Secretariat (34 page)

Secretariat ran the last half in 0:46
2
/
5
. Perhaps that was the most extraordinary of all the records set that afternoon. That time would put him near the lead in the
first
half of most sprinting races.

Early Sunday morning Ed Sweat was sweeping rose petals from the front of Secretariat’s stall. Empty bottles of champagne and the broken stems of glasses were lying on the grass outside the shed. Secretariat was wide awake and standing in the doorway of Stall 21, and Sweat set down the rake and picked up a fork to clean the stall. He was moving jauntily, playfully, bantering with Secretariat, who was blockading the doorway and refusing to budge.

Through the morning horsemen came to the barns, to Barn 42 especially, to check on their Derby horses. They had already studied the charts and a number of them felt, as Henry Forrest felt, that they had seen something rare in this Kentucky Derby. As Secretariat’s performance in the Wood Memorial threw the Derby wide open to them, his performance in the Derby closed the Preakness Stakes at Pimlico. Secretariat was leaving for Baltimore the next morning.

Yet the race had not persuaded Martin that Secretariat was superior to Sham. Sham would be leaving Louisville by plane the following morning, flying to Baltimore for the Preakness, the second leg of the Triple Crown. So the rivalry would be renewed there.

Lucien, Turcotte, and Kenny Noe came to the barn together that morning, and Turcotte and Noe stopped in the stable kitchen for a sweet roll and a cup of coffee. Turcotte had won 10 percent of $155,050 in prize money for his ride on Secretariat, and he was in jaunty spirits as he spoke about the race and the horse between bites.

“All I did was fasten the seat belt,” he insisted.

The Wood had created problems that only the Derby could resolve, and there were resolutions in its aftermath. One of the problems would not follow Lucien to the Preakness Stakes: Angle Light would not run at Pimlico. The Derby and the campaign before it had taken much out of him, and he would be shipped back to Belmont Park. There was never open trouble again between Penny and Whittaker. What the coming of the Derby had created, the running of it resolved. But Whittaker would not forget what had happened to him in Kentucky, and it would leave some bitterness in its wake. For all the turbulence of Derby Week, it all ended very quietly. There was a party in Barn 42 after the race, and Whittaker attended it. He met Penny under the shed. Whittaker was disappointed not because Angle Light had not won the Derby, a possibility he had regarded as extremely remote, but because the bay hadn’t made a race of it. After Secretariat swept past him down the backside, Angle Light faded to tenth.

“You never had any worries to start with,” Whittaker told Penny at the barn. “You don’t have any worries now. You’re goin’ to win the Triple Crown. There’s not another horse like him. And good luck to you.” Then Penny picked a rose from the victory blanket and pinned it to his lapel.

Chapter 26

Lounging in his room at the Warren House in Baltimore and speaking long distance to his wife Juliette, Lucien Laurin was the picture of a man vindicated by a horse redeemed. He had just kicked off his brown moccasins and folded into a chair by the desk with the telephone next to him. His bed was rumpled, a sheaf of newspaper clippings scattered across it, but his manner was composed. Talking to his wife, he wandered back and forth between French and English. There were only four days left to the Preakness Stakes, and in the accelerated pace of his existence, working to bring a $6 million horse through the most difficult and challenging series of races in America, he was enduring almost as well as Secretariat, even enjoying himself at times. His wife was scheduled to join her husband in Baltimore soon.

He certainly had been having a better time of it in Baltimore than he’d had in Kentucky. Once again there was the interminable waiting, but this time with a difference: it was without the taste of chalk that lined the mouth of Derby Week, without the feeling that there was no more time, no more room to maneuver, no more chances. In a way, the Derby had altered the tone and direction of Lucien’s life. He would not retire now, for one thing. And by Tuesday of the week before the Preakness, he seemed almost a different man from what he’d been the two weeks before, during Derby Week, and on the day of the Derby itself. His color had improved, as if he were resting more fully, and he appeared less harried. He was eating better and relaxing more, a man clearly more at ease, at times happy to the point of being content. If anything was missing, it was enthusiasm for Secretariat’s performance in the Kentucky Derby—as if Lucien were still reserving judgment.

He was training a racehorse whom Charles Hatton was proclaiming the greatest Kentucky Derby winner of his time—greater even than Old Rosebud (1914), who was Ben Jones’s standard, too. Other horsemen were enthusiastic also, such as the conservative and cautious trainer Sherrill Ward, who said, “Secretariat has the potential to be as good as Count Fleet and Citation.” Others were saying that also, but Laurin was making no point of it, and that was in strong contrast to the year before when Riva Ridge won the Derby and Lucien promptly compared him to Citation and Count Fleet, causing snickers.

Laurin was at least certain that he had the best three-year-old in America, so he could relax, train his colt at Pimlico, and spend a casual few hours eating crab cakes, reading in the motel room, and going to the barn to admire his red horse. Lucien was superstitious, and the Preakness plainly spooked him. He had tried but failed three times to win it, with Amberoid and Jay Ray and Riva Ridge, and the race made him leery. Turcotte and Penny had teased him because he was the only one of the three who hadn’t won the Preakness. Hill Prince won it in 1950 for Chenery, Tom Rolfe in 1965 under Turcotte. Lucien wondered whether the race was his jinx. He wanted very much to win the ninety-eighth running. On his way to the barn that afternoon, sitting shotgun in a Plymouth Fury, he read a press release from Pimlico dated May 15. It said, in part:

The probable field for the ninety-eighth running of the $150,000-added Preakness Stakes at Pimlico Race Course Saturday swelled to seven today with the addition of Our Native, third in the Kentucky Derby, and two lightly regarded rivals for the awesome twosome of Secretariat and Sham.

One of the two was a horse named The Lark Twist. The final paragraph read:

The Lark Twist has won only one of his 14 starts this year and finished sixth, beaten some five lengths, in a 1
1
⁄
16
-mile allowance race Monday at Garden State.

Lucien grew angry as he thought about what it could mean, thinking the worst. “Jesus Christ almighty, that horse could bump into horses leaving the gate. You don’t know what the hell a horse like that is going to do. It’s dangerous.”

By the time the Fury was slipping past the guards at the gate and winding through the quiet of the stable area, Lucien had calmed down, and never brought the subject up again that afternoon. Climbing from the car, he walked through the russet-colored stakes barn, Barn EE, turning the corner of the shed and passing the guard and walking directly to Stall 41. Billy Silver was in Stall 40. Guard Bill Vernon nodded hello. Lucien spoke to Sweat, who was washing bandages in soap and water. On the stall a halter was hanging. A brush and currycomb lay on the fence. A blue and white checked shield, looking like a Meadow Stable coat of arms, decorated the front of the stall. Billy Silver was standing at the doorway, his perpetual duty station, and waiting for Secretariat to join him. The red horse was lying down. Security had grown tight since Louisville.

Lucien grinned, standing in front of the stall door. Secretariat had just awakened from his noontime nap and came to his feet with a deft, assertive shift of his considerable shoulders. He came to the door and looked at Lucien. Outside the barn, twenty feet from the breezeway of the shed, was a thirty-foot-wide strip of grass that ran the length of Barn EE. In the back, the strip was enclosed by a steel fence acrawl with vines and in front by a dark brown wooden fence, as on a corral, to which had been nailed, at intervals between fence posts, signs bearing the names of all eight Triple Crown winners, from Sir Barton to Citation. Lucien had his hands in his pockets. He was dressed casually—wearing his yellow hat, moccasins, and brown tweed pants—and somehow suggested a suburban father outfitted to mow a lawn or replace the storms with screens.

“Do you think we should graze him out there a little, Edward?” he asked. “The poor son of a gun is in his stall all day. Must be dull.”

Sweat took the leather halter off the stall hook and slipped it over Secretariat’s nose, fastening it with the buckle at the left side.

“Are you going to put a chain over his nose, Edward?” asked Lucien.

“Nahhhh, he’ll be all right.”

“If you can handle him in the Derby with those roses, Edward, you can handle him here.” Lucien had seen the red horse drive Sweat into the ropes when the blanket was put over his withers. “People were so crazy that day in the winner’s circle,” said Lucien. “They were all around him. I thought he was going to kick somebody’s brains out.”

Sweat led Secretariat out the door and through a gap in the wooden fence to the deep carpet of grass. Lucien walked to the gap, too, and leaned back on the fence and beamed with pride at his Preakness horse. “Ten minutes of this is like a dozen vitamins, Edward, a dozen vitamins,” Lucien said with relish. Secretariat reached down and started tearing up the greenery.

Then Billy Silver hollered from the doorway of his stall. He was standing with his neck thrust over the webbing and his ears pricked forward. “Listen to him!” said Lucien. “He likes this horse. He wants to be out there with him, Edward. Should I get him?”

Lucien trusted and respected Sweat and was quick to defer to him on some matters. Sweat appreciated the trust. Lucien went to fetch Billy Silver.

“I never saw a pony so crazy about a horse,” Lucien said, bringing Billy Silver to the side of Secretariat on the grass.

“Yeh,” said Sweat. “But he don’t care nothin’ about the pony.”

Thus together, side by side now, the two horses grazed, raising the aroma of freshly cut grass. The grass was four inches deep and Secretariat buried his nose in it, sniffing and biting off thick tufts. Mechanically, he folded and baled it with his lips, worked it along the sides of his mouth, shredding it with his teeth, then conveyed it down the great grain elevator of his neck.

The year before Lucien used to graze Riva Ridge at the same place on the grass, thinking then that he would go on soon to win the Triple Crown. The race was a nightmare and now he was back again, in precisely the same place and situation, only now with a much bigger gun. The thought struck him of the odds against such an occurrence, and he mused at the luck involved.

Secretariat stood for a moment at the stall door and stared outside. Billy Silver was looking at him, as were Sweat and Lucien. It was growing late in the afternoon and the horses were clean and ready to be fed, and the barn was suddenly suffused with the smell of clean straw and fresh grass and horses. Lucien looked more content for this ten minutes than he had looked all spring, childlike in his enthusiasm for what he was doing. He padded about in his green coat and yellow hat and Indian moccasins, helping Sweat with the chores and stopping now and then to admire his horse.

Behind him Secretariat nickered. “He feels so good,” said Lucien. “You should have seen him jumping and playing after he worked fifty-seven and change the other day.” Lucien trailed off and looked down the shed. From Stall 32, Sham was watching a man prepare his dinner.

The serious training was behind Lucien and the red horse, and the colt had been doing brilliantly. He was coming to the Preakness dead fit, with his eyes wide open. As Lucien had predicted in Kentucky following the Derby, he was bringing Secretariat to the Preakness with an even finer edge. He had the red horse walk three days after the Derby, then boosted Charlie Davis aboard to gallop him four days—from May 9 to May 12. On Sunday, Turcotte was in from New York and Lucien told him to let Secretariat bounce through five furlongs. And bounce he did.

They had not seen such morning speed at Pimlico for years. The colt raced through five-eighths in a spectacular 0:57
2
/
5
, by way of a half mile in 0:45
1
/
5
, and after Turcotte stood up and eased him back at the wire the momentum sent him through an extra eighth in 0:12
3
/
5
, which gave him six furlongs in 1:10. Clockers blinked. The week before, one of the fastest sprinters in America, the older Leematt, won a six-furlong sprint race at Pimlico in 1:10. By eighths, the splits were startling: 0:11
2
/
5
, 0:11
1
/
5
, 0:12, 0:10
3
/
5
, 0:12
1
/
5
. They measured his stride that day at about twenty-five feet, comparable to the stride of Man o’ War. The work left the red horse staring. That was Sunday. He walked on Monday, then he galloped daily through Friday, when Turcotte was at Pimlico to let him blow out a quarter mile.

Sham had come to the Preakness off sharp workouts, too, and Pancho remained confident. Yet something had changed since Louisville. It was painfully visible. Pancho was a good deal more subdued at Pimlico than he had been at Churchill Downs. The Derby had stunned and crushed him, and he was not over it yet. He had been so right about Sham, and so wrong about Secretariat. In the Derby aftermath, he had not made an excuse for Sham’s defeat, but by the time he’d arrived at Baltimore that had changed, as if it had taken that long to talk himself into what went wrong. He had acquired the notion that the loss of the teeth had beaten Sham, not Secretariat, and that all he needed was a fair fight to prevail this second time in the classics. He had ceased criticizing Laurin, and instead was focusing all his creative energies as a trainer on the race May 19. He personally fulfilled Sham’s needs. He threw himself into the job with care and patience and even a touch of passion.

Finished with his day’s work, Pancho was about to slide into his rented Coupe de Ville and head for breakfast when he stopped, as if catching himself, and looked into Stall 32. Sham was lying on a bed of straw, his legs folded under him.

“Let no one here!” ordered Pancho, in a suppressed, emphatic whisper.

His brother Isadore nodded.

Then Pancho clamped a cigar between his teeth and strode off to the car. “I want no one bothering this horse. He needs all the rest he can get.”

More, he sought to exercise as much control as possible over Sham’s environment. Pancho was overlooking nothing. From New York he brought the theater ropes. They were red, with a decorative dip, and they were set up majestically in front of the stall to keep visitors at a distance. One afternoon he became agitated when he saw Sham looking out his stall at a filly grazing on that grassy strip outside the shed. Pancho walked half the distance of the barn and protested to the security guard about it. “I don’t want that filly grazing in front of my horse.” The guard told the man grazing her to take her away.

“I want his mind
only
on running,” growled Pancho.

On Thursday morning, two days before the Preakness Stakes, Pancho was in the office and making his way among the fifteen jugs of mineral water on the floor, each containing five gallons of Sham’s only beverage. “It’s the best water there is,” said Pancho. He read the label out loud: “Mountain Valley Mineral Water from Hot Springs, Arkansas.” On a wall nail was impaled the $142.53 bill for it.

“If I don’t win, I’ll be very, very, very, very disappointed,” Pancho said. “Not disappointed—very, very, very, very disappointed. I think Sham is going to win easy, believe me! In his workout here he finished strong as a son of a gun. It was a terrific work. I don’t think the Derby was a true race. If everything goes right for everybody in the race, we’ll beat him.”

Whatever hostility Pancho felt toward Lucien Laurin or toward the Meadow Stable seemed to vanish at Pimlico by the middle of the week.

Penny had asked a reporter friendly with both her and Martin to introduce them. After the Derby, she sought to break the ice. The reporter, seeing the opportunity, escorted her to meet Martin one morning at the barn. Pancho brightened noticeably when he saw her coming toward him.

As Penny walked up to him, Pancho reached out a hand. “Very nice to meet you, Mrs. Tweedy,” he said. He seemed delighted.

“I’ve heard so many nice things about you,” Penny said.

“Thank you!” Pancho invited her to meet Sham, and so they walked together to Sham’s stall and talked about the incident at the starting gate. Pancho lifted the lip and showed her where Sham had lost two teeth.

She patted Sham’s chocolate nose and told Pancho what a nice horse he had and he thanked her again.