Native Dancer (21 page)

Soon the engine and car chugged into the yard, eased up to the platform, and stopped. “Here he is!” someone shouted. The media
horde gathered at the door of the car, and after a moment, the door slid open and Winfrey popped his head out.

“Who’s he?” someone asked.

They had come to see the horse, not the trainer.

Winfrey jumped out and cleared a path for the Dancer to disembark. A wooden gangplank was set down between the car and the
platform, with strands of straw littered on the plank and bales of hay banked on either side.

“Okay, bring him out!” Winfrey shouted.

The cameramen formed a semicircle around the door, and after a dramatic pause, out came the Dancer. As cameras whirred and
clicked, the grey colt marched down the plank in his headgear, blanket, and leg wrappings, with Harold Walker in front of
him, holding the shank, and Murray to the rear, holding his tail with both hands. Social Outcast and Invigorator followed.
The caravan proceeded straight to a yellow truck, which the Dancer coolly boarded, as if he had reserved a seat. The truck
drove Winfrey and the horses over to the Downs, through the stable gate, and down to Barn 16, where, like a diva at an opening-night
gala, the Dancer made a second grand entrance, departing the truck to another round of camera clicks.

“Easy now, no mistakes here,” Winfrey said.

The trainer had asked Young to make sure a heavier bed of straw was laid in one of the stalls: the Grey Ghost liked a thick
mattress.

“We did what you asked,” Young said. “There’s extra straw in the second stall.”

Calm and compliant, the Dancer moved into his stall and immediately dropped to the ground and rolled back and forth in the
straw, gleefully kicking and stretching and shaking his mane. It was as if he knew the long trip was over and he could finally
cut loose.

“You like that, Pop? Well, go to it,” Winfrey said, smiling with relief now that the trip was over.

McNerney asked Young, who had worked at Churchill since 1911, if he had ever seen a Derby arrival that looked more the part
of a champion. Only one, Young said: Twenty Grand, the strapping bay that had won the 1931 Derby in record time and held the
record until Whirlaway broke it in 1941. McNerney was also obviously impressed with the Dancer. “He’s a big, healthy athlete;
just looking at him, you know he’s good,” McNerney wrote.

The Dancer made his first trip to the track the next morning at nine o’clock, with Bernie Everson on him, Winfrey leading
him on a stable pony, and a clattering mob of cameramen and reporters trailing him. He walked through the backside and entered
the track on the backstretch at the height of rush hour for morning workouts, with horses and trainers and grooms and exercise
riders coming and going. All activity stopped as the Grey Ghost stretched his legs and walked up the backstretch toward the
second turn. Horsemen who had never seen the famed horse from the East flocked to the rail to look. Jockeys riding past on
other horses slowed and looked back over their shoulders.

The Dancer was on the slightly damp oval for fifteen minutes. He took a walk around the track, then jogged around a second
time. “The most talked-about horse since Man O’ War seemed to know he was the center of attention,” the Associated Press reported.
His reputation and physical appearance made an impression. McNerney wrote that “the big grey wins friends and influences people
just by his looks.” Eddie Hayward, trainer of Dark Star, laughed when asked if he was still considering entering another Cain
Hoy Stable long shot, Bimini Bay, in the Derby. “Oh, no,” Hayward said, “now that he’s gotten a look at that grey colt, he
won’t eat for a week.”

As the Dancer was leaving the track, he lashed out with his hind legs at a horse cantering close by. His aim was off, but
the
Morning Telegraph
reported that the Dancer “corded up a bit” in his excitement and had to be massaged with oil to relax his tight muscles.
The colt quickly cooled off and was back in his stall within minutes, seemingly unharmed, but in fact, the incident was the
start of a major scare, according to famed Derby veterinarian Alex Harthill.

The Dancer “tied up badly,” Dr. Harthill recalled years later. “It was a muscular spasm, like a charley horse. It was very
painful and the horse broke out perspiring. Everyone was wanting to scratch him. I had just met Mr. Vanderbilt that winter
at Santa Anita. He was keen to win the Derby, and he had a large entourage coming down from Maryland and New York as his guests
for the race. He didn’t want to hurt the horse obviously, but he wanted to run. We gave the horse a large dose of what amounted
to Gatorade, four or five gallons of electrolytes passed through a stomach tube. We did that for several days with him, as
a matter of fact. He recovered very nicely.”

The news that the Grey Ghost was being treated with a stomach tube would have generated headlines from coast to coast, but
it went unreported, and neither Vanderbilt nor Winfrey mentioned it over the years in any of the many interviews they gave
about the Dancer. “I never tried to keep it quiet, but horse trainers have never been ones to advertise the little things
that go wrong with their horses,” Harthill recalled. “The boss [Vanderbilt] knew about it, I know that. I can’t say if it
affected the horse in the race or not. He was fully recovered by then. But it certainly didn’t help him.”

Vanderbilt was an old-school sportsman known for putting his horses’ best interests ahead of all else, and it is unlikely
he would have allowed the Dancer to run in the Derby if there had been any risk of injury, even knowing how much the public—and
Vanderbilt himself most of all—would have been disappointed. In any case, there was relief, no doubt, when the colt quickly
returned to health.

Winfrey set down stringent house rules for the rest of the week,

probably reacting to the incident. The doors to the Dancer’s stall would be closed at all times. He would leave the barn only
to train. There would be no posing for pictures, no afternoon grazes. The horse was just too fit and full of himself, Winfrey
felt, to expose him to many new and different circumstances.

Winfrey spoke to reporters outside Barn 16 after the Dancer’s workout, as he would every morning leading up to the race.

“Is this a little different than last year?” he was asked, referring to the fiasco with Cousin.

“What a difference from last year,” Winfrey said. “The press boys forgot all about me last year. I think they’re going to
be flocking around this year.” He continued: “I guess I can stand one hectic week. This grey is the kind of horse you get
only once in your life.”

The Dancer’s first appearance on the track dominated Tuesday’s news dispatches from Louisville even though the Derby Trial
was run later in the day before 23,000 fans. Fourteen horses were entered in the race, many being given a final chance to
prove they belonged in the Derby, but they were “mostly second stringers,” according to the Associated Press, and the race
was assigned little importance.

The horse to watch in the Trial, many thought, was Royal Bay Gem, the undersized late-running colt that had come from fifteenth
to win the Chesapeake Stakes. But after being sent to the post at 5-2 odds, he was blocked at the half-mile pole and was never
a factor, with jockey Jimmy Combest strangely never asking for much effort The Gem did close hard, however, coming from last
to fourth with his customary finishing kick, and he would still have his backers in the Derby.

Dark Star won the Trial. The third betting choice at 9-2 odds, he sat in second behind a long shot for a half mile, then shot
into the lead on the turn and pulled away to win by four lengths, with jockey Henry Moreno urging him to the finish line in
1:36, just three-fifths of a second off the track record for a mile. Money Broker, the Florida Derby winner, ridden by Al
Popara, passed a quartet of horses in the stretch to finish second. Dark Star’s shaky credentials as a Derby horse had been
solidified. “I just wish we could have run the Derby today,” trainer Eddie Hayward told reporters.

But even though Harry Guggenheim’s little-known horse now had to be taken seriously, few really believed Dark Star would challenge
the Dancer or Correspondent in the Derby. Correspondent, after all, had whipped Dark Star in an allowance race at Keeneland
eleven days earlier, easily fending off a challenge in the stretch. After the Trial, Arcaro, who would ride Correspondent
in the Derby, made sure reporters remembered that “Dark Star just made Correspondent look even better,” he said with a grin
after finishing seventh in the Trial on a colt named Berseem.

Leaving the Downs after the race, Hayward was sitting in traffic when the car behind him suddenly accelerated, ramming the
rear of his car and causing significant damage. “I’m going to need to win the Derby to get my car fixed,” Hayward told the
crowd at the annual Derby trainers’ dinner later that night at the Brown Hotel. Despite Dark Star’s victory in the Trial,
it was hard not to see the horse and his trainer as star-crossed.

The Dancer was back on the track for a light workout the next morning, again stirring up a commotion. “This observer has been
coming to the Derby since 1916, but never have I known a candidate for the Downs classic to excite quite such interest as
Native Dancer,” columnist Charles Hatton wrote in the
Morning Telegraph
. “When the strapping grey colt walks beneath the shed in Barn 16, the rail is lined with fully as many of the curious as
most paddocks before a race. A score or more of newsmen, feature writers for slick magazines, newsreel,
Life
magazine, TV and daily press photographers follow him to and from the track during training hours, and each morning there
is a parking problem in the vicinity of his barn. Not even Citation stirred such keen interest. Clearly, Native Dancer is
‘the public’s horse.’ Thanks to TV, countless thousands of fans have become interested in him, as they used to be interested
in outstanding ball players. Someone has well said that ‘all the world loves a champion,’ and Saturday, people will be rooting
for the Dancer who will not wager a farthing on the outcome.”

More reporters were arriving every day, with
New York Times
columnist Arthur Daley among Wednesday’s newcomers. He began his morning at dawn, trying to coax responses from Plain Ben
Jones outside Barn 15. Jones, who had trained three of the past five Derby winners and six overall, shooed Daley away. “You
get on away from here, there ain’t no Derby horses here,” he said. “Just go on down the line and look at that grey. That’s
the horse to watch this year.”

Winfrey was holding court again outside Barn 16. “One of the photographers asked me if I wouldn’t take his bridle and lead
him out in the sun for a picture—‘not me,’ I said, ‘I wouldn’t dare,’ ” Winfrey said. “I’ve got a 260-pound man leading him
around now. If I could find a bigger man, I would.”

Vanderbilt was at the barn for the first time, having flown into Louisville late Tuesday night after watching Indian Land,
another of his horses, run in the feature race at Garden State Park. He smiled at Winfrey’s caution. “That’s right,” Vanderbilt
said. “He might decide to get playful and throw you over the roof.”

Winfrey continued: “I wouldn’t let him be photographed grazing on the grass, either. If some of those other horses with coughs
grazed on the same grass, our horse could catch a cold and there goes the ballgame. No, sir, I’m taking no chances.”

Joe Tannenbaum, a young racing writer for the
Miami Daily News
, was covering his first Kentucky Derby. The size and intensity of the hordes around the Dancer awed him. “Winfrey had big
crowds of reporters around him every morning,” Tannenbaum recalled years later. Tannenbaum was also fascinated with Vanderbilt:
“A lot of people thought he was one of those aloof society people, but he was not around the barns; he was tense about his
horses, like a horseman.”

The writers were following their usual Derby week routine: morning interviews at the barns, afternoons in the press box, evenings
at dinners or parties. Joe Palmer, sadly, was missing for the first time since the early 1930s, and CBS, again televising
the race nationally, with Bryan Field handling the call, had several dozen technicians on the premises. The network was trying
out a new blueprint for its forty-five-minute Saturday afternoon telecast. The first fifteen minutes would emanate from a
New York studio, with Mike Wallace and Buff Cobb, the popular husband-and-wife interviewers, previewing the race. They would
then throw it to Kentucky, where Mel Allen, the famed baseball announcer, would set the scene. After Field’s call of the race,
Allen and Louisville broadcaster Phil Sutterfield would cover the trophy presentation and interview the connections of the
winner.

Many more people would see CBS’s broadcast than any of the newsmen’s stories, a reality beginning to sink in with the citizens
of the press box. “Very quickly,” Tannenbaum said, “many reporters rightfully changed their reportorial styles because they
believed that most people had seen the race. It was a landmark change in how the job was done.”

Tommy Roberts recalled, “There’s no doubt the old-time newspaper guys saw their importance being eroded, and they didn’t want
to give that up. Before, when Red Smith or Grantland Rice walked into the track, everyone said, ‘Hail Caesar!’ But these new
popular figures were emerging through TV, guys like Bryan Field and Fred Caposella. That worried the guys who ran the racetracks.
They had grown up with the newspapermen and that world. That was one of the reasons racing was so reluctant to go with TV
originally, because the newspaper guys had such sway with the track operators. No one really understood the power of the medium
yet. But it was starting to change.”

Winfrey had told the writers he planned to give the Dancer a final pre-Derby work Thursday morning, but the weather forecast
was ominous, calling for thunderstorms. Winfrey considered his options. He didn’t want to work the Dancer on a wet track,
and he couldn’t put off the work until Friday, just a day before the Derby. With Vanderbilt’s help, he concocted a plan and
proposed it to Churchill officials: the Dancer and Social Outcast could appear in a “trial” between races that afternoon,
before the rains came overnight Churchill agreed to the idea just in time to have the Dancer’s appearance trumpeted in the
last edition of the afternoon paper.