Native Dancer (23 page)

Mutuel clerks started selling tickets for the Derby at 9 A.M., with the resulting odds unannounced until after the sixth race,
the race before the Derby. The Dancer, paired as a betting entity with Social Outcast, was 3-5 on the track-sponsored “morning
line” printed in the program, but surprisingly, when the odds reflecting the daylong “blind betting” were posted after the
sixth race, there was more money to win on Correspondent. The Dancer wasn’t even the favorite! That changed quickly, of course.
Even though Churchill bettors obviously loved Arcaro, who was riding Correspondent, they still preferred the Dancer. Within
minutes, the Grey Ghost and Social Outcast were down to 6-5 and Correspondent was 2-1.

Winfrey left Vanderbilt in his box and returned to Barn 16 before the sixth race. Murray put the racing bandages on the Dancer’s
legs and brushed him yet again, his coat glistening in the sunlight filtering through his stall. A roar from the crowd signaled
the end of the sixth race. A garbled voice on the scratchy backside public address system announced that it was time to take
the Derby horses over to the paddock. The horses walked over on the track, traveling clockwise around the outer rail, right
in front of the crowd. Harold Walker led the Dancer, with Murray bringing up the rear; it was the first time many fans had
seen the favorite live, and they cheered and shouted their support.

The Dancer was calm in the crowded saddling paddock, where Vanderbilt and Jock Whitney, owner of Straight Face, chatted. Winfrey
offered encouragement rather than instructions as he gave Guerin a leg up onto the colt’s back; they were on the same page,
knowing how the Dancer needed to run. As always, Guerin would fall off the early pace, stalk the leaders, and make a move
turning for home. The jockey’s only concern was that he didn’t fall too far behind this time, with the Dancer racing farther
than ever before against ten top opponents.

The horses stepped onto the track for the post parade, and a line of soldiers and sailors stepped forward in the infield holding
the Kentucky and American flags. The University of Louisville band played “My Old Kentucky Home,” and the Armored Center Band
from nearby Fort Knox played the national anthem. The sun was casting longer shadows as the horses jogged clockwise through
the stretch to the second turn, reversed direction, and approached the starting gate. The crowd loosed a roar of anticipation
as Ace Destroyer went into the first stall, followed by Correspondent, Ram o’ War, Invigorator, Curragh King, and Native Dancer,
then Money Broker, Social Outcast, Straight Face, Dark Star, and Royal Bay Gem.

The eyes of the nation were on the race. Television industry analysts later estimated that almost 20 million viewers were
watching CBS’s live telecast in almost 8 million homes, the totals equal to those for the World Series and far exceeding those
for any previously televised horse race. Seventy-two percent of the TV sets that were on from coast to coast were tuned to
the Derby as Bryan Field gathered himself in front of the microphone and prepared to call the race. America was riveted. Man
O’ War had raced to immortality more than three decades earlier, before radio, with few of his fans seeing him run; and then
Seabiscuit and Citation had come along as the champions heard ’round the country, the heroes of racing’s radio days. Now the
Grey Ghost was on the verge of joining them as the first great horse America had actually
seen
.

At the Louis Restaurant, the racing-mad eatery near the Jamaica Racetrack in New York, a packed house of customers was gathered
around a TV set. There was no doubt where their allegiances lay. “We had a big picture of Eric Guerin on the wall; he had
come in to eat and we were big fans of his,” Costy Caras recalled. “Plus, Vanderbilt was a very popular man with the racing
crowd. They knew he had put a lot into the sport. People wanted him to win.”

Halfway across the country, in New Orleans, Tim Capps, destined to make racing his career as an author and industry official,
was also watching TV. He was eight years old. “We didn’t have a TV in our house, but our neighbor across the street did and
we went over to watch the race there,” Capps recalled. “We had just moved down from North Carolina and my father was in the
seminary. I was just starting to read about horses and get interested. I was enthralled by Native Dancer. He was my first
‘favorite’ horse. I thought his name was great. I had read enough to know Alfred Vanderbilt was famous. And he was grey. He
just jumped off the screen. We had gone over to our neighbor’s house to watch some other things on their TV, college football
bowl games, but the Derby really grabbed me. I wanted Native Dancer to win.”

So did Judy Ohl, a seventh grader in Mauch Chunk, Pennsylvania, north of Allentown at the foot of the Pocono Mountains. “My
father worked at Bethlehem Steel and brought the New York papers home in the evenings,” she recalled years later. “There was
always an article about Native Dancer, and I had become a big fan of the horse even though I had never seen him in the flesh.
But he had a presence that came through even in black-and-white pictures in the paper. It was very exciting to get to see
him race live on TV.” She was watching the Derby in her den with her best friend from parochial school. “The reception was
terrible and the picture was fuzzy, but we didn’t care,” she recalled.

Thousands of other girls across the country had also fallen for the Grey Ghost Lulu Vanderbilt, the daughter of Alfred’s brother,
was one of them. A teenage student at Foxcroft, an exclusive boarding school in Virginia, Lulu had clipped out newspaper articles
and put them in a scrapbook, watched the Gotham and Wood on NBC, and sent several telegrams to the smiling, dapper man who
was always standing next to the horse in the winner’s circle—her uncle Alfred. “My girlfriends got sick of hearing me prattle
on about the horse,” Lulu recalled. “I sent Alfred a telegram before the Derby.”

She had planned to watch the race, but a rare chance to escape the dorm changed her mind. She was spending the day at a steeplechase
race in Middleburg, Virginia. “We got out so seldom, and I was so convinced that Native Dancer was going to win that I decided
to go,” she recalled.

At 4:42
P.M.
, Ruby White, the veteran starter at Churchill Downs, pushed a button that opened the flaps to the starting gate. Out came
the eleven horses. The tote board in the infield was showing the final odds: the Dancer and Social Outcast at 7–10, still
odds-on after all, with Correspondent at 3-1, Royal Bay Gem at 7-1, and Straight Face at 11-1. Of the $778,556 in the win
pool, almost exactly half—$386,333—was on the Dancer and Social Outcast. They had so dominated the wagering that Dark Star
was 25-1 as the fifth choice of eleven.

There was immediately an incident along the rail: Ace Destroyer veered out and grazed Correspondent, squeezing Arcaro and
his horse back. That allowed jockey Henry Moreno, on Dark Star, to swing in from the tenth post and take the lead without
a struggle coming through the stretch the first time. Arcaro rallied quickly, jumping into second, two lengths off the lead,
as he headed past the grandstand and reached the first turn. Dark Star covered the first quarter in a routine 23⅘ seconds.

The Dancer broke cleanly, without incident, and Guerin settled him off the pace, in sixth, as he passed the grandstand the
first time. Some observers later suggested that he was too far back, that he had wanted to run and Guerin had restrained him,
that he could have—and should have—raced nearer the front, in third or fourth. Guerin disputed the suggestion, insisting that
while it may have appeared that he was holding the Dancer back, in fact, the colt was uncomfortable on the track and struggling
to find his stride. In any case, the Dancer was in sixth as he moved into the first turn, in front of early stragglers such
as Royal Bay Gem, Social Outcast, and Money Broker.

Al Popara, the jockey on Money Broker, wasn’t pleased. Under orders from trainer Tennessee Wright to race near the front and
near the rail, he was stuck on the outside and in a pack, moving at a slow pace. He later told a United Press reporter that
he had wanted to remain behind Native Dancer through the first turn and then make a move, “but the pace was too slow,” so
he decided to “circle the Dancer,” cut in front, and drop down to the rail.

A former Golden Gloves boxing champion from Hayward, California, Popara, at twenty-four, was one of the least experienced
jockeys in the race. He was four years into his career, having just the year before ridden his first “name” mount, Gushing
Oil. Tough and hungry, he had ridden Money Broker and other horses with success over the winter in New Orleans, then used
his winnings to move his wife and four children out of a trailer and into a house. He was making his Derby debut on Money
Broker but had almost lost the mount two days earlier when Churchill’s stewards suspended him for ten days for rough riding.
That would have knocked him out of the race in New York, where a suspended jockey was unable to take any mounts, but a suspended
jockey in Kentucky could still ride stakes mounts previously contracted, so Popara was in the Derby.

He was moving Money Broker out and around Guerin on the first turn when Money Broker lugged in toward the rail and bumped
the Grey Ghost just as Curragh King, the long shot that had been racing immediately in front of the Dancer, veered out and
into the Dancer’s path. The simultaneous bump and squeeze knocked the Dancer badly off stride. “Hey!” Guerin shouted. Bill
Shoemaker, riding Invigorator to the inside of the Dancer, had a clear view. “It happened right to the outside of me: Native
Dancer was usually a lot closer to the pace, but Money Broker bumped him good and knocked him back,” Shoemaker recalled years
later. The chart caller for the
Daily Racing Form
wrote that the Dancer was “roughed at the first turn by Money Broker.” Guerin righted the Dancer, pulled him back, and veered
to the outside, ending up in eighth place as he straightened out of the turn.

The possibility of rough riding had certainly existed. Not once in the prior seventy-eight runnings of the Derby had a horse
been disqualified, so the jockeys had a license to be bold. And Churchill Downs still hadn’t installed film patrol cameras,
even though the innovation was more than a decade old. The result was an old-school free-for-all—in every race, not just the
Derby. “There’s more than a bit of rough riding here; the classic phrase ‘every man for himself’ seems, at times, to be the
motto in the jockeys’ room,” James Roach wrote in the
New York Times
that week, adding that “the jockeys are well aware those big [film patrol] lenses aren’t focused on their every move.”

Popara’s intentions would be intensely debated, as would Guerin’s response. This much was certain: with seven horses ahead
of him as he came out of the first turn, the Dancer’s jockey asked his horse to run to start making up lost ground—and run
the Dancer did. Steaming up the backstretch toward the second turn, the Grey Ghost quickly passed four horses and closed in
on the leaders. It was later estimated that he took only 23 seconds to run this middle quartermile segment of the race. “That
is as fast as horses travel,” Evan Shipman later wrote in the
Morning Telegraph
.

Up front, little had changed. With six furlongs down and four to go, Dark Star and Correspondent were still running first
and second, with Arcaro stalking the leader from a half length behind. The Master was in perfect position to strike. So was
Straight Face, with Teddy Atkinson up; the Greentree colt had moved into third, a length behind Correspondent. The Dancer
was a length behind Straight Face as he moved through the second turn. The bump on the first turn had set him back, but he
was just four lengths behind Dark Star now with a half mile to go.

As he negotiated the second turn, Guerin moved down to the rail to save ground; he had raced wide until now, forcing the Dancer
to cover extra ground. Moving to the rail put him behind Correspondent and Straight Face, raising his chances of getting blocked
off, but with so much distance still to be covered, he had time to sit back and see what developed.

Derby contenders and pretenders are separated coming out of the second turn, when they have raced a mile and start digging
deep to cover the final quarter. At that point, everyone—jockeys, fans, trainers, and owners alike—discovers which horses
have enough stamina to compete to the end and which don’t. Fifty yards into the stretch run to the finish line, Arcaro was
stunned to discover that his horse was among the pretenders. Correspondent had pulled away from every rival in his three races
at Keeneland in April, but now, after racing in Dark Star’s shadow for a mile, he slowed and drifted wide. He would finish
fifth. Straight Face also drifted wide, his stride suddenly snagged, his chances gone. He would finish sixth. Royal Bay Gem,
the third betting choice, had started his usual finishing kick on the second turn and was moving up fast on the outside, but
he had too much ground to make up in too little time against horses of this caliber. He would finish fourth.

With horses fading everywhere, the race was suddenly as clear as the blue Kentucky sky. Dark Star, at 25-1 odds, with five
wins in ten career starts, was in front with three-sixteenths of a mile to run. Native Dancer, at 7–10 odds, with an 11-0
record, was two lengths behind. The other nine horses were out of it. Either Dark Star would hold on for the upset, or Native
Dancer, as he had so often, would swoop around the leader and win going away, realizing the defining triumph so many had foretold.

There was every reason to believe the Dancer was on the verge of winning. The Grey Ghost had won most of his races from this
exact position, swooping in from the head of the stretch to pass horses who, in many cases, had credentials superior to Dark
Star’s. The bump on the first turn was forgotten. The Dancer was in position to take over.

Surprisingly, he gained not an inch on Dark Star for a hundred yards, through the top half of the stretch run. Moreno, who
had judged the pace brilliantly until now, alertly moved his dark brown colt from the middle of the track down toward the
rail, cutting off the Dancer’s open lane to the finish line. Guerin had to move the Dancer yet again, swerving off the rail
and to the outside of Dark Star as he tried to rally. Only then, trailing by a length and a half with a furlong to go, did
the favorite begin to run.