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  Inevitably, somebody asked Barrera to compare his horse with Secretariat, the glamour horse in all young memories.

  “I got an opinion,” the trainer said, “and it’ll be proved the day we find a horse that can make him run fast.”

  “Were you disappointed in the time?” another deep thinker asked.

  Barrera’s round, expressive Latin face was a study.

  “When you get $180,000 to win a race,” he said, shrugging off $6,900 of the purse, “how can you be disappointed in time?”

  He had insisted that Affirmed was in hand throughout the race and had plenty left at the end. This inspired a trenchant question that was put to Cauthen:

  “Do you think he could have run a better race, Steve?”

  This was the first Derby ride for the eighteen-year-old from Walton, Kentucky, but he had seen five earlier runnings. His mother Myra started bringing him over for the race when he was three. She and her husband Tex were watching yesterday along with Steve’s young brothers, Doug and Kerry. They had a better view than Steve, who needed a rear-view mirror.

  Now he stared at the source of the last bright question.

  “What do you want?” he said.

  SPECTACULAR BID’S BIRTH

  VERSAILLES, KENTUCKY, 1979

  The 17th of February, 1976, was mild for that time of year with temperatures in the fifties, and although there were occasional showers the horses on Buck Pond Farm were out in the fields as they always are when weather permits. Two or three broodmares were getting close to their time and the foaling barn was being prepared for them when, at 8:25 A.M., somebody saw the six-year-old gray, Spectacular, lying down just beyond the farm manager’s cottage. About eleven months earlier Spectacular had had her first date, traveling over to Gainesway Farm near Lexington to meet a stallion named Bold Bidder. Sometimes a mare’s first delivery can be difficult, but by the time they got to Spectacular she already had her baby. “Good, big, strong colt,” Victor Heerman, Jr, wrote in the foaling records. “Shows quality.”

  “I’ve been in this business thirty years,” Vic Heerman said today, “and I like to think I’ve had some success in it. I always hoped for a horse like this and I thought that if I ever got one I might command some respect as a horseman. So now that I planned this mating and bred the colt and raised him, everybody says, If he knew anything about what he was doing he never would have sold the horse.’”

  Vic Heerman speaks quietly in even, precise tones with just the trace of a smile on his lips.

  “When we sell a yearling,” he said, “we hope the buyer has good luck with it, but I never dreamed this one might have 15 or 20 million dollars’ worth of luck.”

  That’s the sort of luck Spectacular’s baby son might represent if he wins the 105th Kentucky Derby Saturday and goes on to become the champion his trainer believes he will be. As the Derby favorite, Spectacular Bid has been insured for more than $14 million by Harry Meyerhoff, his wife, Teresa, and his son Tom. They paid $37,000 for him at the Keeneland yearling auction in the fall of 1977.

  Spectacular Bid’s birthplace is on Payne’s Mill Road near here about a mile off the Versailles Pike. There are showier places in the blue grass country and more elaborate breeding establishments but none richer in history. It was founded in 1783 by Colonel Thomas Marshall, the father of Chief Justice John Marshall and a hero of the Battle of Brandywine who shared that Delaware River rowboat with George Washington. After the Revolution, when what is now Kentucky’s Fayette County was part of Virginia, Washington appointed Colonel Marshall surveyor general for this area, which was to be assigned in land grants to officers of the Virginia State Line Regiment. He chose for himself this tract about ten miles west of Lexington. The gracious home that Colonel Marshall built is occupied now by Dr. and Mrs. George Proskauer. In 1973 the three hundred rolling acres were bought by Mrs. Proskauer in partnership with Vic Heerman, who sold his interest to her three years later. It was he who planned the mating that produced Spectacular Bid.

  “I had worked for Bill Gilmore of Gilmore Steel in California,” said Heerman, who now lives in Lexington, “and I knew his family. When I was at Buck Pond, his daughter, Mrs. William M. Jason, sent me this little mare to be bred to a proven stallion. I say little, but what I really mean is light, an Arabic type. Bill Gilmore was active in racing in northern California and his daughter thought it would please him if she got into racing on her own, so she and a friend, Bill Linfoot, a veterinarian, bought a mare named Stop on Red. They agreed to breed her for the sales and they set a minimum sales price of $20,000. If a yearling didn’t bring that much, they would take it out of the sale.

  “Stop on Red had a filly by Promised Land that Mrs. Jason took a fancy to and she bid it in for $20,500. Bill Linfoot got $10,250 for his half and Mrs. Jason’s mother bought a half-interest for that amount. The two women raced the filly, Spectacular, just around northern California. She had speed but wasn’t highly competitive. She won four of her ten races but wasn’t greatly interested in racing.

  “This was the mare they sent to Buck Pond. It was the only mare they owned. Because she wasn’t the robust type, I felt she should be bred to a big, strong son of Bold Ruler and at the top of my list in that respect was Bold Bidder. He was a strong horse who could get a mile and a quarter, something not all Bold Rulers could do. Mrs. Jason asked about the double cross to To Market, who sired the dams of both horses, and I said I thought it might be helpful, that it might have a coarsening effect that would add substance to the foal.

  “It has been written that Spectacular Bid was sent to the Keene-land summer sale, the big one, didn’t draw a bid and was returned. Not so. I nominated the colt for the summer sale and he was turned down on his breeding. Now Keeneland can’t wait to get his half-brother next July, so I guess his pedigree has improved.

  “We were disappointed when the colt went for only $37,000 at the fall sale. I had another gray in the sale, by Al Hattab, and he sold for $40,000. They were stabled quite far from the sales ring where not many buyers went to look at them. Jim Hill, the vet who recommended that Mickey Taylor buy Seattle Slew, looked at him three times and twice he brought Mickey along, so I knew he was interested. But at the sale Jim wasn’t a bidder.

  “Later I asked him why and he said, ‘I just don’t know. Maybe I went to the bathroom. Maybe somebody asked me out for a drink and I forgot there was a horse I wanted to bid on.’”

  At Buck Pond, the present farm manager, Ed Caswell, had said: “I came to work here about forty-five days before Spectacular Bid left the farm. He was a nice-looking colt, intelligent acting. He didn’t do anything wrong. He lived up in that paddock where he could go in that run-in shed if he wanted to.”

  Now Heerman drove to Wimbledon Farm No. 2 outside Lexington, where he has kept his stock since leaving Buck Pond. “The colt lived in that field,” he said, pointing, “until he went to the sale. He and his mother were moved here in September and he was weaned in October. There’s his mother, we’ll walk over to her.”

  Flanked by two other mares, Spectacular walked toward the visitors. Her gray coat is as light as her son’s is dark. She is dappled and lop-eared and lovely and friendly as a puppy.

  “All right, girls,” Heerman said, dismissing them. “Spectacular has a two-year-old filly by Crimson Satan that Robert Sangster has bought. She’ll race in England and Ireland with Vincent O’Brien as trainer. Then there’s a yearling colt by Crimson Satan who’ll go to the Keeneland sales in July. Last spring we were told Spectacular was in foal to Bold Bidder but she came up empty.

  “Sangster has bought a half-interest in the mare. He is the football pool man in England who has been winning all the races over there. He and the ladies will take alternate foals. He wanted his first foal to be by Alleged, who won the Arc de Triomphe for him twice, so Spectacular was bred to Alleged March 28 and we’re told she is in foal.”

  Sangster is reported to have paid in the neighborhood of $900,000 for his interest in the mare.
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  “Mrs. Jason told me she had promised not to announce the price,” Heerman said, “but I understand it was phenomenal for half of a barren mare.”

  A VOTE FOR TA WEE

  1970

  Betty Friedan, stay as sweet as you are, don’t take any wooden nickels, and may 1971 be the year you’ll run all chauvinist male pigs back to the dishpan where they belong. And, dear, if you’re uncertain where to hit first with your troops from Women’s Lib, you might consider the offices of the Thoroughbred Racing Association, the Triangle Publications, Turf and Sport Digest, and Newsweek.

  These are the strongholds of the misogynists who perpetrated the grossest injustice of 1970 upon a member of the deadlier sex. They denied little Ta Wee the title of Horse of the Year, a distinction she deserved as richly as they deserve a dainty shoe in the blouse of the breeches.

  There were wide differences of opinion among the electorate who voted in the annual polls to designate racing champions in 1970. The TRA poll picked out Personality as the boss hoss. Staff members of Triangle Publications—the Daily Racing Form and the Morning Telegraph—chose Fort Marcy. So did Turf and Sport Digest Pete Axthelm, sports editor of Newsweek, went for Personality.

  Pooh. The perspicacious Mike Casale, the perceptive Dave Alexander of the Thoroughbred Record, The New York Times’s discerning James Pilkington Roach, and the pertinacious Red Smith say Ta Wee.

  Let us compare credentials.

  Fort Marcy was beyond question the best grass horse of the year. He had no peer on this continent, and he polished off a picked field from abroad in the Washington, D.C. International at Laurel. This was his third straight victory in a $100,000 stakes, following scores in the United Nations and the Man O’War.

  He has more than a million dollars in the bank, less than his owner, Paul Mellon, but more than his trainer, the gifted Elliott Burch.

  However, Fort Marcy was not a standout on dirt, and that is the surface for all but a few major races in the United States. In the view of Pete Axthelm and others who plumped for Personality, that disqualified Fort Marcy.

  Personality ran on skinned tracks and his eight victories included scores in the Preakness, the Wood Memorial, the Jersey Derby, the Jim Dandy, and the Woodward.

  Bred by the late Hirsch Jacobs, he is a versatile son of the brilliant Hail to Reason and Affectionately, the Jacobs family’s pet mare. Hirsch Jacobs considered Personality the finest horse he ever bred but did not live to see the colt succeed. John Jacobs, Hirsch’s son, trained the horse and his stablemate, High Echelon. When Personality caught the sniffles a few days before the Belmont Stakes, John Jacobs sent High Echelon out to win that mile-and-a-half climax of the Triple Crown series.

  Hirsch Jacobs was America’s leading trainer over many years, but he never had a winner of the Kentucky Derby, the Preakness, or the Belmont, which make up the Triple Crown. John Jacobs won two of the three, and had two different three-year-olds fit enough to collaborate on the job.

  That made him trainer of the year in this book, but Personality was only the best three-year-old. Neither he nor any other colt could carry Ta Wee’s shoes.

  Five times a winner and twice second in seven starts, the lady was unmatched for consistency. However, it was neither the number of races won nor the times she registered on the clock that puts her in a class by herself. She is simply the greatest weight-carrying filly of our time and one of the two best on this continent in any time.

  The legendary Pan Zareta, whose owners ran her to death for $39,000 in purses half a century ago, is the only name in American racing history fit to be bracketed with Ta Wee’s. Pan Zareta won a race in Juarez, Mexico, carrying 146 pounds.

  In the Correction Handicap, which was Ta Wee’s first start of 1970, she won under 131 pounds. Never again did they let her go to the post with only the kitchen stove on her back. They kept piling on the furniture until Tartan Stable entered her against colts in the Fall Highweight Handicap at Belmont. Tommy Trotter gave her 140 pounds, something the New York racing secretary had never in his life done to a girl. She won, so when she rejoined the ladies for the Interborough Handicap, he gave her 142. She won.

  In more than three hundred years of New York racing, no filly or mare had ever lugged such a load on the flat. In a sense the voters were right. She isn’t Horse of the Year. She’s the Horse of Three Centuries.

  CLOCKERS ARE LITTLE MEN

  1948

  According to the best traditions, sunrise on a spring morning is supposed to make a guy glad to be alive. But at sunrise, how can a guy tell he’s alive? There is a law in the benighted state of New York which bars children from racetracks in the afternoon, the archaic theory being that frequenting a gambling hell is an occasion of sin for minors. Wherefore a small boy, if he is to be reared properly, must be taken to the track for the morning works.

  There were only a few sets on the training track at Belmont when the small boy got out of the car and walked along the outside rail toward the glass-fronted shed which is supposed to furnish shelter to frostbitten trainers, but is always filled with clockers. It had been explained what a clocker was, how highly skilled his job, which demands that he recognize any one of maybe a thousand horses that will be working unidentified by silks.

  “Why don’t they call ‘em timekeepers?” the boy asked.

  There was a Palomino pony with one of the sets on the track, and the boy pointed him out joyfully.

  “Look!” he said. “He looks just like Trigger!”

  A horse working alone galloped by.

  “Black Beauty!” the small boy said. Might have been, too.

  A stable swipe came walking along the rail with his head down. He passed the small boy just as a horse drove by working nice, reaching out and grabbing ground.

  “Lookit ‘im go!” the boy said.

  “He ain’t goin’ so fast,” the swipe said without lifting his head or breaking his stride. “About thirteen and a half.”

  The clockers were all standing down in front of the little house, because by this time the sun was warm on their shoulders. They were swapping notes and telling lies. The small boy stood a little way off from them and watched. After a while he said:

  “Clockers are all little men. Look, there’s even a midget.”

  “They don’t have to be big,” he was told.

  “Just have good eyes,” he said.

  Big Jim Healey was there watching his horses. Not the same Healey the man was telling a story about, how he raced his string one meeting in New Orleans and, on returning, was asked how it had gone.

  “It was all right,” this other Healey said, this having been his first visit to the home of Antoine and Arnaud and Galatoire and Broussard and oysters Rockefeller and pompano en papillote.

  “It was all right,” this other Healey said, “but there wasn’t any good place to eat.”

  “I found a place just before I left,” he said. “If you’re ever down there, try it. Morrissey’s Cafeteria.”

  A. G. Robertson, the trainer, was there. A man asked him which was the most improved three-year-old he’d seen.

  “The only three-year-old I’ve seen,” Robbie said, “is Citation. The rest are all eight years old.”

  “How about Coaltown?”

  Robbie sighed. “There’s nothing can catch that Coaltown. I wish I had something like him and nobody else in the world knew about him but me.”

  The small boy, who’d been sitting in the house to rest, came out and said it was colder in there than outside. Sammy Smith, who is called Dude Smith, nodded. He said it seemed like spring, but there was always a cold wind this time of year at Belmont.

  “There was a clocker died here a few months ago,” he said. “Guys used to say spring was here and it would seem like it was. That clocker would take a walk out in the infield and he’d come back shaking his head. No, he’d say, it wasn’t here. Every day he’d take a walk out in the infield. Finally he’d come back and say, ‘Spring is here.’ He’d write it down
on the rail here, ‘Spring is here.’ And it would be. It might be late, but spring wouldn’t be here to stay till that day the clocker wrote it down on the rail here. He’d wait till he found blackberry bushes broke out in the infield, and then he’d know.”

  By now Ed Christmas had a set working that included Escadru, his Kentucky Derby prospect. The clockers came to attention when Escadru worked with a stablemate. One of them made like Freddy Capposella, giving it a call: “That’s Escadru behind—Escadru moving up—he takes the lead—Escadru is doing some running, boys, I’ll give you a tip.”

  The rider pulled Escadru up and the small boy walked back toward the car, passing Ed Christmas, who’d been off by himself watching his horse work.

  “The clockers got excited,” a man told Mr. Christmas.

  “What did they catch ‘im in?” Ed asked.

  “They didn’t say.”

  “This your boy?” Ed asked. Not exactly changing the subject, you understand.

  A GOLD CUP

  1951

  When the train from Louisville pulled into Penn Station, a great big man got off, watching his step as nervously as a man carrying a bowl of goldfish across Times Square. This man was carrying a polished mahogany case about two and a half feet tall. With him was a little, grinny guy almost exactly the size of the magnum of champagne which the porter held cradled in his arms. There was a rush of feet and a boy and girl plunged down the station stairs and hurled themselves on the big man.

  “Look out!” Jack Amiel warned his son and daughter. “Don’t scratch it.”

  “Is this it?” the kids asked. “Honest?” They stood off and regarded the gleaming box. Jack Amiel, who owns Count Turf, and Conn McCreary, who rode the colt in the seventy-seventh Kentucky Derby, stood off and regarded them. The case held the Derby Gold Cup, which the kids had ordered by telephone Friday night.

  “We’ve got the place for it all picked out,” they had told their father. Now their eyes were shining the way Amiel’s and McCreary’s had shone the night before.