That’s the theory. In practice, Storm Cat—apart from his twice-daily acts of sexual congress with the fastest, wealthiest, and most attractive available partners in the world, seven days a week throughout the breeding season—lives like a monk. He eats mostly grass, sleeps on straw, drinks only water. He has no visits with the other stallions. His one diversion is running away from his groom, which he is doing less of lately, because his current groom is kind but strict. He wears only a leather halter. He does not race, he does not train for racing, he does not even exercise. He has given all that up.
Regularly, en route to the breeding shed, he steps on a scale. If the number seems high, he cuts back on the sweet feed that is his sole indulgence. His weight is monitored minutely. When he dropped a few pounds in February, at the beginning of the breeding season, he was rushed to the Hagyard Davidson and McGee Veterinary Clinic, in Lexington. “It wasn’t much—enterocolitis,” Doc Yocum said. “With any other horse, we probably wouldn’t have bothered.” He traced its onset to a few instances when Storm Cat arrived at the breeding shed wringing wet before he even started: “My theory is he was just so worked up to get back at the mares.”
Storm Cat’s stall—where he goes as infrequently as possible, to get his coat brushed, say, or to sleep during inclement weather—is outwardly unremarkable: a foot and a half of straw in a whitewashed cinder-block room with two wooden doors. (Even here, value creates value: Storm Cat’s muck is carted off and resold to the Campbell’s Soup Company, which uses it as the breeding ground for the mushrooms in its mushroom soup.) But while he sleeps, a box nestled in the ridge of his barn projects an infrared beam that looks for obscurity—smoke. An ultraviolet device picks up flickers of light in the hydrocarbon range—flame. A third mechanism compares ambient temperature against its rate of rise—heat. These three devices monitoring the separate elements of fire are tied into the forty-second alarm system and into a sprinkler system, fed by massive pipes capable of delivering six inches of standing water to the stall in seconds. Fire is a problem because barns are drafty by design and straw is extremely flammable, but Ben Giles, who guides the building projects at the farm, compares Overbrook’s safeguards favorably with fire detection measures in museums. “We don’t have the luxury of being able to cut a barn up into small spaces to confine or suppress a fire, because a horse needs air. In that sense, the museums have it a little easier,” Giles says. “Plus, their van Goghs are worth a whole lot less than Storm Cat.”
It took a long time for people to see that Storm Cat was a lucky horse. As a yearling, he was smallish, long-haired, potbellied, with the kind of turned-out knees that got him booted out of Kentucky’s best auction. Twice at the track, he lost races that he should have won, once because he shouldered an inferior horse in the final stretch out of sheer cussedness, and later because his mind wandered when he was too far in front at the Breeders’ Cup, a race that would have established him as the leading contender for two-year-old horse of the year. He missed all his Triple Crown races as a three-year-old because he was recovering from knee surgery, and when he tried to come back, late in the year, he trained on dirt that had turned greasy after a hard rain, and was never the same. When he retired from racing, in 1988, people quickly forgot about him. His stud fee dropped from thirty thousand to twenty-five to twenty, and he couldn’t fill his book of mares.
Then his first crop of colts and fillies hit the track. Suddenly, people started remembering what a brilliant, blazingly fast runner he’d been, how he took a competitive streak that bordered on the criminal and used it to overcome his natural unsoundness. By the time his second and third crops hit, people knew that Storm Cats could run. They could run at two years old, or three, or four; colts or fillies, they could run long or short, turf or dirt, in Europe, Japan, or America. By 1994, when Tabasco Cat took the last two jewels of the Triple Crown, it was clear that Storm Cat had a calling.
The mares arrive for their appointments by horse van and walk over a gravel loading dock into the receiving barn—a sort of greenroom for mares in estrus. When a mare enters, somebody pushes a button, a window opens, and Cooperstown, an Overbrook teaser stallion, sticks his head in to try his luck, nuzzling her flank and nosing her haunches. If she kicks, he’s the one she kicks at, not Storm Cat. (“If they don’t make it at the track, they end up being teasers,” Doc Yocum says. “So it’s a little incentive deal.”) In the past twenty years, veterinarians have grown very precise in pinpointing ovulation (an increase in accuracy that has allowed stallions to double their workload—and farms to double their profits—since fewer and fewer mares require follow-up visits), but final verification is still left to the teaser stallion. If there are any doubts about her receptivity after Cooperstown’s initial interview, he is forced to try a jump himself—wearing a leather butcher’s apron to ensure that the dry run goes unconsummated. Usually, though, she’s willing, the window shuts for Coop, and the mare is led into a padded chute to be washed for the breeding shed.
Just before Storm Cat’s mare is ready, his groom, Filemon Martinez, a quiet man with a Clark Gable mustache, walks the sire of sires across a covered bridge over Hickman Creek to the stallion barn. From the doorway of the barn, where Storm Cat and Martinez wait like actors in the wings, you can hear the business of breeding: “Easy, boss,” and “Go, buddy,” and, if it’s a stallion with problems in the Valentino department, the pacesetting shouts of “Hyup! Hyup! Hyup!” Most do just fine in the breeding shed, although farm policy seems to be anywhere that works. At least one stallion, Cape Town, prefers to perform al fresco, on the grass, with all the usual team in attendance, plus one guy giving helpful pushes from the rear.
By the time Storm Cat enters the shed, the video camera is rolling (for lawsuits and insurance) and the mare—Rootentootenwooten, in this case—is standing with her head against the wall, wearing padded booties on both hind feet. Storm Cat neighs or hollers or roars—whatever it is, it’s frightening and long and full of the inevitable, like the squeal of tires that you know will end in shattering glass. Then he measures himself and rears while the team rushes around him. There are two schools of natural cover: pasture breeding, where horses are let loose in a paddock together, and hand breeding, where a squad of breeding-shed professionals choreograph the proceedings for safety and speed. Overbrook prefers the latter, as practically all large-scale breeding operations do, and their version of it takes at least five people: two to soothe and distract the mare, one to steady the stallion, a tail man, and the stallion manager. When Storm Cat rears, the tail man lifts up the mare’s tail, and Wes Lanter, wearing a latex glove, pilots Storm Cat to the place he probably would have found on his own, but not as quickly.
All the majesty of the act is in the roaring, apparently—count to fifteen and it’s over. Somebody says “Good cover” with a mixture of appreciation and relief, and Storm Cat, still draped across Rootentootenwooten’s back, fits the curl of his neck to hers and allows himself a moment of unstallionlike tenderness before he backs off and puts his feet on the ground again. The stallion manager pulls down a handheld shower nozzle, of the sort you find in French bathtubs, to wash Storm Cat off. Then the groom leads the sire away, through the stallion barn, down the hill, and back into the shadows of the covered bridge. Lanter pulls off his latex glove and says, “He’s what everybody hopes happens to them when they retire.”
2000
“No, I found my ball. I’m looking for the golf course.”
Copyright © 2010 by The New Yorker Magazine
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
RANDOM HOUSE and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
All of the pieces in this collection were originally published in The New Yorker. The publication date of each piece is given at the end of the piece.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data<
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The only game in town: sportswriting from the New Yorker/edited by David Remnick.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-679-60366-5
1. Sports—United States. 2. Sports stories, American. 3. Sports literature—United States. I. Remnick, David. II. New Yorker (New York, N.Y.: 1925)
GV704.A57 2010
796′.0973—dc22 2009040009
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