The Horse God Built

by Lawrence Scanlan

  Bill Nack took down that banter while researching his book Big Red of Meadow Stable, and while the words were all uttered in English, they were delivered tonally—as if Eddie were speaking Vietnamese. “I spent many hours watching Eddie work,” Nack told me. “He talked to the horse, but it was all a singsong to keep the horse’s mind busy. Secretariat, of course, didn’t understand English, but he did understand tone. So Eddie spoke in diphthongs.”

  Nack was once asked by a racing fan to name some of the most fascinating personalities he had encountered in his many decades around racetracks. He named Eddie Sweat first, calling him “one of the most memorable characters I’ve met in racing.” Then he named Angel Cordero, Jr., whose signature move was the leaping dismount. Finally, Nack named the groom Sloan “Duck Butter” Price. I admire Nack—for his writing, and for his unsentimental view of the track, and I found it telling that two of his choices were black grooms, and that Shorty Sweat topped his list.

  Marvin Moorer, Eddie’s firstborn son (Marvin had decided in his youth to take on his mother’s name, for personal reasons), is a former racetrack groom who worked with his father at Belmont between 1983 and 1987. Marvin watched him work with Secretariat a lot. What Marvin later remembered was that Eddie spoke to the horse in a southern Creole language known as Geechee, or Gullah.

  A blend of English and several West African languages, including Yoruba and Ibo, Gullah can still be heard on the coasts and islands of South Carolina and Georgia. Gullah culture formed centuries ago when people from Barbados and West Africa were brought as slaves to the islands to grow rice, indigo, and cotton. Depending on what’s being said, the singsong oral language can sound like an English dialect or be almost incomprehensible to an English speaker. Here are a few samples: Uh yeddy um but uh ain sheum, which means “I have heard of him, but I haven’t seen him.” Or this, from the translation of the New Testament into Gullah, a twenty-five-year project that was just completed in 2005: “Fo God mek de wol, de Wod been dey. De Wod been dey wid God, an de Wod been God.” (“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God.”)

  Marvin recalled watching his father in the stall as Eddie asked Secretariat to pick up his left front foot, and the horse did it. “I thought,” said Moorer, “Is this a trick they’ve put on for my benefit?” There came from Eddie a constant chatter, delivered in the firm belief that this horse was grasping every word and nuance. And the measure of his trust in the horse, said Marvin, was that Eddie would sometimes brush him in the barn corridor—without cross-ties. I liken it to holding a hawk on your arm without leather protection and relying on trust and instinct to spare you from the talons’ squeeze.

  “I know what you want,” Eddie would say to Secretariat. And, of course, Eddie did know. Heaven for a horse is a handler who speaks your language, and fluently.

  Sometimes, the ritual between them would take a sour turn. As if his patience had finally been exhausted, Eddie would bark at the horse and just glare at him. Secretariat took it like a needed slap in the face. He would retreat, lower his head, even step back some and make little licking and chewing motions with his mouth. It is what horses do when they offer peace.

  Eddie insists on, and gets, respect. A horse needs to know that his handler understands him and will not be intimidated. Secretariat would want what all horses want: a worthy leader to trust and follow and count on. In Eddie Sweat, Secretariat has gotten that, and much more.

  A handler can be too cocky or too careful, and Eddie has found the middle ground. No one understands this horse like this groom. On matters of feeding and workload and routine horse doctoring, the horse’s trainer has often deferred to Eddie. And Secretariat leans on him, too, as many on hand this eleventh day in November of 1973 will attest.

  Secretariat was flown earlier in the day to this, his new home in north-central Kentucky. Eddie swallows hard as he remembers the trip. The L-188 speeding down the runway, engines loudly droning, Eddie in the hold with the horses—Secretariat and his running mate, Riva Ridge. Eddie had taken up a position directly in front of Secretariat, like a stewardess holding a nervous passenger’s hand. Man and horse faced each other, pressed into each other, a small human forehead touching a massive equine brow. Eddie had seen a hint of worry in the horse’s eyes; Secretariat, with his teeth, had taken a grip on Eddie’s ski jacket. Eddie closed his eyes and, with his mouth open slightly, breathed in the very essence of the horse, as if to store the memory somewhere deep inside him.

  Eddie led Secretariat off the plane at Lexington and onto a van and finally passed him over to the stud-farm managers at Claiborne. He had to explain the great horse’s likes and dislikes, in the manner of a worrisome mother listing to a new baby-sitter the salient and particular needs of her only child. How this horse hates motors and having his ears touched. Loves oats and cut-up carrots more than sweets or hay. Loves to play with his doffed halter like a dog tugging on his own leash. Can tire of adoring crowds but actually likes having his picture taken. Eddie thinks of all the times he has held the horse on a lead shank before a circle of photographers and fans come to see the legend in the flesh.

  Secretariat is still fresh off dramatic victories in the Derby, the Preakness, the Belmont. Named Horse of the Year, he is a champion racer with $1.3 million in earnings, the first Triple Crown winner since 1948, and now he will take on new duties at this farm as a breeding stallion with six million dollars’ worth of work lined up for the rest of his days. At this moment in time, the fall of 1973, no stallion on earth is worth more. Owner, trainer, and jockey have all shared in the Secretariat windfall. Old track traditions and hierarchies have meant that the groom—the one human the horse seems to cherish— has gotten only one or two apples of the many golden ones that have fallen in Secretariat’s considerable wake. The most celebrated groom of his day, a virtual security blanket to a champion horse, Eddie is still just another backstretch gypsy, traveling from barn to track, barn to track, where he has often slept on a cot by Secretariat’s stall, rising before dawn, shoveling horse manure, earning base wages. He is an eminently skilled horseman earning an unskilled laborer’s wage and living a migrant worker’s life.

  Eddie is only sad now. If he should experience moments of bitterness later on, they will be years, decades, down the road. For now, he still sups on privilege. And yet no one has borne the burden of Secretariat as Eddie has.

  The horse’s racing career spanned some seven hundred days, only twenty-one of them actual race days. All the others were rest days, workout days, travel days, days of fending off the press and adoring fans. The pressure sometimes wore on Eddie. “If anything goes wrong,” he would say, “it’s my responsibility.”

  No more. This afternoon, a new handler, Lawrence Robinson, had a go at leading Secretariat, but the horse immediately declared his allegiance to Eddie Sweat. The horse’s magnificent hind end, the one that a racing writer once likened to the motor on a Sherman tank, swung around and, in a blur, he nailed his new handler in the rump with a cow kick. The new man, the caretaker of stallions at this legendary stud farm, is neither green nor unthinking—far from it. This was all the horse’s doing. At one point during his little tantrum, Secretariat turned and looked directly at Eddie, who appeared small and uncomfortable in his new role as bystander. The horse’s look said, What is going on here? Why him and not you?

  Eddie stays a week at Claiborne to help with the transition. He knows, as does Lucien Laurin, that Secretariat will not tolerate the sudden loss of his beloved groom. The horse is weaned off his handler slowly, like a foal from a mare.

  Eddie later tells a reporter why he’s so sad. “I guess a groom gets closer to a horse than anyone,” he says. “The owner, the trainer, they maybe see him once a day. But I lived with him, worked with him.” Then, while staring into Secretariat’s new stall, Eddie makes a chirping sound, and the horse responds instantly by pricking his ears and moving closer to Eddie.

  “Well,” says Eddie, in a voice soft an
d tinged with unspeakable mournfulness and aimed at the horse, “it’s all over now. They’ll never forget you, big fella. Never.”

  What the man really means is that he, Shorty Sweat, will never forget this horse. Eddie has never encountered a horse like this one and he will sorely miss Secretariat’s kindness, his curiosity, his heart. God, such a heart. “This is a hurting thing to me,” he will later tell a friend, understated as always. “I’m so sad I didn’t even want to bring him over here. It’s been a wonderful two years. Now it seems like my whole career has ended.” Eddie is thirty-four years old.

  He ponders leaving the track. He considers, only briefly, becoming a truck driver—with steady wages and hours. His wife, Linda, wants him to quit the track. But the horses are in his blood, and the shed row, for all its vagaries, calls to him.

  He puts it this way to a reporter: “I’ve been at it a long time. Like I told my wife before I married her, ‘Before I met you I was with the horses and I’ll still be doing it long after you’re gone.’” It’s as if he thinks himself blessed by a life with horses—so blessed, he will outlive Linda.

  Eddie remembers the first time he saw Secretariat, and how he dismissed the colt. A song by Roberta Flack comes to him, a song he heard often that year on barn radios: “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face.” Too pretty, he thought then of Secretariat. Too damn fat. Eddie and the other barn rats started calling him “Ol’ Hopalong” for the way the young colt devoured oats, put on pounds, and gracelessly took to the track.

  Eddie had told Canadian Horseman in 1973, when he was in Toronto for the Canadian International Stakes, “I didn’t think much of him when we first got him. I thought he was just a big clown. He was real clumsy and a bit on the wild side, you know. And I remember saying to myself I didn’t think he was going to be an outstanding horse.” The Meadow, the farm in Virginia where Secretariat was born, had seen a few Bold Ruler colts, and they had a reputation for running three-quarters of a mile and then quitting. Eddie thought the pretty red horse was in that mold.

  Two years later—and Eddie smiles at the thought—Ol’ Hopalong has joined Nixon and Watergate, Vietnam and Woodstock on the front pages of every newspaper in the land. There is only one hero in 1973, and he is “The People’s Horse,” the one who still eyes his groom at Claiborne with an air of expectancy.

  Eddie Sweat has been around horses most of his life and he has never come so close to perfection. Everywhere Secretariat has gone, people have wanted to touch him—before the race, after the race, even, on occasion, during the race. Every day for two years, thinks Eddie Sweat, that’s been my job: to touch greatness. And now it’s over. He turns his back on the stall and walks away, fixes his gaze on the lush fields at Claiborne and discreetly wipes a tear from his left eye. He does not, dares not, look back.

  A RARITY

  No one could have predicted Secretariat’s greatness, or that of Seattle Slew, Seabiscuit, or Man o’War. It is what keeps every trainer in the game—the hope that the next superhorse is, at this very moment, out in the middle field, the dark bay foal, say, sucking hard on his mare’s teats.

  Gus Gray, a trainer I met in Ocala, Florida, early in 2005, told me then he had a colt who was going to win the 2006 Kentucky Derby. “You can lay down your bet right now,” he assured me. “The horse”—and Gus owned half of him—“got these big eyes, like a eagle. When you see him, you done seen the champion.” The colt’s name was John in the Cloud, and his ancestors included Tri Jet, Tom Fool, Storm Cat, Swaps, and Bold Ruler (the sire of Secretariat).

  But the odds were massively stacked against his winning (and sure enough, he did not make the entry list): Derby winners are exceedingly rare, and only eleven horses in history have ever won the Triple Crown. I remember a European rider’s term for the Canadian show jumper Big Ben, a term he used with affection: “That horse,” he told me, “is a freak.” Just as Secretariat was a freak.

  Secretariat’s owner, Penny Chenery, would be the first to admit that breeding horses is a genetic crapshoot. She told me that Secretariat, “next to having my children, was the most remarkable event in my life. But he was not my creation or accomplishment. We just got lucky.” Secretariat’s full sister, a filly called The Bride, was a fine broodmare but did nothing on the track.

  When a great one like Secretariat comes along, we feel as if a blessing has been bestowed upon us. And it has. A great comet has streaked across a black sky and we happen to have been walking along a dark country road and seen the celestial rarity in all its brilliance. We will tell our grandchildren what a marvel it was, one that made us feel both small and exalted at the same time. While that comet burned and cast its shimmering light, the world seemed a more beautiful place, and it felt good to be alive.

  1

  RED HORSE, BLACK ANGEL

  EIGHT IN THE MORNING north of Lexington under a bright summer sun, and this corner of the sprawling theme park in Kentucky already has the feel of a lively small-town fair. A long row of white domed tents—spires on top, blue pennants flying—offers shade to the peddlers setting up their wares. Strange to say, given the breakfast hour, but the smell of grilled burgers and hot dogs is in the air, the sno-cone sellers are doing a brisk business, and it seems like every hawker of Secretariat memorabilia in America has booked kiosk space here under that hot Confederate sun. It’s Secretariat Day at Kentucky Horse Park.

  Kentucky Horse Park is a twelve-hundred-acre working horse farm and theme park, with more than fifty breeds on display and all manner of horse shows running from February to December. The big Rolex eventing competition takes place here, along with dressage and rodeo and hunter/jumper shows and Pony Club rallies. The park is a mecca for the horsey set and will be the site of the 2010 World Equestrian Games.

  Earlier, a volunteer at the entryway dropped into my hand a keepsake—a Secretariat button. Inside a white circle is the head of a red horse wearing blue-and-white blinkers, red for the horse’s chestnut coat, blue and white the colors of Meadow Stable. From trees inside the park hang oversized blue pennants with the same image at the top and, below, these words:

  SECRETARIAT

  BRONZE STATUE

  UNVEILING

  July 17, 2004

  Secretariat.com

  Browsers are cruising the tents and filling up their shopping bags, apparently undeterred by the lofty prices of almost everything. The only free thing here is Big Red gum, with packets going to anyone who can answer this skill-testing question. (Warning: If you didn’t get “Who’s buried in Grant’s Tomb?” you may not get this one, either.) “What was Secretariat’s nickname?” a cheery woman in a red T-shirt asks me while offering a pack of Big Red gum. A huge poster at her kiosk announces the 2004 Secretariatfest and the prospect of “officially licensed merchandise”—Secretariat teddy bears and key chains, little plastic Secretariat snow globes, Big Red pens. I pass the test, get the gum, and try some. It’s awful. Awful pricey describes some of the art here, and I am reminded of this fact: Many are drawn to the memory of a great horse and many are trying to capitalize— sometimes artfully, sometimes in a tacky way.

  I, too, am drawn to the memory of a great horse. My mission—to paint a fresh portrait in words of the great Secretariat—has brought me to this unveiling thousands of miles from home. I’ve caught wind, you see, of a curious fact: The bronze we are about to see will feature not just the horse, with his jockey up, but the groom. Think of all the bronzes, paintings, even photographs of legendary horses. In most, the horse alone is captured for posterity, and in some works of art, the jockey has a place on the great runner’s back. The groom, the lowly groom, is almost never depicted.

  I have hardly begun my journey, but already there’s a theme for the book cooking in my brain. The theme is connectedness between a human and an animal, and day by day I’m realizing that the exquisite horse whose story I would tell had forged a profound connection with the man who cared for him—cared for him in every sense of the phrase. And it seems that Secreta
riat’s sculptor and I are of the same mind. We want to honor the one rarely honored: the groom.

  Ron Turcotte has arrived at the park in his wheelchair. He has driven all the way from New Brunswick, Canada, in his van and hooked up in Lexington with his brother, Aurele, who has flown down from his home in Quebec. Air travel, Ron Turcotte tells me, is a nightmare for those who use wheels to get around. He gave up on it a long time ago. He’s wearing a blue blazer with a round decal over his heart that shows a stylized horse and jockey in a Stars and Stripes motif. The jacket is the one they gave him when he was inducted into Thoroughbred Racing’s Hall of Fame at Saratoga in 1979. On Turcotte’s right lapel is a pin that depicts the Secretariat postage stamp issued in 1999.

  The memorabilia buyers soon suss him out and line up to have him sign their framed photos of Secretariat, bobble-head dolls, posters, framed art, T-shirts, and ball caps. Turcotte is wearing a sea blue cap of his own. breed more secretariats, it reads.

  A vendor is trying to persuade Turcotte to sign a ceramic jockey’s boot—a replica of the one he wore during his Triple Crown rides, black, with wide brown trim at the top. Vendor and jockey seem to be negotiating. This is what baseball, football, and hockey players complain about: merchandisers who use an athlete’s signature to jack up the price of their wares. I am astonished by the range and the sentimentality of some of these wares, and I wonder, Who buys these trinkets? And do china-shop rules apply? If Turcotte drops the ceramic boot, is it, de facto, his?

  An old jock like Turcotte is used to autograph hounds and he doesn’t mind keeping them waiting while he poses for photos with some track cronies. One is another ex-jockey, Bobby Ussery, who rode against Turcotte umpteen times and Secretariat a few times. He is wearing a U.S.A. ball cap and a blue shirt with the top three buttons undone to reveal a hairy, fleshy chest and about a pound of gold jewelery at his neck. The two old jocks are laughing, with Turcotte telling some tale from decades ago—something about wrestling in the tack room with another jockey for possession of a wallet.