Native Dancer (20 page)

Such harsh reducing left him weak and unable to ride up to his potential. Fortunately, Theall, a fellow Cajun, continued believing
in him, and he remained under contract to Brown. Theall’s faith finally paid off in 1946. Guerin, at twenty-one, spent the
summer dueling with Arcaro in New York and won his share of races. “It’s funny that you fellows who write for the papers seldom
give Eric Guerin the credit he deserves. He’s a pretty slick rider,” Arcaro told reporters one day. The secret was out by
the end of 1946. Guerin’s total of twenty-one wins in stakes and handicap races ranked among the nation’s best.

He earned his first Kentucky Derby mount the following year on Jet Pilot, trained by Silent Tom Smith, the reclusive legend
who had conditioned Seabiscuit. Jet Pilot had won five races and more than $87,000 as a two-year-old with Guerin on him, and
he was the second choice in the Derby, behind Phalanx, ridden by Arcaro. Smith had brought Jet Pilot along slowly because
of sore feet, but figuring the chestnut colt had one good race left, he hoisted Guerin up before the Derby with simple advice:
“Take him to the front and don’t look back.”

Guerin broke to the lead and slowed the pace to a crawl—a half mile in 49 seconds—leaving Jet Pilot with enough energy to
hold off Phalanx and Calumet’s Faultless down the stretch. It was a brilliant ride. Guerin had won the Kentucky Derby at age
twenty-two. “I was at Churchill Downs that day, riding for Joe W. Brown,” Leblanc said. “Jet Pilot wasn’t the best horse in
the race, but Phalanx didn’t run for Arcaro and Eric rode a nice race.”

A rush of bad luck immediately ensued, as if the racing gods were punishing Guerin for winning the Derby before he had paid
his dues. He made seventy-five straight starts without winning, and the streak was halted not by a victory, but by the fourth
major fall of Guerin’s career. This one resulted in a fractured vertebra that laid him up for three months, giving him time
to ponder his many ups and downs. He made a fateful decision, realizing that his persistent weight problem and resulting lack
of strength had contributed to this latest fall. It was time to start eating right.

For years, he had eaten one major meal a day and otherwise starved himself on a liquid diet. That had allowed him to ride,
but he wasn’t winning the war. Lying in the hospital with a broken back, he listened as Dr. Alexander Kays, the medical adviser
to the Jockeys’ Guild, prescribed a new eating regimen: a poached
egg
, toast, and coffee for breakfast; no lunch; a slice of lean meat and a vegetable for dinner; and minimal intake of liquids.
It was a diet that could help Guerin control his weight with doses of vitamin supplements, weekly shots of vitamin B12, and,
of course, willpower. “It wasn’t an easy way to live,” Guerin told the
Blood-Horse
years later, “but the vitamins and diet enabled me to keep riding.”

Leblanc said, “The one thing you could never take away from Eric was that he had a lot of willpower. He had a real weight
problem and he had to reduce hard for a long time to keep riding, and he did.”

By 1949, Guerin was healthy and stronger, and his career was on the upswing. Vanderbilt and Winfrey called, looking for a
rider. The timing was perfect. Vanderbilt’s stable was on the rise. Guerin won on Bed o’ Roses, Loser Weeper, Next Move, Foreign
Affair, and Cousin, and also rode stakes winners Crafty Admiral and Royal Governor for other stables, including the King Ranch,
which gave him a mount in the 1950 Kentucky Derby. Vanderbilt and Winfrey loved his soothing way with fillies and his nose
for the finish line: at one point in 1949 he won five stakes races within three weeks, all photo finishes. In January 1951,
he signed a contract with Vanderbilt; he would earn $1,000 per month, plus 10 percent of the stakes earnings his horses accumulated.

“Eric was in a beautiful spot, getting to ride all those good horses, but he made the most of it; he really produced,” recalled
Costy Caras. “He was a big name around New York. He and Arcaro and Teddy Atkinson were the key guys, the guys that dominated.
Eric would come into my father’s restaurant. I got to know him very well. We became quite buddy-buddy We both liked big-band
music, and we liked to play softball. I went with him to New Orleans one time when he was suspended for a week, and as big
as he was in New York, you would have thought God had walked into the room down there.”

The media’s typical depiction of him as a “quiet youngster” was good for business but not entirely accurate. He was young,
successful, and making more money than he could believe, and “like a lot of the jockeys back then, he spent whatever he made,”
Allen Jerkens said. Recalled Frank Curry, “When he’d come to New Orleans, there would be a party lasting two or three days.
They’d rent out a restaurant and go to the jai alai at this place Joe Brown ran, and it was just lights-out. And Eric was
picking up the tab.”

Inevitably, with so many jockeys in the family, his success caused problems. “We were close growing up, but we drifted apart:
he was famous and I wasn’t,” said Charles Ray Leblanc, who later became a racing official in Chicago and New Orleans. “My
brother Euclid resented that the whole family kowtowed to Eric, and he moved out to California to get away from it, to get
out of Eric’s shadow and the whole family talking about him. It got to Euclid.”

Family issues aside, Guerin was on a roll, as popular as he was successful, as famous as he was dependable, and then Native
Dancer came along in 1952, fitting seamlessly into the positive tide. Guerin knew by the Dancer’s second victory, in the Youthful
Stakes, that this was a horse that could take him to a place few jockeys reached. Now, indeed, the possibilities lay in front
of him as the Derby neared, a feast of temptations, unseen but indisputably available: another Derby victory, a Triple Crown,
a place in history on a horse for the ages.

If Vanderbilt and Winfrey had compiled a list of potential downfalls that could bring about the unthinkable, a loss in the
Derby, a problem with Guerin’s ride wouldn’t have made the list. The jockey had overcome injuries, failure, and weight problems
to become one of America’s best, and now he was riding a magnificent horse with supreme confidence, never moving too soon,
always unleashing the Dancer’s powerful finishing drive at just the right time. There was pressure, sure, but what did that
matter? Guerin and the Grey Ghost were, it seemed, an infallible team.

F
ew sports events were more important than the Kentucky Derby in the early 1950s. Along with college football’s Rose Bowl,
auto racing’s Indianapolis 500, and golf’s Masters, the Run for the Roses was one of the few events affixed to a time and
place. Just as the start of the World Series was a sign that autumn leaves would soon be falling, the running of the Derby
on the first Saturday in May in Louisville had become an emblem of America’s spring.

Inaugurated in 1875, the race had traveled an arduous road to prominence, surviving antigambling crusades, financial crises,
political opposition, a depression, and two world wars. One man, Matt Winn, a Louisville businessman and handicapper at the
turn of the century, had kept it going and built it into a landmark.

Other races such as Chicago’s American Derby had been just as important in the late 1800s; Kentucky racing was struggling
and the Derby was in jeopardy, with Churchill Downs on the brink of becoming the fourth Louisville track to fail. Winn put
together a group including hotel owner Louis Seelbach and Louisville mayor Charles Grainger and saved the Downs in 1902, then
sold his interest in a tailoring business a year later and became the track’s general manager. He was taking a great personal
risk—Winn had eight daughters to support—but it was a turning point for the Derby.

Over the years, Winn installed pari-mutuel machines and a public-address system, lured fans with bands and air shows, brought
in celebrities and politicians, put the race on radio, and courted New York’s finest sportswriters, enhancing the Derby with
a sheen of glitter and distinction. Kentucky was already horse heaven, the heart of the nation’s breeding industry, and the
Derby evolved into the state’s signature event. By the time Winn died in 1949, the race faithfully transformed the nation
into a community of railbirds for a few days every spring. The first live national telecast in 1952 had widened the audience,
and now, a year later, with the lure of the undefeated Dancer, and the nation reaching out for assurances at an uneasy time,
enthusiasm for the Derby was at a crescendo.

A cadence of familiar customs marked the weeks before the race. The trainers of most Derby contenders arrived at the Downs
in early April and drilled their horses on chilly mornings in the shadow of the twin spires atop the grandstand. The backside
hosted a convocation of racing’s best horsemen, including Sunny Jim Fitzsimmons, Calumet’s Plain Ben Jones, Greentree’s John
Gaver, and Whitney’s Syl Veitch. The Derby horses’ owners and jockeys trickled in later with reporters from across the country,
and a crush of humanity descended on Derby eve, the fans coming by plane, train, and car and getting little sleep in between
their Friday night parties and Saturday trips to the Downs.

The event was an American Bacchanalia, the scent of big money and fast horses colliding with Kentucky bourbon and pretty women
to create a weekend of Roman excess in a conservative Mississippi River town. Comedians and congressmen vied with starlets
and sports stars for invitations to private clubs and all-night parties. Hotels and cabdrivers tripled their rates. High rollers
came in private railcars, drank champagne for breakfast, and shoved fistfuls of bills through the betting windows at Churchill
Downs. At least one new story of laughable extravagance made the rounds every year. In 1953, Dick Andrade, a flamboyant oilman
and bon vivant, brought a horse up to his suite at the Brown Hotel to mingle with guests at his Derby eve party.

Native Dancer, the horse everyone was talking about, took a train down from New York, his every step chronicled. Winfrey had
wanted him to make the 757-mile trek from Belmont Park to Churchill in the White Ghost, the Vanderbilt stable’s massive van,
but Vanderbilt preferred the train, having transported his horses by rail since Discovery’s days. The Dancer was booked on
the Cincinnati Limited, departing New York on the Sunday afternoon after the Wood and arriving in Louisville a day later.
Social Outcast was also on the trip, as was Invigorator, after having finished third in the Wood.

The trip became a media event. Several of New York’s best sportswriters, including Frank Graham of the
Sun
, Joe Williams of the
World-Telegram
, Red Smith of the
Herald Tribune
, and James Roach of the
Times
, booked overnight berths and traveled with Winfrey and his wife. Lester Murray stayed with the Grey Ghost in a special car
as the train chugged through Pennsylvania and Ohio during the night. Murray draped a blanket over the horse as temperatures
dipped into the thirties.

“Don’t want you catching no cold,” the groom said in the railcar illuminated by a dim lantern bulb. “You can’t be going and
getting sick now.”

In the middle of the night, outside Columbus, Ohio, the train stopped suddenly to avoid hitting a car, and the writers “were
jolted almost out of their berths,” with one hurting a rib, reported Jerry Mc-Nerney in the
Louisville Courier-Journal
. Winfrey dashed from his berth to the Dancer’s car. “My horse!” he shouted worriedly. Murray said Invigorator had been lying
down when the jolt occurred, so he was fine, but the Dancer and Social Outcast had been standing and the Dancer “got bumped
plenty.” Fortunately, the Grey Ghost was wearing a leather headgear—standard equipment for horses traveling in trains—and
wasn’t seriously injured.

The jolt received little play in the papers and was quickly forgotten, but it resurfaced thirty-six years later when Ralph
Kercheval told
Los Angeles Times
turf writer Bill Christine that Native Dancer had injured his right front ankle in the incident and “wasn’t in the best of
shape” arriving in Louisville. The ankle was “this big around,” Kercheval told Christine, forming a sphere the size of a grapefruit
with his hands. If it was, McNerney didn’t notice. “I’ve watched about 20 Derby winners arrive in Louisville, including Count
Fleet, Citation and Whirlaway, and none gave the impression of such sheer power and bubbling-over energy as this big grey,”
McNerney wrote in the
Courier-Journal
the next day. There was no mention of a lump on his ankle.

The car carrying the Dancer, Social Outcast, and Invigorator arrived early in the afternoon at a small rail yard three blocks
from the Downs. Tom Young, Churchill’s longtime track manager, drove over to greet Winfrey and the horses and guide them through
the sea of reporters, photographers, and cameramen there to record their arrival.

“Don’t block the platform with those cars!” Young shouted as they waited for the train. “Leave him plenty of room to walk!”