For the good of the barn, Eddie, as senior groom, would put other grooms in their place. “Let’s face it,” said McClain, “some of those grooms were screwups, and they were never going to do right.” But whatever Eddie Sweat did to set them straight, according to McClain, “he did it the right way.”
As for his love for Secretariat, offered McClain, “Eddie and that horse were like brothers. Eddie lived with him; he traveled with him. They were kin, joined at the hip.”
I thought out loud of all the people who had bought Secretariat posters and videos, and how they loved and admired this horse—but always from a distance. They had crowned a horse their king and they were his willing subjects. Eddie Sweat was the pauper in this tale, but he actually lived with the king.
“You think about it,” McClain responded. “It’s like having a child. You have to feed him, take care of him, bathe him. He’s yours. In a lot of ways, he didn’t belong to anybody else but Eddie. You would feel that way, too, if you were the constant companion. You’d either hate each other or love each other, one of the two. You’d be so damn glad to see him go, or it would kill you.”
After his time with Secretariat, McClain stayed in racing for another thirteen years. He went from Lucien Laurin’s barn to work for Woody Stephens. (The latter died in 1998 at the age of eighty-four.) “By then,” said McClain, looking bemusedly back on his own youthful arrogance, “I was real smart.” For three years in succession, he had been employed by barns whose horses had won the Kentucky Derby: Riva Ridge in 1972, Secretariat in 1973, Cannonade in 1974. “I thought that was the way it was supposed to be, but it ain’t never that way.” And the travel, which had seemed so exciting in the beginning—Kentucky in the spring and fall, Chicago in the summer, New Orleans in the winter— began to wear on him, never mind its effect on his marriage to Amy Gill. That partnership would end in less than two years.
McClain discovered that training horses was hard work, that expenses—vet and farrier bills, transportation costs, stable hands’ wages—could be overwhelming, and that horses like Secretariat and grooms like Eddie Sweat were as rare as blue moons. As McClain put it, “I finally waved the white flag.”
But all those years of rising before dawn left him with a longing for first light. Later, when I told him what a thrill it had been for me to see the riders at dawn on the Keeneland track, he nodded. “It’s still my favorite time of the day,” he said. “I still get up with the sun. The regimen has stuck.”
Ted McClain and I chatted one more time when I returned his box of clippings, and he showed me a painting that Penny Chenery had commissioned. She had prints made, framed three of them, and gave one to Ted. The painting’s foreground shows Eddie Sweat leading Riva Ridge, then the star of the stable, while the white-haired Lucien Laurin looks on approvingly, his arms folded. Very much in the background, exercise rider Charlie Davis is leading away a chestnut wearing a blue blanket with white trim. The horse, of course, is Secretariat.
Sometimes Marvin Moorer, Eddie Sweat’s firstborn son, will catch himself in this pose: standing with his weight on his back leg, his left hand in the back pocket of his jeans, the thumb of his right hand tucked into the front pocket. If Eddie ever stopped moving, that was the stance he would sometimes adopt. And his son, without thinking, does the same.
The last time I spoke with Marvin, late in 2006, he was living in Arizona and studying for a new career as a computer technician. In the 1980s, he had worked at the racetrack as a groom alongside his father, who had taught him many of the finer elements of the craft, but only after helping his son overcome a rather large hurdle: fear of horses. It seems, in retrospect, almost amusing—the father a natural horseman, the son a reluctant practitioner.
“My dad taught me how to love animals,” says Marvin, forty-seven when we spoke in 2006. “I never understood how they’d obey him. He showed me that horses had more sense than most humans, and that you didn’t have to be mean. Carrots and sugar work better. I was a pretty good groom, but he was the best. He had a charm with horses and he spent a lot of time working on legs and feet. I’d go away and come back to the barn and I’d say, ‘You still on that one leg?’ He would use liniment or warm alcohol, just his hand on that leg, giving a massage. But you could see the result. His horses always looked good.”
At the end of those long days, father and son would sometimes take a drink, or two. Eddie liked Smirnoff’s vodka; Marvin liked Budweiser. “We were more like best friends,” says Marvin. “We’d talk each other to sleep. When I was a teenager growing up in the Bronx, there were gangs, and he kept me away from that. He would never touch me, but he’d threaten. We had a pretty good bond. ‘Boy,’ he’d say—he always called me ‘boy’—‘you gotta slow down.’ I miss him. And I dream about him all the time.”
It seems like everyone in Eddie’s circle had a nickname. Eddie used to call his son “Chesterhead,” for his square head—shaped, said Eddie, like a chest of drawers.
The only keepsake Marvin has of his father is a Seiko watch, once given to Eddie for a stakes race victory and passed on to Marvin when he won his first stakes race as a groom. The son, though, has his memories, complete with soundscape. When Marvin calls up Eddie, he imagines him grooming the horse he adored and talking to him in the Creole language called Geechee.
Marvin paints a picture of a gentle man with Popeye arms—his forearms were the size of his son’s calf. Eddie’s father, David, was tall and slim, a sharecropper who worked land—his own fifteen-acre plot and that of others—between Vance and Holly Hill in Orangeburg County, South Carolina. David Sweat had a beat-up old car and an old mule (later replaced by an aged tractor), a dog, a few pigs, and some chickens. “He was gentle with the grandkids,” says Marvin. “He’d give us what we wanted, if he could. I never saw him angry. He was always under control. My father was just like him.”
Eddie’s mother, Mary, was short in stature and generous in spirit, but she brooked no nonsense. Growing up, Eddie would have been “whupped” for disobedience. But the Sweat homestead—a tiny one-story cinder-block house with a wooden porch and three bedrooms, the nine kids stacked inside like kindling, with no running water and just a woodstove for warmth in winter—was as good a home as the times would allow. As late as the 1960s, water to the place still came from a hand pump atop a well, with a privy as toilet. “There was a lot of love in that house,” Marvin told me. “Sometimes it was hectic, especially after my father left. He kept the family together. He promised he’d send them things, and he did.”
By the age of fourteen, young Eddie had found steady work with horses. He was a country kid with a sixth-grade education and a burning desire to leave the place he was born in. Lucien Laurin’s Thoroughbred training center, Holly Hill Farm, was a springboard to a job at the track and a new life in the big city.
“When he lived in New York,” Marvin says, “his fridge was always overflowing with food. He never wanted us to lack for anything— clothing, shoes, but especially food. He would invite new guys at the track back to the house for a meal.” It was as if Eddie saw hunger as an old enemy that might return at any moment. Friends from the New York days say he seldom got angry, but one thing could make him irritable: if dinner wasn’t ready when he got home.
Shorty Sweat would never forget the hardships of his childhood, working in the fields for pennies under a boiling summer sun, the constant dearth of food and clothing, money and living space. School was a building that also served as a general store and, on the weekends, a bar. “I’ll never go back,” Eddie would say. He would visit all right, make his rounds, dish out money or gifts where he thought those were needed most, then hightail it back north to Belmont.
Even in New York, young Eddie—still a teenager—would work out in a boxing gym with his friend and fellow racetracker Fred Davis. This wasn’t about becoming a prizefighter; it was about keeping in shape and learning the art of self-defense. Eddie was a black man in a white man’s world, and there were always fights. Later
in life, Marvin would ask his father about the racism he had encountered in his life. Marvin himself had been spared that scourge: His best friend growing up in New York was a white kid. “He said he had stories to tell, but he wasn’t going to tell me,” says Marvin. Maybe they were too awful to tell, and the father wanted to spare his son.
In 1939, the year Eddie came into the world, Mississippi senator Theodore Bilbo introduced a Back to Africa bill that would have “repatriated” (read deported) American blacks. When Eddie was eight years old, Jackie Robinson became the first black man to play on a major-league baseball team. Although ballplayers from the two races had played together after the Civil War, segregation had the same impact on both the diamond and the racetrack: Black jockeys and black ballplayers were ousted. Many black jockeys went to Europe. Black baseball players formed their own Negro League and the so-called color barrier ruled for many decades—until Jackie Robinson came along. An army private from Cairo, Georgia, Robinson had once been court-martialed for refusing to sit at the back of an army bus. With the Brooklyn Dodgers, he had to abide the taunts and racial slurs of fans, opponents, even players on his own team, who at first launched a petition against him.
Growing up in rural South Carolina, Eddie would have endured the same, or worse. Segregation was deeply entrenched in a state that ranked among America’s poorest, with income levels half the national average, and high rates of illiteracy and disease. (The slave ships had brought people from Africa and the Caribbean who were adept at growing rice and tolerant of the heat, but the ships also brought mosquitoes and malaria. A German doctor visiting Carolina in the eighteenth century said it was “a paradise in spring, in the summer a hell, and in the autumn a hospital.”)
To help ease the transition from slavery to freedom, black families living near the coasts of South Carolina, Florida, and Georgia had been famously promised “forty acres and a mule” by a Union general in 1865. Some families did get land, only to see it given back a year later to its original white owners. The words poor and black have been partners a long time. Though much has changed in South Carolina, Vance continues to struggle. In a town where 85 percent of the people are African-American, the annual per capita income, according to the latest census data, is under nine thousand dollars. Small wonder that Eddie fled. He was part of an exodus that had begun in the 1920s, when black men and women headed north in search of jobs and a measure of freedom.
In New York, Shorty Sweat had his own house in Queens, about ten miles from the track. It was a beautiful home, Marvin remembers, a one-story brick house with three bedrooms, a large dining room, a sunporch, and a big backyard. Eddie also had a car. For a time, it was a 1969 brown Mustang. In 1972, no doubt feeling flush with Secretariat on his list of horses to groom, Eddie bought a brand-new black Dodge, which he was very proud of. His brother Morris was a mechanic, and Eddie, too, knew his way around an engine and would tinker with the car. At home, he would cook his favorites—stewed chicken, catfish stew, fried pork chops, grits and tomatoes and fatback bacon. He followed the New York Mets, his chosen team. He would play pickup basketball, “or try to,” Marvin says with a laugh. His dance was the boogaloo, a style of music that blended rhythm and blues, rock and roll, soul, and mambo. Eddie didn’t read much—just the Daily Racing Form and the racing section of the New York Daily News. He smoked cigarettes, Salems, and a pack might last him three days.
Edward “Shorty” Sweat was shy in the company of white folks, especially those he would have seen as above his station—such as owners and trainers. All that changed in the company of family and close friends. Marvin called his father a smooth talker, a snappy dresser, a ladies’ man. In his lifetime, Eddie would father four children by three different women.
When I asked Blondella Davis—Eddie’s friend for thirty years— what she remembered about him, she said, “His mouth. He had a very big mouth. He’d say what he wanted to say. He was very straightforward. I used to call him ‘Big Giant.’ I’d say to him, ‘You are a very short man with a very forceful voice.’ ”
Eddie’s greatest fear, his son told me, was of losing his job. Grooming horses was all he knew, and it was fear of unemployment—as much as respect for his bosses—that made him shy and quiet in the company of his white superiors. But in the company of black friends and black family, everything changed. “Around us,” Marvin says, “he was the man of the house. We all went to him for advice. When he said something, we all stopped and listened. And he could make us laugh. He was the life of the party.” New guys on the track would be ripe targets for his darts, but he always did it in such a way that even the butt of the joke laughed along.
Blondella’s husband, Fred, worked with Eddie on the track for many years and they were fast friends all their lives. Eddie and Linda Sweat, Fred and Blondella Davis got together often—for Christmas parties and cookouts at the Sweat home, for trips to the track. “My memories of Shorty are good ones,” Blondella said from her home in South Carolina, just steps from the cemetery where both Eddie and Fred are buried. “Shorty was a lot of fun when he was having fun and he liked to make us laugh. He would call me ‘Miss Blond.’ A sincere family man, a good family man. He loved his horses to death, especially Secretariat. That was his baby.”
No doubt about it: The big red horse was family. Marvin has seen the photo of his father crying the day he surrendered Secretariat at Claiborne Farm. “Secretariat was like a brother to him,” says Marvin. “My father loved him as much as he loved me or my sisters. It hurt my father a lot when Secretariat died. He said he’d never have another horse like that.” And he was right. He never did.
I found trainer John Veitch to be a sympathetic and insightful voice on the subject of racetrack grooms. We met briefly at a Thoroughbred horse sale in Lexington in the summer of 2004. He was by himself and leaning on a rail outside the auction barn, watching the slow parade of gorgeous colts and fillies. He seemed immediately friendly to my project: The name Eddie Sweat was still working its magic for me, like a diplomatic passport. I was reminded yet again of the high esteem in which Eddie was held in track circles. I did not want to disturb Veitch that day, so we talked later on the telephone, just days before the 2005 Kentucky Derby.
I was trying to make sense of Eddie. The stories I was hearing of his drinking in his later days, for example, seemed to give off a whiff of self-pity. But that may be too harsh a judgment, and I wondered if a prominent trainer who knew and liked Eddie Sweat would have a clue.
“Being a Thoroughbred groom,” Veitch told me, “is not a living. It’s your life. It’s seven days a week and it’s a life with tremendous disappointment, because horses are fragile. Eddie rubbed a horse who was the second-best who ever lived.” (Veitch ranked Man o’War first.) “And after that experience, after hitting that pinnacle, he realized it wasn’t coming back.”
The sad fact is that racetrack grooms are not paid what they should be, but then, said Veitch, two-thirds of trainers are not making a living, either. “It’s just the game,” he said; then he added a bittersweet note. “This used to be a great sport.”
For Veitch, the loss of black grooms like Eddie Sweat—accomplished, learned, and devoted horsemen—is almost impossible to measure. What these men gave to horses was their time, and just about every second of it. Now, said Veitch, there are “instant trainers” and “mega-trainers,” some of whom never even see the horse they are supposed to be training. By Veitch’s estimation, some 95 percent of the best-bred horses in America are controlled by ten trainers. Some of them, he said, care little for their stable help, and turnover is absurdly high. The loyalty, the sense of craft, the high standards that defined Eddie Sweat’s approach to the job are harder to find.
In Secretariat’s time, the grooms had revealing nicknames, names as colorful as those of the horses they tended. Veitch knew, or knew of, many of them: Liquor Ben, Never Sweat Hays, Hard Times, Slow ’n’ Easy, Lyin’ Lefty Daub, Kitchen Sittin’ Smitty, Frank ’n’ Beans, Radio Joe, Easy Money, C
an’t Talk, Sweet Potato, Gate Mouth, Snow Fields, Sloan “Duck Butter” Price. Bill Nack compiled the list in a piece he wrote on grooms and their plight for Sports Illustrated in 1991. These men were members of a black fraternity, and they all hailed from South Carolina, Kentucky, Georgia, and Alabama.
None of them hit the high that Eddie did, but some came close. Some enjoyed their moment in the sun, then went back to what they had been doing before. Some never got over their loss, and Veitch wondered if that described Eddie Sweat. “But I don’t know,” he said. “I’m in deeper waters here. I can only speculate.” This much-lauded trainer knew only that a good groom is his eyes and ears, and that no one listened or watched more attentively than Shorty Sweat.
Veitch—the son of Hall of Fame trainer Sylvester Veitch and himself a notable trainer of Alydar, among others—told me that the old black grooms like Eddie Sweat brought something special to the racetrack. He lamented their loss.
He cited the example of Clyde Sparks, who galloped horses in Lexington before World War II and then worked as a groom for Veitch’s father. “Clyde,” he said, “was born and bred in Lexington and he worked his entire life with horses. He became a groom for my father in the forties, worked through the fifties and sixties, and then, in 1974, came to me. He never missed a day, except for two months after he got kicked by a horse.” In 1977, Clyde Sparks started grooming Alydar.
Alydar ran second to Affirmed in all three Triple Crown races in 1978, a keen rivalry that many racetrackers remember fondly. Alydar, a chestnut, won fourteen times, earning close to one million dollars. And in the breeding shed, he—not Affirmed—was the star and America’s leading sire in 1990, when he broke a hind leg in his stall at Calumet Farm, where he is buried.
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