Native Dancer (9 page)

A lot was at stake. The stable’s annual trek to California was looming, and Winfrey needed to know which of the pending two-year-olds
to take. He liked to run the early bloomers in the three-furlong dashes for juveniles at Santa Anita and leave his youngsters
with more far-reaching potential at home; they were better served, he felt, by receiving several more months of schooling
at Sagamore and then starting their racing careers in the spring in New York, where the racing was better.

That morning, it wasn’t hard to separate the horses with potential from those destined to accomplish little. Social Outcast
looked sharp; he would go to California. Find also ran well. But the best of the crop were Crash Dive and Native Dancer. Working
together with Appley riding Crash Dive and Bernie Everson on Native Dancer, the pair circled the track and blazed to the finish
line. They were at the head of the class.

It was up to Winfrey to choose which to take to California; taking both and having them compete against each other seemed
pointless. The trainer deliberated briefly and decided to leave Crash Dive on the farm and take Native Dancer to the West
Coast. “I thought Crash Dive was probably the better of the two, not necessarily on ability; he just seemed at the time like
the better-bred horse,” Winfrey told the
Blood-Horse
in 1985. “If I’d had to make a choice, at that point, of buying one or the other, and the price was the same, I probably
would have taken Crash Dive.”

As it happened, Crash Dive suffered a rash of slender “quarter cracks” on his heel bones that kept him from racing at all
as a two-year-old. He returned to win some races later in his career but never realized the potential he showed on the farm.

Native Dancer went in the other direction, dazzling backstretch clockers at Santa Anita. With Vanderbilt watching on Christmas
Eve morning in 1951, the colt effortlessly covered two furlongs in twenty-three seconds, a remarkable effort for a yearling.

“That’ll do,” Vanderbilt deadpanned.

Would it ever.

T
he Dancer worked so impressively as a yearling and early two-year-old at Santa Anita that Winfrey decided the colt was too
talented to race in the gimmicky three-furlong dashes that were so popular in California. The horse just trained in California,
then was shipped back East with the rest of Vanderbilt’s stable in March. His racing career began in April 1952 on a chilly
afternoon at Jamaica, the egg-shaped track in Queens, New York. More than 40,000 fans were there for the Wood Memorial, a
key stakes race for the East’s best three-year-olds. The Dancer was entered in the second race, a five-furlong dash, and he
made sure he was noticed.

His eye-popping workout times had been published in the racing papers, and word had spread that Vanderbilt had a speedy two-year-old.
Reaching the post as a 7-5 favorite, he broke alertly, waited briefly behind two horses, and overtook them easily when Eric
Guerin asked him to run in the stretch. He crossed the finish line almost five lengths in front. “Jumped a mud puddle at the
sixteenth pole and still won easy: very impressive,” recalled jockey Bill Shoemaker, who was at Jamaica that day.

Winfrey and Vanderbilt brought him back just four days later in the Youthful Stakes, another five-furlong race. Twelve other
horses were entered, turning the event into a wild scramble of inexperienced horseflesh. Guerin kept the Dancer, a 9-10 favorite,
near the front and out of trouble. A colt named Retrouve had the lead heading into the turn, but Guerin was just waiting to
move. He let the Dancer loose turning for home, and the colt zoomed past Retrouve, pulled away, and won by six lengths. James
Roach, the racing writer for the
New York Times
, was so impressed he announced that evening in the press box that he didn’t believe Vanderbilt’s colt would lose a race all
year, and anyone who wanted to take him up on that proposition could do so.

Within days, it was announced the colt would be sidelined for several months. Vanderbilt’s veterinarian, Dr. William Wright,
had detected bucked shins—tiny fractures in the cannon bones of the forelegs, a common, minor ailment for young horses, cured
only by time off. The Dancer would miss three months and several important races before returning in August at Saratoga, but
that was fine with Winfrey. The East’s two-year-olds usually sorted themselves out at Saratoga.

Within days of the announcement about the Dancer, Vanderbilt experienced his greatest Kentucky Derby frustration with a horse
named Cousin, a talented but troubled colt.

Vanderbilt had bought Cousin for $20,000 as a yearling in 1950, thinking that if he couldn’t breed a Derby winner, maybe he
could buy one. Cousin lost his first start as a two-year-old in 1951, then won three in a row and was shipped to Saratoga,
where he won the Flash Stakes, Saratoga Special, and Hopeful Stakes within four weeks. “What a horse he could have been if
he’d gotten straightened out,” Appley recalled. “But he was crazy from the word go. After I galloped him the first time, I
came home and told my wife, ‘I got on the damnedest horse today.’ ”

While dominating at Saratoga, Cousin refused to train on the main racing strip. “He’d get to the track and fall over like
he’d been shot and refuse to get up,” Appley recalled. Jock Whitney offered Vanderbilt the use of Greentree’s private training
track in Saratoga, and Cousin resumed training. Whatever aversion the horse felt for the main track didn’t extend to the afternoons:
in the Hopeful, he defeated Tom Fool, Greentree’s best two-year-old and later a handicap champion.

“Cousin was a nut, but he could run,” recalled Bayard Sharp, Vanderbilt’s friend and fellow Jockey Club member. “We were all
helping Alfred with the horse at Saratoga. Alfred came to me and said, ‘I have this nut and he hates my lead pony and I can’t
get him to the track to work. Maybe we can fool him. Would you lend me your lead pony?’ So I did. And it didn’t help. Cousin
kicked the hell out of my lead pony and never got to the track. But then we got to the Hopeful, and here we’ve all helped
Alfred with the horse, lent him lead ponies and whatnot, and Cousin goes and beats us all.”

To most observers, the victory marked Cousin as a contender for the 1952 Kentucky Derby, but within the stable, concerns about
his behavior overshadowed the achievement. He had thrown Guerin before the start, almost lain down in the starting gate, and
then again refused to train on the main track after the race. “They brought in a vet,” Appley recalled, “and the vet said,
‘This horse is plum crazy.’ ”

Winfrey somehow got him through two more races in the fall of 1951, but he ran seventh in the Anticipation Stakes and eighth
in the Futurity after curiously breaking into the air coming out of the starting gate. Vanderbilt and Winfrey hoped he would
mature over the winter and come back more willing in the spring, but he was even more difficult, occasionally consenting to
light training but otherwise refusing to follow orders. He produced a third-place finish in two starts at Jamaica in April
1952, and Winfrey went ahead and shipped him to Churchill Downs with contingencies. If the colt trained agreeably, he would
run in the Derby, ending Vanderbilt’s streak at eighteen years without a Derby horse. But if he caused problems in training,
he would run in the Derby Trial, a smaller prep race run at Churchill Downs four days before the big race, and Winfrey and
Vanderbilt would then reassess.

A disaster unfolded. Cousin refused to train at Churchill and put on a monumental show of stubbornness one morning in front
of hundreds of disbelieving railbirds. Winfrey waved a bullwhip, took the colt to the paddock, walked him around the track
both ways, and brought in an older horse to try to convince him to run, all to no avail. Finally, after an hour of balking,
Cousin extended himself mildly on a single trip around the track, then returned to the barn. Reporter Jerry McNerney of the
Louisville Courier-Journal
wrote the next day that Cousin had “behaved as if he were related to the mule family.”

Winfrey knew how badly Vanderbilt wanted to run in the Derby, but he also knew he couldn’t enter such a contrary horse in
such an important race without knowing if a genuine effort would ensue. Thus, Cousin was entered in the Derby Trial, his last
chance to prove himself.

Vanderbilt, in the midst of his term as the president of the Thoroughbred Racing Associations, spent the morning of the Trial
at the barn, chatting with reporters and track officials.

“What are you going to do with that crazy horse?” asked Churchill’s track director, Tom Young.

Vanderbilt laughed. “You mean, what is Cousin going to do with
us
?”

That afternoon, the colt balked at entering the starting gate, broke sixth in a field of eight, and quickly lost interest,
finishing last, more than forty lengths behind the winner. Vanderbilt left town. Cousin was out of the Derby. “If the horse
had run as fast as Alfred did in running to catch his train after the race, we’d have won by seven lengths,” Winfrey told
reporters. Cousin was removed from training, sold, and sent to Europe, where he raced with success on a steeplechase circuit
before being killed in a race.

The Dancer was convalescing in New York as Cousin unraveled in Louisville. The grey colt returned on schedule two months later,
having given his sore shins time to heal. He resumed training in July at Belmont and was shipped to Saratoga.

Saratoga Springs had been a summer place unlike any other for decades, thriving on illegal gambling as bribed politicians
looked the other way and bookmakers worked out of bars, the backs of stores, and glittering nightclub-casinos on the nearby
lakefront. “You talk about a live town,” recalled Tommy Trotter, a New York racing official in the early fifties. “There were
nightclubs going, celebrities from Hollywood, just a fun town. I’d be eating breakfast at a little grill across from the track
at seven in the morning, and here would come the showgirls, coming in from doing the shows, along with guys with their tuxedos
still on. It was absolutely wide open, all high-class, just top racing and shows at night and gambling.”

But dramatic changes were afoot in 1952. An anticrime panel led by Tennessee Senator Estes Kefauver had discouraged organized
crime with televised hearings in which sweating mobsters were grilled. Saratoga’s bookies were gone, its casinos shuttered;
racing’s Gomorrah had reluctantly discovered religion. The members of horse racing’s high society, who regarded Saratoga’s
meeting as their annual convention, still spent their days at the track dressed in jackets, hats, and other formal wear, rooting
for their horses from private boxes; then gathered at night for elegant dinners, yearling sales, and big-band parties lasting
until dawn. The Spa, as the town was known, was still a seersucker jacket in the sun and a dance in the dark. But the grand
hotels were closing, and high rollers were no longer promenading down Broadway.

The start of the racing meeting was met with relief as a sign that not all of the town’s traditions were changing; there were
still few better settings for racing, few tracks with fans more knowing and caring. The sport’s best stables were still present,
their horses exercising on steamy mornings and racing through hot afternoons. As always, Vanderbilt’s cerise and white colors
were hung on the barn nearest the track. He loved August at Saratoga. It was where his society roots and passion for racing
blended most seamlessly, and where he had first learned about racing as a boy. Now, as then, he commuted from Sagamore Lodge
in the nearby Adirondack Mountains, where he had spent his boyhood summers and where his wife and children were now staying.
Vanderbilt spent the weekdays with his family and his weekends at the races and sales amid the racetrack fraternity he considered
his second family.

The owner was anxious to see the Dancer back in action, as were Winfrey, Murray, and everyone in the barn. The grey colt had
shown potential in his two victories in April, but he had a lot of catching up to do after such a long layoff. Two-year-olds
were campaigned as rigorously as possible in the early fifties. This was a custom that horsemen had maintained through the
first half of the century, before big money invaded the breeding industry and turned top horses into valuable commodities
that needed more conservative handling and preservation for stud duty. Seabiscuit made an astonishing thirty-five starts as
a juvenile in 1935, and twenty-three more the next year. Whirlaway raced sixteen times at age two in 1940, one more start
than Count Fleet made as a juvenile two years later. Vanderbilt’s Bed o’ Roses had raced twenty-one times in her championship
juvenile campaign of 1949, so, clearly, Winfrey wasn’t afraid to push a young horse. The Dancer was painfully raw by those
standards, having made just two starts as August began. It was almost as if his career had not even begun.

Winfrey and Vanderbilt planned to change that at Saratoga. The month-long meeting at the historic wooden track on Union Avenue
was a hothouse for two-year-old racing, with the best juveniles in the East and Midwest gathering and sparring in a series
of stakes. There was the Flash Stakes on the first day of the meeting and the prestigious Hopeful Stakes on the last day,
and in between, such races as the Saratoga Special, the Grand Union Hotel Stakes, and the United States Hotel Stakes. Cousin
had won three, including the Hopeful a year earlier, and Winfrey and Vanderbilt wanted to push the Dancer even harder and
run him in four. It was an audacious blueprint. Years later, any trainer who suggested running an inexperienced juvenile four
times in twenty-six days—against top opposition, no less—wouldn’t have a job the next day.