triumphs in major races such as the Futurity,
which he had won three times. He was at his best in the big events, and his move on Tahitian King was a classic. Knowing he
wasn’t on a horse that could beat the Dancer in a stretch duel, he had preemptively grabbed the lead, hoping the favorite
might get blocked long enough to cause problems. The plan had worked, and Arcaro, sensing a possible upset, asked Tahitian
King for a finishing kick.

That the Dancer was behind so late in a race wasn’t unusual. He had trailed in all of his races until making a late move,
then often, curiously, loafed to the finish line once he had established his superiority, almost as if he wanted the others
to catch him. After months of observation, Winfrey had deduced that the horse preferred the company of others when he raced;
running alone and in front bored him, it seemed. Winfrey had thus conditioned him to race behind the front-runners, in traffic,
until it almost seemed too late, accelerating just in time to win at the end, leaving little time for loafing.

But if it was normal that he was behind Tahitian King with a quarter mile left in the Futurity, it wasn’t normal that horses
were in front of him and on either side, leaving him without a running lane. Guerin knew he had to react quickly. A successful
rider on the New York circuit, known for his cool head and steady hand, he recognized that the race was on the verge of getting
away. He hesitated, hoping the pack around him would begin to break up, and knowing he was in trouble if it didn’t Magically,
it did: Little Request dropped toward the rear, fading fast, and a sliver of daylight opened to Guerin’s right. He steered
the Dancer into the opening, loosened his grip on the reins, and shouted at the horse. Back went the Dancer’s ears and out
went his stride, his reach so extended that, it was said later, you could see the bottoms of his hooves at midstride.

In the career of every top athlete, equine or otherwise, there is a moment when it becomes clear this is no ordinary competitor.
For Native Dancer, that moment came in the final two hundred yards of the Futurity. Once he had found running room and accelerated,
he drew even with Tahitian King so quickly that Arcaro had no chance to react. It almost resembled a deft magician’s trick:
he was pursuing Tahitian King one second, eyeball-to-eyeball the next. Cheers soared into the air, and just as quickly, the
Dancer wrested away the lead and took aim at the finish. He had gone from fourth to first in five remarkable steps without
Guerin even drawing his stick.

A combination of factors would send the horse’s popularity soaring in the coming months: his prodigious talent; his come-from-behind
style, which exhausted his fans but left them wanting to see more; the timing of his arrival, at the dawn of the TV age; and
the sheer humanness he exuded with his limpid eyes and charisma. But of all the factors, none were more important than, simply,
his color. His grey coat stood apart in any equine crowd, discernible not only to fans at the track but also to those watching
on TV.

A fast grey was a phenomenon. Only one of every one hundred thoroughbreds was grey in 1953, and through the years, other than
a stallion named Mahmoud that C. V. Whitney had imported from England and a colt named First Fiddle that had won some races
during World War II, greys had not distinguished themselves in American racing. Many horsemen had long considered them unlucky,
lacking stamina, or even diseased, as the legendary Italian breeder Federico Tesio had written. “It wasn’t prejudice so much
as a sense of caution and reservation,” longtime
Daily Racing Form
columnist Joe Hirsch recalled years later. “Greys just were different. It was a sense of racism, I suppose.”

Greys would have disappeared entirely from racetracks around the world in the late 1800s if not for a French stallion named
Le Sancy, the single horse from which all modern grey pedigrees are traced. Le Sancy’s son, Le Samaritain, won the French
St. LÉger, a major race, and sired a colt named Roi Herode. After a respectable racing career, Roi Herode retired in Ireland
and sired a brilliant colt named The Tetrarch, a light grey with white patches dotting his coat. Nicknamed the Spotted Wonder,
he won all seven of his races as a two-year-old in England in 1913, then was injured and retired to stud, where he sired a
speedy filly named Mumtaz Mahal and many other winners.

The Tetrarch restored enough faith in greys to keep the line alive in England and America, yet many owners, breeders, and
horsemen still avoided them, and racing secretaries were still writing “grey only” races into their condition books as late
as the 1940s, believing the curios would draw women to the track. Even in the early 1950s, many horsemen still saw them as
sissified novelties and claimed, only half jokingly, that if you came across a grey or a horse with three or four white legs,
you might as well cut off its head and feed it to the crows.

There was no substance to the notion that greys were genetically inferior, of course. Coloring had no effect on a horse’s
ability to race. The grey tint in the Dancer and others was attributable to a lack of pigmentation in some hairs, leaving
the coat a blend of dark and light hairs that appeared grey from a distance. Many greys were born dark and died white, and
spent much of their lives in a state of transformation from one extreme to the other. The Dancer, colored chocolate brown
at birth, was now a rich dark grey with patterns of light rings just visible in his coat. His sire, Polynesian, was a bay,
but the genes of his dam, Geisha, had dominated his coloring. Geisha was a grey great-great-granddaughter of Roi Herode and
a daughter and granddaughter of greys. Now her son was a grey, becoming more famous every day.