Secretariat (45 page)
Authors: William Nack
In its own way, Secretariat’s performance in the 1
3
/
16
-mile Preakness was even more brilliant than his race in the Derby. He dropped back to last out of the gate, but as the field dashed into the first turn, Turcotte nudged his right rein as subtly as a man adjusting his cuff, and the colt took off like a flushed deer. The turns at Pimlico are tight, and it had always been considered suicidal to take the first bend too fast, but Secretariat sprinted full-bore around it, and by the time he turned into the back side, he was racing to the lead. Here Turcotte hit the cruise control. Sham gave chase in vain, and Secretariat coasted home to win by 2 ½. The electric timer malfunctioned, and Pimlico eventually settled on 1:54
2
/
5
as the official time, but two
Daily Racing Form
clockers caught Secretariat in 1:53
2
/
5
, a track record by three fifths of a second.
I can still see Florio shaking his head in disbelief. He had seen thousands of Pimlico races and dozens of Preaknesses over the years, but never anything like this. “Horses don’t
do
what he did here today,” he kept saying. “They just don’t
do
that and win.”
Secretariat wasn’t just winning. He was performing like an original, making it all up as he went along. And everything was moving so fast, so unexpectedly, that I was having trouble keeping a perspective on it. Not three months before, after less than a year of working as a turf writer, I had started driving to the racetrack to see this one horse. For weeks I was often the only visitor there, and on many afternoons it was just Sweat, the horse and me, in the fine dust with the pregnant stable cat. And then came the Derby and the Preakness, and two weeks later the colt was on the cover of
Time, Sports Illustrated,
and
Newsweek,
and he was a staple of the morning and evening news. Secretariat suddenly transcended being a racehorse and became a cultural phenomenon, a sort of undeclared national holiday from the tortures of Watergate and the Vietnam War.
I threw myself with a passion into that final week before the Belmont. Out to the barn every morning, home late at night, I became almost manic. The night before the race, I called Laurin at home and we talked for a long while about the horse and the Belmont. I kept wondering, What is Secretariat going to do for an encore? Laurin said, “I think he’s going to win by more than he has ever won in his life. I think he’ll win by ten.”
I slept at the
Newsday
offices that night, and at 2
A.M.
I drove to Belmont Park to begin my vigil at the barn. I circled around to the back of the shed, lay down against a tree and fell asleep. I awoke to the crowing of a cock and watched as the stable workers showed up. At 6:07, Hoeffner strode into the shed, looked at Secretariat, and called out to Sweat: “Get the big horse ready! Let’s walk him about fifteen minutes.”
Sweat slipped into the stall, put the lead shank on Secretariat and handed it to Davis, who led the colt to the outdoor walking ring. In a small stable not 30 feet away, pony girl Robin Edelstein knocked a water bucket against the wall. Secretariat, normally a docile colt on a shank, rose up on his hind legs, pawing at the sky, and started walking in circles. Davis cowered below, as if beneath a thunderclap, snatching at the chain and begging the horse to come down. Secretariat floated back to earth. He danced around the ring as if on springs, his nostrils flared and snorting, his eyes rimmed in white.
Unaware of the scene she was causing, Edelstein rattled the bucket again, and Secretariat spun in a circle, bucked and leaped in the air, kicking and spraying cinders along the walls of the pony barn. In a panic, Davis tugged at the shank, and the horse went up again, higher and higher, and Davis bent back yelling, “Come on down! Come on down!”
I stood in awe. I had never seen a horse so fit. The Derby and Preakness had wound him as tight as a watch, and he seemed about to burst out of his coat. I had no idea what to expect that day in the Belmont, with him going a mile and a half, but I sensed we would see more of him than we had ever seen before.
Secretariat ran flat into legend, started running right out of the gate and never stopped, ran poor Sham into defeat around the first turn and down the backstretch and sprinted clear, opening two lengths, four, then five. He dashed to the three-quarter pole in 1:09
4
/
5
, the fastest six-furlong clocking in Belmont history. I dropped my head and cursed Turcotte:
What is he thinking about? Has he lost his mind?
The colt raced into the far turn, opening seven lengths past the half-mile pole. The timer flashed his astonishing mile mark: 1:34
1
/
5
!
I was seeing it but not believing it. Secretariat was still sprinting. The four horses behind him disappeared. He opened ten. Then twelve. Halfway around the turn, he was fourteen in front . . . fifteen . . . sixteen . . . seventeen. Belmont Park began to shake. The whole place was on its feet. Turning for home, Secretariat was twenty in front, having run the mile and a quarter in 1:59 flat, faster than his Derby time.
He came home alone. He opened his lead to twenty-five . . . twenty-six . . . twenty-seven . . . twenty-eight. As rhythmic as a rocking horse, he never missed a beat. I remember seeing Turcotte look over to the timer, and I looked over too. It was blinking 2:19, 2:20. The record was 2:26
3
/
5
. Turcotte scrubbed on the colt, opening thirty lengths, finally thirty-one. The clock flashed crazily: 2:22 . . . 2:23. The place was one long, deafening roar. The colt seemed to dive for the finish, snipping it clean at 2:24.
I bolted up the press box stairs with exultant shouts and there yielded a part of myself to that horse forever.
I didn’t see Lawrence Robinson that day last October. The next morning, I returned to Claiborne to interview Seth Hancock. On my way through the farm’s offices, I saw one of the employees crying at her desk. Treading lightly, I passed farm manager John Sosby’s office. I stopped, and he called me in. He looked like a chaplain whose duty was to tell the news to the victim’s family.
“Have you heard about Secretariat?” he asked quietly.
I felt the skin tighten on the back of my neck. “Heard what?” I asked. “Is he all right?”
“We might lose the horse,” Sosby said. “He came down with laminitis last month. We thought we had it under control, but he took a bad turn this morning. He’s a very sick horse. He may not make it.
“By the way, why are you here?”
I had thought I knew, but now I wasn’t sure.
Down the hall, sitting at his desk, Hancock appeared tired, despairing and anxious, a man facing a decision he didn’t want to make. What Sosby had told me was just beginning to sink in. “What’s the prognosis?” I asked.
“Ten days to two weeks,” Hancock said.
“Two weeks? Are you serious?” I blurted.
“You asked me the question,” he said.
I sank back in my chair. “I’m not ready for this,” I told him.
“How do you think I feel?” he said. “Ten thousand people come to this farm every year, and all they want to see is Secretariat. They don’t give a hoot about the other studs. You want to know who Secretariat is in human terms? Just imagine the greatest athlete in the world. The greatest. Now make him six-foot-three, the perfect height. Make him real intelligent and kind. And on top of that, make him the best-lookin’ guy ever to come down the pike. He was all those things as a horse. He isn’t even a horse anymore. He’s a legend. So how do you think I feel?”
Before I left, I asked Hancock to call me in Lexington if he decided to put the horse down. We agreed to meet at his mother’s house the next morning. “By the way, can I see him?” I asked.
“I’d rather you not,” he said. I told Hancock I had been to Robinson’s house the day before and I had seen Secretariat from a distance, grazing. “That’s fine,” Hancock said. “Remember him how you saw him, that way. He doesn’t look good.”
I did not know it then, but Secretariat was suffering the intense pain in the hooves that is common to laminitis. That morning, Anderson had risen at dawn to check on the horse, and Secretariat had lifted his head and nickered very loudly. “It was like he was beggin’ me for help,” Anderson would later recall.
I left Claiborne stunned. That night, I made a dozen phone calls to friends, telling them the news, and I sat up late, dreading the next day. I woke up early and went to breakfast and came back to the room. The message light was dark. It was Wednesday, October 4. I drove out to Waddell Hancock’s place in Paris. “It doesn’t look good,” she said. We had talked for more than an hour when Seth, looking shaken and pale, walked through the front door. “I’m afraid to ask,” I said.
“It’s very bad,” he said. “We’re going to have to put him down today.”
“When?”
He did not answer. I left the house, and an hour later I was back in my room in Lexington. I had just taken off my coat when I turned and saw it, the red blinking light on my phone. I knew. I walked around the room. Out the door and down the hall. Back into the room. Out the door and around the block. Back into the room. Out the door and down to the lobby. Back into the room. I called sometime after noon. “Claiborne Farm called,” said the message operator.
I phoned Annette Covault, an old friend who is the mare booker at Claiborne, and she was crying when she read the message: “Secretariat was euthanized at 11:45
A.M.
today to prevent further suffering from an incurable condition. . . .”
The last time I remember really crying was on St. Valentine’s Day of 1982, when my wife called to tell me that my father had died. At the moment she called, I was sitting in a purple room in Caesars Palace, in Las Vegas, waiting for an interview with the heavyweight champion, Larry Holmes. Now here I was, in a different hotel room in a different town, suddenly feeling like a very old and tired man of forty-eight, leaning with my back against a wall and sobbing for a long time with my face in my hands.
Secretariat launched his career as a stallion at Claiborne Farm with a host of breeders expecting him to sire champions by the herd, to turn out brilliant racehorses as quickly and efficiently as he had once knocked off quarter-mile splits in the Triple Crown. His pedigree and talent notwithstanding, however, none but the most romantically optimistic of horsemen ever harbored any hope that the horse would accomplish in the breeding shed what he had achieved on the racetrack. History was against him. Fact is, not one of the indubitable giants of the American turf—not Man o’ War, Count Fleet, or Citation—ever sired a horse who could have beaten him on the race course. Man o’ War came the closest to reproducing himself: War Admiral, by far his greatest offspring, had flashed high and abundant gusts of speed while winning the 1937 Triple Crown, the year before Seabiscuit whipped him in their celebrated match race. But what the Admiral had to offer seemed to pale in comparison to the relentless drive and power that carried his sire to twenty victories in twenty-one starts. And neither Count Fleet nor Citation, the ’43 and ’48 Triple Crown winners, respectively, came even remotely close to siring a horse with War Admiral’s brilliance on the courses.
Secretariat retired to stud at America’s most historic commercial thoroughbred nursery, and by the end he had spent most of his career there surrounded by far more accomplished breeding stallions, including three of the most brilliant progenitors in the world—Nijinski II, Danzig, and the fabled Mr. Prospector. Yet Secretariat, first through the exploits of his own racing sons and daughters and then, more emphatically, through his influence as a champion sire of broodmares, ultimately left his enduring mark on the breed as well as the game. By the time the final numbers were in, Secretariat had sired 53 stakes winners out of a total of 663 named foals, 16 crops in all, and they had won nearly $29 million on racecourses throughout the Northern Hemisphere. If his numbers, as a sire of runners, did not measure up to those of the more celebrated Claiborne stallions, the horse certainly had his moments in the world of thoroughbred breeding. Among his offspring were two of the most gifted competitors of the 1980s—one a near–Triple Crown winner, Risen Star, and the other, one of the greatest fillies ever to grace the American turf, Lady’s Secret. In 1988, Risen Star would probably have won the Kentucky Derby had he not been hung out to dry on the final turn, fully eight horses wide, while also trying to close ground behind a lukewarm pace set by the eventual winner, Winning Colors. Risen Star closed to finish third, beaten by just over three lengths. The greatest of Secretariat’s sons came back to win the Preakness, and three weeks later, in the Belmont Stakes—the very scene of his sire’s most memorable performance—Risen Star pounced on Winning Colors as the two sped down the back side, opened up a six-length lead on the turn for home, and then turned up the heat as he galloped home alone to win by a smashing fourteen and three-quarter lengths in 2:26
2
/
5
seconds. Only Secretariat had done it bigger and faster. Risen Star’s margin of victory was the longest since 1973, and his final clocking was the second fastest one-and-a-half-mile Belmont in history. Risen Star retired after winning eight of eleven races and just over $2 million in purses.
If the Belmont was Risen Star’s defining triumph as a racehorse, then surely the 1986 Breeders’ Cup Distaff, with a $1 million purse and one and a quarter miles to cover, was the race for which that little gray bullet, Lady’s Secret, will always be best known—the race in which she swept right into history. A year earlier, as a three-year-old, Lady’s Secret had finished second in the same race to her stablemate, Life’s Magic, and now she was back to make a run at that coveted prize and claim her right to the highest title in the sport, that of the leading racehorse in the land. She had already won an astonishing seven Grade 1 stakes through the 1986 season—these major races traditionally offer the toughest competition and thus rank as the most important events on the racing calendar—and a victory at Santa Anita would bring her total to eight, giving her a clear shot at the overall championship. The issue was never in question. Sweeping to the lead in that low, pendulumlike stride, the “Iron Lady,” as she had come to be known, opened up five lengths down the back stretch under jockey Pat Day, cruised off the final turn still in front by four, and won ridden out in a gallop by two and a half lengths over Fran’s Valentine. Secretariat’s most capable daughter was subsequently voted the Eclipse Award as the nation’s 1986 Horse of the Year. Lady’s Secret ended her career after winning twenty-five of forty-five races, taking down more than $3 million in purses, and earning the ultimate accolade from no less an authority than veteran Hall of Fame trainer Woody Stephens. “I always thought Gallorette was the greatest race mare I ever saw,” said Woody, recalling the great distaff campaigner of the mid-1940s, “but now I think that Lady’s Secret might have been better.”
Though Secretariat went to stud as the greatest son of Bold Ruler, with expectations that he would be the dominant force in carrying on that prolific tail-male line, he actually left his deepest imprint on the breed not through his male offspring, none of whom has made any significant impression at the stud, but rather through the females that he left behind. (It ultimately fell to the surpassing Seattle Slew, the 1977 Triple Crown champion who descended in tail-male from Bold Ruler through Boldnesian and Bold Reasoning, to keep the line flourishing into the twenty-first century, chiefly through his most accomplished son, A. P. Indy.) In the breeding shed, Secretariat turned out to be far more like his own maternal grandsire, Princequillo, the little World War II orphan from Britain via the Continent who came to these shores in steerage through submarine-infested waters and eventually established himself at Claiborne as one of the nation’s greatest sires of broodmares in history. Just like him, Secretariat quickly proved himself to be one of the leading broodmare sires in America, season after season, with his female offspring coveted at studs around the world. By the fall of 2001, his female offspring had produced four champion racehorses and 139 stakes winners. In 1992, Secretariat was the leading broodmare sire in the nation, his 135 daughters having produced the winners of more purse money, almost $6.7 million, than the daughters sired by any other stallion. (In all, Secretariat mares have produced runners that so far have won upward of $115 million in purses.) In the best of breeding sheds, all royal blood flows together, and 1992 was the season that A. P. Indy—by Seattle Slew out of Weekend Surprise, a daughter of Secretariat—won the Santa Anita Derby, the Belmont Stakes, and America’s richest race, the $3 million Breeders’ Cup Classic. At season’s end, A. P. Indy was named America’s Horse of the Year and retired with a lifetime total of nearly $3 million in earnings.
At the height of his breeding career, A. P. Indy stood at stud for a fee of $150,000, one of the highest in America, but that was not even a third of the money commanded at the time by the hottest of all Kentucky stallions, Storm Cat, whose roots are rich in Secretariat blood. They trace to Secretariat’s daughter, Terlingua, who was probably the fastest two-year-old filly ever sired by Secretariat. Terlingua was out of Crimson Saint, who had spectacular speed for short distances. Trained by D. Wayne Lukas, Terlingua beat the colts in Hollywood Juvenile Championship in 1978, won the Hollywood Lassie Stakes, and ended up winning seven races and $423,896. Retired to the stud, Terlingua was bred to Storm Bird, a son of the great Northern Dancer, and out of that mating, in 1983, she foaled Storm Cat, a precocious two-year-old who won $557,080 in his juvenile year but only one race after that. Sent to the stallion barn at Overbrook Farm, in Lexington, he quickly began siring winners, one after another, and over the ensuing years he emerged as a whirlwind at the stud, a phenomenon so prolific at siring major stakes horses that in the year 2000, his seventeen yearlings offered at public auction sold for $22,468,000—an average of $1,321,641 per horse. In the fall of 2001, by which time Storm Cat had already sired some eighty-five stakes winners, with progeny earnings of more than $64 million, it was announced that his stud fee in 2002 would be set at $500,000, the highest in the industry. At one point, the son of Storm Bird out of Terlingua, by Secretariat, was the most valuable stallion in the world.
In the eyes of breeders, to be sure, Secretariat had a kind of bittersweet career at the stud. “It’s tough to say the word ‘disappointed,’ ” said Edward Bowen, the former editor of
The Blood-Horse
magazine and long-time observer of the thoroughbred breeding industry, “but you’d have to admit that Secretariat didn’t reach the exalted heights as a stallion that people had hoped for. But I think he was a very good sire of racehorses—a good, solid stallion—and he was and still is an outstanding broodmare sire. There his influence continues.”