Native Dancer (8 page)

“I was fairly blunt with Alfred,” Kercheval recalled. “I told him if he wanted to start breeding better horses, he needed
to take his best mares down to Kentucky and start breeding them to the outstanding sires there. He said to me, ‘You’re running
it,’ obviously realizing that if he wanted to make any changes, he could. He was a really good horseman, extremely knowledgeable;
he knew what he was doing. But he pretty much let me do what I thought was right I don’t think.

he cared for the way things were going, and he’d brought me in to make them better. So I gave him what I had in mind, and
he looked it over and didn’t change too many things. You couldn’t ask for a better boss. We were the same age, just two months
apart, and we got along, had respect for each other’s opinions horsewise. We sort of hit it off.”

Polynesian was the prototypal Kentucky stallion Kercheval wanted Vanderbilt to use. The horse had won the Preakness and Withers
Stakes and set two track records as a three-year-old in 1945 and had won seven major handicap races as a four-year-old. His
trainer, a steeplechase expert named Morris Dixon, had kept him out of the Belmont Stakes and other longer races, doubting
his ability to win at those distances, but there was no doubting his breathtaking speed. “I had always thought Polynesian
had a great deal of brilliance, and that he was even a much better horse than he had an opportunity to show,” Kercheval recalled.
“I felt he could have raced well at those longer distances. And I felt he had a terrific chance as a sire.”

He was also an equine Cinderella. Raised on a formula of cow’s milk fed from a bucket after his mother died, he had begun
his racing career with three losses as a two-year-old, then contracted a rare form of blood poisoning that caused stiffness
in his legs and loins. His future in doubt, he was carried to a van and driven to Dixon’s farm in Pennsylvania to convalesce.
For ten days, he stood almost motionless under a tree in a paddock as grooms dragged him to and from his stall. Then he was
attacked one morning by hornets; Dixon said later that his ten-year-old son was playing in the paddock and probably shook
the tree, angering the hornets. Stung repeatedly, Polynesian embarked on a wild-eyed twenty-minute dash. Once he was corralled,
magically he was cured. Either his condition had run its course, or as some old-timers believed, the hornet stings had served
as the unlikeliest of remedies. Either way, he was a cranky handful upon returning to the races, often refusing to train on
certain tracks in the morning, but he blazed through his afternoons, totaling twenty-seven wins in fifty-eight starts before
being retired. Alfred Vanderbilt said of him years later, “Some people are born to greatness, some have greatness thrust upon
them. Other, apparently, have to be stung into it.”

He had gone to stud in 1948 at Gallaher Farm on Russell Cave Pike in Lexington, Kentucky, and just months later, by chance,
Vanderbilt, organizing the new Kentucky branch of his breeding operation, began boarding his mares right across the street
at Dan W. Scott’s farm. (Kercheval had recommended Scott; they had gone to high school and college together.) When Kercheval
and Vanderbilt were deciding how to breed their Kentucky mares in 1949 to produce foals in 1950, they reserved three “seasons”
to Polynesian, meaning that three of their mares would be bred to him that spring. The fact that Polynesian was across the
street was a factor in the decision to make Geisha one of the three mares. Geisha, then a compact six-year-old roan, detested
being loaded into a van. “The steps of vans were quite high off the ground in those days, and a horse could develop a real
horror of having to get in,” Scott recalled. “Geisha was practically impossible to load. But we didn’t have to load her to
get her bred to Polynesian. All we had to do was walk her across a road with very little traffic. It was just simpler and
it made sense, especially since the pedigrees were an interesting mesh, anyway.”

Years later, Kercheval smiled when it was suggested that Geisha’s reluctance to load was a factor in the fateful decision
to breed her to Polynesian. “I would never put off something I wanted to do on account of something like that,” Kercheval
said. “By my way of thinking, I could load any horse. You could always find a way.”

The “mesh” of pedigrees was more important, Kercheval said. “Despite Geisha’s poor record and productivity to that point,
her family was the kind that could produce something good,” he said. Her grandfather John P. Grier was one of Man O’ War’s
toughest rivals. Her grandmother La Chica was a blind mare who had produced a champion two-year-old. She had a full sister
who was a stakes winner on the steeplechase circuit. And of course, her sire was Discovery. “The key was Discovery,” Kercheval
said. “I had always felt Discovery was probably the greatest horse I ever saw. His history of weight and distances matched
with Polynesian’s speed was a good match.”

The philosophy of the breeding industry was “breed the best to the best and hope for the best”: deal in the highest available
stock to improve your chances of breeding a winner, but never forget that it was an imperfect science. Vanderbilt’s philosophy
was only slightly different: “breed the best to a Discovery mare and hope for the best,” he often said. In that spirit, Geisha
was led across Russell Cave Pike on May 8, 1949, bred to Polynesian in the hallway of the barn at Gallaher Farm, and led back:
a morning walk, briefly interrupted.

Vanderbilt was later hailed for having the insight to breed Polynesian to Geisha. Typically, he was careful not to boast,
pointing out that if he accepted the credit for breeding a horse so gifted, he should also accept the blame for having bred
so many horses that, he said, “couldn’t get out of their own way.” (Along the same lines, when asked if there had been reason
to believe Geisha might be better as a broodmare than she was on the track, he replied, “It’s hard to say; I trained her myself.”)

In reality, Vanderbilt and Kercheval together made the decision to breed Polynesian to Geisha. “I would say both were driving
the car,” Dan W. Scott said. Kercheval’s wife, Blanche, recalled years later, “Alfred told Ralph several times ‘I’m getting
all the credit for this horse, but I wouldn’t have him if it hadn’t been for you.’ ”

Vanderbilt’s stable embarked on a resounding comeback in 1949, coinciding with the hiring of Bill Winfrey as a trainer. Vanderbilt
had used Lee McCoy since the early 1940s and occasionally trained some of the horses himself, but just as he had felt the
need to overhaul his breeding operation, he also felt it was time to put a better trainer in charge. Winfrey’s touch was so
galvanizing that Vanderbilt soon began referring to the years before 1949 as B. W: before Winfrey.

The stable’s comeback had started, ironically, with breeding decisions Vanderbilt made at his lowest ebb of frustration, shortly
before he hired Kercheval. Bed o’ Roses, a filly foaled in 1947 out of a Discovery mare, swept the East’s four richest races
for two-year fillies in 1949, earning $199,200, the third-highest total ever for a two-year-old, male or female. She was so
feminine and attractive that Eric Guerin, her regular jockey, said of her years later, “If she could have cooked and cleaned,
I would have married her.” Also in 1949, Loser Weeper, a four-year-old chestnut sired by Discovery, won the Metropolitan Handicap.
Next Move, another filly foaled in 1947, won eleven races and was voted the champion of her class of 1950.

Suddenly, Vanderbilt was back, his stable’s lean war years a distant memory. The stable soared from thirty-three wins in 1948
to sixty-eight in 1950 as earnings jumped from $162,000 in 1948 to $584,000, the third-highest total in the nation, in 1950.
And Vanderbilt had bred the horses winning the big money, restoring his faith in his abilities as a breeder. Still, his ultimate
goal wasn’t to win races for fillies such as the Demoiselle Stakes and Matron Stakes, lucrative though they were. True greatness
was conferred in the Triple Crown, and Vanderbilt was continuing to fail there, again not even entering a horse in the Kentucky
Derby as Calumet Farm’s Ponder won in 1949 and the King Ranch’s Middleground won in 1950.

Five weeks before Middleground’s victory, Dan W. Scott awoke at 2 A.M. on March 27, 1950, to the sound of a branch scratching
across his bedroom window—a sign from his night watchman, Lloyd Craig, that another equine life was about to begin. It was
the prime of the foaling season at Scott’s 280-acre commercial farm, and with no phones or radios available to pass along
news, Scott had instructed Craig just to awaken him with a branch whenever a mare sank to the ground and began to deliver
at night.

The thirty-four-year-old farm owner scrambled out of bed, threw open the second-story window, and peered down at Craig, who
simply said, “Geisha’s down.” Scott wasn’t surprised. Geisha was long overdue, having been scheduled to deliver her foal by
Polynesian on February 28. The extended pregnancy wasn’t a concern, though. To the contrary, Scott was pleased. A meticulous
record keeper, he had noted that eighteen of the twenty-five stakes winners foaled at his farm had come late. A foal’s lungs
and breathing apparatus developed in the final weeks of the mare’s pregnancy, and Scott suspected that horses who were delivered
late could breathe better and were better equipped to handle duress on the track.

Otherwise, there was little reason to expect the foal Geisha was ready to drop into the world to possess uncommon qualities.
Geisha had won only one of eleven starts in her racing career and birthed a single, unremarkable foal since being retired.
“Alfred didn’t think that much of Geisha; at the time she was no big deal to Alfred,” Scott recalled. And her foal was part
of just the second crop that Polynesian. had sired, so it was still too soon to know whether he was a stallion who would pass
along his greatness.

Geisha’s foal certainly wasn’t the most anticipated of the twenty-six that would constitute Vanderbilt’s foal crop of 1950.
Seven of his mares were in foal to Discovery that spring. Good Thing, the dam of Bed o’ Roses, was in foal to Polynesian.
Other Kentucky sires such as Amphitheater and Questionnaire had been mated with Vanderbilt’s best mares. Maybe one of those
would develop into the Triple Crown star Vanderbilt wanted.

A routine delivery unfolded that night in front of Scott, a collegeeducated second-generation farm owner, as comfortable delivering
a foal as he was dealing with society clients such as the Wanamakers, Whitneys, and Vanderbilts; and Craig, the black night
watchman Scott would later recall as “someone I treasured, the kind of horseman they don’t make anymore.” In a dark barn behind
Scott’s house—Scott believed mares were more relaxed giving birth in the dark—a chocolate-brown male emerged in perfect condition
at 2:10 A.M., the head positioned properly, all limbs functioning.

The foal blossomed quickly in the coming weeks. Geisha was a strong milk producer. The farm had good grass. Scott turned out
his horses as the weather warmed, letting the foals stay out at night.

“Native Dancer was a big, rough foal that wanted to play all the time,” Scott recalled. “I once had a fraternity brother,
a great big man with great big hands, and he would shake your hand and not realize he was breaking your hand. Native Dancer
was like that as a baby. He’d entice the other foals away from their mothers, and they’d play, and there’d be some big ruckus
over something he had started, and someone would get hurt, but never him. He was very healthy; you didn’t have to do anything
other than make sure he wasn’t too full of himself. He was just the most exuberant foal you could imagine, a joy to be around.
No one had any idea he was going to be a Native Dancer, of course. You can’t watch horses run in a field and decide. The track
is an entirely different ball game. People ask me, ‘Did you recognize a champion?’ I said, ‘No, but I recognized a wonderful
animal.’ ”

Through the spring, Vanderbilt’s other mares in Kentucky also delivered; there were eleven foals in all by the end of the
season. They returned to Sagamore Farm after their mothers had been bred back to various stallions. Geisha and her baby were
loaded onto a van on June 28, 1950—Geisha did load, however reluctantly—and returned to Maryland, where Vanderbilt’s other
mares had delivered. In all, nine colts and seventeen fillies constituted his foal crop for the year: a rollicking mass of
infinite possibilities.

They spent the next eighteen months at Sagamore, by now a 950-acre spread regarded as Maryland’s finest horse farm. Incorporating
twenty buildings and seventy full-time employees in three divisions—breeding operations, training operations, and maintenance—the
farm had immaculate barns, fences and paddocks, an outdoor racing strip, and a quarter-mile indoor track for winter gallops;
a kitchen, chef, dining room, and dormitory housing for the staff; and a large house for Kercheval and his wife.

From the beginning, even when he was just another yearling in the field, Native Dancer stood apart. “He was a very nice individual
as a youngster, did things easily, had nice balance and a powerful physique,” Kercheval recalled. “There was never a doubt
about his athletic qualities, and he was handsome from the word go, a very nice-looking foal without the crooked legs a lot
of them have.”

Several other horses in the crop also showed promise through their breaking, development, and early light training. The best
was Crash Dive, a speedy colt sired by Devil Diver, a popular Kentucky stallion. Find, a son of Discovery, also showed promise,
as did the colt named Social Outcast. In the fall of 1951, they were put through quarter-mile trials one morning, taking their
first quantifiable steps as racehorses. The annual event lured Vanderbilt from Long Island, anxious to see the first crop
of youngsters he had bred with Kercheval. There was a buzz in the air as Vanderbilt, Kercheval, and Winfrey strode to the
two-story tower by the finish line of Sagamore’s training track. The yearlings galloped around the track and were timed over
the final two furlongs as their balance and fluidity were studied. A stopwatch served as the final arbiter.