The Horse God Built

by Lawrence Scanlan

  Wages for grooms and hot walkers can be as low as a few hundred dollars a week—for twelve- and fourteen-hour days. Migrant workers, especially, might earn minimum wage but aren’t always paid for every hour worked, never mind overtime. The best some grooms can hope for is one day off in thirteen; smaller outfits offer even less. Classier stables may offer a groom up to six hundred dollars a week, with a day or two off every week and bonuses when the horse being rubbed wins a race. All attempts at unionizing grooms have failed: Turnover is too great, and there are always teenage runaways and migrant workers at the gate willing to work for a pittance.

  Only a few states in the United States offer pension programs to backstretch workers. Medical coverage is hit-and-miss, although California’s Santa Anita Park has an enviable setup: a medical clinic for backside staff, who pay only two dollars a visit, with free hospital and emergency care. The cost is covered, in part, by a share in uncashed pari-mutuel tickets. (Such tickets are issued each time a bet is made at the track, but some tickets are not cashed in—through oversight or the desire for a keepsake or souvenir.) But most grooms felled by accident or illness must depend on charity doled out by the Horsemen’s Benevolent and Protective Association.

  There is money at the track, lots of it. Churchill Downs, for the Kentucky Derby in 2005, had a new look—a $121 million face-lift, with luxury boxes selling in the quarter-million-dollar range. But, contrary to theory, the wealth does not trickle down to lowly grooms. According to the Jockey Club, some $1.1 billion in purses was won at more than one hundred tracks in North America in 2005. Meanwhile, more than $15 billion was wagered on those same races. Backside workers not only see precious little of this money but get even less than they once did.

  That’s because the track is facing competition from lotteries and casinos, and attendance at races is declining. Too many trainers are chasing too few owners for work, so the squeeze is put on the men and women at the bottom of the track hierarchy. Trainers charge owners a daily rate to exercise, feed, and house horses (about forty-five to seventy-five dollars a horse), but some trainers will charge far less than their actual costs: They gamble that winnings will make up the shortfall. In the meantime, the only place to trim costs is in labor. And track labor has always been cheap.

  Bill Nack described the groom’s life in Sports Illustrated in 1991. “In New York,” he wrote, “the cradle of American racing and the citadel of the sport’s eastern establishment, some of the housing for backstretch workers is a scandal.” He described how in 1989, Charles Clay, the California-based groom of Sunday Silence (the horse had won the Derby and the Preakness), was appalled by the housing he was offered at Belmont. When he saw his dorm at “the citadel,” he scrubbed every inch of it with bleach, set off two cockroach bombs, and put forty roach traps along the walls. “They expect people to live in that kind of filth?” said Clay. “It was a disgrace.”

  A student at the University of Maryland studied backstretch life for his Ph.D. thesis in 1995. Anthony J. Schefstad called his paper “The Backstretch: Some Call It Home,” and he concluded that the backside of the track is “one of the last operating serfdoms in the United States.” He documented the low wages, the isolation and boredom, the deplorable housing, but he also noted that grooms’ “genuine love of horses” often serves as a substitute “for other satisfactions.”

  Schefstad found—this was in 1993—that resident grooms in Maryland earned an average of $1,009 a month; hot walkers got $544 a month. Most had little education or training and lacked even a driver’s license. Some had entered the United States illegally and were ripe for exploitation. And while several organizations offer help to grooms, the charity is meted out on a case-by-case basis.

  Schefstad had worked at the track since 1990 and thus had special access to the private and guarded world of the backstretch. It is a world, he wrote, in which stories circulate about the generosity of trainers who keep sick grooms on full salary, bestow cars on them, pay for their children’s operations. “We take care of our own,” the stories say. The stories are true, but they are also rare.

  Schefstad detailed “a personal communication” he had had in November of 1991 with the president of a racing communications firm who was describing what he saw at a prominent Midwest track. “While the track is probably the nation’s nicest,” the president wrote, “the backstretch situation is the worst. . . . Instead of single men and women you see in most backstretches, [it] seemed to have entire families living there. It was, in a word, depressing, especially when you look across the road to a facility that cost upwards of $200 million to build.” The correspondent had to be describing Arlington in Chicago.

  “Of all the racetracks I’ve been to,” said my track-rat friend David Carpenter, “Arlington is the most beautiful—even more beautiful than Saratoga. It was so clean that when people ripped up their losing pari-mutuel tickets, they didn’t drop them on the floor like they do at other tracks. That would have been unseemly. No, they dropped the tickets in the waste bin.” David remarked on the landscaped grounds, the flowers, and, at the entry, a life-size bronze of a six-year-old John Henry, with Willy Shoemaker up, edging a horse called The Bart by a nose in the first Arlington Million stakes race. Arlington, then, features a lavish entry and a Third World backstretch.

  Judy Jones, an equine artist who grew up in Chicago, calls Arlington “the Taj Mahal of racing.” When fire burned down the old track in 1985, the new one was built to a majestic standard and even won an Eclipse Award for its design. “But nothing,” Jones said, “was done for the backside. There was a lot of controversy about it. That backside looks like the ghetto.”

  More recently, there have been changes to the Arlington backstretch, though not enough for some. In the fall of 2005, a spokesman for the track cited four-million dollars’ worth of improvements to backstretch housing and said, “Arlington Park provides the highest quality of backstretch living standards at any racetrack in America.” The occasion of the comment was a court case brought against Arlington by the U.S. Department of Justice involving violations of the Fair Housing Act.

  Jeffrey Taren, a lawyer representing the HOPE Fair Housing Center—a nonprofit organization seeking to improve backstretch housing at Arlington—told me he’s had “the royal tour” of the backstretch. “If that’s the highest quality,” he said, “it’s a sorry statement for the industry as a whole.” There have been “marginal improvements” to housing at Arlington, said Taren, and the Illinois legislature has earmarked millions of dollars in casino royalties to improve conditions at the state’s backstretches. In the meantime, he said, there are still areas on the Arlington shed row where one communal bathroom serves 140 people. “When all is said and done,” said Taren, “it’s still going to be the kind of housing that you and I would never want to call home.”

  I have not seen Arlington, but I have been to Saratoga, and I remember feeling there what I felt when I first went to Fenway Park in Boston and Wrigley Field in Chicago. The memories of great events in sport seem to have been etched into the fabric of these places. I remember a wooded area on the grounds at Saratoga where families were picnicking in the shade as the race card played out on a warm spring afternoon. The backstretch, that other world, is close by at both Arlington and Saratoga, but hidden and cordoned off.

  Schefstad reported that everyone he talked to on the backstretch liked horses more than people. Asked what he would miss most if he no longer lived and worked at the track, one groom told him, “The horses. The people, most of them, not all of them, aren’t worth a damn.” On the other hand, few horse-care workers spoke disparagingly of the backstretch. For all its indignities, it was home—maybe even an improvement on previous arrangements (a dumpy motel, a homeless shelter, a jail cell).

  The language in Anthony Schefstad’s paper is often academic and detached, but I could sense his sympathy for “racetrackers.” This man clearly knows the track, knows the fragility of horses and what happens to unsuccessful or injured
horses, and how rare is the great horse with heart. “Such is the dream of the resident horsecare worker: to work with such a horse,” Schefstad wrote. “All dream of rubbing a Secretariat, Northern Dancer, Ruffian . . . that one horse that will set them apart and provide a defining moment in their life.”

  Racetrack grooms are like carnival workers. They pull up stakes every thirty days, as the meet at one track ends and another begins elsewhere. They go north and south according to the season, or maybe west, hoping for a kinder life. On to the next shanty in the next city or town, maybe hitching a ride with a trainer or getting in the van with the horses. When you spend any amount of time with a horse, you begin to smell like one. I like that smell, though not all do. It is a tincture of hay, straw, and leather, all manner of horse emanations, and the dander and dust that come off a horse when you brush him and that settle on your hair, your skin, in your ears and nostrils.

  A groom’s tools are few and simple. A cloth in a back pocket, brush and curry comb, a broom and manure fork—those are the main ones. Each stall has to have its soiled straw removed daily and replaced with fresh stuff (for a horse should not breathe the vapors of soiled bedding, nor should we, for that matter). Each horse—and one groom may be responsible for three or four horses—has to be rubbed and brushed, bandaged and tacked up and led to the track on race day, maybe rubbed with liniment to loosen his muscles in cool weather, and afterward bathed and sponged, the excess water removed with a metal scraper. Feet must be cleaned before and after every workout and feet painted to prevent cracking and splitting. Elaborate mixes of oats, sweet feed, vitamins and supplements must be prepared individually for each horse and fed each horse twice daily, along with hay. There is wormer to be administered, medication to be given, cuts to be tended to. The groom must check the feet and legs for heat and other signs of injury, apply poultices as necessary, soak feet in tubs of Epsom salts or ice or menthol brace, take a rectal temperature if the horse seems out of sorts. Water tubs have to cleaned daily and filled. The horses must be hand-grazed and, when there are fields for them, led to and from the paddocks. Horse blankets need cleaning, as do saddles and bridles with saddle soap and beeswax.

  A groom is there before dawn to wake the horses and begin the day, with work winding down before noon. The resident groom faces a long and mostly boring day—maybe the groom goes to the track and loses precious pay—before more work in the evening and turning off the lights at night.

  Eddie Sweat would start work with Secretariat and the other horses at 5:30 a.m. and continue to 6:00 p.m. each evening. He saw little of his wife and children, even while he was based at his home track of Belmont, and when he was on the road with the horses, he would be gone for months at a time. “I don’t mind the hours,” he said just before the Belmont Stakes in 1973. “The racetrack is home to me. It is the only life I know.”

  A groom is moving constantly, and the good ones follow a precise rhythm, so that each job occurs in its most natural order and never at the expense of another. The horses are led to track and bath stall and paddock, with no one kept waiting. Eddie would have known all the little tricks—putting cayenne mixed with Vaseline on bandages to discourage a horse from chewing them off, blowing into a horse’s eye to dislodge dirt, adding vinegar to a poultice for healing a wound. Eddie was entrusted with the best horses; he was given the keys to the horse van when the horses shipped on to the next meet; he was the groom who knew what to do without ever being told. He was loyal, punctual, dedicated, the groom’s groom.

  He knew, really knew, Secretariat, Riva Ridge, Chief’s Crown, and every horse in his care. He could tell by watching them if they were bored or angry, sour or tired, feeling playful or pained. He knew the spots each one liked to have scratched—under the jaw, just behind the ears, along the back. Maybe one horse preferred not to have his mouth touched; another might have found it heavenly to have Eddie massage his gums and nostrils. He would have done all he could to keep his horses happy and ambitious.

  “I respect my horses and my horses respect me” was one of Eddie’s favorite expressions. What a beautiful word is respect. Implicit in that word—at least in the context of the horse–human relationship—is a host of other words: confidence, humility, decency, understanding, openness. Eddie brought all those qualities to his dealings with horses, and you cannot put a price on that.

  Phyllis Rogers, a librarian at Keeneland, told me she was sure that Eddie Sweat had given a talk one year to a Thoroughbred owners’ association in Lexington, and though she made inquiries on my behalf, no one seemed able to find the video taken of his lecture. What a pity. We will have to imagine that scene: the most celebrated groom in North America, his name forever linked to the immortal Secretariat,

  humbly urging the rich and powerful to be kind to their horses. It would never have occurred to him to suggest that they be kind as well to their grooms.

  At a French restaurant in Lexington, Le Deauville, the owner ostentatiously greets patrons at the sidewalk terrace between puffs on his Gauloise. He is there blowing smoke as we enter, and then again as we leave—a cigar-store Indian with a Parisian accent. Inside his establishment, over escargots and steak frites, Amy Gill is describing what it’s like to walk the track at a packed Churchill Downs, in Louisville, just moments before the Derby.

  “A friend of mine is an equine physiotherapist, and she sometimes works on horses on Derby day,” Gill says. “I often join her down there on the backstretch. It’s so amazing to be that close, to look up at those twin spires from the track, to be so close to the horses that you can touch them. It’s very emotional.”

  Gill is an equine nutritionist who makes her rounds of bluegrass farms, advising on blends of grain and vitamins and minerals to promote health, prosperity, and speed in her clients’ horses. Slim, dark-haired, and effusive, she is herself a rider and a horse owner. Gill grew up in Connecticut and as a child spent summers at a cottage near Chaffeys Locks, a place close to my own home in southeastern Ontario. That curious geographical connection means that when she talks about Derby day, the scene seems both real and surreal, as if a girl from a village down the road were detailing all that she has seen and heard on a visit to another galaxy.

  “Why emotional?” I ask.

  Gill does not romanticize horses or a life with horses, unlike some horsey women. She comes to the horse with science in one pocket and detachment in the other. But she has also been around good horses all her life and is clear-eyed when she talks about why some of us find the horse so attractive.

  “Horses evoke emotion in us,” she tells me in the restaurant over our shared entrée, which she barely touches. “It has to do with the curvature of their bodies. Their sleek shape, their softness. It’s the beauty thing. What sells the horse is the beauty. They’re sensual, erotic. And when you see them up close, all these great horses just before the Derby, you see their determination. That combination of power and intelligence.”

  As he walked on to the track at Louisville, leading Secretariat— the fastest, the most beautiful, the most admired horse of his time and maybe of all time—Edward “Shorty” Sweat would have felt everything that Gill was describing. He would have enjoyed that same view of those nineteenth-century spires that Gill finds so enticing. Twice, Eddie walked winners toward the Derby circle and a waiting garland of roses—in 1972 and 1973. I imagine that for many years the thrill of that walk, with the copper horse especially, must have sustained him, given him a sense of pride and self-worth. This, too, is a form of wealth.

  Being at the Derby must be a little like hobnobbing with movie stars. No, better. These stars are purer than those others—and beautiful, and they shed purity and beauty as they walk among us. This must be why so many people wanted to touch Secretariat, to run their hands over his body.

  At 5:45 a.m. at Keeneland Race Track, the lights are all on in the grandstand, and so are the tall skylights on the roof. The track before me is cast in their stark light, the sky above still black as licoric
e. I sit on a bench at trackside, eager with notepad, camera, and tape recorder, and I wait. There is no one about and I am beginning to wonder if my source at the Keeneland Library has misled me. Where are the sleepy-eyed grooms, the exercise riders on twitchy young colts and fillies, the squinting trainers with their stopwatches?

  And then I hear it, faintly at first but unmistakable, the two-one, two-one, two-one beat of a galloping horse. Iddle-oop-iddle-oop-iddle-oop-iddle-oop. Black horse and black rider explode from the darkness like a fast boat darting out of fog. They are sprinting flat out across that wide expanse of light, racing toward the pitch-blackness beyond the finish line. The rider is tucked in behind the horse’s neck, and I can hear the horse’s loud breathing, or “high blowing,” brrrapppp brrrappp brrrappp, and the sweet mythic thunder of his hooves. Then horse and rider are gone, black into black, and the sound of them fades. I miss them immediately. “Do it again,” I say to no one.

  This is as close as I will get to a dream I have had for many years: to be on the back of a Thoroughbred coming down the stretch, tucked in behind my horse’s neck and holding back nothing, feeling that wind in my face, that sense of floating and flying at the same time.

  31;I have galloped horses, and I remember many of them: a little palomino mustang and a big red quarter horse on weeklong wilderness treks in Wyoming; a Thoroughbred–quarter horse cross on a cattle drive in southern Alberta; a Selle Français in the Saumur region of France; a bony bay gelding in Costa Rica; a roan on a beach in southern Spain; my own horse, countless times, on the old railway bed near the stable. In Wyoming, I raced in quarter-mile sprints, one-on-one, against other riders. But I have never galloped a Thoroughbred a mile, flat out, on a racetrack.