The Horse God Built

by Lawrence Scanlan

  THE HORSE GOD BUILT

  Also by Lawrence Scanlan

  The Horse’s Shadow

  Harvest of a Quiet Eye: The Cabin as Sanctuary

  Grace Under Fire: The State of Our Sweet and Savage Game

  Little Horse of Iron: A Quest for the Canadian Horse

  Wild About Horses: Our Timeless Passion for the Horse

  Horses Forever

  Heading Home: On Starting a New Life in a Country Place

  Big Ben

  As Coauthor

  Healed by Horses: The Carole Fletcher Story

  The Man Who Listens to Horses

  Riding High: Ian Millar’s World of Show Jumping

  THE HORSE GOD BUILT

  The Untold Story of Secretariat ,

  the World’s Greatest Racehorse

  LAWRENCE SCANLAN

  Thomas Dunne Books

  St. Martin’s Press New York

  THOMAS DUNNE BOOKS.

  An imprint of St. Martin’s Press.

  THE HORSE GOD BUILT. Copyright © 2007 by Lawrence Scanlan. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY. 10010.

  www.thomasdunnebooks.com

  www.stmartins.com

  All photographs are by Raymond G. Woolfe, except those on pages 143, 187, and 223, which are by Lawrence Scanlan.

  ISBN-13: 978-0-312-36724-4

  ISBN-10: 0-312-36724-4

  First published in Canada by HarperCollins Publishers, Ltd.

  First U.S. Edition: May 2007

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  For Edward “Shorty” Sweat

  It’s like God said, “You just think you’ve seen horses. I’m gonna show you a horse.” Then he built Secretariat.

  —Jim Reno, sculptor, Kerrville, Texas,

  in Equine Images magazine, 1991

  Charles learned quickly that working at a racing stable is an unforgettable experience, and it quietly threatened to become a life—of oneness with nature and communion with horses, of incurable wonder.

  —Edward Hotaling,

  on the life of Charles Stewart (1808–1884),

  a black jockey and trainer from Pocahontas, Virginia,

  in The Great Black Jockeys, 1999

  ILLUSTRATIONS

  PROLOGUE: A HORSE AND HIS GROOM

  A RARITY

  1. RED HORSE, BLACK ANGEL

  CONNECTION

  2. THE BACKSTRETCH: EDDIE’s WORLD

  GRACE

  3. “YOUR MIRACLE HAS ARRIVED”

  THE GREATEST

  4. “EDDIE WAS A PRINCE”

  PARADE OF STALLIONS

  5. “FULL OF RUN”

  A GIFT

  6. CATCHING A GLIMPSE OF GLORY

  ADULATION

  7. THE GHOST OF EDDIE SWEAT

  THE THOROUGHBRED STALLION

  8. PILGRIMAGE

  “MY BABY”

  9. EULOGY FOR AHORSE

  KNOWING HORSES

  EPILOGUE: IN PRAISE OF A BOND

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  SOURCES

  INDEX

  PHOTOGRAPHS

  Page iii

  Secretariat winning his second race—by six lengths.

  Page 1

  Secretariat on the plane heading for Claiborne Farm on November 11, 1973. Worried by

  the engine’s roar, he grips the jacket of his groom, Edward “Shorty” Sweat, with his teeth.

  Page 17

  Eddie appears to be chatting up the big red horse before his last race, at Woodbine Racetrack in Toronto.

  Page 51

  Eddie Sweat looking happy and relaxed at his home away from home—the backstretch.

  Page 87

  Secretariat as a foal. He was bigger and more muscled than most.

  Page 103

  Secretariat nuzzles Eddie Sweat while Riva Ridge looks on.

  Page 143

  Ed Bogucki’s bronze was unveiled in Lexington, Kentucky, on July 17, 2004. The life-sized bronze depicts Secretariat, jockey Ron Turcotte, and groom Eddie Sweat just moments after the Derby win.

  Page 187

  The brass plates on Secretariat’s old stall at Claiborne Farm near Paris, Kentucky.

  Page 223

  The metal plate on the grave of Eddie Sweat near Holly Hill, South Carolina.

  Page 249

  Secretariat crosses the finish line at Woodbine on October 28, 1973.

  Page 281

  Eddie Sweat struggles with his emotions on the day he hands over Secretariat to his new

  keepers at Claiborne Farm near Paris, Kentucky.

  Page 311

  Eddie Sweat eyes Secretariat while the horse eyes the photographer on the grass behind the

  track.

  THE HORSE GOD BUILT

  PROLOGUE

  A HORSE AND HIS GROOM:

  SECRETARIAT AND “SHORTY” SWEAT

  A MAN APPROACHES THE STALLION BARN at Claiborne Farm, near Paris, Kentucky, intent on one stall where a horse—bright as an orange, shiny as brass—is anxiously circling and examining his new digs.

  “Hey, Red,” the man says to the horse. The late-fall day is chilly and bright, as good a day as any for a parting.

  The horse is Secretariat and the man his longtime groom, Edward Sweat, though everyone calls this low, muscled man “Shorty.” Secretariat nickers at the sound of the man’s voice, as Eddie has come to expect. They are old friends, almost beyond greetings. The chestnut’s eyes soften and his ears swivel forward to take him in.

  “Did you know, Red, you’re in your daddy’s old stall?” Eddie asks the horse. “Bold Ruler lived here. What do you think of that?” Eddie runs his right hand over the brass nameplate, then falls silent. He looks up and admires the lofty ceilings, the expansive stalls, the wide corridor, how the little ten-stall barn opens to the sky at each end. The place is airy and neat, a fitting home for a fine, fine horse. The first thing the horse had done—once his shipping bandages had been removed from his legs—was to inspect his new apartment, then roll in the straw.

  Eddie thinks of his two great charges, Riva Ridge and Secretariat, and how different they were in their stalls. He used to call Riva “Pea-head” because of his small cranium. The horse—named after a battle between American and German soldiers in the mountains of Italy in 1945—would go into his stall after an early-morning workout, lie down, and fall asleep. If you wanted to brush Riva, you had to get in there before he dozed off. Eddie could have lain down on top of him, knocked down the barn; Riva wouldn’t have budged. The horse wanted, and got, his nap. He had won the Kentucky Derby in 1972, and with that victory came a privilege or two.

  Secretariat, on the other hand, would sleep standing, facing a corner; only at night, when quiet had settled over the barn, would he lie down. But he never stretched out. The imperious horse would fold his front legs beneath him and listen, always listen, for strange sounds. And the second he heard one, he was up. Eddie knows all this because he has spent untold hours watching this horse, listening from his cot outside the stall, monitoring his moods and cycles. No need now for such vigilance.

  It is Sunday, November 11, 1973. The day marks the end of something, the beginning of something else. Everyone close to the horse feels unbearably sad. Trainer Lucien Laurin was teary-eyed back at Belmont Park in New York when the horse was loaded, and now, at Claiborne, he is still teary-eyed. Exercise rider Charlie Davis stayed in his bunkhouse bed at Belmont, for he could not bear to watch the horse leave. The horse’s owner, Penny Chenery, normally available to
the press, declines all interviews. For a long time, she just stands in the barn at Claiborne and stares at her horse. “It’s been a rough day for her,” Elizabeth Ham, Chenery’s secretary, tells a reporter on the scene. “This is the end of a lot of things. This means a big change for a lot of people.”

  Eddie looks stricken at the prospect. He stares intently at the horse with the three white feet and the star and the stripe on his forehead, and the horse returns the gaze, trying to fathom his groom’s mood. Eddie knows that a horse—certainly a keenly intelligent and spirited horse such as Secretariat—reads his handlers constantly. His eyes and ears are fixed on Eddie Sweat, for the horse knows something is amiss. His head is high; his tail snaps out annoyance. Why am I here in this new place, he wants to know, far from the track and home? Where is the man’s prattle, which I always find such a comfort? Why isn’t he in here putting a halter on me, the great horse thinks, and setting me up in the cross-ties for a rubdown? Eddie is always saying or doing, or both, and now he just stands there. The horse has never seen the man so still, so silent, so removed, and the stall door between them now feels like a wall.

  The work of a groom is constant, with its own rhythms and rituals. When the horse was out breezing on the track, Eddie and his cohorts were mucking out his stall, taking away sullied bedding, filling hay nets, hauling buckets of water. How many times has Eddie hand-walked and hand-grazed Secretariat? He has lost count. And though Eddie has never been on the horse, he has spent many, many hours at his side, behind him, before him, beneath him—strapping on the big chestnut’s shipping boots and leg wraps, laying a wool blanket over his back, checking his legs, reaching for his oh-so-ample girth, doing up horse-blanket straps, picking his feet, brushing on hoof paint. Eddie Sweat has cleaned his tack, has bathed the horse and cleaned his privates, given him worm paste, cut up the carrots he loves, poured into his feed bucket the grain and hot mash he adores. Man, this horse loves his supper.

  “Don’t worry, Red,” Eddie says, “I told them how much you love a good feed. You won’t be missin’ any meals here.”

  Eddie Sweat takes no comfort this day in his small claim to fame: He is the only groom in history to have handled Kentucky Derby winners two years in succession—Riva Ridge in 1972, Secretariat in 1973. Born in 1939, the sixth of nine children to a poor black family of tenant farmers near Holly Hill, South Carolina, Eddie was briefly a boxer in his youth, hard-bodied, with powerful thighs and massive forearms.

  Geraldine Holman, Eddie’s youngest and favorite sister, remembers her mother, Mary, telling her that even as a child, Eddie was obsessed with horses. Because of the age gap between them, Eddie and Geraldine only got to know each other later. She once asked him, “Why did you leave home so early?” And Eddie told her, “I was just fascinated with horses.”

  As a boy, he would board a school bus that passed Lucien Laurin’s Thoroughbred operation, Holly Hill Farm. Some days, Eddie skipped school to hang around Laurin’s farm, and Eddie’s mother would be furious when she learned of it. Eddie landed work at Holly Hill in the early 1950s—first as an exercise rider and then, when he got too heavy, as a groom. In time, he became the farm’s most trusted and most valued groom, the one given the prize horses to rub and brush, to load into vans and drive to faraway meets, the groom with “the touch.”

  “Lucien practically raised Eddie,” says Geraldine. “Lucien was his second family.” Laurin had taught him the basics—how to apply poultices and powders and all the rest. But Eddie’s father—part black, part Cherokee Indian, with white blood as well coursing in his veins—also taught Eddie some things.

  David Walker, a longtime racetrack groom who learned his craft at the feet of Eddie Sweat, his uncle, told me, “Eddie’s father, David Sweat, knew a lot about animals. He would go into the forest and gather herbs for his poultices. Eddie was the same way. For a damaged tendon in a horse, he would make a little potion, wrap him up, and the next thing you knew, that horse was walking. Eddie was the greatest groom who ever lived. He had a way with horses. He could get them to do things that no one else could.”

  Eddie’s first horse, one he loved very much, was a Thoroughbred called Lake Erie. The horse was not sound, but Eddie kept working on his legs. “The little horse ran good for me,” Eddie would later say. “He won every time I turned him loose, he must have won four or five straight. So that sort of gave me ‘the spirit’ of rubbing horses.” Then came Count Amber, and a son of his called Amberoid (winner of the 1966 Belmont Stakes), and Traffic and National, Tumiga, Bronzerullah, Lord Quillo. Eddie remembers a great many of the horses he has rubbed and much about them.

  But this day, he cannot quite grasp the fact that the horse who stands before him, who continues to look at him expectantly, will never run again. The horse will tear around his paddock when he has a mind to, but he will never again best other Thoroughbreds on the track, in front of a grandstand with every man, woman, and child standing up, screaming. Almost as bad, thinks Eddie, as clipping a hawk’s wings and confining him to a cage.

  “That ain’t right,” Eddie says to himself. “Makes no sense.” Then he pauses and wonders whether it makes any more sense that he will probably grieve till the day he dies over the loss of this horse.

  Eddie’s manner around horses is casual, yet protective and watchful, and he brooks no nonsense. What Secretariat loves about Eddie Sweat is that this man does not fear him (though he does, at times, fear for him, but that is another matter). Even a trace of fear in a human begets fear in a horse; calm usually begets calm. Attending to this horse has never been easy, yet they have come to an understanding, this horse, this groom.

  The difficulty, one that may well have stymied other grooms, is the horse’s princely air. He has had it since he was a foal roughhousing in the paddock, and he has it yet, a haughtiness to go with his coiled-spring athleticism. Secretariat is big-boned to boot—not overly tall, about 16.2 hands fully grown and shoes on, but imposing since he weighed two hundred pounds more than most Thoroughbreds. “He has muscles in his eyebrows,” the venerable racing scribe Charles Hatton once observed. Others were struck by the horse’s fearlessness in races, how he would burst through openings between horses—like a bruising halfback splitting linebackers, some said. In his early days, he was clownish and awkward and high-strung. One time after a race, a fan reached out to touch him and the horse scooted forward, driving Eddie into some ceremonial ropes near the winner’s circle and leaving burns on Eddie’s neck. Secretariat was a handful. And so smart that sometimes his jockey pretty much let the horse decide the winning tactic in a race.

  Eddie was never cowed by the horse he calls “Big Red,” but simply went about his business, as though he were brushing Billy Silver, the gentle Appaloosa gelding and track pony who was besotted with Secretariat.

  Brush in one hand, cloth in the other, Eddie used to lay on each as if guided by a metronome: brush and rub, brush and rub. As he worked from the front of the horse to the rear, Eddie would stand a little to the side. Any farther would have been construed by the horse as a sign of wariness or weakness, which would not do; any closer, Eddie knew, was pure recklessness. The horse would issue little kicks (warning shots across the prow, but more playful than menacing), swing out to the side, lean into Eddie’s body, and bob his head in protest or try to bite the brush.

  So much adrenaline, so much mischief, thinks Eddie, and he shakes his head in wonder and amazement as he looks into Secretariat’s eyes. He calls up all the times during handling when the big stallion reared up on him. Not because the stallion was mean or hot-tempered or crazy, but because he was so fit and primed and energized. “Hot to trot” did not begin to describe this horse. Secretariat could barely stand still when he wasn’t sleeping or eating. He was the boxer who could not stop shadowboxing.

  Jim Squires, who wrote Horse of a Different Color, talked about how hard it is to be a stallion’s keeper, especially a Thoroughbred stallion’s keeper. “Presumably because they are so valuable,” he
wrote, “Kentucky horses are in general the most protected, pampered, and undisciplined animals in existence. As a result, many of them— stallions in particular—are prone to bite, strike, kick and eat the very ‘hardboots’ who care for them.”

  Eddie laughs to himself, thinking of Secretariat when he was a brash two-year-old colt who would run from the sound of motors, as if someone had struck a match and set the flame against the horse’s skin. Time and miles cured this horse, as they do most horses. But even now, thinks Eddie, every motor—when it purrs but especially when it starts—stirs up in Secretariat the memory of that first encounter.

  Eddie can see it now. They were at Saratoga, in upper New York State, and exercise rider Jimmy Gaffney was walking Secretariat along the backstretch after a workout. Through the dawn mist, Jimmy could see someone get into a truck, and he knew what was coming. “Don’t start the truck!” he screamed, but the driver was already inside the cab and was beyond hailing. Jimmy could feel his horse tense beneath him, but there was nothing he could do. In the moment that engine fired, the horse he was riding all but vanished. Secretariat was so strong, so quick, and he could drop and shy sideways faster than a man can blink. Jimmy hit the ground, but, bless him, thinks Eddie, never lost his grip on the reins. The left hand held as the big horse dragged him over the track, onto the wet grass, and back toward the stable. Eddie conjures that red tail raised like a flag, that clipped mane aswirl in the wind, Jimmy skimming alongside like a human sled. Eventually, he did let go, and a groom caught the stallion between barns, but it was a long time before the pulses of everyone in Secretariat’s circle abated.

  Eddie knows the power of idle talk to calm a troubled horse. And brushing-time chat never much varied. “Stop it now! C’mon, Red. C’mon, Red. I’m gonna brush you now,” Eddie would plead. “You’re steppin’ on my toes. You tryin’ to put a foot in my pocket?”