Native Dancer (36 page)

When reporters surrounded Guerin after the race, he just smiled. “Was I scared? Damn right I was, right down to the last fifty
yards,” he said. “I wanted to start moving up at the half mile pole, but he wouldn’t go. Then he made up his mind to go. It
was like always. You can try to explain to another rider how good it is, how strong he feels and what it’s like to ride him,
but you can’t; a guy just had to ride him to know.”

Harold Walker and Lester Murray led him away, toward Barn 20, with Murray chattering as he gripped the horse’s tail.

“Come on, Daddy, and I’ll do you up nice,” the groom said. “You got a nice night coming after that.”

An hour later, after the horse had cooled down and been bathed and fed, Murray stood outside stall 6 and spoke to several
reporters.

“He run every time,” the groom said, unable to suppress the pride welling inside him. “He make you think he isn’t gonna go,
and he always go. He don’t need someone telling him when it’s time. He knows.”

The Dancer abruptly looked up, as if he had heard the compliment. Murray and the horse had been together for two years now,
and anyone who spent any time around them could see that their connection was almost kinetic.

“You like that, huh,” Murray said. “You listening.”

The Metropolitan, it turned out, was the most important of the year. The miracle comeback ultimately convinced Horse of the
Year voters that the Dancer deserved the sport’s highest honor in 1954. It also convinced the editors of
Time
that he was a public figure of the highest distinction. An illustration of the Dancer, in profile, made the cover of the
issue of
Time
dated May 31, 1954, above a headline reading, “Native Dancer: A little heartbreak, then a burst of glory.” The colt’s light
grey face was set against a luminous backdrop of blue sky, a horse farm pasture, and two strips of Vanderbilt’s cerise and
white silks.

The sight of a horse’s face on the cover surely shocked some of
Time’s
readers accustomed to pictures and portraits of prominent, serious-minded figures from business and national and international
affairs. Others who had made the cover in the previous year included Earl Warren, chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court;
Allen Dulles, head of the Central Intelligence Agency; Queen Frederika of Greece; Chou En-lai, premier of the People’s Republic
of China; and just the week before, Texas millionaire Clint Murchison. Now added to that roll call: the Grey Ghost.

“There were people who collected autographed covers of
Time
magazine, and after Native Dancer was on the cover, we suddenly got fifteen or twenty in the mail asking for them to be signed,”
Bill Winfrey’s son Carey recalled. “We put them on the ground in his stall and got Native Dancer to stand on them, and then
sent them back ‘autographed.’”

The magazine’s two-thousand-word article (printed without a byline) detailed the Dancer’s career and personality as well as
those of Vanderbilt and Guerin, and also took readers minute by minute through the Metropolitan drama. “The Big Grey reigns
as popularly chosen monarch over a domain that has grown into the nation’s biggest spectator sport,” the article reported.

The wording on the cover—“a little heartbreak, then a burst of glory”—referred to what the editors saw as the Dancer’s racing
blueprint: he temporarily broke his fans’ hearts with his agonizingly slow starts, then mended them with his mad rushes to
glory down the stretch. But the wording was even more appropriate as a summary description of the Dancer’s career, which,
after the Metropolitan, now stood at twenty victories in twenty-one starts, with the past ten races all successes. The Derby
had been his heartbreak, but the ensuing burst of glory had elevated him to the pinnacle where he now stood, hailed as one
of America’s most famous athletes, the hero of racing’s golden age, his status papers stamped in ink in the wake of his greatest
escape.

O
n the very day the Dancer’s issue of
Time
magazine reached newsstands across America, the horse was declared lame after a morning workout at Belmont. Battling what
appeared to be a mild case of soreness in his right front foot, he was twelve days removed from the Metropolitan and four
days away from a rematch with Straight Face in the Suburban Handicap when he came out of a three-furlong breeze in obvious
distress. Bernie Everson jumped off his back as he pulled up, unsaddled the limping colt, and walked him back to the barn.
After an examination, Winfrey announced the Dancer would miss the Suburban. “He seemed fine this morning, so we tried him
out with a breeze—you saw the results,” the trainer told reporters.

The first sign of foot trouble had come several days earlier, after an excellent mile workout on a quiet Sunday morning. The
Dancer cooled out nicely but appeared to miss a step as he entered his stall. Winfrey had him led back out for an examination
and detected that the foot was, indeed, tender, but X rays showed no breaks and Winfrey lightheartedly dismissed the problem
as “a sore tootsie.” The Dancer resumed training after taking a day off, walking for an hour on Tuesday and galloping two
miles on Wednesday with Winfrey riding just ahead on a pony, monitoring every step. There was no sign of soreness, so the
ill-fated breeze was scheduled for Thursday. “It goes without saying that we’re disappointed,” Vanderbilt said afterward.

Another set of X rays was taken, again indicating no broken bones. Vanderbilt’s vet, Dr. William Wright, settled on a complicated-sounding
diagnosis: a bruised digital cushion with a secondary inflammation of the bursar between the navicular and coffin bones. Lay
term: a bruise similar to the injury to the Dancer’s other front foot that had ended his 1953 campaign after the American
Derby.

This latest injury had probably occurred during the horse’s spectacular rally in the Metropolitan, when his feet were asked
to absorb the awesome thumping of his 1,250 pounds being hurled to the ground with a violence seldom seen from a thoroughbred.
The possibility of a wicked irony surfaced with a “tootsie” problem having stopped the Dancer twice in nine months. It could
be, now that he had matured from an equine teenager into an adult, that his immense body and powerful racing mechanism—the
very assets that made him great—generated too much force, more than his feet could handle. “He is so heavy and hits the ground
so hard that that may have caused the bruising,” Winfrey told the
Blood-Horse
.

The only antidote was rest. Amid whispers that he might never race again, the Dancer was taken out of training, much to the
public’s dismay. Straight Face rolled to a four-and-a-half-length victory as a 7-5 favorite in the Suburban before a Memorial
Day crowd of 56,736, New York’s largest racing crowd in five years. Hundreds of get-well cards arrived at Barn 20 and Vanderbilt’s
New York office, and the Dancer embraced the “downtime” with his trademark charisma. As Vanderbilt’s other horses trained
and raced out of Barn 20, the “lazy so-and-so” ate lavish hay “brunches” while soaking his sore foot in a hot bath, then slept
standing up with the foot in a poultice wrap. It didn’t take much imagination to envision him winking and saying, “Beats working
for a living.”

The foot improved enough for the colt to resume training in early July. Obviously, his summer trip to Europe was out, as was
the New York handicap Triple Crown, but there were numerous other races on both sides of the Atlantic that he could win before
being retired at the end of the year. Winfrey worked to have him back into racing shape as quickly as possible. The colt was
breezing at Belmont by the end of July, his foot seemingly healed, and was shipped to Saratoga along with Find, Social Outcast,
and the other Vanderbilt horses that would run at the Spa that year. The plan was to run him either in the Saratoga Cup, a
one-and-three-quarter-mile weight-forage event near the end of August, or the Whitney, a straightforward Spa handicap in which
he would surely be assigned a crushing weight.

If all went well in August, the colt would probably then travel to France to race in the Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe in October.
Vanderbilt was optimistic enough about that possibility to take Winfrey with him on a trip to Paris in July to inspect Longchamp
and gauge the challenge the race would pose. They were encouraged. The Dancer would have to race in a clockwise direction
for the first time, and also race on grass for the first time, but Winfrey and Vanderbilt had long suspected the Dancer would
be murderous on grass.

Back in America, the horse trained sharply at Saratoga in early August, and Winfrey and Vanderbilt decided to give him a prep
race before returning him to stakes competition in the Whitney or the Saratoga Cup. They picked out the Oneonta Handicap,
an obscure seven-furlong sprint on August 16, as the place for him to shake off the rust that had gathered since May. Saratoga
handicapper James Kilroe assigned him 137 pounds, by far the most he had ever carried, but even with that massive handicap,
he drew only two opponents. One was another Vanderbilt horse, seven-year-old First Glance. Joe W. Brown’s three-year-old Gigantic
was the other.

With so few horses entered and the Dancer certain to attract virtually every dollar wagered, Saratoga elected to run the race
without taking bets, essentially transforming it into a public exhibition. More than 14,000 fans came to the Spa on a muggy
Monday, lured by the increasingly rare chance to see the Dancer race. A brief downpour left the track rated sloppy, with puddles
on the turns and rivulets in the stretch. The heavy air didn’t dampen the crowd’s enthusiasm. After Lester Murray walked the
Dancer from the barn to the paddock (Murray was celebrating his sixty-fifth birthday, so Winfrey let him handle Harold Walker’s
customary chore of leading the Dancer on race day), some 2,000 fans surrounded the horse as he was saddled underneath the
Dutch elm in the paddock. He was giving eighteen pounds to First Glance, winner of the Wilson Handicap at Jamaica earlier
that summer, and thirty pounds to Gigantic, winner of the Swift Stakes at Belmont in May. The Dancer figured to win easily,
but he had been out of action for three months and the other two were capable horses. Who knew what would happen, especially
with such a severe weight disparity in play?

The crowd cheered the Dancer’s appearance on the track and applauded him through the brief post parade. There was a hush when
the horses were loaded into the starting gate on the backstretch, then a roar as they were sent running. The Dancer was first
out of the gate, but Guerin quickly dropped him back, following the usual blueprint. First Glance jumped into the lead by
a couple of lengths over Gigantic, with the Dancer in third, another couple of lengths back. They held those positions through
the short run up the backstretch, then angled into the turn. “Gigantic will be able to tell his grandchildren he was ahead
of Native Dancer after three furlongs,” James Roach wrote later in the
New York Times
.

The Dancer started to roll on the turn. It was a familiar sight. Down went his head, out went his stride, and away went the
opposition. He quickly passed Gigantic, then pulled even with First Glance, gaining ground with every stride. He shot past
his stablemate at the quarter pole, taking a clear lead. So much for any chance of a real race developing.

Guerin waved his stick in front of the Dancer’s right eye a couple of times, seeking to keep the colt from easing up in the
stretch. The threat worked. The Grey Ghost charged ahead purposefully along the rail, the 137 pounds on his back seemingly
no hindrance. “He ran as if he had no more than a feather-stuffed pillow on his back,” Roach later wrote. The crowd stood
and cheered as his lead widened to two lengths, four, six, even more. Guerin waved the stick again in the final furlong, and
the Dancer raced hard to the finish. He was nine lengths ahead of First Glance at the wire, thirteen up on Gigantic.

Though just a betless weekday exhibition, the race had given fans a glimpse of the Grey Ghost at his finest. His time of 1:24⅘
was impressive, especially considering the weight he had carried over a sloppy track. (A horse carrying twenty-one fewer pounds
over a fast track had set Saratoga’s seven-furlong record of 1:23.) He was so decisive when he moved and so fluid and dominating
in the stretch that it was hard to watch other horses after observing him. Even the best couldn’t compare with Native Dancer
at the peak of his powers.

The Oneonta’s tiny purse of $3,270 raised his career earnings to $785,240, fourth on the all-time list behind Citation, Armed,
and Stymie. A few more major victories would make him the sport’s all-time money-winner, and Vanderbilt’s plans for getting
him to that goal became the focus after the colt had cooled out without soreness in his foot. What was next? Vanderbilt said
it was more likely that the Dancer would run in the Saratoga Cup than the Whitney, for which he had already been assigned
136 pounds, but no firm decisions would be made for a few days. “We should know more in a day or two,” Vanderbilt said.