Native Dancer (38 page)

With the departure of Hewitt and the
Omnibus
crew, the Dancer’s time in the public eye was over. The roar of the crowd and the pomp of the winner’s circle were giving
way to the serenity and abundance of a sire’s life. The waiting line to breed to him had started forming when he was two,
and it was growing madly now. There was a rumor that he might service fifty mares in his first year, with each service costing
$5,000. “The same indefinable genius that clings to his races is even more pronounced as one imagines his future as a stallion,”
Shipman wrote. “His masculinity is so pervading that if he fails to stamp his [progeny] with authority, one’s whole faith
in the meaning of individuality will be in question. He is a superb male animal.”

Kercheval was in charge of him now. It was the farm manager’s job to remake the Dancer into an effective sire, essentially
breaking the horse again but teaching him to breed, not to race. Class was in session through the winter of 1954 and spring
of 1955 as the Dancer was bred to his first book of mares. He had a lot to learn at first. “He wanted to rush and dive at
the mares,” Kercheval recalled. Finally, Kercheval took the shank from the groom one day as a breeding session was beginning
and tugged hard as the Dancer started to lunge again. The horse pulled back, reared, and flipped over backward, crashing in
a heap.

Kercheval was horrified. Horses that topple in such a manner can land on their heads and suffer brain damage. “I could already
see the newspaper headline: Old Football Player Kills Great Racehorse,’ ” Kercheval recalled. Native Dancer was motionless
on the ground for more heartbeats than Kercheval cared to count before finally stirring. Kercheval stood back, afraid of what
he had wrought. “And I’ll be damned,” the farm manager recalled, “if that horse didn’t get himself up, take three or four
steps over to me, and look me right in the eye. I’ve never seen another horse respond like that. I thought, What, is he gonna
hit me or something?’ ”

Stunned and relieved, Kercheval led Native Dancer outside for a lecture. “I said, ‘Do you know how to do things properly now?’
” the farm manager recalled. “He went back in that breeding shed, walked over to the mare, got himself ready to breed, and
damn if he didn’t look right over at me, like he was getting ready to show me that he had learned his lesson. I gave him a
motion and said, ‘Yes, go ahead,’ and he went on and covered that mare perfectly, a beautiful job. It was like we had had
a conversation. And I never had another moment’s trouble with him after that.”

Kercheval sat in his den in Lexington, Kentucky, as he recalled the moment. He was almost ninety now, able to reflect on a
long and vigorous life that had included playing college and pro football and working with top thoroughbreds for decades.
The fact that he had helped plan the mating that produced Native Dancer touched him with awe. “He was the strongest horse
I ever saw,” Kercheval recalled, “more like a big, powerful draft horse than a thoroughbred. He just had immense strength.
And he was the smartest horse I was ever around, bar none. They say horses don’t think, and I guess horses don’t think, but
some are able to reason within their wisdom, and a few operate on another level altogether. Native Dancer was that way. After
that day that he flipped over, which, I believe, scared the hell out of both of us, if I ever pulled on the shank, he’d stop
and look at me and say, Okay, boss, what’s next?’ It was amazing, the way that colt thought. God, what an animal he was.”

T
he Dancer roamed Sagamore Farm’s fields for thirteen years, maintaining his vigor and playfulness as his coat gradually turned
a startling, distinguished white. “I was at a race at Laurel [in Maryland] in the early nineties, and a man came up to me
and said, Was that your dad’s farm?’ ” Alfred Vanderbilt III said. “I told him it was, and he said, Oh, I used to drive by
there all the time and see Native Dancer in the field. It was like seeing Winston Churchill.’ ”

He was voted Horse of the Year for 1954 in every year-end poll of writers and racing officials, taking such honors for a second
time even though he had raced only three times during the year.

Gradually, the Dancer grew accustomed to his new life as a stallion. A troublemaker at first, he bit a finger off one groom’s
hand, then bit the groom’s replacement on the arm. A wily veteran groom named Joe Hall came to the rescue and developed a
lasting bond with the Dancer similar to Lester Murray’s relationship. “Joe Hall could walk into a stall and talk to a horse,
and it was like a principal talking to a kid,” recalled Laura Riley, a Maryland veterinarian who worked at Sagamore breaking
yearlings in the 1970s. “When I met him, he was immensely proud of having been the big horse’s groom. So proud to have been
entrusted with the great horse. Also proud that he was the only one who could deal with him. Otherwise, the horse may not
have gotten to stand stud.”

The Dancer was never less than one of the world’s foremost stallions, his stud fee starting at $5,000 in 1955 and rising over
the years to $20,000, the highest advertised fee in the world. But money was no object to the horsemen who wanted their mares
bred to the Grey Ghost. A succession of top mares from across America as well as from Canada and Europe made the trek to the
Worthington Valley north of Baltimore. Harold Ferguson, hired as Sagamore’s office manager in 1951, replaced Ralph Kercheval
as the overall farm manager in 1958—Kercheval went back to training a stable—and carefully guided the Dancer’s stallion career
along with Vanderbilt, limiting the horse’s bookings to between twenty-five and forty a year.

With the racing industry watching, the Dancer’s sons and daughters began competing on tracks across America and Europe in
1958. The first crops were mildly disappointing, compiling respectable totals of wins and earnings but lacking horses of distinction.
The Dancer’s first champion was a filly named Hula Dancer who raced in Europe and was undefeated as a two-year-old in 1962.
The first American-based star was a brilliant colt named Raise a Native who raced only four times but won the 1963 Futurity
Stakes in a romp and set a track record for five furlongs at Aqueduct. Vanderbilt raised the Dancer’s stud fee by $2,500 solely
because of the furor the colt caused.

A bowed tendon prevented Raise a Native from running in the Kentucky Derby and possibly avenging his father’s only defeat,
but the Dancer’s blood soon began to haunt Churchill Downs. In the same year Raise a Native was unable to run, one of the
Dancer’s grandsons, a small, fiery Canadian-bred colt named Northern Dancer, won the 1964 Derby. Foaled out of Natalma, a
Native Dancer-sired mare, Northern Dancer also won the Preakness before finishing third in the Belmont in his bid to become
the first Triple Crown winner since Citation. Two years later, a dark brown colt named Kauai King, sired by the Dancer himself,
scored a front-running win as the 5-2 favorite in the 1966 Derby and also won the Preakness before faltering in the Belmont,
finishing fourth in his Triple Crown bid.

Respect for the Dancer as a sire was on the rise. Forty-five Dancer-sired horses won races in 1965, the total up sharply from
thirty-one two years earlier. In 1966, with Kauai King leading the way, forty-three Dancer-breds combined to win one hundred
races and $977,254, the second-highest total of the year for any sire, behind only Bold Ruler.

Another strong year was ending and the Dancer was already booked to breed to twenty-eight mares for the coming season when
he refused to take a carrot from Joe Hall on the afternoon of November 14, 1967. Massive and white at age seventeen, he usually
eagerly took a carrot in exchange for letting Hall put a shank on him. He refused the carrot again in his stall and glanced
back at his sides several times, as if he were experiencing pain there. Hall suspected a mild case of colic; the groom had
walked the Dancer through a bout with colic six years earlier and detected some of the same symptoms.

A farm superintendent phoned Dr. Irvin Frock, a local veterinarian. Colic medicine was administered and the Dancer’s condition
fluctuated through the night; he pawed the ground and was restless at times—traditional signs of intestinal distress—then
seemed relieved. When his condition worsened the next day, Dr. Frock, fearing an intestinal blockage, advised that he be transferred
to a clinic.

The Dancer was taken by van to the University of Pennsylvania’s New Bolton Center in Kennett Square, Pennsylvania. Barely
able to stand during loading, he was severely dehydrated and in shock by the time he arrived in the evening, his temperature
and heart rate soaring. He was immediately sedated and wheeled into surgery, and when the surgeons opened him up, they found
a tumor the size of an orange looping over the small intestine and “strangling” it They also found other small tumors throughout
the abdominal cavity.

Ten feet of intestine were removed during three hours of surgery. The Dancer was then taken to a recovery stall shortly after
midnight, still under sedation. Hall, who had made the trip with the Dancer in the back of the van, recounted what happened
next in an interview with turf writer Snowden Carter that appeared in the December 1967 issue of
Maryland Horse
magazine: “We all stand around and watch him as he comes to. Dancer tries a couple of times to get up, but he can’t make
it. All the time, I’m talking to him. I keep saying to myself, ‘This ol’ horse ain’t gonna die.’ But he does. About 5:30
[A.M.]
I’m standing beside him. He draws a deep breath and then he don’t breathe no more.”

It was hard to imagine, but the mighty Dancer was dead.

“After a while they wheel him back to the van,” Hall continued in his
Maryland Horse
interview. “We’re bringing him home to bury him, but I still don’t think that Dancer’s dead. We get to the farm at about
11:30 in the morning and there’s nobody around. I’m sitting up front with the driver. I tell him to blow his horn so they’ll
know we’re here. He reaches up and pulls that cord to the horn. When I hear that horn, then all of a sudden I can’t hold the
water back to save my life. The water runs down my face. I don’t know why the horn did that to me. It sounds so far away.
I said to the driver, ‘Man, don’t blow that horn no more.’”

The Dancer was buried in a field at Sagamore Farm, his grave marked with a headstone alongside those of Discovery and some
of Vanderbilt’s other top horses. Vanderbilt was disconsolate. “He got letters from people from all over the world, and he
didn’t want to answer them,” recalled his daughter Heidi. “I was surprised that he wasn’t going to take that on himself. I
don’t know why. He could be very reticent about things that were painful. So I told him I would answer the letters. They were
from people who remembered watching the horse on TV, or he’d won them some money. Some of them had followed his entire life
and knew everything about him. They were heartbroken that he died. These were genuine letters of condolence. There were many.
It took me a long time to answer them all, and they kept coming and coming. It was sad, but also wonderful that he had been
such an important horse to so many.”

The Dancer’s success as a stallion was illustrated in his career production statistics. Of the 304 foals he sired in thirteen
crops, 224 reached the races and 194 of those who raced won at least once; both figures were well above industry averages.
Most significant, an exceptionally high 15 percent of his foals won stakes races, the ultimate barometer of class. Though
generally regarded at the time as a mild disappointment when measured against what had been expected of him, the Dancer had
passed along quality to the generation that followed him.

As if to honor him, one of his sons, Dancer’s Image—a grey with tender ankles, no less—won the first Kentucky Derby run after
his death, rallying from tenth on the second turn to win by a length and a half. Dancer’s Image was later disqualified and
placed last, in one of the Derby’s greatest controversies, when his postrace drug test allegedly turned up traces of phenylbutazone,
or “bute,” a painkiller legal at some tracks but not Churchill Downs.

Still somewhat uncertain at the time of his death, the Dancer’s influence on pedigrees soon became far more profound than
anyone could have imagined. His son Raise a Native was an enormously successful stallion, siring Alydar and Mr. Prospector,
two dominant American sires of the 1980s. And Northern Dancer, Native Dancer’s grandson, surpassed them all as the most successful
sire of the second half of the twentieth century, with many of his champion sons and daughters racing in Europe.

Through the greatness of Raise a Native, Alydar, Mr. Prospector, and Northern Dancer, Native Dancer’s name emerged as one
of the great and enduring markers of class in a pedigree. He was a greatgrandfather of Affirmed, a Triple Crown winner in
1978. His descendants won many of the major races around the world, including the Breeders’ Cup Classic, England’s Epsom Derby,
and France’s Arc de Triomphe, and they dominated the Kentucky Derby. The Dancer was a great-grandfather of Derby winners Genuine
Risk (1980), Alysheba (1987), Strike the Gold (1991), and Fusaichi Pegasus (2000); a great-great-grandfather of Ferdinand
(1986), Unbridled (1990), Thunder Gulch (1995), Real Quiet (1998), and War Emblem (2002); and a great-great-great-grandfather
of Sea Hero (1993), Grindstone (1996), Charismatic (1999), and Monarchos (2001). The latter, racing forty-eight years after
the Dancer in the Derby, was a virtual clone of his famous forefather, a powerful grey.