The Red Smith Reader Page 9

  He had got there thirty-five times on merit and Stymie took favors from nobody.

  New York has had a number of these little ceremonies since Stymie’s day—Native Dancer, Tom Fool, Nashua, Kelso and the mare Shuvee were saluted in this fashion—and never was more genuine warmth displayed than yesterday. Secretariat looked magnificent as always, Ron Turcotte was properly turned out in Meadow Stable’s blue-and-white blocks, and Edward Sweat was resplendent. A puffy new cap had replaced the groom’s porkpie hat. He had a mod jacket, burgundy slacks and two-toned shoes.

  Mrs. Tweedy got a big bouquet of red roses and an assortment of mementoes including a silver scroll inscribed with the colt’s racing record and the words: “From a grateful New York Racing Association whose fans thrilled to his matchless heroics for two years of an historic career, on the occasion of Secretariat’s final racetrack appearance.”

  An agreeable extra touch was the presentation of wrist watches to Eddie Sweat and Charley Davis, the exercise rider, who was mounted on Billy Silver, the stable pony.

  All this happened after the third race. By the time the field lined up for the sixth race Secretariat was back in his barn at Belmont where he will await shipment to Claiborne farm, in Paris, Kentucky. In the sixth race was a three-year-old gelding named Master Achiever. On July 4 last year, Master Achiever got second money when Secretariat finished fourth in his first start. Next time they met, Secretariat won by six lengths. Yesterday Master Achiever was sixth.

  For yesterday’s seventh, the field included Angle Light, which beat Secretariat in the Wood Memorial last spring. This time Angle Light was second. They are still working for a living, steeds like Master Achiever and Angle Light. For the big horse, it’s all fun now.

  THE GRAY HORSE

  SARATOGA SPRINGS, 1952

  A man with half an eye—which is all anybody could be expected to have open at that hour of the morning—could have seen that this was Alfred Vanderbilt’s stable, for the black kitten playing with a tuft of thistledown in the barnyard wore a cerise collar with white diamonds. Corroborative evidence was furnished by the presence of Squire Vanderbilt and his trainer, Bill Winfrey, drinking coffee in the stable office.

  “There is a horse in this barn,” a visitor said, “name of Native Dancer. I’ve read that he can run, so don’t tell me about that. Tell me what he’s like personally.”

  “He has heard about Cousin,” Winfrey said. “And he’s trying to make up for him by being just the opposite. I can’t fault him anywhere.”

  Cousin is the Vanderbilt three-year-old that considers horse racing a sinful occupation. Vanderbilt and Winfrey pleaded with Cousin to win the Kentucky Derby this year, but he said the hell with it and went off to sulk on Sagamore Farm in Maryland. Native Dancer, a two-year-old, has demolished all opposition in his five races, and if he doesn’t put his earnings over $100,000 in the Hopeful on Saturday, they’ll be combing bodies out of the infield lake until next August.

  “He’s full of play,” Winfrey said, “and always ready to do his work. I can’t fault him at all.”

  “What do the boys in the stable call him?”

  “Native Dancer,” the trainer said.

  “Sometimes,” Vanderbilt said, “in a burst of originality, they call him ‘the gray horse.’”

  There is a turf writer here who saw Native Dancer win his maiden race on Wood Memorial Day at Jamaica last April and then canter by six lengths in the Youthful Stakes two weeks later. Although the colt came out of the Youthful with bucked shins and subsequently developed a splint, this man went around betting that Native Dancer would come back and win his next five starts. He still has two races to go, but the man has been haunting the sales of Grand Union Hotel furnishings, pricing objets d’art

  “We painted the bucked shins,” Winfrey said, “and fired him for the splint, and he hasn’t given us any trouble since.”

  “Who named him?” Vanderbilt was asked.

  “I think I did,” he said. “He’s by Polynesian out of Geisha, you know. He’s Geisha’s second foal. The first one was by Questionnaire and I wanted to call him Wrong Slant, but I settled for Orientation. He wasn’t much, ran for about $3,500, and we sold him.

  “It isn’t easy getting names approved. Take my mare Pansy. I just name her foals for the sires and ignore the dam. She produced a foal by Shut Out, so we called him Social Outcast, and another by Questionnaire that we named Query.

  “Back about 1938 I bought a mare named Miyako from H. A. Waterman, for $15,000, I think. I assumed Miyako was a Japanese name, so when she had a filly by Discovery I called it Geisha. Why did I buy Miyako? Mostly because Waterman was selling her, I guess. She was a sister of El Chico, the unbeaten two-year-old of 1938, and she had won a stakes, the Autumn Day at Empire City.

  “Geisha wasn’t too sound. She won two or three races and we didn’t want her claimed and she couldn’t move up, so we retired her. Of course, a horse that won three races for me in those days was practically the same as Man o’ War. That’s B.W.—before Winfrey.”

  “How did you happen to send Geisha to Polynesian?”

  Alfred grinned. “I didn’t look the whole country over and decide this was the mating that would produce a champion. Since Polynesian went to stud I’ve booked two mares to him each year, and though I was asked to reduce it to one, I don’t want to, because I think he’s going to be an outstanding sire.

  “Geisha has a full sister of Native Dancer that’s a weanling, and she has a yearling by Amphitheatre. The way to get a good horse is to breed a Discovery mare to something.”

  A moment of respectful silence was observed following this thickly veiled commercial for Discovery, the Sagamore Farm’s presiding stallion. Then Native Dancer was led out for his work, bucking ebulliently at the end of a shank.

  The gray horse is a strapping colt, big as a three-year-old, with a white star. Bernie Eversole got up on him, and Winfrey told him to work three quarters with First Glance. While trainer and owner walked to the grandstand to watch, the pair jogged, broke at the top of the back stretch, and came around together. Native Dancer doesn’t run, he flows,

  “Does he have the look of eagles in his eyes?” Mr. Vanderbilt was asked.

  “Where else?” the owner said.

  DEAD SEA DOWNS

  JERICHO, OCCUPIED JORDAN, 1967

  The lowest gambling hell in the world lies hard by the shore of the Dead Sea, 1,291 feet below sea level. Nowhere on the face of the earth can you get lower, not at Charles Town or Suffolk Downs, not even at Aqueduct on a Tuesday in November.

  The gambling hell has no official name. Call it Dead Sea Downs or Qumran Park. It is a little Shoeless Joe of a racetrack on the desert, at present a casualty of last June’s six-day war but in its time a center of cheerful debauchery in a region where sin isn’t exactly an innovation. (After all, when Joshua brought the walls of Jericho tumbling down, the only house in town left standing was that of Rahab, the harlot.)

  Dead Sea Downs sits beside the highway leading south from Jericho. A faded wooden sign over the gate shows a running horse with a jockey in silks, and squiggly Arabic lettering identifies it as the “course for horses Arabian.”

  The track is a one-mile oval of sand crusted with little white drifts of salt, overgrown now with clumps of thorny burnet called netish, meaning “scratcher.” Except for a panel or two of fence at the finish line, the inside rail consists of rusty oil drums set on end, and a low ridge of sand substitutes for an outside rail.

  What’s left of the grandstand looks out across the saltiest puddle in creation, steely under the fierce sun, to the Moab Mountains on the east shore. Behind the stand a rude fence encloses the paddock walking ring, and behind that rise stark cliffs pitted with caves where the Dead Sea Scrolls lay hidden for two thousand years.

  Today the grandstand is just a grand place to stand, a roofed platform like the New Haven station platform at Rye or Greenwich. Before the war it had chairs for the beauty and chivalry of Jordan
, who gathered each winter Sunday to play the ponies and the camel race that concluded each program. Everybody says the Bedouin jockeys pulled their camels.

  In the spring, racing moved across the Jordan River to Amman, the capital, so Dead Sea Downs was idle when the war came. Now that Israel occupies this West Bank territory, neither the horses nor the horseplayers are welcome back.

  At its peak, Dead Sea Downs must have been something, but not much, like Saratoga when the games were running at Canfield’s or Riley’s or Piping Rock. A player who tapped out at the track could repair to the Dead Sea Hotel on the lake shore where Sharif Ben Nasser provided an opportunity to recoup at baccarat or roulette.

  Ben Nasser, uncle of King Hussein and formerly Jordan’s prime minister, is an Arabic version of James Cox Brady, president of the New York Racing Association, and Ogden Phipps, chairman of the Jockey Club. His huge racing string is the Middle Eastern equivalent of the Phipps family’s Wheatley Stable, and last month, when the Shah of Iran threw a coronation for himself, Sharif sent his gaudiest steeds to dress up the show.

  Ben Nasser is a tycoon of many parts, though some of his most profitable enterprises might not appeal to the Messrs. Cox and Phipps. His Dead Sea Hotel was an embarrassment to the king because things went on there which might be all right in other seashore resorts like Sodom or Atlantic City but, in the opinion of local Bedouins, tended to give this neighborhood a bad name.

  Twenty-one centuries ago this land was occupied by the Essene sect, an extraordinarily strict religious body, some of whose puritan-ism seems to have survived. At any rate, Uncle Ben’s casino finally was shut down, ostensibly because of illegal gambling, which was the least of its pleasures.

  In a way it’s too bad that there is no racing here now, for this is where it all started. There is a legend that when Mohammed was wheeling and dealing, he turned loose a herd of horses on the desert within sight of water. As they raced to drink, a trumpeter sounded recall. Most of the steeds ran on but those that wheeled back in obedience became the foundation for Mohammed’s breeding operation.

  That’s how the expression, “improvement of the breed,” began, but of course horses had been used for cavalry earlier. In the Maccabean war about 170 B.C., Lydias led a force of 100,000 foot-soldiers, 20,000 horses, and 32 elephants to subdue the Jews. The campaign was bad for Eleazer, brother of Lydias. He got hit on the head with a falling elephant and snuffed it.

  As history goes in these parts, all this is modern. Archaeologists have established there were people here in the Mesolithic era, at least ten thousand years ago, and everybody knows that where you have people you have horseplayers, except maybe in Appleton, Wisconsin. Not even Max Hirsch goes back that far.

  A VERY PIOUS STORY

  1948

  At the Derby, Walter Haight, a well-fed horse author from Washington, told it this way.

  There’s this horseplayer and he can’t win a bet. He’s got patches in his pants from the way even odds-on favorites run up the alley when he’s backing them and the slump goes on until he’s utterly desperate. He’s ready to listen to any advice when a friend tells him: “No wonder you don’t have any luck, you don’t live right. Nobody could do any good the way you live. Why, you don’t even go to church. Why don’t you get yourself straightened out and try to be a decent citizen and just see then if things don’t get a lot better for you?”

  Now, the guy has never exactly liked to bother heaven with his troubles. Isn’t even sure whether they have horse racing up there and would understand his difficulties. But he’s reached a state where steps simply have to be taken. So, the next day being Sunday, he does go to church and sits attentively through the whole service and joins in the hymn-singing and says “Amen” at the proper times and puts his buck on the collection plate.

  All that night he lies awake waiting for a sign that things are going to get better; nothing happens. Next day he gets up and goes to the track, but this time he doesn’t buy a racing form or scratch sheet or Jack Green’s Card or anything. Just gets his program and sits in the stands studying the field for the first race and waiting for a sign. None comes, so he passes up the race. He waits for the second race and concentrates on the names of the horses for that one, and again there’s no inspiration. So again he doesn’t bet. Then, when he’s looking them over for the third, something seems to tell him to bet on a horse named Number 4.

  “Lord, I’ll do it,” he says, and he goes down and puts the last fifty dollars he’ll ever be able to borrow on Number 4 to win. Then he goes back to his seat and waits until the horses come onto the track.

  Number 4 is a little fractious in the parade, and the guy says, “Lord, please quiet him down. Don’t let him get himself hurt.” The horse settles down immediately and walks calmly into the starting gate.

  “Thank you, Lord,” says the guy. “Now please get him off clean. He don’t have to break on top, but get him away safe without getting slammed or anything, please.” The gate comes open and Number 4 is off well, close up in fifth place and saving ground going to the first turn. There he begins to move up a trifle on the rail and for an instant it looks as though he might be in close quarters.

  “Let him through, Lord,” the guy says. “Please make them horses open up a little for him.” The horse ahead moves out just enough to let Number 4 through safely.

  “Thank you, Lord,” says the guy, “but let’s not have no more trouble like that. Have the boy take him outside.” Sure enough, as they go down the backstretch the jockey steers Number 4 outside, where he’s lying fourth.

  They’re going to the far turn when the guy gets agitated. “Don’t let that boy use up the horse,” he says. “Don’t let the kid get panicky, Lord. Tell him to rate the horse awhile.” The rider reaches down and takes a couple of wraps on the horse and keeps him running kind, just cooking on the outside around the turn.

  Wheeling into the stretch, Number 4 is still lying fourth. “Now, Lord,” the guy says. “Now we move. Tell that kid to go to the stick.” The boy outs with his bat and, as Ted Atkinson says, he really “scouges” the horse. Number 4 lays his ears back and gets to running.

  He’s up to third. He closes the gap ahead and now he’s lapped on the second horse and now he’s at his throat latch and now he’s past him. He’s moving on the leader and everything behind him is good and cooked. He closes ground stride by stride with the boy working on him for all he’s worth and the kid up front putting his horse to a drive.

  “Please, Lord,” the guy says. “Let him get out in front. Give me one call on the top end, anyway.”

  Number 4 keeps coming. At the eighth pole he’s got the leader collared. He’s past him. He’s got the lead by two lengths.

  “Thank you, Lord,” the guy says, “I’ll take him from here. Come on, you son of a bitch!”

  STEVE CAUTHEN’S “PERFECT RIDE”

  LOUISVILLE, 1978

  The way Laz Barrera planned it, Steve Cauthen would take Affirmed out of the gate briskly and then tuck him back behind the pace. There could be no loitering at the start because Affirmed was in the second stall with Raymond Earl, a speed horse, at his left. If he didn’t get out of there in a hurry, the whole Kentucky Derby field would be running over him.

  The colt and the kid obeyed the trainer exactly. Coming past Churchill Downs’ seething stands the first time, Cauthen kept glancing to his right in search of Sensitive Prince. He knew that the unbeaten front-runner, breaking from the outside post, would be along as soon as he could get clear of the others. The kid was right about that, and as they reached the clubhouse turn, Sensitive Prince came sailing across his bow to take the lead from Raymond Earl.

  Cauthen steadied Affirmed in third place, precisely where Barrera wanted him. Then the rider started looking back for Alydar, Affirmed’s most persistent rival. He couldn’t find him, however, for Alydar had beaten only two horses to the first turn and Jorge Velasquez couldn’t get him running.

  “I was looking back for him most of
the whole race,” Cauthen said later.

  “Steve Cauthen rode that horse perfect,” Barrera said. “He rode like he rode this race a hundred years ago and came back to ride this one at eighteen years old. Do you believe in renaissance (reincarnation)?”

  Barrera told Cauthen to come into the homestretch fairly well out in the track so that Alydar, who prefers to wait and make one big move, would have to come through on the inside or go wastefully wide around him. Laz didn’t want Alydar blasting past him on the outside as he had done in the Champagne Stakes last year.

  He needn’t have worried. Afterward, Velasquez suggested that the track may have been too hard for Alydar’s taste. He said the favorite only ran a little in the last eighth of a mile.

  Affirmed, still going on his own, had put Sensitive Prince away on the last turn and Cauthen didn’t have to ask him for anything until Believe It ranged up and thrust his head in front with a quarter-mile to go. Then Steve moved, and Affirmed drew two lengths clear without apparent effort.

  “Then he started pricking his ears like he always does,” the kid said. “So I started hitting him.”

  Still looking back for Alydar, he gave his mount six stout licks on the right rump. At last Alydar showed up, too late. For just a moment, those in the crowd of 131,004 who could see anything but sunburned necks had a notion that the favorite might get there. They were wrong by a length and a half.

  Alydar was $1.20 to $1.00 in the mutuels, Affirmed $1.80. That margin was reflected at the wire, in reverse. It was a marvelously formful finish with all of those who had seemed to have a chance represented in alphabetical order—Affirmed, Alydar, Believe It, Darby Creek Road, Esops Foibles, Sensitive Prince.

  After days of raw rain, the weather had turned spectacularly clear, and as the track dried, management rolled it. It was fast enough for a mile and a quarter in 2 minutes, 11/5 seconds, which was faster than the Derby record that Whirlaway held for more than 20 years, but no threat to Secretariat’s 1:59 2/5.