Native Dancer (31 page)

Bill Winfrey agreed with Partridge, telling reporters upon arriving in Chicago that “on cold, hard figures, Jamie K. should
beat us.” But the Dancer’s trainer also offered his theory about the horse in the wake of the Triple Crown season: “We have
reason to believe Native Dancer does not fully extend himself once he gets to the front, and that he wins only by the margin
necessary to get the job done. That was the case in the Preakness and Belmont, at least. The Classic should give us a chance
to test this theory.”

With 39,460 fans crammed into the track and a national TV audience watching on CBS, midwestern bettors backed Jamie K. down
to 4-1 and Van Crosby to 9-2, with the Dancer at 7–10, his highest odds since the Derby. The atmosphere was electric; Chicago
racing was flourishing, with the summer meetings drawing the country’s best horses, trainers, and jockeys. “It was right there
with New York, if not better,” longtime racing official Tommy Trotter said. The Dancer was late getting saddled because of
the crowd around him, throwing off the schedule for CBS’s telecast. The horses were rushed to the starting gate without a
post parade.

Breaking from the fourth post position on a track rated “heavy” after rains late in the week, the Grey Ghost was sixth after
the first quarter, with Van Crosby setting the pace and a 19-1 shot named Sir Mango close behind. Guerin moved the colt up
to third as he headed into the turn, then asked for a run. The Dancer responded as if he had heard the doubters and wanted
people to know what he thought of them. His head dropped and he bolted past Van Crosby and Sir Mango, taking the lead at the
top of the stretch.

Fans searched the pack for Jamie K. and Royal Bay Gem, expecting the late-runners to make their usual charges as they straightened
out for home. Both were straggling near the rear, outrun and outclassed this time. It was the Dancer’s day. For once, he didn’t
ease up after taking the lead. He pulled away steadily through the stretch, his lead growing with every stride as he passed
the eighth and sixteenth poles and headed for home. The turf writers from around the country who had gathered in Arlington’s
press box to chronicle “the fourth jewel” of the 1953 Triple Crown broke into applause at the sight of the Dancer crushing
his rivals.

His lead at the wire: nine lengths.

The racing world’s response: wow.

“He never let up, did he?” a smiling Vanderbilt said to Guerin in the winner’s circle.

“Not one bit, sir,” Guerin said. “I think we could have spotted them twenty pounds with the way he ran today.”

Arch Ward, longtime sports editor of the
Chicago Tribune
and originator of baseball’s All-Star Game, wrote lavishly of the Dancer in his column the next day. “It was one of the most
devastating knockout punches in the history of big-time racing,” he wrote. “His closest pursuers looked as if they were in
another race as the Dancer sped under the wire. He has done everything that can be asked of a three-year-old. He has beaten
the sprinters, the middle-distance horses and the long-winded. He has gone to the front early. He has been hemmed in. He has
come from far back. He has won on fast, sloppy and heavy tracks. Yesterday, he was at his glorious peak.”

The Dancer was shipped back to Belmont and then on to Saratoga, where he had won four races in twenty-six days the year before
and now was treated like a visiting potentate as he trained for the Travers. When he worked out two days before the race,
all activity at the Spa ceased. Fans eating breakfast on the clubhouse porch pushed their chairs back, left their food, and
went to the railing to watch. Sweepers leaned on their brooms, taking a respite. Trainers put down their stopwatches, and
exercise riders on other horses stopped. Winfrey sent Bernie Everson out with instructions to cover a mile. The Grey Ghost
circled the track and came through the stretch to waves of applause. “It was a moment for a horse owner, horse trainer—and
exercise rider—to remember,” James Roach wrote in the
New York Times
.

The Travers was memorable for what happened not during the race, but before it. More than 28,000 fans, the most in Saratoga
history, filled the track. A great crowd swarmed the Dancer in the shaded paddock before the race. With little security in
place and no barriers separating the horse from his public, fans came up and stroked him, petted him, spoke to him, and even
plucked hairs from his tail. Winfrey became alarmed, but Harold Walker held the shank tightly and the horse remained calm.

“I’m standing there by the horse and someone comes out of the crowd and walks around Native Dancer and looks at his legs and
comes and rubs his hand up the legs, and I said, Who is this?’ ” Claude Appley recalled. “Bill Winfrey came over to me and
said, Who is this?’ I said, ‘I don’t know who it is.’ Bill went over to him and said, ‘I’m sorry, you have to leave.’ What
it was, I think, people felt they owned him.”

Security guards were called in to cut a swath through the crowd so the Dancer could get to the track for the race. “When they
went to move him, they had to rein people off,” recalled Daniel W. Scott III, the son of the man who had foaled the Dancer
in 1950. The younger Scott was with his father at Saratoga that day. “He had become an icon, with mobs chasing him and people
shouting,” the younger Scott continued. “It was like the scenes with the Beatles a decade later. Native Dancer had become
as popular in the sports world in 1953 as the Beatles were in music in the sixties.”

Evan Shipman, covering the Saratoga meeting for the
Morning Telegraph
, devoted his column to the remarkable scene. “If there was ever any doubt about Native Dancer’s popularity, it was dispelled
Saturday when the record crowd greeted Vanderbilt’s champion with a warmth unequalled since the brave days of old Exterminator
30 years ago,” Shipman wrote. “He is the most popular thoroughbred of our time. Leaving comparisons as a racehorse out of
it, we are sure Citation, Count Fleet and the others never had this… appeal. We have only one explanation to offer, of course,
and that is television. More people have watched Native Dancer this season than have ever before seen a single horse.”

The scene before the Travers had Biblical overtones, with thousands gathering to see and touch their idol and linger in his
presence. The Dancer was just a horse, but the public clearly saw him as more, an alluring and profound figure. He embodied
all the traits that humans attribute to a champion: stamina, grace, determination, beauty, ability, and charisma. Eleven weeks
after his defeat at Churchill Downs, which had so devastated his fans and would, however unfairly, define him to some in later
generations, his redemption was being fulfilled.

Vanderbilt proudly presided over the horse’s triumphant sum-

mer of 1953, the Derby disappointment temporarily forgotten amid the cheers and headlines. “Dad was just so excited,” Vanderbilt’s
daughter Heidi recalled. “He talked about the horse all the time, and you knew he couldn’t wait to get to the barn. There
was no mystery about how important it was to him, and how wonderful it all was.” No mystery, indeed. “He was so thrilled to
have bred this kind of a horse, this great champion,” Dan W. Scott recalled. “And he was already commenting about how wonderful
it would be to have him as a sire.”

“Whenever Native Dancer was mentioned, Alfred’s face just lit up,” said Chick Lang, a former jockey who rose through the racing
industry’s ranks and became the general manager of Pimlico and a Vanderbilt confidante. “Alfred bred the horse, remember,
and raised the horse at Sagamore, so Native Dancer was just a great, great validation for him and his operation. And Alfred’s
gratitude showed. When he spoke of Native Dancer, it was as if he was speaking of his own son who had won the Heisman Trophy.”

Alfred Vanderbilt III said, “People are fascinated by horses, kids especially. Heidi and I grew up insane about horses. If
I was left alone in a room with nothing to do, I played with horses. Hounds went through the bottom of the lawn at Broadhollow
on fall mornings. We rode. Our father was a famous owner of horses. Horses were everything. And the most famous horse was
in our family, I was young, but I remember seeing Native Dancer on TV. I remember everyone talking about him. He was the idol
of all idols, and my daddy owned him.”

The Travers was televised nationally on NBC, and the Dancer put on a typical show. He easily defeated four opponents as the
1-20 favorite, rallying as usual on the second turn and winning by five and a half lengths, despite giving away as much as
a dozen pounds. It wasn’t a race so much as a platform for his obvious superiority, barely more taxing than his workout two
days earlier. “What a pleasure it is to ride a horse like that,” Guerin said afterward. Winfrey confessed to reporters that
he was no longer sure about his theory that the Dancer exerted himself only as much as was needed to win. The colt had won
his most recent two races by a combined fourteen and a half lengths.

The chain of events that led to Arcaro’s predicament in the American Derby started on the afternoon of the Travers. In the
Saratoga Special, a race for two-year-olds run earlier in the day, Guerin, on Porterhouse, and Hank Moreno, riding Turn-to,
were coming down the stretch together three months after they had raced to a photo finish in the Kentucky Derby. When Porterhouse,
rallying along the rail, came up on Turn-to, Moreno’s horse veered in and initiated contact. Moreno immediately moved away,
but Guerin’s horse veered out and forced another collision at the sixteenth pole. Porterhouse went on to finish first, but
stewards placed him last and suspended Guerin for ten days after determining, with help from the film patrol, that Guerin
hadn’t attempted to avoid the second bump and, in addition, had hit Moreno’s horse in the chest with his whip.

Such suspensions were routine; even the best jockeys tangled with stewards now and then, especially now that the film patrol’s
cameras were watching. But this suspension was hardly routine. Guerin was scheduled to ride the Dancer in the American Derby
that Saturday, but Illinois stewards said they would respect New York’s ruling even though their bylaws didn’t prevent suspended
jockeys from fulfilling stakes-race obligations already assigned. Guerin, who had ridden the Dancer in all of the horse’s
eighteen races, was out of the American Derby.

The racing world wondered what Vanderbilt and Winfrey would do as the Grey Ghost boarded the Empire State Express at Saratoga
and headed for Chicago, traveling in a private car as five adults and a boy—Carey Winfrey, twelve, was making the trip with
his father—tended to him. Winfrey and Vanderbilt obviously wanted a top jockey, so their options were limited. There was Wee
Willie Shoemaker, the young Californian leading the nation in wins. There was Teddy Atkinson, the regular rider for Greentree
and its fine handicap horse, Tom Fool. And of course, there was Arcaro, the best of the best.

Before Winfrey boarded the train for Chicago, he told Vanderbilt he wanted Arcaro. Vanderbilt nodded. The Master had been
the Dancer’s toughest critic and rival, but he was the right replacement. He was strong enough to handle the Dancer, and his
superb command of pace and tactics would give the Dancer the best chance of winning the race. Vanderbilt knew the horse’s
fans would howl, remembering how Arcaro had gloated after the Derby and steadfastly refused to concede that the grey deserved
so much praise. The fans would take any jockey other than Arcaro, no doubt. But it appealed to Vanderbilt’s arch sense of
humor to put the Master on his horse after all that had happened, and it was also a sound racing decision. Arcaro was the
choice.

There was only one problem: the Master had already agreed to ride Jamie K. in the American Derby, attempting yet again to
knock off the Dancer. It didn’t matter that he was Winfrey’s and Vanderbilt’s first choice. He was unavailable.

The situation simmered as the Dancer traveled all day Sunday and early Monday, attracting crowds a political candidate on
a whistlestop tour would envy. At a stop in Buffalo, New York, fans threw open his car door to see him. In Ashtabula, Ohio,
a crowd of two hundred came to the station for a glimpse. Two fans in Chicago fought over a piece of cardboard he stepped
on while being unloaded; they wanted his valuable footprint. Marshall Smith and Howard Sochurek, a writer and photographer
for
Life
magazine, were making the train trip with him, preparing a major story.

As the Dancer rode the rails, a fateful twist occurred; the racing gods, it seemed, were intent on making sure the marriage
of the Dancer and the Master came about. Jamie K., with Arcaro up, raced dismally in a prep event at Washington Park five
days before the American Derby, finishing fourth, nine lengths behind the winner, Sir Mango. The Dancer’s Triple Crown rival
had finished tenth, fifth, second, and fourth in his recent races, sharply off the form he had shown in the spring. James
Norris decided to pull his horse out of the American Derby. Norris lived in Chicago and didn’t want the horse laying an
egg
at home.

Arcaro was available.

John Partridge met Winfrey with the news when the Dancer arrived at Washington Park on Monday afternoon.

“We’re out of it, Bill—and Arcaro is available to you, if you want him,” Partridge said.

“We can sure use him,” replied Winfrey. “Although Guerin knows the horse and is used to him, Arcaro is a pretty good substitute,
don’t you think?”

Arcaro’s agent, Bones LeBoyne, was also on hand to meet Winfrey, and a deal was quickly struck. “Eddie knew what he was getting
into, but it’s worth noting that he took the chance anyway,”
Daily Racing Form
columnist Joe Hirsch recalled years later. “He knew that there was going to be heat and that he would feel it. Not every
jockey would have signed on for that. But Eddie was one of a kind.”

Lester Murray was skeptical, to say the least. The Dancer’s groom was a great believer in the horse’s intellectual powers,
which, Murray felt, seemed to border at times on what a human might possess.