Secretariat (42 page)

He made it look easy. Turcotte was coasting on the lead, bounding along through the mile in 1:36, when Tentam started to move to him. Secretariat toyed with Tentam. As they turned for home, through a mile and a quarter in 2:00 flat, Tentam came to Secretariat, but Turcotte let out on the reins and pulled away through the stretch, winning by five lengths and breaking the track record. The pattern of the zinger held again, its final time, when Laurin and Penny decided to ship Secretariat north to Canada for his final start in the Canadian International at one and five-eighths miles, the longest distance he would ever run, on the grass course at Woodbine Race Course. Turcotte worked him five-eighths three days before the race, and Secretariat rushed through it in 0:57
3
/
5
, a full second faster than the track mark, around a plastic fence set out twenty-eight feet from the rail to protect the turf course for the races. Canadian clockers were astonished at the move. They had never seen so fast a run at Woodbine.

It was merely a foreshadowing. In the race itself Secretariat was brilliant. It was run in a cold drizzle on October 28, just eighteen days before the syndication contract required that he be at Claiborne Farm. Only one thing would be missing in the International. Following the spectacular workout on Wednesday, Turcotte returned to New York and learned he had been suspended for careless riding in a race unrelated to Secretariat. The days of the suspension would include the day of the Canadian race. Turcotte’s friend, jockey Eddie Maple, was assigned the mount on Secretariat. If it was any consolation, Turcotte got a job announcing for television at the race.

Secretariat had little trouble handling the International field. He raced Kennedy Road head and head into the far turn, and when the champion drifted out and bumped him going to the bend, he got mad. Maple had to steady him a moment, but once he was free Secretariat bounded away. He opened five lengths quickly on the turn, and by the time he turned for home—with steam puffing from his nostrils—he was in front by twelve. He rolled on under Maple through the stretch, winning by almost seven.

It was over that quickly. The victory in the Canadian International brought to a close a brief but remarkable career which many veterans—Charles Hatton and aging horse-man Hollie Hughes among them—thought greater than Man o’ War’s. Hatton had waited a lifetime for Secretariat, and he’d finally found him. The colt’s career was an affirmation of it. Secretariat was leaving the racetrack with twenty-one career starts in which he finished first sixteen times, was second three times, and third once. He was fourth in his first start, the farthest he had been behind his field.

He had won $1,316,808 in his lifetime, making him the fourth leading money-winning thoroughbred of all time, though he raced only two years. But beyond the statistical sheets and the gross income statements, beyond the track and world records and the imposing margins of victory, he left behind a feeling among those who saw him that they had witnessed a natural phenomenon. He had style, and when he was himself, he made it almost art. Many veteran horsemen, from New York starter George Cassidy to the
Racing Form
’s chief of clockers, Gene Schwartz, rated him above Man o’ War among the horses they had seen. They were not alone.

“He’s the greatest horse I’ve ever seen,” said Charles Hatton. “He’s the greatest horse that anyone has ever seen. Don’t let anyone kid you. He could do anything, and he could do it better than any horse I ever saw. No question about it in my mind. He should never have been beaten.”

“He’s the fastest horse I’ve ever seen,” said Eddie Arcaro.

“He’s the horse of the century,” said Hollie Hughes. “His performances are superior to any horse I’ve ever seen, and that includes Man o’ War. Secretariat has done far more. Man o’ War didn’t beat older horses except for one, Sir Barton, and he was all wore out and ready for the grave by then. Secretariat is far better than any horse I ever saw. The Belmont? It astounded me. I couldn’t think of anything like that I had ever seen. No one has ever seen anything like that in this century. He was the horse of the century.”

They held a special formal farewell to him at Aqueduct on November 6, a crisp autumn day of bright yellow sun and overcoats drawn up above the necks. Ed Sweat and Charlie Davis, along with Billy Silver, brought him to the Big A that afternoon to parade between the races. Old horseplayers and young girls draped themselves over the paddock fence at Aqueduct and watched and listened to the ceremonies. “Goodbye, Secretariat—We Love You,” said one sign. Sweat led the red horse around, and speeches were made. Vanderbilt spoke, and so did Racing Association President Jack Krumpe and Penny Tweedy, who was dressed in a dark fur coat and holding a dozen roses and speaking into a microphone. Her voice echoed throughout the clubhouse and grandstand: “Having a horse like Secretariat is something that you pray might happen to you once in a lifetime, and we’ve loved every minute of it.”

In one way or another, Secretariat touched the lives of many people in many ways, and they were different for it. Penny had become a public figure, and she was on her way to being an ambassador for the sport, a speaker and spokeswoman. As she spoke that afternoon at Aqueduct, her marriage was almost over. Jack Tweedy had changed jobs and moved to California the summer past, following Secretariat’s Belmont Stakes, and Penny stayed east with Secretariat. The days as Jack Tweedy’s housewife and cocktail party companion in Denver were behind her, and she knew it then, though she would not announce the divorce until early 1974.

As they gathered in the winner’s circle, as the speeches were made, Lucien Laurin stood shivering with his hands in his pockets and near tears, pale, bent over, and looking, for the first time, like a man grown suddenly old with his responsibilities. He had endured the most formidable strain of the sport, first with Riva Ridge and then with Secretariat. After forty years on the racetrack—after the years as a jockey fighting weight, after the years of disbarment and then training in the hovels of the sport, after all the years spent building up a practice in New York—he came to the races at the age of sixty and survived. If he had miscalculated in the Wood Memorial, in the Whitney and the Woodward, he did his best and most brilliant work when it mattered, through the Triple Crown, displaying a kind of genius in the weeks before the Belmont Stakes.

He remained through all of this a partisan of Riva Ridge, his first good horse, his first Derby horse, and even in the end he seemed unable to comprehend the dimensions of Secretariat’s greatness. Charles Hatton once estimated that Secretariat was twenty pounds the better horse, but Lucien never seemed to recognize that. Before the Marlboro Cup, Lucien said of Secretariat, astonishingly, “The more I keep training this horse, the more I’m doing with him, the more I’m getting to believe that he’s the greatest horse
I have ever trained.
” And even after the race, even after Secretariat blew past Riva Ridge with such authority, Laurin told Turcotte and Eddie Maple in the stable office, “I still think Riva Ridge can beat Secretariat.” Turcotte looked at Maple, who smiled and said nothing, and told Lucien, “From a quarter mile to a mile and a quarter, you name the bet. $1000? $2000?”

Eddie Sweat waited by the fence for Secretariat, holding the lead shank as Ron Turcotte cantered the colt up the homestretch by the cheering fans. Sweat had come a long way from the rural backwaters of Holly Hill, South Carolina. In three years he had become the most famous groom in America, a symbol of Secretariat with whom many would identify. In the end, he was the one person the colt visibly responded to, the one he recognized and waited for. “I’ll miss him,” said Eddie, as Secretariat went past. “This is a hurting thing to me. I’m so sad I didn’t even want to bring him over here. It’s been a wonderful two years. Now it seems like my whole career has ended.” What he had beside the memories was the victory hat, the symbol of the three-year-old campaign. The day after the Canadian International, as he sat at home in Queens with his wife, Linda, Sweat was clutching the hat and looking at the label inside of it. Linda was reading a letter when she looked up and saw him.

“You got a girl’s phone number in that hat?” she asked.

“I’m gonna retire my hat,” he said.

“You’re what?”

“I’m retiring my hat. This hat is now retired.”

“That’s stupid,” she said.

“It’s not stupid. A lot of people retire their hats.”

And so he did. Linda helped him, showing him how to press it down and fold it for a frame.

On the racetrack, as the applause followed the colt, Turcotte stood in the stirrups and went easily with him, rocking with the stride and holding fast to the reins. It would be the last time that he would ever ride Secretariat. On his back, Turcotte had come into his own in the last two years. He would not be recognized in America for his accomplishments, even in his most successful year. But he would be feted in his native Canada. Turcotte had endured the pressures of the Triple Crown—the first jockey since Eddie Arcaro to win it. Though he had ridden two other champions of 1974, Riva Ridge and Talking Picture, and was the leading rider in New York, the toughest circuit in the world, the turfwriters and racing officials chose to honor Laffit Pincay, Jr., with the Eclipse Award, the industry’s Oscar, for being the first jockey in history to win over $4 million in purses. Yet, in his native land, the Queen of England would bestow upon Turcotte the Order of Canada, one of the nation’s highest honors, and that to him was worth five Eclipse awards. When he climbed down from his mount on November 6 at Aqueduct, he was convinced he had had the good fortune to ride the greatest horse that ever lived.

Not all remained with memories so fond. Of the thousands who were at Aqueduct that day, one was Frank Martin. He was wearing the same hat he wore those mornings at Churchill Downs, when he was soliloquizing about Laurin and Sham. It had been a long year. The Belmont was the culmination of a four-part horror show that began when Sham failed to fire in the Wood Memorial. For the Sommers, too, Sigmund and Viola, the classics had been an ordeal. The day following the Belmont Stakes, the Sommers came to see Sham at the barn. They looked tired.

“I was humiliated,” said Mrs. Sommer, standing by the car.

“I went home last night and got drunk and cried,” said Sigmund Sommer. He was wearing a white shirt with the SS monogram over his heart.

Now it was five months later, and Martin had not forgotten. Sham, the colt who was to take the place of Autobiography in the Sommer barn, had fractured a leg at Belmont Park months before. He was operated on and retired to stud at the Spendthrift Farm on Iron Works Pike, off the road to Paris. Martin was leaving the paddock when the ceremonies were taking place, a cigar jammed in his mouth and his hands plunged into his jacket pockets.

“I’m just sorry it’s not Sham,” he said, and walked away.

Others were affected, too. Gaffney was selling mutuel tickets on the day of the farewell, still sorry at what had happened to him on that Friday following the Preakness Stakes. He had been the first to recognize the colt on the racetrack, the first Secretariat fan and booster, and he had missed the greatest glory of all. In Angle Light there was another quiet ending. Following the Wood Memorial, he never won again. Eventually he broke down. Whittaker retired him to the stud in Kentucky, and he began there with a fee of $3500 for a service. The advertisements in the breeding magazines would announce, predictably, that he was the colt who had beaten Secretariat in the Wood. That race had helped to earn him the life of leisure at the stud, giving him an identity all his own.

Whittaker’s life had changed, too. He never got over the Derby experience, and the aggravation of that week ruined the game for him. He would speak, at times, as if he was still wondering what had hit him. “So I had one little horse, okay? And she had a lot of them. And here she is, has everything that she could want in the horse racing business—top friends, the publicity, the wonderful horse she had, and here she is, telling one guy, with one horse, to pick up his marbles and go home. Why?”

They played “Auld Lang Syne” at the farewell ceremony, as Turcotte galloped Secretariat up the stretch, and Henny Hoeffner and Ed Sweat met him as Turcotte rode him back.

“Eddie,” said Henny, after the saddle was taken off. “Go right back to the truck with him. He don’t need anything. He doesn’t know what he’s doin’ out here with all this applause.”

And Ed Sweat led him off the racetrack for the last time.

As the L-188 came into Lexington, the airport tower called to pilot Dan Neff, “There’s more people out here to meet Secretariat than there was to greet the governor.” To which Neff replied, “Well, he’s won more races than the governor.”

The cargo door opened to Lexington and more than 300 persons gathered on the grass of the Blue Grass Airport to greet them. Among them was Seth Hancock. Ed Sweat led Secretariat down the ramp and walked after Seth, who took them to a small orange Claiborne Farm van. From there the procession, with police lights blinking, began for Paris. It was a bright, chilly afternoon, and all down the Paris Pike out of Lexington the leaves were falling and the countryside was alive with change. Pregnant mares were sniffing at the fields of grass, stallions romped the pastures, the foals were weaned and the yearlings in training. There was a sense of renewal in the air.

The cars and the vans filed slowly across the railroad tracks and up the Winchester Road in Paris, which lay half asleep. The vans pulled into the stone gates and edged up Kennedy Creek, to the office and the loading ramp. By now Seth was out directing traffic. Beyond the ramp was the black creosote breeding shed. Next to the office, just fifty feet away, were the gravestones of the greatest of the Claiborne stallions, from Sir Gallahad to Bold Ruler. It had been seventy years since Arthur Hancock, Sr., married Nancy Clay and moved from Ellerslie, and these graves stood like monuments to the empire that he had built and passed on to Bull, and that Bull had passed to Seth, who was standing on the loading ramp and watching the gates come open on the van. It was there, from the same ramp, that Bold Ruler was loaded and destroyed almost three years before.