The stricken Nack had seen him grazing in the distance the day before and wanted to look upon him one more time. But Secretariat had taken a bad turn, and the request was denied. “Remember him how you saw him” advised the horse’s owner. The next morning at dawn, Secretariat lifted his head and nickered loudly — “Like he was beggin’ me for help,” his groom would later say. Before morning was out, the great heart would cease to beat.
There have been other big horses, other big hearts. Think of Phar Lap, the New Zealand-bred horse also known as The Red Terror, Red Lightning and Big Red. The name means, in the language of Thailand — or Siam, as it was called in his day — lightning or “wink of the sky.” After he died, his heart was preserved and displayed in a museum in Canberra, Australia. For comparison’s sake, curators parked it beside the heart of an Australian cavalry horse and listed the two weights. The remount’s weighed seven pounds; Phar Lap’s weighed more than thirteen.
In the Great Depression of the late 1920s and early 1930s, Phar Lap, “the wonder horse,” provided almost as much diversion as the dimpled Shirley Temple. He was a seventeen-one-hand, 1,250-pound chestnut horse who allowed a toddler to ride on him but would buck off experienced jockeys when they dared order him about.
A brilliant horse inclined to mischief, he would grab grooms by the shirt, tug sharply and whinny gleefully when the shirt ripped. Phar Lap adored his personal groom, Tommy Woodcock, who always had a cube of sugar for him and called him “Bobby Boy.” After a painfully slow start to his career, he won thirty-seven races in three years. “He’s not our horse,” his trainer’s wife once remarked. “I think every child in Australia owns him.”
The public idolized him, but not so the bookies who lost their shirts faster than Phar Lap’s first grooms. Anonymous phone calls issued threats: acid in the horse’s face, poison in his feed. A passenger in a car once leveled a double-barreled shotgun at Phar Lap, but Woodcock put himself between the gun and the horse and somehow the pellets missed. Race officials kept adding more weight to handicap Phar Lap, and though he continued to win, his owner — fed up with all the harassment — finally took him to America.
His jockey, Jim Pike, likened trying to hold him back to stopping a freight train. A Sydney vet, Dr. Stewart McKay, observed of Phar Lap that “his muscles are such that his hind legs should be cast in bronze so future generations can bow in admiration before such perfect propulsive machines.”
Phar Lap died in California suddenly and mysteriously, his head in Woodcock’s arms, his body swollen like a balloon. Perhaps significantly, the threats that had hounded Phar Lap out of Australia had resurfaced in America. If the cause of death was colic, why did such a strong horse succumb so quickly? If sour feed killed him, why was no other horse in the stable affected? Was Phar Lap the victim of an antigambling zealot?
The postmortem reported that the horse’s stomach and intestines were severely inflamed — “as if from an irritant poison.” Subsequent examinations contradicted that finding, and the hasty removal of his heart to the museum may have stymied further, perhaps conclusive, analysis. The words of a jockey who rode against him may well have been prescient: Phar Lap, he complained, was too good. “Sure things” upset the system — a sometimes nasty underworld built on chance and greed.
Last but not least of the speed-horse legends is another horse they called Big Red around the barn. Everything about Man o’ War was big. His appetite. His size. His reputation.
Born March 29, 1917, at the height of the First World War (and thus his name), Man o’ War quickly became a national hero in the United States and the focus of spectacular bids to buy him. One Hollywood movie producer dangled $1 million in front of Man o’ War’s owner. The Texas cattle baron and oilman W. T. Waggoner signed a blank check and invited the horse’s owner to name his price. But Man o’ War was not for sale.
He seemed to inspire affection in everyone who saw him run. His workout times were often faster than his race times, which were themselves stunning. Man o’ War ran for the pure joy of it, quickly staking out his position at the front and defying any horse to catch him or even to get close.
He lost only one race: a poor start left him ten lengths behind, but he easily recovered and could have won had he not been boxed on the rail. The winning horse that day was called, fittingly, Upset, and his jockey, Willie Knapp, later wished he had just moved over and let the legend breeze past. “So great a champion as Man o’ War,” he said with feeling, “deserved to retire undefeated.”
Man o’ War won one of his twenty-one races by one hundred lengths and set record times (three world, two American, three track), not by a fraction of a second but by six seconds or more. Save for that one loss, he was never pressed.
The almost sixteen-two-hand chestnut had a huge stride and the manners of a blueblood. All his life he raised a fuss about being saddled, yet he was playful, too: like an obedient dog, he would carry his groom’s hat in his mouth.
Next to running, Man o’ War loved eating. His handlers sometimes kept a bit in his mouth, hoping to check his habit of hastily devouring huge quantities of food. Every day Man o’ War ate all the hay he could eat, twelve quarts of oats and a handful of carrots. As a racer he weighed a hefty 1,150 pounds; as a breeding stallion he shot up to 1,370 pounds.
Even as a stately twenty-five-year-old horse, Man o’ War never stopped acting the champion. He had to be locked in his stall to prevent him from challenging young stallions in adjacent pastures to impromptu races. And so Big Red is remembered: the mane flying, tail high and proud, the stride long and easy.
In October 1989 I was in Stuttgart, Germany, watching Ian Millar ride the incomparable Big Ben in a grand prix event. For Ian’s memoirs, I wanted to walk a little in the lanky rider’s shoes on this European tour. After many hours at his farm near Perth, Ontario, I was acquiring a sense of the man. I was also feeling more and more affection for his striking chestnut horse, the Thoroughbred-Belgian warmblood cross then dominating the world of show jumping. Big Ben had won double gold at the Pan-American Games two years previously and had done what no horse had — taken the World Cup two years in a row. “Brave — brave — brave,” Ian once said of him.
7.5 Big Ben led by groom Sandi Patterson: lord of the show ring every time out. (photo credit 7.5)
Big Ben entered the show ring with princely bearing, tail and head high, supremely confident. A frisson of excitement rippled through the audience even before his name was announced.
But Big Ben was a true freak: a seventeen-three-hand horse by a small stallion out of a tiny mare, neither of whom had ever produced offspring even approaching in size or merit that one glorious colt.
Big Ben had his idiosyncracies. He loathed plastic bags and the sound of trains, loved his routine 10 A.M. ride. If it came late, his anger showed. When his devoted groom Sandi Patterson took a rare day off, he was surly with her stand-in and pouted for days. But Big Ben was coltish, too, and would steal Sandi’s shoes and toss them in the air when she lay on the grass beside him.
I remember my time at Millar Brooke Farm fondly, and especially one summer day watching Ian and Ben glide over the outdoor course, me leaning against a tree in the company of sundry dogs and cats. The loose beauty of their partnership left me feeling a small sense of privilege, for I was an audience of one. I might have been in a bar at noon as Miles Davis and John Coltrane rehearsed or in a cavernous arena as Bobby Orr and Gordie Howe played shinny.
When we first arrived in Stuttgart, photographers and journalists swarmed Big Ben’s stall. The lord of the ring was a favorite every time out.
Grand Prix day is typically on a Sunday, and this horse had a sense for Sundays. He bobbed his head and pawed the ground as Sandi tacked him up that morning in Stuttgart. Competing against forty other horse-and-rider combinations, Ian and Ben went clear in the first two rounds. In the jump-off they faced three world-class riders along with Nick Skelton of Great Britain — maybe the finest speed rider in the sport.
> Ian and Ben’s time was a blistering 32.76 seconds, well under the forty-seven seconds allowed. No other rider matched that time or even went clean.
As is the custom, during the awards presentation all the lights in Hanns-Martin-Schleyer-Halle were turned off and everyone in the stadium flicked on the cigarette lighters handed out earlier. Outside the stadium minutes beforehand, Ben had been pawing the air, Trigger-like, when police-band tubas warmed up next to him, but at that moment he was standing calmly in the center of a pitch-black ring, the spotlight on him and the yellow first-place ribbon at his shoulder.
Capturing that magical moment is a photograph: background velvety black, so black that Ian’s riding helmet seems to disappear into it, with only a small patch of brown turf showing in the bottom left-hand corner. The photograph has the feel of a portrait painting. Horse and rider exude haughtiness: Ian eyes the camera, a tight, proud smile on his lips; Ben, ears pricked forward, looks slightly to the right but the intensity is discernible in his visible eye. There is no hint of the filled stadium, only the glow of this one victory, and the promise of more.
The glory of Stuttgart, and indeed that entire European tour — which saw Ben receive a hero’s welcome in Belgium, where he was born — would be followed by three calamitous events: two colic surgeries a year apart and a horrific highway accident in 1992 that killed one man and one horse and badly injured several others. The wonder is that Big Ben rebounded.
Two weeks after the accident, to the astonishment of the show-jumping world, he won the grueling derby at Spruce Meadows in Calgary — for an unprecedented fifth time. One of his last great victories, in 1993, was that same derby. The record will never be matched.
In 1994, during the writing of Big Ben, a book for younger readers, I talked at length to Sandi Patterson, who had to relive the surgeries and the gruesome accident on the prairie. For a time, one image haunted me: the broken horse van on its side, the barefooted Sandi on top, screaming Ben’s name into the dark vault as the rain pelted down. His only groom for seven years, she had come to love him. Sandi taught me a lot about the powerful bond that can form between horse and human. I confess I found it odd and mystifying then. Not anymore.
On Big Ben’s farewell tour in the summer of 1994, people lined up for hours under a hot sun to touch him or be photographed with him. They cherished the horse, not just because he won so often in his spectacular ten-year career, but because he won against adversity. His size, his contrariness, the colic, the accident — all could have stopped him. He had heart, and anyone who ever saw him jump a fence sensed it.
Compared with racing, show jumping is a young equestrian sport. The term first gets a mention in French cavalry manuals of the late 1700s, but only in the 1860s did organized show-jumping competitions get under way. Though early show jumpers rode ever so slowly and carefully — riders were then allowed all the time they needed — the sport took off. By 1900, jumping competitions formed part of the Olympic Games and international show jumping had been launched.
A classic story from the world of show jumping involves a gifted German rider named Hans Winkler and his horse, a notoriously difficult bay mare named Halla. She, like Ben, was a freak horse.
Sired by a German trotter and one-quarter Thoroughbred, Halla was first tried as a steeplechaser and then as a three-day event horse of possible Olympic caliber. But she proved too fiery for the dressage phase. To land, finally, in Winkler’s hands seemed a stroke of luck, one that makes some of us believe in fate or destiny. If Ian Millar and Big Ben were the perfect equestrian match of the 1980s, Halla and Winkler were their counterpart in the 1950s.
As rider and trainer Winkler had his own style, based not on the strict discipline of the German tradition, but on a keen insight born of psychology and diplomacy. Vicki Hearne, an astute writer and horse trainer, has called Winkler “one of the most tactful and reassuring riders who ever lived. I never saw anyone so light on the reins and in the saddle.”
Winkler knew he had a special horse. Though tall, she was nimble, and despite her leanness, she was an extraordinary jumper who won numerous puissance competitions. She was also uncommonly courageous. Proof came in the 1954 world championships (which required that competitors ride one another’s horses). Halla, a nervous horse made more so by the many new riders, had one disastrous twenty-six-fault round. “Crashing and burning,” riders call it when numerous fences go down, often dramatically.
Though she came up lame, and though the horrified Winkler begged the judges to let her withdraw, the rules of the day obliged her to cover the course a second time with the same rider. Other horses might have refused. Halla did what was asked of her and had only one fence down. Winkler — who won that world championship, by the way — knew then what a mare he had.
At the 1956 Olympic Games in Stockholm, Winkler pulled a groin muscle while vaulting the penultimate fence in the first round. Despite the pain, he asked Halla to take the last fence, which she did. Still in terrible pain, Winkler had to be lifted up into the saddle for the jump-off. Some horse-wise people thought it was madness for a rider to face huge fences on a high-strung mare when he could do little more than point the horse at the jumps.
Vicki Hearne later applauded both Winkler’s trust in his horse and the horse’s achievement. “Imagine a race-car driver,” she wrote, “suddenly unable to operate clutch, brake and accelerator except in a distant, awkward and weak fashion.”
In show jumping the takeoff point is critical: it is a matter of inches. If the horse leaps too soon or too late, if the horse momentarily loses focus — diverted by a banner or a camera’s flash — the rail falls. Overly fast or overly slow horses will not manage a jump-off course. Turns can be neither too tight nor too round.
But in this game of high-speed chess it is the rider, not the horse, who calls the shots. Suffused with adrenaline, the rider must also allot parts of the brain to analysing the sequence of jumps, and number of strides between them, the seconds allowed and riding itself. When Winkler rode Halla that day, however, he vaguely hoped the horse could call the shots. Even to embrace such a hope, Winkler had to have trained her well. As Holly Menino put it in her thoughtful book on horse-human athleticism, Forward Motion, “Teaching a horse to jump fences is more like instructing a child to read than like training a dog to stay or to fetch.” Only a literate horse could do what Halla did.
“All I had to do,” said Winkler, “was just sit there doing nothing — she worked everything out.” (Nor has she been alone in that ability. The steeplechase world was stunned six years after Halla’s feat when a champion horse called Mandarin snapped his bit early in a race and his jockey rode him the remaining three miles without a bridle. He won — by a neck.) Other riders have pointed out how delicately Winkler sat the horse, and how terrible the pain must have been. “Doing nothing,” certainly in this instance, was a feat in itself.
Halla won an individual gold medal for Winkler and team gold for Germany. When Winkler was helped out of the saddle, he did the right thing: he threw his arms around Halla and thanked her.
The Irish have a special feel for the horse, perhaps literally so.
Among the many legends that surround the aforementioned Eclipse and Dennis O’Kelly is one in which the latter is fleeing English law (for leveling English fences) and hiding in a stable. His quest is to breed the perfect “harse” by first finding the perfect sire and the perfect dam. In the pitch-black stall, he runs his hands over the horse near him and, upon feeling her lines and conformation, realizes he has found her.
A novel called O’Kelly’s Eclipse, written by Arthur Weiss in 1968, speaks to the notion that fine horsemanship is an Irish birthright. “It was the limestone subsoil,” claimed O’Kelly, “which made Ireland the best place in the world for the raising of God’s chosen animal.” There is truth in that: minerals in the limestone come up through the grass and are said to enhance bone development. Add fine rains to almost perfect pastures and, sometimes, you get almost perfect
harses. Arkle was one.
He may well have been the greatest steeplechaser of all time. He was born on April 19, 1957, in County Dublin, where a disabled widow named Mary Baker and her son Harry kept up the family tradition of breeding a few steeplechasers.
Arkle, a gangly bay with large eyes and almost mulish ears, was a natural jumper who could, went the boast, leap the mountain in Scotland that was his namesake. The duchess of Westminster, an aristocrat of Irish origin, bought him at the urging of a trainer who lived near the Bakers and who steadfastly refused to rush young horses into competition. Like Eclipse, Big Ben and many other successful horses, Arkle enjoyed his youth and came to work relatively late in life.
Brave and determined as a racer, Arkle was also an unusually sociable horse, kind to children and friendly to dogs. His favorite meal, served at 4:30 P.M. every day, consisted of a bran mash mixed with six eggs, oats and — that crowning touch — two bottles of black beer. He was an Irish horse, after all.
For all his playfulness in the paddock, though, on the race course he was unmatched. His twenty-five victories included three consecutive Cheltenham Gold Cups. He always saved enough for his patented run at the finish. Sometimes Arkle ignored the finish line altogether and simply kept on running. Because he beat other horses so badly (by up to thirty lengths) and because a few horses died trying to catch him, some called Arkle a “killer” horse.
In his last race, in 1966, Arkle hit a guardrail and cracked a bone in his foot. The miracle was that he finished at all, let alone a close second. It must have caused him great pain to run, and many wept to see him limp back to the unsaddling ring. When he finally died in 1970, put down after arthritic lesions developed in both feet, the Irish mourned his passing as they would a head of state. “We will never,” said his jockey, Pat Taaffe, “see his likes again.”
Dangle gold bullion in front of a thief; walk a horse of high pedigree past him. The effect is the same. Madness sets in. The glories of the sport-horse world are many, but there also exists a dark and sinister aspect that may be inevitable when horseflesh commands the price it does. This, too, is part of the mix, part of what the horse stirs in our hearts.
Wild About Horses Page 20
