The Horse God Built

by Lawrence Scanlan

  As for Eddie Sweat, Gaffney has an image of him driving Lucien Laurin’s red horse van—to and from Belmont, to and from South Carolina, to and from Florida. For Gaffney, the image of Eddie behind the wheel of that van speaks volumes of the great confidence that owner and trainer had in him. In the barn, on the highway, night or day, Shorty Sweat, they knew, would always do right by the horses entrusted to him. “He had a way with horses,” said Gaffney. “He knew how to manage them. It’s hard to say what distinguishes a good groom from a bad groom, but Eddie was Lucien’s best groom. He was reliable; he was there all the time.”

  There is a saying on the backstretch to describe a groom preparing a horse after a race—rubbing him down, bathing him, organizing his food, blanketing him, making him comfortable: “Do him up,” a trainer will say, and the groom will know, or should, precisely what that means. By all accounts, Eddie could do a horse up as well as, or better than, anyone else in the business.

  Groom to a multimillion-dollar horse, he died a pauper. In an author’s note to the 2002 edition of Secretariat: The Making of a Champion, Bill Nack wrote that Eddie Sweat’s handling of Secretariat had made him “the most renowned groom in America.” That groom lives on in Ed Bogucki’s bronze, but bronze is cold. Cold comfort.

  Bill Nack spoke longest that day at the Kentucky Horse Park when the bronze of Secretariat was unveiled. He seemed an old hand at the lectern, relaxed and chatty. He linked his stories together in a neat garland, as if he had told these tales a thousand times before, which, no doubt, he had, for more than thirty years had passed since the first telling.

  What impresses me most about William Nack—elegantly dressed that day in a gray tweed jacket and a yellow tie dappled with variously colored profiles of jockeys’ torsos—is how lyrically and yet how quickly he wrote, always to a magazine’s deadline, about Secretariat. He seemed to be on the scene for every critical moment in the horse’s life: every race, many of his workouts, every critical passage. Nack had the sense, and the good fortune, to be there and to get it all down.

  Nack even compiled, with the aid of Lucien Laurin and his assistant Henry Hoeffner, a log detailing the horse’s training regimen for every single day from January 20, 1972, when the horse arrived at Hialeah from the Meadow Stud, to November 12, 1973, when he was shipped from Belmont to Claiborne Farm.

  I had seen a copy of the log at Keeneland Library. The type clearly emanated from a typewriter—a Corona, it turns out—and it speaks volumes of Nack’s mission that he would set out to compose such a logbook, like a courtier following in a king’s footsteps as he walked in sand day after day, the courtier measuring and recording in his book the depth and size of the print, the length of stride, the weather and circumstances of the day.

  “Walk,” the log might read, or “Jog,” “Gallop,” “Half mile in 473⁄5.” Every race, too, was listed. Sometimes there was an asterisk, as for September 16, 1972, when Secretariat won the Futurity Stakes at Belmont. Beside the asterisk is this note: “Ron Turcotte hit Secretariat and went faster than Lucien wanted him to go. ‘He’s just a baby,’ Lucien scolded. ‘You’re asking too much of him.’”

  Nack’s long features in Sports Illustrated on Secretariat’s life and, especially, his death are some of the finest sports journalism I have ever read.

  It has been said of Bill Nack that he was to Secretariat what James Boswell was to Samuel Johnson: chief biographer (though Raymond Woolfe might have something to say about that). Nack told a magazine reporter in 1998 something of his own biography: In the summer of 1958, he was a hot walker at Arlington Park in Chicago. He had a notion then of not going to college. “I want to go off with the horses,” young Nack told his parents, who reacted as if he had announced his intention to join the circus or become a hobo. Eventually, he did go to the University of Illinois, then fought in Vietnam in the 1968 Tet Offensive. Later, he was hired by Newsday (Long Island), where he reported on politics and the environment.

  At the magazine’s Christmas party in 1971, the eggnog no doubt flowing, Bill Nack stood on a table and recounted every Kentucky Derby winner from 1875 (a horse called Aristides) to the present. That remarkable bit of theater won him the job as Newsday’s racing writer.

  “I couldn’t stop smiling,” he said of the time. “They made my hobby my job.”

  He also had good luck. What if he had picked Sham as the horse he would follow and chronicle? But Nack knows bloodlines, and the Bold Ruler/Princequillo “nick,” or combination of bloodlines, was a notable one. Nack was following his own instincts as well as Gaffney’s tip when he started taking notes on the young Secretariat.

  Nack began his address at the unveiling by citing the ancient Greeks, who thought that the horse, along with the human form, was perfection itself. And in all his years at the track, the sixty-something Nack said he had never seen a horse’s conformation to match that of Secretariat. He marveled at the horse’s enthusiasm for competition and he called the horse’s Triple Crown victory the greatest feat in the history of Thoroughbred horse racing, and one of the greatest feats in the history of sport in America. “He remains,” said Nack, “a platonic ideal of the racehorse.”

  Nack recalled a particular assignment in the wake of Secretariat’s dramatic win at Belmont on June 9, 1973—this was the race he had won by thirty-one lengths, setting an American record. Nack’s task was to find out where certain prominent people had been during that race.

  “I had some fun with it,” he began. “I found out from my friend [sportswriter] Heywood Hale Broun that Jack Nicklaus, the great golfer, was watching the Belmont Stakes at home. He ended up on all fours on his den floor, pounding on the floor, as this horse turned for home. Friends looking on were perplexed or aghast, or both. He said, ‘I don’t know anything about horse racing, but for some reason I was pounding on the floor and tears were coming down.’ And he said to Heywood Hale Broun, ‘Woody, I don’t understand it. Help me understand it.’ And Broun said to him, ‘Jack, your entire life as a golfer has been a search for perfection. And on June the ninth, you saw it and you recognized it for what it was.’ ”

  In the press box that day at Belmont, there was what Nack called “pandemonium.” Meanwhile, up on the third floor—in the track’s dining room, in fact—Pete Rozelle was also watching the race. Nack described Rozelle, the commissioner of the National Football League, indeed the father of the modern NFL, as “a very distinguished man.”

  Rozelle told Nack that what he remembered most about the race was that during Secretariat’s spine-tingling stretch run, he felt someone’s hands around his ankles. His first thought was that someone had collapsed at his feet. “And I realized,” said Rozelle, “I was standing on my table! I have no idea to this day how I got there.”

  Everyone who had been inside that sprawling, high-ceilinged tent in Lexington laughed, all doubtless remembering where they had been when that race was run.

  Later, Nack told us, he asked Ron Turcotte what it was like to be on the great horse’s back in the last seconds of the Belmont, what he heard and saw. “I heard Sham’s hooves disappear behind me,” replied the jockey, referring to the horse who finished fifth and last that day after vying for the lead right up to the homestretch. “And then there was nothing,” Turcotte went on. “All I could hear was Secretariat breathing and his hooves hitting the ground. It was very quiet.”

  Many racing fans assume that all the noise of the grandstand, all that thunder of the hooves, is as loud for the jockeys as it is for spectators. Not so, says contemporary Canadian jockey Chantal Sutherland. She likens that minute or so during a race to entering a tunnel where all is quiet. “You could whisper to the jockey beside you during a race,” she once said, “and he could hear you.”

  What Ron Turcotte heard as he headed for the finish line that day in June of 1973 was an almost surreal quiet—just his horse’s breathing and the drumming of his hooves. There was another sound, that of bedlam in the stands as the rafters shook, but Turcotte said it sound
ed like ocean surf to someone walking just out of sight of the sea. At the mile-and-an-eighth pole, the jockey heard a voice at the hedge yelling, “Ron, go on with that horse!” But when Turcotte looked, there was no one there. “I think,” Nack told us, “Ronnie assumed it was God,” and we laughed.

  In the Belmont, all the horses carried 126 pounds, so Turcotte was able to use his favorite saddle—not one of those flat, tiny leather things, but a heavy cushioned saddle. The jockey once said that riding a racing saddle is like sitting on two rods; riding this big saddle on that big striding horse, he said, was like sitting on a comfortable sofa.

  “He was such a nice horse to gallop,” Ron Turcotte was saying, reminiscing on the phone one morning from his home in Drummond, New Brunswick. The unveiling was months away.

  “I’ve heard all kinds of stories about Secretariat,” he told me, stories about how mean or spooky the horse was. “The truth is, he never did a thing wrong. He was the kindest horse in the world.” Turcotte did remember that morning in New York early on in schooling when Secretariat dropped his first rider. But that was nothing. Jockeys fall off young horses; it’s as common as rain dripping down windowpanes.

  “Ask anyone,” Turcotte went on, pleading Secretariat’s case. “Charlie Davis and I used to play around. With me on Secretariat and him on another horse, we’d grab each other, goose each other.” The big red horse did not blink an eye.

  As for Eddie Sweat, Ron Turcotte heaped praise on the man in the same way that everyone who knew him did. “Eddie was special,” the jockey said. “He was special to me. Horses were his life. He was a dedicated, good horseman. That day at Claiborne, he just sat there crying. He just broke down. He had a deeper feeling for that horse. You don’t see a dedicated horseman like that anymore. Before the Derby, Eddie slept on a cot in front of Secretariat’s stall to make sure no one got to the horse. You didn’t have to worry with Eddie. Any horse he looked after was well monitored and guarded.”

  How was he with horses? I asked Turcotte. He replied that a mean horse would start the day trying to take a chunk out of Eddie, but by day’s end, Eddie had that horse eating out of his hand. “He would never scold a horse,” the jockey said. “Even if a horse were to rip his pants or take a nip out of him, he would never slap a horse. He’d raise his voice a little and he would stare him down. My brother, Noel, and I, that’s how we learned. The mean horses, you just leave them alone and stare them down. He ignores you; you ignore him. Those stories about horse whisperers? Eddie was beyond that. The horse would come to him.”

  Ron Turcotte likewise had a reputation for getting along with horses. When he worked with his father cutting lumber in the bush around Grand Falls, New Brunswick, he had a favorite workhorse, a Canadian (the breed, I mean) called Bess. “I loved her,” he once said. “She was almost human.” When his father sold the horse during a long period of unemployment (there were eleven children to feed), Turcotte’s feelings were hurt and he headed off to Toronto, hoping to find work as a roofer. But a carpenters’ strike put that notion on hold and he survived by digging worms at golf courses during the night. One day, as he paid his rent at the boardinghouse where he was staying, he noticed the Kentucky Derby being shown on television, and his landlord suggested he get a job at the track.

  At Woodbine, he was hired on as a hot walker for Pete McCann, trainer for Windfields Farm. Run by E. P. Taylor, Windfields was the most prestigious Thoroughbred farm in Canada and one of the great racing operations in North America. The pay was thirty-five dollars a week; accommodation was a cot in the tack room. Then Turcotte became a groom, and a demanding former jockey named George Thompson was soon showing him the ropes as exercise rider. Turcotte’s was a tough apprenticeship: After the first day of riding he was so tired and sore, he could not climb the stairs to his room. Later, on the advice of another jockey, he ate with his left hand for months so the crop would feel natural in either hand. He was not afraid to use the stick, but he never used it needlessly. The muscled rider with the tree-trunk legs got on with his mounts.

  I reminded Turcotte of that greeting he used to give Secretariat: He would reach into the horse’s mouth and grab his tongue as if shaking a hand. “Eddie would do the same thing,” Turcotte said. “He’d grab the tip of Secretariat’s tongue to wish him good morning. Before you knew it, every time Eddie passed his stall, the horse stuck out his tongue.”

  Ron Turcotte says he used to dream of horses from his early youth, as far back as he can remember. “All boys drew cars,” he said. “I drew horses.” But not even in his dreams could he have conjured up a horse like Secretariat.

  “Riding him,” he told me, “it was like a pleasure ride. He was so agréable [agreeable]. It was something you dream of. I’d be on him, thinking I was Roy Rogers on Trigger. I’d teach him something one day, and the next day he would do it.”

  In the days leading up to the unveiling of the bronze, I feel the need to see those Triple Crown races once again. Jenifer Stermer, the curator of collections at Kentucky Horse Park, takes me into a small room off the museum; then she wheels in a television on a high metal cart, a VCR, and a mittful of videos on Secretariat. I will watch the races in their entirety all by my lonesome in that tiny, high-ceilinged room.

  There, in the minutes before the Derby, is Eddie Sweat, looking cool in a red hat. Charlie Davis is up on Billy Silver, providing company and solace to Ron Turcotte and Secretariat. I get a chill seeing the pair move from last at the first turn and then charge for home. In the Preakness, it is the same. Last at the first turn, then the charge from behind. Here comes Secretariat. I am taping all this, so I can replay, if I wish, the audio. The machine also records my awe as the horse charges. “Jesus, Jesus,” I can be heard to say.

  And then the Belmont. The voice of the announcer, Chic Anderson, saying, “He’s moving like a tre-mend-ous machine. . . .” And overlaid is my own voice on the tape I will take home—“Oh, oh”— sounding as if I have been hit in the belly by a fist. I am not on the floor, like Nicklaus, nor on a tabletop, like Rozelle, but I am moved all the same, even though I know precisely the choreography of these races. I have read all the books, the racing charts, pored over all the literature, and I knew where and when Secretariat will make his move. And yet I am totally unprepared for what I feel. The heart gives over to exhilaration, the frissons play up and down the spine, and the eyes get wet. I am alone in a room, overcome by something I struggle to define.

  As my viewing of the 1973 Belmont draws to a close, I write in my notebook, “Power power power. Flow, flow, flow.” But the words seem absurd on the page, and they do this horse no justice, no justice at all. I insert more videos, watch Secretariat getting a bath at Claiborne. He looks so relaxed, his skin so smooth, and the water runs off him as if he were already made of bronze.

  CONNECTION

  I have a friend who lives near Ocala, Florida, a lifelong horsewoman named Carole Fletcher, who is teaching several of her horses to spell—to pick out wooden block letters of the alphabet on voice command. She is a trick-horse trainer, and as kind and patient, and as demanding, as any horse trainer in the world. We had both read a remarkable book called Beautiful Jim Key, about “an educated horse” who performed feats of spelling and simple math onstage (he would use his lips to make correct change out of a National Cash Register). This was in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

  Much taken with the book, Carole sought out its author, Mim Eichler Rivas, and visited the horse’s grave in Tennessee. The story of Jim Key defies belief, though it’s well documented. My question to Carole was this: “Why would a horse like Jim Key even try to attempt spelling?”

  “It’s something we don’t understand,” said Carole. “When my horse picks out the letter h, for example, I can see him thinking. But maybe he’s also picking up some message from me, some kind of telepathy.” So the horse is perhaps using not only his brain but also some sort of equine receiver in his brain that’s sending a message from Carole—“
That’s the block; pick that one, that one there.” Or maybe what the horse sees is an image of the right block, and then his formidable memory kicks in and allows him to complete the task. We may never know.

  In her book, Rivas speculates that what motivated Beautiful Jim Key was the desire to please his master—a black man named Dr. William Key, a self-educated veterinarian, a former slave, and the greatest horse whisperer of his time. “The secret,” wrote Rivas, “of Beautiful Jim Key’s extraordinary abilities was something more than ‘simply education.’ ... It was both more than that, yet also more basic. It was love. The love between human and nonhuman was so powerful it had bridged the language divide.”

  My own speculation is that Eddie Sweat and William Key had both discovered the same secret: that the love of a horse can have particular and spectacular rewards, and one of them is a connection beyond words.

  2

  THE BACKSTRETCH: EDDIE’s WORLD

  HOME FOR A RACETRACK GROOM living on shed row is typically a twelve-by-fourteen room with a concrete floor and a single lightbulb overhead, that classic symbol of penury. Two or more grooms might share this space. There might be roll-out cots, a cheap radio, a little TV with bunny ears. There might be a hot plate and a tiny fridge, though local fire regulations sometimes forbid the use of appliances. Chilly at night, a hot box by day, invariably noisy and smelly and dirty, such accommodation—if one can call it that—often lacks privacy, security, and comfort.

  There are no laundry facilities. The window might be carved out of a cinder-block wall, with a blanket over it. The shower and washroom down the hall may not have been cleaned in a long, long time, and some grooms cannot bring themselves to use them. Your neighbor may be a drifter strung out on drugs or alcohol, so petty theft is rampant. There is no rent, which is a small blessing, and references are rarely sought, but you can also be evicted without recourse.