Native Dancer (24 page)

Dark Star had little left That was obvious. Moreno was just trying to coax his horse to the finish line. He glanced back at
the sixteenth pole, saw the Dancer, and admitted later, “I was pretty scared when I saw that big grey behind me.” His and
everyone else’s eyes were on the Dancer. The race hadn’t turned out as planned, but the Grey Ghost had fluttered hearts before
and come out fine, and he bore down on the leader with his trademark fierceness now, gaining ground with every step.

It was in the issue of
Life
magazine on newsstands across the country that week that the Dancer’s stride had been measured at twenty-nine feet, and every
inch of it was on display now as the colt closed on Dark Star. The lead was down to a length in one stride, then less than
a length inside the sixteenth pole, Guerin beating a tattoo on the Dancer’s flank, the crowd roaring, millions watching at
home.

He was a half length behind with one hundred yards to go, then, after another step, a head behind.

Just a head to win the Derby.

Covering twenty-nine feet with every stride, the Dancer drove hard, his innate competitiveness firing him, his chances still
alive.

The finish line loomed, but the Dancer took another colossal step and closed more ground, his head bobbing deliciously close
to Dark Star. All he needed was another stride, two at the most.

Dark Star lunged, the Dancer made a final reach, and both crossed the finish line as millions shrieked.

The race was over.

The impossible had happened.

The Dancer had lost.

V
anderbilt watched from his box above the homestretch, standing alongside Jeanne, Bill and Elaine Winfrey, Ralph and Blanche
Kercheval, and Louis Cheri. Like the rest of the country, he thought the Dancer was in perfect position at the top of the
stretch, with just one horse to pass. Like the rest of the country, he watched in disbelief as the colt failed to gain ground
on Dark Star until it almost seemed too late before making his remarkable run in the final furlong.

“Did he get it?” Vanderbilt shouted amid the din as the horses crossed the finish line.

“I don’t think so,” Winfrey said.

Vanderbilt knew it was true. The crowd roared when it was announced that the stewards were reviewing a photo of the finish,
but Vanderbilt left for the apron alongside the track, certain that Dark Star had won. He was making his way through the grandstand
when the announcement came, and he grimly accepted condolences from strangers, with a nod of his head. His innate aristocratic
restraint served him well now. He had won and lost hundreds of races at dozens of tracks over the years, and he knew as well
as anyone to expect the unexpected, but this was hard to take. After simmering for almost two decades, his Derby dream had
been dashed in two minutes.

“Alfred jumped up and left immediately, so I said, Well, I’ll go congratulate the Guggenheims,’ ” Jeanne Vanderbilt recalled.
“We knew them quite well. I went over to where they were sitting, but they had already left. I came back and sat down. Everyone
was just stunned, absolutely shocked. It was almost incomprehensible. So close at the end! People started filtering by the
box, saying how sorry they were. There was an aura of people trying to figure out how this could have happened.”

Vanderbilt made it to the apron, where the jockeys were weighing out and heading to the jockeys’ room to change for the next
race. Vanderbilt spoke briefly to Guerin, trying to discern what had happened, and gave Al Popara a murderous stare. “If looks
could have killed somebody, I would have been dead,” Popara told Derby historian Jim Bolus years later. Money Broker had finished
eighth, eleven lengths behind the winner, after bothering the Dancer on the first turn.

Lester Murray and Harold Walker took the Dancer from Guerin. They had watched the race from the apron, not far from the finish
line, after leading the Dancer over from the barn and sending him out for the post parade. Murray sat on the ground, shank
in hand, until the horses came around the far turn and headed down the stretch with the crowd roaring. Then he rose into a
half-crouch and made a fist, his face flush as Dark Star held on.

“Did he get it?” the groom said, wheeling and asking Walker as the horses crossed the finish line.

“I don’t think so,” Walker said quietly.

Murray had been one of the stars of the week, regaling reporters with stories of the Grey Ghost. The big man with the old
felt hat had become a familiar figure. Now, as Dark Star’s handlers hollered and rejoiced, Murray snapped the shank on the
beaten favorite. Walker led the horse back to the barn, with Murray bringing up the rear. The crowds that had surrounded them
all week were suddenly gone. Murray would later swear the Dancer looked back as he walked away, seemingly confused that he
wasn’t getting to go to the winner’s circle, where he had always gone after a race.

It was a day many would never forget, in countless ways, for countless reasons. So many Americans had never seen a major horse
race, much less a Kentucky Derby, much less a Kentucky Derby with an undefeated grey favorite being hailed as the next Man
O’ War. And now the horse had lost as millions of fans watched, the defeat incomprehensible to many.

At the Louis Restaurant in Jamaica, a house full of customers turned away from the TV screen in disappointment. “My mother,
father, two brothers, and myself, we were all rooting for Eric and Native Dancer,” Costy Cavas recalled. “There was a lot
of sadness when he didn’t win.”

Judy Ohl, the seventh grader in Mauch Chunk, Pennsylvania, was jumping up and down in her den and screaming as the horses
came down the stretch. “It was devastating when he didn’t win,” Judy said. “I’ll never forget the feeling. It seemed so unfair.”

Lulu Vanderbilt, Alfred’s niece, was in the crowd at the steeplechase race in Virginia when she heard the news. “They came
on the loudspeaker and announced that Dark Star had won the Kentucky Derby,” Lulu recalled. “I was so dumbfounded that I just
sat down in a field. I was in complete shock. It was horrible. And I’ve talked to other people who had the same feeling that
afternoon. That race just killed people.”

Tim Capps burst into tears. Watching on his neighbor’s TV as an eight-year-old in New Orleans, he couldn’t comprehend the
emotions he was feeling, but profoundly, they would lead to a career in racing. “It was kind of a riveting moment,” Capps
recalled. “I had no personal connection with the horse, but I was in love with him and I got so upset when he lost that I
cried. After that, I started reading a lot more about horses and racing. I was on my way. Secretariat was the defining horse
for later generations, but for people of my generation, it was Native Dancer. And for some reason, the image that always stands
out is him losing the Derby. If you were born in the 1940s or thereabouts and follow racing, you’ll never forget that day.”

Ordinarily, the public is thrilled by such surprises, a champion toppling. It is human nature to root for those not expected
to win, and to revel in their victories. The first half of the sports century had been littered with such moments, now burnished
into the nation’s memory. There was little-known Francis Ouimet’s defeat of British stars Harry Vardon and Ted Ray in the
1913 U.S. Open golf championship, the victory that turned golf into a spectator sport in America. There was the only loss
of Man O’ War’s career, to a colt named Upset in the 1919 Sanford Stakes. There was unbeaten Notre Dame, coached by Knute
Rockne, losing to Carnegie Tech in football in 1926. There was boxer Jim Braddock, the Cinderella Man, struggling through
the early years of the Depression on welfare before upsetting Max Baer to win the heavyweight championship in 1935. More recently,
in 1951, baseball’s New York Giants had rallied miraculously late in the season to force a play-off with the Brooklyn Dodgers
for the National League pennant, then won the play-off on Bobby Thompson’s ninth-inning homer.

Dark Star’s upset of Native Dancer was just as surprising, but it didn’t elicit the same, sweeping delight. To the contrary,
where the others had overjoyed, this depressed. “Thousands turned from their TV screens in sorrow, a few in tears,”
Time
magazine reported.
New York Times
columnist Arthur Daley wrote, “This reporter was never as emotionally affected by a horse race as [this one]. At the end
he felt heartbroken. Since he didn’t have a pfennig bet on the outcome, it had to be pure sentiment which moved him.”

The weeping wasn’t limited to press romantics. “I have never had the defeat of any horse I did not raise myself depress me
as much as that of Native Dancer on Derby Day,” wrote a Kentucky breeder named Charles Kenney in a letter to Vanderbilt. “My
wife, who is usually a stoic, burst into tears. I sure felt like joining her. [And] my reaction has been echoed by practically
every man, woman and child in the Blue Grass.”

Kenney’s letter was one of hundreds Vanderbilt received. Never, safe to say, had a Derby defeat generated such emotion. “I
don’t believe I have ever felt so bad as the moment the Dancer lost the Derby. I’m not ashamed that tears welled in my eyes,”
wrote a man from Omaha, Nebraska. Bayard Sharp wrote, “I have never heard of so many people who were genuinely sick” after
a race.

Not everyone was “sick,” of course. Those who had bet on Dark Star and earned $51.80 for a two-dollar wager were not the least
bit sad. Neither were Harry Guggenheim, Eddie Hayward, and Henry Moreno, Dark Star’s owner, trainer, and jockey, all instantly
earmarked for a place in Derby history as the purveyors of a monumental upset.

Across the country, though, there was far more sadness than elation. Why? For starters, the Dancer was enormously popular,
so naturally, his defeat was disappointing. “He was just so good that you didn’t want him to get beat,” recalled Hall of Fame
trainer Allen Jerkens, who watched the race on TV. Now he had lost, and the circumstances cast him as that most alluring of
figures, the noble victim. He had faced two obstacles, many agreed, the bump on the first turn and a less-than-perfect ride
from Guerin, yet had still come within a head of winning, his furious rally illustrating to a public already fond of him that,
indeed, he possessed a champion’s heart.

Outside of Dark Star’s camp, there was the vague sense that racing’s natural order had been violated, that a wrong had been
committed, that the best horse not only had lost but also deserved better. Arthur Daley wrote that his sadness probably stemmed
from “a bitter and brooding feeling that the best horse didn’t win.” Joe Tannenbaum concurred in the
Miami Daily News
, writing that Vanderbilt’s colt “appeared to be the best horse in the Derby and certainly must still be rated as the potential
champion of this year’s three-year-old class.” Momentously, even the
Daily Racing Form’s
chart caller, supposedly the most neutral man in the press box, wrote that Native Dancer was “probably best.”

The postrace dissection centered on four topics: the bump, Guerin’s ride, the Dancer’s fitness, and Dark Star’s undeniably
fine performance, with the bump becoming a source of great controversy. Although Vanderbilt was gracious in Louisville after
the race, the stare he gave Popara on the apron made it clear he believed Money Broker’s jockey had intentionally impeded
the Grey Ghost. He told the
Morning Telegraph
as much at Belmont two days later, commenting that Popara was guilty of “deliberately going and getting” the Dancer. The
comment made headlines, and Vanderbilt quickly distanced himself from the issue and never again blamed Popara in public. But
his inner sentiments had been revealed. “He did think Money. Broker and Popara were laying for him,” Alfred Vanderbilt III
said years later.

Guerin levied his own charge several days after the race, telling a United Press reporter, “I talked to Popara, and he told
me his horse was lugging in and he couldn’t hold him. But truthfully, I think he was lying. I don’t think it was an accident.”

Why would Popara have come after the favorite? Not because of some plot involving money changing hands in an attempt to orchestrate
the finish. That surely happened from time to time, but in this case, it was ludicrous to suggest that a race-fixer wanting
to knock off the Dancer would have identified an obscure jockey on a 45-1 shot as a willing, able, or effective accomplice.

On the other hand, it was entirely possible Popara could have “come after” the Grey Ghost as long shots often came after favorites
in the early 1950s, or more accurately, as any jockey came after another in a major race. “In those days, everyone tried to
get the favorite; get him out of the race,” Dr. Alex Harthill said years later. “Popara certainly did that. Money Broker hit
the Dancer really hard.”

Eddie Arcaro seconded the idea several days after the race, suggesting that the incident, which had occurred behind him, was
a typical event in a race ungoverned by the film patrol. “Sure, Popara knew what he was doing, and he did just what I would
have done,” Arcaro told the
Baltimore Sun’s
William Boniface. “When you are going after a big one like the Derby, you don’t let any horse through the middle, especially
a favorite like the Dancer. That’s race riding.”