Native Dancer (26 page)

In a wicked irony, Moreno won precisely as Guerin had won in 1947 on Jet Pilot: by taking the lead early and controlling the
pace from the front. While the rest of the field was focused on Arcaro, waiting for the Master to move on Correspondent, Moreno
raced just speedily enough to tire out those lacking the necessary stamina, yet just slowly enough to guarantee that his horse
had enough left to hold off the Dancer down the stretch. Dark Star ran the final quarter mile in 252/5 seconds, two seconds
faster than Citation. That strong finish enabled him to hold off the Grey Ghost’s final burst. “Moreno rode a wonderful race,”
Arcaro said days later. “I say that because of the way he judged the pace just right.”

Hayward had instructed Moreno to lay third or fourth, watch Native Dancer up the backstretch, and make a move in the final
quarter, but the jockey tore up that blueprint and used his own after taking the lead as he raced past the stands the first
time. He was emboldened, he told the Knight-Ridder News Service years later, when Guggenheim grabbed his boot after his prerace
conversation with Hayward and said, “Listen, you do what you think is best.” He heard that as a mandate to be more aggressive
than Hayward had intended.

Equally important was Moreno’s decision to move to the rail down the stretch. Dark Star had raced beyond a mile only once
and was beginning to drift wide after turning for home. Knowing the Dancer was on the rail with a clear path to the finish,
Moreno swerved back to the inside, forcing Guerin to swerve off the rail in midstretch. The ground that this cost the Dancer
probably decided the race. The
Daily Racing Form
chart caller noted that Dark Star was “alertly ridden” and “won with little left”—testimony to a job well done.

Moreno was kissed several times by movie actress Marilyn Maxwell on the victory stand after the race—photographers made her
keep kissing until they all got a shot of it—and asked a valet to bring him a cigarette as soon as he arrived in the jockeys’
room. “I thought I had a wonderful chance all along,” the jockey told reporters. “As I was going out onto the track, I got
the feeling I was going to win.”

Arcaro’s voice was the loudest in the jockeys’ room even though Correspondent had disappointed as the second choice at 2-1
odds. The Master, who had criticized the “building up” of Native Dancer before the race and then been criticized for voicing
that criticism, was almost gleeful. “Well, you Native Dancer guys, wasn’t I right?” he shouted to reporters. “I said he was
only a fair horse and that the only thing he’d beaten was Tahitian King. If you call that a great thoroughbred, well, I don’t.”
Continuing later with a smile, the Master said, “You just can’t call a horse Citation or Man O’ War until they’ve done what
those horses did.”

Guggenheim and Hayward joined Moreno in the jubilant winner’s circle, where the Derby cup and a garland of roses were presented.
The trainer admitted to reporters that Moreno had ignored his conservative instructions but that Dark Star “had gone to the
front so handily that the boy used his own judgment and let him go. A boy has to know those things. I can’t tell him. He’s
on his own out there.”

As security guards led the owner and trainer back across the track and into the grandstand, heading for a reception for the
Derby horse owners and dignitaries in Churchill president Bill Corum’s office, a fan reached out and clapped Hayward on the
back.

“You did it, Eddie, you did it,” the fan shouted.

The low-key trainer cracked a smile. “Yeah,” he said, “I guess I did.”

Arriving at the crowded reception, Guggenheim immediately ran into Vanderbilt, hailed the next day by the
Courier-Journal
as “by all rights the most disappointed man at Churchill Downs.” Vanderbilt had lingered briefly on the apron and then headed
upstairs to the reception. He was among the first arrivals. When Guggenheim arrived minutes later, Vanderbilt stuck his hand
out with a smile and said gamely, “If it had to be anybody, Harry, I’m glad it was you.” Guggenheim was, after all, a family
friend from Long Island and spent part of every summer with Alfred’s mother at Sagamore Lodge.

“Alfred regarded Harry as one of the pillars of the racing establishment and a person of the same high standards,” Clyde Roche
said. “The fact that it was Harry was the reason Alfred could accept the defeat with equanimity. If it had been anyone else,
I don’t know.”

As the two pillars of the American aristocracy shook hands, Joe Tannenbaum, the rookie Derby writer, was back at Barn 16,
sniffing for scenes to include in his story. Guerin, too, was back at the barn,

having showered and dressed after speaking to reporters. “I wished I’d been a photographer,” Tannenbaum recalled. “Guerin
was in the stall with the Dancer, talking to him. It was quite a touching scene. I wrote it. Guerin was saying, in effect,
how sorry he was that the horse had lost. How very, very sorry he was.”

T
he Dancer was shipped by train back to New York, with Winfrey and his wife riding up front in an overnight berth and Lester
Murray caring for the horse in a special car attached to the rear. There were no famous newspaper columnists on board, as
there had been on the trip down. No crowds gathered at a switching yard just to get a glimpse of the famous—and now once-beaten—grey.
Only a few photographers were at Belmont to record the horse’s return. But as a stew of unpleasant memories simmered, Winfrey
was resolutely positive. “I have more confidence in the horse than ever,” he told reporters after the Dancer was back in his
stall at Barn 20 early Monday evening. What about the controversy regarding the bump and Guerin’s ride? “We offer no excuse
for the Derby defeat and feel he doesn’t need one,” the trainer said. “And I don’t care to look back.”

Such was the tone quickly established around the horse. Unmistakably, it came from the top. The Dancer’s Derby loss would
haunt Vanderbilt for the rest of his life, but other than the one slip when he accused Popara of “deliberately going and getting”
his horse, he accepted his fate. “Alfred took it well,” Jeanne Vanderbilt recalled. “We got on a plane and went back to New
York. He was very controlled. He didn’t show anything except, ‘Too bad, what bad luck.’ Then it was, Okay, let’s get up and
go to the barn and start all over again.’ ”

In a movie, the horsemen in Barn 20 would have determinedly set out to exact revenge for the Grey Ghost as inspiring music
blared. But this was reality, and the men weren’t neophytes who might yield to such a pitch of emotions. They were racetrack
veterans hardened to the disappointment that was a constant in their sport, and they just kept getting up and coming to work,
following Vanderbilt’s lead. “Losing the Derby was devastating, but was my father the type to come out of it more determined?
No, he was more along the lines of, ‘It was a horse race. There’s another next week,’ ” Alfred Vanderbilt III said.

The Dancer’s next major race was in three weeks, actually. It was the Preakness, the second jewel of the Triple Crown, held
at Pimlico, in Baltimore. Vanderbilt had once said, years earlier, that it was a race he wanted to win more than the Derby,
a reflection of his many connections to the event. Baltimore was where Vanderbilt’s grandfather Isaac Emerson had amassed
a vast fortune, and where Vanderbilt had spent many childhood vacations and first fallen in love with racing at age ten. Later,
he had managed Pimlico and served as the track’s president and majority stockholder and had just recently sold his stock.
And, of course, Sagamore Farm, just north of the city, was where the Dancer would retire to stud; Vanderbilt had already made
that announcement, thrilling Maryland’s horse clientele. “Even though Vanderbilt lived in New York, whenever I ran into him
on the road, he would say, ‘How are things at home?’ ” recalled the
Baltimore Sun’s
William Boniface.

As with the Derby, Vanderbilt had left nary a mark on the Preakness over the years, finishing third with Discovery in 1934
and fourth with Impound in 1939, and otherwise sitting the race out. Though his priorities had changed—the Derby was now the
race he most wanted to win—his ties to the area remained strong, and there was no doubting his motivation, especially after
the Derby.

The Preakness had been held either one or two weeks after the Derby since the end of World War II, but the Maryland Jockey
Club had pushed the wait back to three weeks in 1953. Winfrey was grateful. Many of the reporters who had hung around Barn
20 all spring disappeared, their attention shifted to Rocky Marciano’s heavyweight title defense against Jersey Joe Walcott,
which Marciano won with a first-round knockout. Winfrey had time to train the Dancer more purposefully than before the Derby,
when things had seemed so rushed. He put the horse through several shorter works designed to add speed, and the Dancer responded,
gaining a sharpness that hadn’t existed in Louisville.

The only drawback to the long interval was that it was a little
too
long. Winfrey didn’t want the Dancer to go three weeks without racing, so he entered the horse in the Withers, a one-mile
landmark on New York’s racing calendar, first held in 1874. Man O’ War and Count Fleet were among the horses that had won
the event, which was scheduled now for Belmont on May 15, two weeks after the Derby and one week before the Preakness, fitting
neatly into the Dancer’s schedule.

The announcement that the Grey Ghost would run in the Withers scared away most of the opposition. Only three other horses
were entered: Social Outcast, who had run seventh in the Derby; Invigorator, who had finished third in the Derby; and a long
shot named Real Brother. Then Winfrey and Vanderbilt scratched Social Outcast because of rain late in the week, leaving the
Dancer with just two opponents. Chuck Connors of the
Morning Telegraph
warned that the race had been reduced “to the quality of a soggy pretzel at a brewmaster’s picnic,” but the public didn’t
mind. More than 38,000 fans came to Belmont to see the Dancer’s first race since the Derby, and millions watched on NBC.

It was the Dancer’s fourth national TV appearance in twenty-eight days, and the impact of the publicity was beginning to sink
in. “Perhaps nowhere in America is the miracle of TV more appreciated than here on the West Coast,” wrote Oscar Otis, the
Morning Telegraph’s
California correspondent, “for in this somewhat isolated [region] racing fans are avidly tuning in not only the Triple Crown
classics but also the Gillette series of races from New York on Saturdays. The latter is easily one of the most popular programs
on the air.” The Dancer was becoming “the horse in the living room.”

Belmont officials limited wagering on the Withers to win bets, and all but $27,168 of the $154,909 pushed through the windows
was put on the Grey Ghost. He was sent to the post at odds of 1-20, the legal minimum. “Those odds were staggering, quite
a statement from the public about what it thought of the Derby,” recalled the
Baltimore Sun’s
William Boniface. “That 1-20 wasn’t just coming from all the women who said, Oooh, look at the pretty grey’ Dyed-in-the-wool
horsemen were betting on him, too. And 1-20 said people really had dismissed the loss to racing luck.”

Vanderbilt, Winfrey, and Guerin met in the paddock before the race. The Big Apple railbirds who had lost money on the Dancer
in the Derby shouted wickedly at Guerin, whose ride was still being debated. Riders of other famous horses had occasionally
lost their mount in such circumstances, but if Vanderbilt contemplated taking Guerin off the Dancer, he never admitted it
publicly. “I wasn’t there,” Carey Winfrey said years later, “but I would suspect that Eric felt terrible, and Alfred and my
father said, ‘Don’t be silly,’ trying to make him feel better.”

The Dancer looked resplendent in the paddock, although some horsemen noted that his “off ” ankle appeared even larger than
usual. Winfrey insisted again that the ankle was not a problem, explaining that a compound he was using on the ankle had bleached
the skin white, merely making it more noticeable, not more troublesome. Anyone doubting that explanation was likely convinced
by the Withers, in which the Dancer gave no indication that he was troubled by a sore ankle, his loss in the Derby, his trip
to Louisville—or anything.

He was anxious to run, frisky through the post parade, and his hurried first step out of the gate resulted in a stumble. Real
Brother shot into a clear lead along the rail, with Invigorator trailing and the Dancer in third after a quick recovery. They
held their positions up the backstretch, with Real Brother two lengths in front and the Dancer just behind and to the outside
of Invigorator. When Invigorator was sent toward the lead on the turn, Guerin loosened his grip and let the Grey Ghost run.

The three horses were virtually even as they came out of the turn and headed into the stretch. By the eighth pole, the Dancer
and Invigorator had pulled away from Real Brother, but not from each other. Guerin refrained from using his stick, merely
waving it in front of the Dancer at the sixteenth pole. The colt responded immediately and dramatically, surging two lengths
ahead, then three. Guerin’s gesture and the horse’s response occurred right in front of the grandstand, and the crowd roared
as the Grey Ghost thundered toward the finish, covering those famed twenty-nine feet with every stride. He was four lengths
ahead at the wire.