The Horse God Built

by Lawrence Scanlan

  Ed Bogucki is a stickler for conformational detail, and he hunted down rare archival footage at the Arlington International Racecourse of Man o’War competing at the height of his career. He also borrowed photographs from fellow artist Helen Hayse, who had seen the original Big Red in person when she was a child and again when she was sixteen years old.

  Like Bogucki, Hayse made a point of including the groom in her art. Her oil painting of Man o’War, completed in 1987, shows the proud horse with Will Harbut, the horse looking somewhat tense but undeniably awesome, his groom so relaxed that you would think he were holding an old two-dollar-a-ride pony.

  Helen Hayse told Equine Images in 1991 that she never got over her first encounter with Man o’War. “He was magnificent,” she said. “He looked like an emperor should ride him at the head of a conquering army. In his middle years, when he was at his physical best, he was more muscular with a high head that looked out over the world, like he was the king of everything he surveyed.”

  A well-known equine artist, Hayse, who died in 2003, did five paintings of Man o’War before she was satisfied that she had captured him. In 1987, the same year she painted Man o’War, Hayse painted Secretariat and found herself comparing the two horses. Secretariat was pretty, Hayse maintained; “Man o’War was magnificent.”

  Ed Bogucki, who takes a different view, saw Secretariat in 1989. Bogucki pronounced him plump (in the rich archival literature on Secretariat, you can find ample testimony to back that observation). But even then, in his dotage, the horse had stature. “My impression,” Bogucki recalled, “was that he was carrying a lot of weight. I thought he was too heavy. I didn’t want to show him as he was then. I wanted him light and active and in the prime of his career. Still, for all that, I was impressed. He still had a lot of power, yet he was easy. You feel a stallion’s power even though he’s not running and you feel the greatness. He oozed it.”

  The sculptor, with the blessing of a stud groom at Claiborne, ran his hands over Secretariat. Bogucki checked out the horse’s cannon bones, fetlocks, knees, shoulders, withers, gaskins, the set of the tail. He watched him walk and run.

  “He did have the look of eagles,” said Bogucki. “It was a pleasure to run my hands over him, and he was so patient for all this.”

  Bogucki’s task for the Kentucky Horse Park show in 1991 was to create a one-third-life-size version of the horse. Like many sculptors, he was inclined to include the jockey. So, during the spring of 1990, Bogucki traveled to Saratoga Springs, New York, to meet with Ron Turcotte, who was there for celebrations to mark the fortieth anniversary of the Racing Hall of Fame. Bogucki photographed him, measured him, and videotaped him for the sake of accuracy. The sculptor had by then chosen the moment—just seconds after the Kentucky Derby win—he would immortalize.

  At that point, Eddie Sweat did not figure in the bronze that was forming in Ed Bogucki’s head. But as he pored over archival material, which he later admitted was “overwhelming” in size, he spotted one photograph that changed everything. It was a shot that Raymond Woolfe—author of a very fine photo essay entitled Secretariat—had taken the day that Eddie Sweat handed his horse over to the stud manager at Claiborne Farm. I had seen the photograph early on in my research and it immediately drew me to the character of Eddie Sweat. It struck me that here was a man of substance and great feeling. The image was of Eddie seen from behind and standing by a low wall while wiping a tear from his eye with his left hand. (Woolfe later told me that this black-and-white shot, and a similar one on the plane—of Secretariat gripping Eddie’s ski jacket with his teeth—are his two favorite images of the hundreds in the book. Many of the images are in color, and many are splendid, so his comment is telling.)

  “I knew Eddie liked the horse very much,” Bogucki told me, his comment purposely understated. “I knew he had to be in the statue and that the combination would make a good presentation. No one is closer to a horse than a groom. Eddie really loved that horse. To exclude him wouldn’t have been proper. The combination—Eddie and Secretariat—was essential to the Derby win.”

  In 1991, Bogucki asked Eddie Sweat—then rubbing horses, as ever, at Belmont in New York—to come to Wisconsin and check the nearly completed clay model for accuracy. Bogucki sent him plane tickets in the mail, but Eddie had to fit in the trip between morning and evening feedings at the track. It must have been a hectic day: from the airport in New York to the one in Milwaukee, then whisked out to Bogucki’s small farm in rural Wisconsin, three hours with the sculptor, and then back to New York and the track.

  The sculptor recalled how moved Sweat was to see himself included in the work. “You got my boots and my hat!” Eddie enthused when he got closer to the model. Sweat talked at length about what was happening in those adrenaline-filled moments after the Derby win. He confirmed what Ron Turcotte had earlier told Bogucki: The horse was still so wired, so “on the muscle,” that he practically dragged his groom all the way to the winner’s circle. The race had siphoned off only a portion of his drive.

  “Secretariat,” said Bogucki, “had a ton of energy left. His blood was pumping. For the bronze, I wanted the horse really collected and ready to burst out.”

  The groom has his right hand on the horse for a reason. “Eddie’s touch would have been a calming influence,” Bogucki said. “They’re talking. It’s almost a mental thing. You hook into an animal.” Then Bogucki told a story about training one of his Arab horses and how the horse would lose focus the instant Bogucki lost his. I heard him say that the connection between human and horse can be lost in a heartbeat, like a telephone connection. Suddenly, the line is dead. Eddie Sweat’s arm and voice—that and his intimacy with this horse—afforded such a connection.

  The other reason Eddie Sweat would have laid his hand on the horse, said the sculptor, was to get a sense of his intentions. The horse was so energized, and yet so caught in the crush of well-wishers, that the groom must have feared for their safety as well as his own. The horse would have instinctively moved into the groom’s rigid arm, offering Eddie Sweat at least a little control over a potentially dangerous circumstance.

  Eddie Sweat impressed the sculptor as a kind and gentle man. They connected immediately and talked, in a loose and amicable way, about buying a horse together. It was not idle talk, and it was a measure of how comfortable and trusting each was in the other’s company. “I had the pleasure,” Ed Bogucki said, “of having a very good friend very quickly. I genuinely liked and admired him. He was not a big man, but short and powerful and considerably strong. He was very dedicated in everything he did, and I wished I’d had the pleasure of knowing him longer.”

  For Ed Bogucki, the Secretariat bronze represents the contributions of all grooms, exercise riders, and hot walkers, the people who work on, and sometimes live on, shed row (or the backside, as some call it). They do so much, he told me, and get no credit.

  By this time, all my instincts as I researched my book were pointing me toward the backstretch. I was interested, of course, in Secretariat’s owner and trainer and jockey, but it was the so-called bottom echelon of Secretariat’s circle that now called to me. Eddie Sweat, his bond with that horse, how Eddie saw the horse, and, as best I could determine, how the horse viewed Eddie: That’s what I wanted to explore.

  It bothered Bogucki that Eddie was so subservient. “Hat in hand and all that crap” was how Bogucki put it. It was one of the first things the sculptor talked about when I met him outside an art gallery in Lexington in the summer of 2004. “Eddie would say, ‘Yes, boss’ when I’d ask him something,” Bogucki said. “ ‘I’m not your boss,’ I’d tell him. ‘Yes, boss,’ Eddie would reply.”

  Ed Bogucki was wearing blue jeans and a fashionable striped shirt. His white hair fell over his forehead in bangs, and he struck me as an older, thinner version of that TV performer from my childhood, Captain Kangaroo. Bogucki was seventy-two years old, though he looked far younger, and I thought of what an old horseman had once told me: “Horses keep yo
u young.”

  Sweat told Bogucki many stories about his old charge, including a funny one about why the horse was late arriving to the paddock for the Derby. It seems that Secretariat had nodded off and lain down in his stall before the race. Eddie had to rouse him, clean away the bits of bedding that were stuck to him, and make him presentable to the world of racing.

  The original small bronze from the art show at Kentucky Horse Park found, naturally enough, an admirer in Penny Chenery. She liked its vitality and spirit, and she set about organizing a fund-raising committee to commission another bronze by Bogucki. This one would be slightly different in some details. But more importantly, it would be life-size.

  In 1999, the fund-raiser got the kick-start it needed. Chenery contacted Sotheby’s and organized an international sale of Secretariat memorabilia through Amazon.com. Fans and admirers of the horse were also invited to contribute to the fund, and many did.

  Bogucki, meanwhile, also made a detail of the bronze—just the horse’s head and shoulders—and set it on a wooden base. He signed it “To Eddie Sweat, a friend.” But getting the minisculpture to Sweat proved difficult, for he could not be found. Finally, Bogucki got in touch with a racing broadcaster in New York named Andee Brown, who was able to find him. Brown organized a conference call, linking the sculptor and the groom. Sweat was recovering from open-heart surgery, and he seemed happy to know the statue was coming his way.

  This was late in 1997, when Eddie was also ill with leukemia, kidney disease, heart disease, and asthma, ailments that finally forced him to leave the employ of Roger Laurin (Lucien’s son) the following year. He died at North Shore University Hospital in Manhasset, New York, on April 18, 1998.

  Jimmy Gaffney knew that Eddie and his family were in need of help in the days before he died. Through a mutual friend, the exercise rider sent the groom a check. But the friend brought it back. Eddie did not have a bank account and therefore could not cash the check. Gaffney sent him cash instead.

  “Can you imagine?” Gaffney said to me. “No bank account.”

  Gaffney had read somewhere that Eddie Sweat had gambled away a lot of the money he had earned while grooming Secretariat. Gaffney was simply lofting a clay pigeon in order to shoot it down, and this he did quickly and with alacrity, the anger rising in him as he spoke. Cancer has destroyed Gaffney’s saliva glands, so that sometimes, on the phone, there would be a pause while he took a drink of water to lubricate his throat.

  “Eddie never gambled in his life,” said Gaffney. “He never bet the horses.” It irked Gaffney that some reporter had besmirched the reputation of a friend, a good and honest man. Pity that Eddie Sweat did not possess Jimmy Gaffney’s entrepreneurial spirit. Gaffney, you see, had saved some of Secretariat’s horseshoes—forty of them—and fortified his track pension by selling them. One shoe, worn in the horse’s first race, was recently auctioned off for thirteen thousand dollars.

  Gaffney knew when he rode Secretariat that he was going to be a great champion. “Right away,” he told me, “I noticed his power. He was a little rough and hard to hold and he had a habit of ducking left on the track when a rider would pull him up after a gallop, a habit we corrected with a full-cheek snaffle [a type of bit]. But there was just something about him. It’s hard to explain, but even in the walk you could feel his power.”

  Gaffney told Bill Nack, “Start taking notes.” Nack was then a track hound hard on the trail of Riva Ridge, and he must have heard many hot tips in his days on the backstretch. This was one he acted on. “I’ve been on good horses all my life,” Gaffney said. “I was the first one to recognize Secretariat’s greatness. And I rode him just about every day for thirteen months. I told my mother, ‘This is going to be a great horse.’ I knew that sucker could run.”

  Raymond Woolfe’s book contains several shots of Jimmy Gaffney up on the two-year-old Secretariat. In one, the rider is up out of the saddle and perched over the horse’s neck and flying mane. “Galloping in the early days,” the caption reads. All of the horse’s feet are off the ground, and there is great symmetry in the image. I am jealous of the rider’s position; I want to be up there, feeling all that power under restraint.

  In another shot, likely taken right after the gallop, the rider has stopped his horse and turned him sideways to pose for the camera. Exercise rider Charlie Davis is on another horse behind, but he looks nowhere near as pleased as Gaffney. The eye is drawn first to his horse, to the slight tension in him, and the undeniable look of pride on Jimmy Gaffney’s face. He has strong arms, strong eyebrows and hawkish features. His smile does indeed seem to say, This sucker I’m on can run. One day you’ll read about him.

  In other images, these in color, Gaffney is seen in his red riding helmet, the goggles attached, and a bright yellow cardigan—“Perry Como sweaters,” we used to call them—which seems at odds with his brown leather riding boots. Gaffney is holding Secretariat, facing him as someone else hoses him down. The veins are popping at the horse’s neck and shoulder. Another shot shows Gaffney hot-walking the big horse after that same bath. A big red blanket, edged in black, with ll (for Lucien Laurin) at the haunch, drapes the horse. Secretariat has a soft look in his eye and, with the blanket tucked up close to his head, reminds me of an infant swaddled and ready for sleep.

  Gaffney said he cried when Secretariat won the Triple Crown, and he cried again on those few occasions when the horse lost. He is most bitter about the Wood Memorial on April 21, 1973, when Secretariat finished third, four lengths back.

  Gaffney rode the horse three-eighths of a mile the day before the race and found him sluggish, so much so that he had to kick him into gear. He knew there was something wrong with the horse, and he reported that fact to Henry Hoeffner, an assistant to Laurin. Meanwhile, there had been a death in Laurin’s family—that of his father-in-law. The result was high stress in the Meadow Stable’s barn and also confusion, and it’s unclear whether Laurin was actually aware of the dramatic change in the horse’s condition. A vet, meanwhile, had discovered a small abscess in Secretariat’s mouth just before the race, but he didn’t believe it was problematic. In any case, wisely or not, Secretariat ran in the Wood Memorial.

  Laurin and Gaffney then had what the latter called “a big blowout,” and Gaffney quit Laurin’s employ just before the Belmont.

  If Eddie Sweat had died penniless, Jimmy Gaffney blamed the trainer. He remembered Laurin saying to him, “ ‘Stick with this horse, Jimmy, and I’ll take good care of you.’” Gaffney told me, “I worked my ass off. I really made Secretariat into a champion racehorse. But my bonus was nothing like what I expected. ‘I’ll make it up to you,’ Lucien told me. Well, he never did.”

  Jimmy Gaffney has a vivid memory of sitting on a bale of hay, drinking a can of beer, with Eddie Sweat after one of Secretariat’s victories. The owner and trainer were heading off to a champagne dinner, and Eddie and Jimmy looked on as the limousines pulled up.

  I offered the opinion that nowhere is the disparity between the haves and have-nots played out quite so dramatically as it is on the racetrack. The winner’s circle inevitably excludes the very ones who know the horse best and love him most. I told Gaffney that although I had never met Eddie Sweat, I did have a powerful sense of the man, and the more I learned about him, the more outraged I was that he had died so poor. Ed Bogucki had included him in the bronze, but the process of exclusion continued in other ways. “Where,” I asked, “was Eddie Sweat’s family at the time of the unveiling? Were they not invited? Where was Charlie Davis, the black exercise rider who also rode Secretariat? Where, for that matter, were the African-American admirers of Secretariat? Are there none?”

  “It’s funny you should say that,” Gaffney replied. “My wife was there, and she said the exact same thing.” Then I told Gaffney about something I had read, somewhere among all the clippings at the Keeneland Library: that Eddie Sweat had somehow squandered his earnings.

  “Are you kiddin’ me?” Gaffney shot back. He was practically sp
itting rage at this wild untruth that had found its way into print.

  During a long telephone conversation just before he died, Eddie Sweat had apparently complained to Jimmy Gaffney that he had been badly treated. I’m not sure that Eddie used those precise words, but that, apparently, was the sentiment. Did Eddie mean that his contributions as a gifted groom had not been fully recognized? Did he mean that the wages of a groom—even the groom of the great Secretariat—don’t amount to a hill of beans, and that only as he lay dying did he fully grasp that fact? Or was he voicing, finally, a lament on behalf of all on shed row whose love for a horse begets them that horse’s love, and precious little else?

  The night before the unveiling, there was a black-tie dinner in Lexington, to which Gaffney and his wife were invited. “Now I’m invited to some of these parties. I wasn’t then,” he said, meaning the early 1970s, when he was part of backstretch society. The beer/champagne divide was, and is, as tall as some horses.

  But for all his bitterness, and he is palpably bitter, Jimmy Gaffney loved the work of exercise rider. “I did it all my life,” he said. “I miss the smell of a horse, right now. And I loved Secretariat. Despite anything you may have read, he was not a dangerous horse. He might nip Eddie if Eddie was working around the horse’s testicles, but he wasn’t mean; he was playful. He had this unique way of accelerating; he’d pull his legs up and out. It was very unusual, but it sure worked.”