Secretariat (13 page)

“After eighteen years of housewifery, I felt out of touch and unsure. I was at the age when many of my friends had gone back to college for teaching degrees, taken public relations jobs, or opened gift shops.”

Counting on her father’s mares, on the experience of farm managers like Gentry and Bailes, Penny didn’t feel she was plunging into racing unassisted. Nor did she feel the sudden rush of pressure to learn, as she might have felt had her father died. She had time to feel her way around while she adjusted to a world away from the ski slopes of Vail and the machinations of Colorado politics. She had always been interested in her father’s racing stable, though she had never participated in the operation of it. “My father never needed help. He wanted an audience.”

Still in Denver, she began reading and studying the variety of racing publications—The
Blood-Horse,
the
Thoroughbred Record,
the
Daily Racing Form,
and books about racing. She conferred frequently with Bull Hancock, asking him what she regarded later as “dumb questions.” They were the questions of a novice: it was amateur night at The Meadow.

Yet one of the decisions she made that year, however new she was to active involvement in the sport, had major historical repercussions. Despite its evident failure, Penny decided to continue with the Phippses the two-year flip arrangement to which her father had already agreed, so she sent Somethingroyal to Bold Ruler twice, in 1968 and 1969. Not bad for an amateur.

Thus Penny Tweedy was beginning to involve herself in what became a central passion and ambition in her life. She was her father’s daughter, moving to save The Meadow—the land and the mares and the stallions and the yearlings and the paddocks and the barns and the manor house—and the racing stable and the Chenery name in racing.

She became the nominal leader of the Meadow Stud, assuming control by default more than anything else. Neither her brother, the scholarly Hollis, nor her sister, Margaret Carmichael, shared her enthusiasm for racing. She sensed that their attitude was, “If Penny wants to do it, let her do it. Dad isn’t going to live much longer, and when he’s gone we’re going to sell it all anyway.”

At family meetings during her father’s illness and the stable’s drift—when the future of it was uncertain and she was still running a household in Denver—Penny sensed this unspoken understanding that with the passing of her father would come the passing of the farm. And she was determined not to let that happen.

The stable started losing money in the late 1960s—something it had rarely done—a total of $85,000 in 1969. That was the year in which she sensed the strongest pressure, among family members, to begin considering the sale of the farm, the breeding stock, and the racing stable. It was also the year when Casey Hayes, Chenery’s private trainer for more than twenty-five years, resigned. It was a major turn of events. Seeking counsel to find a new trainer, Penny turned to Bull Hancock for advice, and he suggested Roger Laurin, thirty-three, the son of Bull’s own trainer, Lucien Laurin. Roger, a public trainer who conditioned horses for various clients, accepted the job with the proviso that for two years he would make all the decisions on training the horses and rise or fall with them. She agreed.

Of the twenty horses in training at the Meadow Stable when he took over, Roger sent fourteen back to the farm, saying they were unfit to race. He sliced stable expenses sharply from $250,000 to about $120,000 a year. While the stable had lost almost $100,000 the year before he took it over, it began showing a profit during his first year of running it. And Penny was asserting herself more forcefully.

The many nonproducing broodmares at The Meadow were sharply culled. In that enterprise she sought and received the counsel of Bull Hancock. All mares, from then on, would have three years to produce. Culling the failures became a rule. There would be no unproductive boarders living and dining for years at The Meadow. They would be sold privately or at auction. Instead of breeding the mares to the farm stallions who were not producing winners, Penny and Howard Gentry sought to breed the broodmares to young or proved stallions. They soon had mares booked to proved studs such as Round Table and Northern Dancer, and to the young and promising Dr. Fager and his archrival on the racetrack, Damascus.

Penny Tweedy took over the running of The Meadow as a businesswoman, with a tough attitude, seeking to reestablish it on a sound financial basis. Behind the Cheer smile and the procelain sparkle of her teeth, behind the radiance and the friendliness and the warmth—behind all the charm, gentility, and good Episcopalianism—was a mind with a thermostat idling at sixty degrees. “I got tough fighting with my brother and sister as a child. My father wanted his children to be tough and self-reliant and to defend their points of view.” By upbringing and education Penny Tweedy was a scion of the corporate class, and she fit snugly and without fear into racing’s ruling structure. Racing’s establishment had changed markedly since the early Vanderbilt days when the ruling guard had names like Whitney, Woodward, and Belmont. The old names were still on the Jockey Club roll, but the power had shifted to financiers and industrial moguls like John Galbreath, John Hanes, George M. Humphrey (President Eisenhower’s former secretary of the treasury), Captain Guggenheim, and C. T. Chenery.

Penny Tweedy’s fear was not of her father’s friends, some of whom encouraged her to keep the silks in racing. Her concern was the sentiment, as expressed by brother Hollis at the Meadow Stud board meeting in August 1969, that they might consider selling the farm, the breeding stock, and racing stable and invest it all in the stock market. Penny objected, quietly, to the idea. “I don’t think we have the right to sell Dad’s horses while he is alive,” she said, “because I don’t think he would want that.”

There was no argument, no raised voices, but the sentiment for sale was there. Her hope to keep the farm and stable was based in part on the belief, a kind of cosmic belief, that good horses and good times come in cycles to breeding and racing operations. The Meadow Stable, she believed, was ready to go into orbit again, into a winning cycle. She recalled that, after Hill Prince retired in 1951, there was a seven-year hiatus until the emergence of First Landing in 1958. There was another, though shorter, wait for champion Cicada five years later, but since Cicada The Meadow had not produced a champion.

She believed that a good horse, a big money winner, would shift the sentiment against selling the farm and stable and turn it in favor of keeping them. There was money to be made in racing—more than ever in the history of the sport—and she knew that one top horse could show that dramatically and quell the belief that there were more possibilities on Wall Street than shed row. She believed that a star would bring Hollis and her sister into the sport, exposing them to racing and the drama of it, the excitement and the glamor, and involve them as participants.

What The Meadow needed was the big horse, and in March of 1971, Penny Tweedy addressed the Fortnightly Club and told the thirty largely Smith and Vassar women that she was banking on the Meadow mares, “optimistic that another good stakes winner will come out of the horses we have just sent to the track.” They had just sent Iberia’s son Riva Ridge to the track as a two-year-old, with Secretariat a young yearling near training. Roger Laurin trained Riva Ridge briefly, not long enough for his own mortal good.

An opportunity arose for Roger Laurin that few men would pass without reaching for it, and Roger reached. At the age of thirty-five he was offered the chance of training the Phipps family’s string of horses—the most prestigious stable of runners in the country, by reputation the most powerful band of horses in America. Trainer Eddie Neloy, the man who had joked with Penny Tweedy during that monumental coin flip of 1969, had died of a heart attack on the morning of May 26, 1971, just six weeks before Bold Ruler died, two months before Secretariat went into training, and only fourteen days before Riva Ridge would make his first lifetime start.

Ogden Phipps was suddenly without a trainer for all his blue-bloods in Elmont, Long Island, in the stable area at Belmont Park not far from Lucien’s barn.

Bull approached Roger, and Roger accepted. There was hardly a way a young man could refuse. It was managing the New York Yankees in the 1950s, the Green Bay Packers of the early 1960s, the Miami Dolphins of the 1970s—he would train the finest blooded horses in America and he would be backed up, on Claiborne Farm, by scores of the finest broodmares on earth, by stallions such as Phipps’s Buckpasser, and by a variety of others such as Round Table, Damascus, Bold Lad, and Dr. Fager. It was the stable for which trainer Neloy had set a record in 1966 by winning forty-one stakes races and purses worth $2,456,250, a money-winning record that exceeded Jimmy Jones’s 1947 record by more than $1 million.

“Who do you think I should try?” Penny asked Roger, seeking a replacement for him.

“How about my dad?” he asked.

“No,” she said.

Penny Tweedy had already seen Lucien that past winter at Hialeah, and she feared he might be patronizing toward her—the old-timer talking down to the young upstart kid. Roger’s stable, including the Meadow horses, had been near Lucien’s barn in Florida, and she remembered that Lucien was there infrequently, that he was letting his son run his stable much of the time, and that he acted as if he were about to retire altogether, which in fact he was. He was not her idea of a trainer for the Meadow horses. She wanted a second-generation trainer, for one thing, as she was a second-generation owner, someone like Roger himself.

She sat in Colorado a couple of days, with Roger’s brief notice running out, and no time to fly to New York to interview trainers for the job, refusing to call Bull for help since Bull, on behalf of the Phippses, had just lured her trainer away. She decided instead to call Roger back. “Maybe if your dad could help us out until we get going,” she said to Roger. “I know you have to leave. I would appreciate it. But if you could explain to him that I’m hiring him on an interim basis, and that if he doesn’t want to stay he doesn’t have to, and if I don’t want to keep him I don’t have to.”

The arrangements were made first through Roger, acting as intermediary. Then the details of the agreement with Lucien were reached during a meeting on a rainy afternoon at the racetrack. The Meadow Stable box seat was so near the front of the section that the rain was falling into it, so Penny and Miss Ham and Lucien fumbled around for a few moments in search of a dry place to talk.

The meeting did not take long. They agreed that Lucien would be paid his usual daily rate per horse, twenty-five dollars at the time, and that he would get 10 percent of the winnings and 10 percent of all the sales he negotiated, but no salary since he was a public trainer with other clients. It was essentially the same agreement they had with Roger.

Shortly thereafter, Lucien saw the first hints of promise. Less than two weeks after taking over the stable, on June 9, he watched Riva Ridge bumped and badly beaten under Chuck Baltazar. On June 23, wheeling the horse back again, Lucien saw him run off and win by almost six lengths under Baltazar. In an allowance race he won again, whipping his field by four, and by then Lucien knew he had a horse in his barn. And so, at one point, Lucien changed his mind about retiring.

The bay was beaten in a stakes race at Aqueduct July 21, after Baltazar was forced to steady him in heavy traffic. The jockey was then suspended for a riding infraction at Aqueduct, and Lucien decided to put his fellow French Canadian, Ron Turcotte, on the colt. Ron had been working horses for Lucien in the morning. He was on Riva Ridge when he raced to his first stakes victory in the Flash on opening day at Saratoga. Turcotte knew he was connected to a live wire, telling Lucien that Riva moved with freakish ease, and Penny Tweedy began to believe she had the colt she had been waiting for, the winner who would save the farm. The day Riva Ridge won the Futurity and started his $500,000 climb to the championship was the turning point, the day she believed the pendulum was swinging upward once again.

Thus Riva Ridge became the golden boy, the ugly duckling, and the underdog, so homely, his ears twirling floppily above a gentle if not striking mien, but he moved like a deer. Iberia was her father’s mare, First Landing her father’s stallion, and it was as if Penny were living a storybook tale about the prince who was a horse and would save her dying father’s farm if only he could get there fast enough.

Riva, as she came to call him, was her pet, her favorite, the one to whom she went first in the mornings at the barns. His homeliness only enhanced his appeal. Hollis Chenery and Mrs. Carmichael, swept up with the others in the excitement generated by the bay, flew to Louisville for the Kentucky Derby, joining the family in the ecstatic aftermath of the winner’s circle at Churchill Downs. They were at Belmont Park to watch him romp by seven, rejoining the family there in the winner’s circle. Riva Ridge pulled the entire family into racing, and in the days of a bearish market, made hundreds of thousands of dollars quickly. There was no more talk of selling the horses and the farm.

At the start of it all—the Thursday after Riva’s victory in the Flash Stakes—Lucien and his wife Juliette took Penny Tweedy to dinner at Chez Pierre in Saratoga. That was the point at which she began genuinely to like and understand Lucien. “I realized then that this was a tremendous individual. He might not be receptive to my ideas but he knew a great deal more than I did.” She would not forget that night. They had a grand time over a French dinner, drinking wine and singing and talking of Riva Ridge. And just that morning, Charlie Ross had started toying with Secretariat’s ears down at The Meadow, getting the red horse ready for the bridle.

Chapter 13

In the beginning Penny resented Secretariat—resented his outrageous good looks and his physique, his first victory by six, and his promise as a two-year-old, fearing for the eminence of Riva, her golden boy.

This ambivalent feeling was essentially a contradiction of her wish to make and keep The Meadow solvent and profitable. She easily overcame it. The superstition about opening day at Saratoga was more entrenched, and she followed it north from her rented house on Long Island. A year before, Riva Ridge was running in the Flash Stakes on opening day, and she flew all night to see him run in it. She missed her connection at La Guardia, the airlines lost her bags, she was miserable, tired, and almost missed the race. She sensed then that The Meadow was coming back and that it was important for her to be there. And she didn’t want to miss Secretariat’s race on opening day, July 31.

“I said to myself, ‘Maybe lightning is going to strike twice. You better be there.’ ”

Sometime in late June and July of 1972, Secretariat woke up as a racehorse, ceased being an overgrown pumpkin of a colt, and began to like the business of racing: to get with it when the gates opened, pumping the legs and the neck and tracking the leaders for a while and then—once the legs began to mesh and the rhythm took over—picking up speed, grabbing the bit, and racing hell-bent past them for the wire. Some horses loaf; others refuse to run at all; others spit out the bit and back off when they are in a fight. Others fear close contact, shying away when bumped, hemmed in, or impeded. Not Secretariat.

He began to come alive, and after his first win he started training faster, running faster and harder against the bit. Then he was off to Saratoga, traveling north by van up along the Hudson River to the historic old spa, the mile-and-an-eighth sandbox where the rich play in August, where the beams are still made of wood and the awnings at the racetrack are peppermint striped and the people eat corn on the cob and chicken in a basket.

On July 29, two days before his third start, Lucien sent Secretariat three-eighths in 0:35 under hand-urging, a sharp move at Saratoga, whose surface is not as fast as Belmont Park’s. It primed the pump for Monday. Lucien had the red horse entered in the fourth race, a six-furlong sprint for two-year-olds who had never won two races. The purse was $9000, with $5400 to the winner, and he was in with six others. The feature that day was the Test Stakes, the prestigious filly race that Imperatrice and Miss Disco had won in the 1940s. About the time Penny Tweedy and Lucien Laurin headed toward the paddock and Turcotte donned the Meadow silks, one elderly turf-writer who had seen the grandmothers but never the grandson was awaiting quietly the colt’s arrival for the fourth.

The cognoscenti give Mrs. Helen Tweedy’s Secretariat the nod for potentiality. He has electrifying acceleration, duende, charisma, and starfire raised to the steenth power. He also is pretty good.

Charles Hatton in the July 19
Daily Racing Form

Wearing tinted glasses and a summer suit, smoking mentholated cigarettes in a holder, his gray hair drawn back, his voice carried along on the soft southerlies of an old Louisville accent, Charles Hatton sat on a bench near the paddock and watched for Secretariat.

Hatton had been coming to the races for more than fifty years, working around them almost as long. His tutor was the former black slave and the rider of Ten Broeck, Billy Walker. Walker had retired as a jockey and was timing horses in Kentucky when Hatton came under his tutorial care. Billy Walker taught him the intricacies of a horse’s conformation—the proper angulation of the skeletal parts, the muscular investiture, the set of the eyes and the jowls and the length of the cannon bone relative to the length of the forearm. Horses were anatomical puzzles, all of a piece but in pieces.

Hatton had no way of knowing it then as he sat on the bench, but there was a young racehorse turning the corner of the racetrack—perhaps 150 yards away—who would fulfill some ideal that he had been turning over in his head since Billy Walker put it there more than fifty years ago.

Secretariat walked down the pathway toward the paddock, toward the towering canopy of trees above the saddling area, toward Hatton, who saw the colt and came to his feet. The red horse filled Hatton’s eyes of an instant, not striding into his field of vision but swimming into it, pulling Hatton from the bench to a standstill before him.

Hatton had seen thousands of horses in his life, thousands of two-year-olds, and suddenly on this July afternoon of 1972 he found the 106-carat diamond: “It was like seeing a bunch of gravel and there was the Kohinoor lying in there. It was so unexpected. I thought, ‘Jesus Christ, I never saw a horse that looked like that before.’ ”

Hatton followed the youngster to the saddling area. “First thing I know, I look around and there was a circle of people standing there like Man o’ War was being saddled,” Hatton recalled.

Hatton was in momentary awe. “You carry an ideal around in your head, and boy, I thought, ‘This is it.’ I never saw perfection before. I absolutely could not fault him in any way. And neither could the rest of them and that was the amazing thing about it. The body and the head and the eye and the general attitude. It was just incredible. I couldn’t believe my eyes, frankly. I just couldn’t because I’ve made a kind of thing of looking at horses since before the First World War, when I was a kid, but I never saw a horse like that.”

All was of a piece, in proportion, Hatton thought. Secretariat had depth of barrel, with well-sprung ribs for heart and lung room, and he was not too wide in the front fork, nor too close together, and he came packaged with tremendous hindquarters. Hatton noted the underpinnings, stunned at the straightness of the hindleg, an unusual and valuable trait—straightness, not as seen from the front or back, but rather straightness when viewed from the side, from the gaskin through the hock to the cannon bone behind. It was as straight a hindleg as Hatton had ever seen and would serve as a source of great propulsive power as it reached far under the body and propelled it forward.

The value of a straight hindleg in a thoroughbred is roughly analogous to the value of the left arm held straight in a golf swing. A straight left arm gives maximum arc to the backswing and downswing and more propulsion to the clubface, greater sweep and power with minimum effort. “This construction comes to a sort of scooting action behind,” Hatton later wrote. “He gets his hind parts far under himself in action, and the drive of the hindlegs is tremendous, as he follows through like a golfer.”

His eyes moving up, Hatton looked at the head. The nostrils were large, with great flaring room for breathing large quantities of air rapidly—Man o’ War had enormous nostrils, too—and the wide spread between the jowls suggested that it housed an ample windpipe. The cannon bone was not too long—the longer it is, the more susceptible it is to stress and injury, as is the tendon—and the forearm above it was of good length. Hatton noticed the sloping rump, the Nearco mark, but rejected it as unimportant. That sloping rump used to be the emblem of sprinters, but the staying Nearcos had remodeled that conception. Secretariat’s shoulders were powerful, and he stood slightly over at the knees—that is, seen from the side, his knees were neither concave, an anatomical disaster in a horse, nor perfectly straight, but rather slightly convex. In this particular he was fine to Hatton, slightly over to reduce the concussion of the hooves on the racetrack.

“It was the thrill of a lifetime.”

Hatton and the circle of onlookers parted, stepping back as groom Mordecai Williams led Secretariat to the paddock. Turcotte joined them there, conferring briefly with Lucien on the race and the way to ride the colt. This was not a herd of nonwinners of the type he spread-eagled at Aqueduct two weeks earlier. Two of the colts, Russ Miron and Joe Iz, had shown speed, and Turcotte knew he’d have to catch them if the red horse fell back and ran as he had under Feliciano.

“Don’t rush this colt,” Lucien reminded him. “Let him feel his way and just come on with him. He has a particular way of running. You can’t rush him.”

The crowd had made Secretariat the odds-on favorite at $0.40 to $1.00, and Turcotte sat ready on him in the starting gate, clutching a handful of his coppery mane for balance when George Cassidy sprang the latch and sent them on.

Secretariat brushed the side of the gate when the doors sprang open, drifting left and brushing Fat Frank as they left the slip, and Turcotte could feel him trying to get with it. He could feel him chopping and struggling to put his mass in motion. So Turcotte sat chilly on him. Secretariat had broken alertly, but was dropping back as the field made off for the turn. Russ Miron rushed to the lead and through an opening quarter in 0:23
1
/
5
, with Joe Iz a head behind and on the outside of him. Turcotte eased Secretariat to the outside, giving him time to find his stride and room to move when he found it. As Russ Miron raced past the half-mile pole, Secretariat was last, trailing him by four with his own quarter in 0:24. The horses made the bend, and Turcotte had Secretariat five horses wide, giving him the worst of it but no traffic to deal with. The colt started rolling around the turn, picking up speed past the three-eighths pole and moving past Fat Frank, Court Ruling, Blackthorn, and Tropic Action in a matter of jumps, zipping along that second quarter mile in 0:22
3
/
5
, and moving up on Russ Miron and Joe Iz to the head of the lane. By then he was just a half a length from the lead and on the outside.

With Secretariat moving to them, Joe Iz caved in first, dropping back, and passing the three-sixteenths pole Ron reached back and hit the red colt once, right-handed. Secretariat drifted left. Turcotte switched his stick and straightened him out by rapping him once left-handed. Secretariat had Russ Miron in trouble at the eighth pole. Carlos Marquez worked on him vigorously, but Turcotte eased away from him in the final 220 yards, hand-riding to a length-and-a-half victory in 1:10
4
/
5
for the six furlongs, his final quarter in 0:24
1
/
5
.

Now the colt began to exact more than just casual interest from horsemen. “Mrs. Tweedy,” said Virginia breeder Taylor Hardin, turning to her after the race. “I’d like to apply for breeding rights to that horse. I was the first person to ask for breeding rights to Native Dancer and I was right.”

Turcotte liked his race that day, too, though he would not do handsprings back to the jockeys’ quarters over it. He had given the youngster the worst of the running, taking him to the high ground at the turn and giving away lengths to two fast colts. And the red horse caught them with a rush when his rider chirped to him. Secretariat ran willingly, responded to the whip, and didn’t loaf when he made the lead. The early signs were good. Turcotte also recalled his heavy-headed way of running—stylistically, he was the opposite of the airy-going Riva Ridge—the way he pounded the ground as he reached out for more of it. He had beaten maidens, he had beaten nonwinners of two races, and now he would have to run against the best—the best stakes horses on the grounds, and that meant running against the undefeated Linda’s Chief. Secretariat and Linda’s Chief were both being aimed for the $25,000-Added Sanford Stakes August 16, another six-furlong sprint.

The tempo of Secretariat’s life was accelerating, and Lucien found him thriving on it. For The Meadow, the timing was superb. Riva Ridge was beginning to fall from the heights he’d attained following the exhausting journey to Hollywood Park. On August 5, at Monmouth Park in New Jersey, he was beaten in the $100,000 Monmouth Invitational, tiring after tracking the pace to the stretch. He finished fourth, beaten by six. It was the start of a long diminution in value and prestige.

The following evening, back in Saratoga once again, Penny found herself sitting in the Wishing Well restaurant and looking across a plate of steak, corn, and potatoes at Bull Hancock. Sixty-two years old that year, Bull was the head of the most successful and prestigious breeding empire in America—Claiborne Farm—and was known as the godfather of his industry.

By 1972, his son Seth was working under him, learning the breeding business as Bull had learned it himself, from the yearlings to the broodmares to the stallions. Claiborne had become an enormous spread of acreage, growing over the years from 2100 to almost 6000 acres. Bull had added the 1050-acre Marchmont Farm, which he purchased in the estate sale of his late brother-in-law, Charlton Clay, building five new barns on it and planting trees and adding broodmares. Bull leased the 1800-acre Xalapa Farm, with its stone barn and brass-lined stalls with iron hinges, with its broodmare barn chiseled in stone and its commodious stallion barn. Nasrullah had been his masterstroke, in retrospect, but only the beginning of his ascension as the leader in his industry. From 1955 through 1969, with the broodmare bands growing to 350 mares, America’s leading sire stood annually at Claiborne—Nasrullah, Princequillo, Ambiorix, and Bold Ruler. On that August evening in 1972, there were 26 stallions standing at Claiborne, 16 of them champion racehorses either in America or abroad, and among the most famous horses in the recent history of the turf—Buckpasser, Nijinsky II, Hoist The Flag, Damascus, and Round Table.

It was a pleasant evening in a quiet town on the eve of a sudden change at Claiborne Farm and another resurge in the Meadow Stable. Bull would not be staying at Saratoga through August. He would spend a few more days at the spa, searching out yearlings for clients, playing golf, and doing some business in the booking of stallions for the coming spring. He would not be in Saratoga for the Sanford Stakes. Instead, he would fly to Scotland to shoot grouse, and he would watch the races in Ireland and fly to France to see a Claiborne horse run there.

Bull was not feeling well that evening at dinner. In fact, he complained to Penny and her friends dining with them that he felt very badly, and for the first time Penny could remember, he had only one drink of bourbon before dinner, declining a second but telling the others not to mind him, to have another. Of course, Bull had seen Secretariat run and he spoke enthusiastically about the red horse at the Wishing Well. He didn’t live to see him run again.