The Horse God Built

by Lawrence Scanlan

  “Clyde Sparks knew Alydar better than any person in the world,” said Veitch. “Good grooms develop a bond with their horse. It’s stronger than marriage, stronger than any religious devotion. It’s almost mystical.”

  John Veitch knew Eddie Sweat and the skill and dedication he brought to his task. “At one point,” said Veitch, “the best job in the world for a man of color was to be a racehorse groom or a porter for the railroad.” (Veitch might have added jazz musician to his list.) Imagine how grateful Eddie would have felt. Imagine his pride and sense of good fortune. His wages, though likely low (Veitch said it was well known that Lucien Laurin ran a stingy barn), would still have far surpassed what farmworkers—black or white—could hope to earn. Eddie had escaped the sharecropper’s fate and found a world where he mattered mightily.

  “The groom is the life of the horse,” Veitch said. “A good groom will make your horse; a bad groom will ruin him.” A skilled, caring groom will report to the trainer the slightest heat or swelling in the leg. Catch it early and you can fix it. Fail to catch it and the horse’s potential may be lost forever.

  Epidemiologists talk about something similar in the world of medicine. If you can come to know a baseline in the health of a given population, get a fix on what is “normal,” you are much better equipped to sniff out the abnormal and deal with it. A good groom has the same intimate knowledge of a horse, and any deviation from the norm sets off alarm bells. Thus alerted, a good trainer will put out the fire before it’s even a fire. But preventive medicine—whether on the racetrack or in human health care—is seldom practiced or valued.

  The good black grooms from the American South, said Veitch, spent all their lives around horses. The best arrived at the track as young but fully fledged horsemen, and they worked for the same stable until they dropped. They would notice if the horse ate or drank less, quicker or slower, if the horse was lying down more, any change in the color, amount, smell, or frequency of the horse’s urine or feces. Today, Veitch said, many grooms are Hispanic and they don’t possess enough command of English to report such subtleties to the trainer— even assuming their skill. (On the other hand, many California trainers today swear by their Mexican grooms.)

  Veitch remembers that some stables used to give their grooms sweaters of that stable’s racing colors. The black men wore the sweaters with pride, as soldiers wear their dress uniforms in a parade. Roger Laurin, son of Lucien, was sixty-nine when I interviewed him for this book. He lives in Miami Beach, Florida, and owns a few horses, but my sense now is of a dabbler, not a player.

  “What do you miss about the track?” I asked him.

  “I miss winning,” he said, showing some of his father’s wit. “Getting beat was no fun.”

  Roger Laurin hired on Eddie Sweat in the early 1980s, after his father retired. Eddie’s time with Laurin senior went back decades, to the time that Lucien owned a training operation in Holly Hill, South Carolina. Father and son both knew that when it came time to hire a groom, the best was Eddie Sweat.

  “What did he have?” I asked Roger.

  “If I knew that,” he replied, “I’d bottle it and go back into business. Every generation, someone like him comes along. He was just in the right place at the right time. My first memory of him is back at my father’s farm in South Carolina. Eddie had the biggest forearms I’d ever seen. He was very strong, though he wasn’t a big man. But he didn’t muscle horses; he didn’t use that strength of his. He had no problems with horses. He was a very steady guy, a good and likable man.”

  It bothered Roger Laurin that I knew he had helped out with expenses at the time of Eddie’s death, that Roger had paid the airfare when the groom’s wife and family flew from New York to Eddie’s funeral in South Carolina. Maybe Roger was protecting his own privacy, like some philanthropists who insist on discretion. Or maybe he was protecting Eddie Sweat’s memory, or the Sweat family’s dignity. Maybe he felt that the Laurin family was in Eddie’s debt.

  In any case, everyone would agree that Eddie had no problem with horses. It was money, said Roger Laurin, he had a problem with. “Eddie and money,” he said, “didn’t stay together very long. It didn’t matter what you paid him. A friend would ask him for money and he would give it to him.” I have the sense that loans on the backside are seldom, if ever, repaid.

  Eddie Sweat was not like so many who drift to the track, where the wages are slim but so are the prerequisites—no education, references, or résumé required. A stable may try you, and if you show up on time, do a decent job, and remain sober (or sober enough), you stay on for as long as your punctuality, work ethic, and sobriety last. When they go, you go.

  “You have to like the horses,” said Roger Laurin. “You have to have a feeling for them. Too many times, the first questions asked are, ‘How much do you pay?’ and ‘How much can I borrow?’ ” Even if Eddie Sweat did have money, Laurin speculated, he would have worked with horses until he dropped.

  A few years ago, I was in Cleveland and spent an afternoon at Thistledown, a B track featuring cheap, spent, and sometimes rank (obstreperous) horses. For the riders, it was risky business just mounting some of them. I watched the grooms intently, eyed the hovels they lived in as I entered the grounds, heard their banter before and after races. What I took from the day was their light and easy manner: Whatever their circumstances, they did, indeed, seem to love the game. They were, as many are, drawn to the beauty of the horse.

  Bill Barich captured that sense of the grooms’ loyalty to their horses in his book Laughing in the Hills. Grooms, he wrote, “lived the most rigorous and honest lives on the backstretch and seemed to have fewer illusions than anybody else.” Barich said that grooms were as suspicious of owners as they were of trainers, and one groom told him in confidence that he had left his former employer after being instructed to mistreat the horses. Barich painted a picture of grooms as gypsies, drifting from this track to that one, from one trainer to another, for good reason or bad reason or no reason at all, and if the booze in their bottles did not last long, neither did their marriages and relationships. “But through it all,” Barich wrote, the grooms “remained faithful to some inner model of goodness, an eccentric and singular moral code, and always to the horses.”

  Tom Wade was to Seattle Slew what Eddie Sweat was to Secretariat. In the mid-1980s, when Eddie was grooming a horse called Chief’s Crown for Lucien Laurin, the two grooms spent about a week together when that horse was sent to Three Chimneys Farm in Kentucky.

  I spotted a picture of Chief’s Crown in Lucy Zeh’s book, Etched in Stone. The photograph shows a bruising dark bay, winner in 1984 of the Eclipse Award as champion two-year-old male and, later, twelve races, which netted his owner $2.2 million. Chief’s Crown would also sire Chief Bearheart, twice Canadian Horse of the Year in the late 1990s. Chief’s Crown died in 1997, the year before Eddie did, and as I stared at the horse’s photograph, I wondered if the person holding the lead shank, but not visible in the picture, was Shorty Sweat.

  Wade and Sweat shared common interests, of course, and common friends, and at Three Chimneys Farm, they spent every moment they could in each other’s company. Tom Wade had grown up in smalltown Kentucky, the son of a painter father and a hairdresser mother, and at the age of fifteen he left home to work on a horse farm in South Carolina. His brother, a groom who would later gallop horses for Lucien Laurin at Holly Hill, had known Eddie in those days. This was the 1970s, and the Wade brothers were among the few grooms who were white.

  “I was a white man in a black man’s world dealing with horses,” Tom Wade told me. “I respect them for the way they gave their souls to the horse. In their era, if they had a good horse, they had it all. There wasn’t much else to have in their day.”

  Tom Wade sat at his kitchen table, welcoming but cautious. A heavyset man in his early forties, he was wearing a black T-shirt and blue jeans. He had placed his hands and arms on the table and sometimes he would lean back and squint at me or display a lopside
d grin.

  The bond that forms between a groom and a champion horse is one that few ever experience firsthand. I had a hunch that Tom Wade could help me make sense of Eddie Sweat’s life-altering connection with Secretariat. For twenty years, starting in 1982, Wade was Seattle Slew’s one and only groom, and for those twenty years he had mostly declined to be interviewed about what that had meant to him. During that time, he did not want the added burden of having to explain or justify something he had said to the press.

  When Slew died on May 7, 2002, Wade said, he felt an obligation, and perhaps a freedom, to speak freely. He had determined that if a writer approached him, he would be candid and open. And so he was with me.

  “What,” I asked, “separates an ordinary groom from a great one like Eddie Sweat?”

  “The good groom,” Wade replied, “has focus. He doesn’t allow outside interference. You put the horse first, above all else. It’s pretty basic, pretty simple. You see, I think you’re blessed to be around a good horse, and once you’re given that opportunity—it’s more of a huge responsibility, really—the focus, the dedication have to be there.” His list of “outside interferences” included wine, women, song, business, and family.

  “A lot of these grooms,” Wade explained, “are in for life. You’re married to the horse. It’s like marrying your spouse. Humans generally outlive horses, so Kathy always knew her time would come. But in Slew’s life, he came first. Kathy and I were married fifteen of the twenty years I took care of the horse, but I wouldn’t have married her if I’d thought it was going to be a distraction. We did this as a team.”

  Some would argue that a horse owner has no right to inflict on a groom—especially given their generally poor pay—that kind of total dedication to a horse. But if grooming Seattle Slew constituted a supreme sacrifice, Wade willingly made it. Two days into caring for the dark bay horse, he realized the degree of his commitment. “I knew that I would be with Slew till death do us part. I didn’t see it any other way.”

  Nor was Tom Wade bothered that grooms get little credit for what they do to secure a horse’s comfort and confidence. He harbored no bitterness about hours worked or vacations missed. Eddie Sweat likewise never whined about his hours, his wages, the sacrifices he made as father, husband, brother, son. On the contrary, he seemed, by most accounts, a happy man made more so by the company of a special horse. “A pauper,” as Horace wrote, “in the midst of wealth.”

  The odd thing about Wade’s grooming Slew all those years is that the horse hated to be groomed, hated what most horses love—the brushing of skin and mane and tail. Tom Wade did not much groom the one horse he was paid to groom.

  What he did do was this: “Manage, or manipulate—and I don’t mind using the word”—the stud-farm manager, the barn foreman, the exercise rider (Slew was ridden at the stud farm for years), the blacksmith, the veterinarian, the farm owner, the owners of the horse. “I felt I had to manage all those people in a way that they would respect the horse and the needs of the horse. Because if you have ten people involved with the horse—and these are important and, some of them, powerful people—everybody can’t have his own way. This is probably the first time I’ve used the word, to manage a horse, but there’s a lot that a groom can do.”

  “So you saw yourself,” I asked Wade, “as speaking for the horse?”

  “I saw myself,” he replied without hesitation, and even raising his voice, “I saw myself as standing up on a stump and screaming and hollering for the horse. That’s exactly right.” But Wade is as careful with words as he is, no doubt, with horses. He adds that keeping all those vested interests on the same page with Seattle Slew was not always difficult.

  Slew himself could be difficult, and he bit Wade “a few times,” as he put it. Always, said Wade, because the groom “provoked” him. One time, a visitor to the farm stood alongside groom and horse while some photos were taken, and the visitor was rattling keys. The key rattler herself did not bear the brunt of the stallion’s annoyance; Tom Wade did—apparently for permitting the nuisance. Another time, Wade, perhaps feeling pressure to rush the daily routine, entered Slew’s stall to take him outside. The great horse, who preferred his groom to wait at the entrance, showed his anger by biting him on the chest.

  “I knew better,” Wade told me. If he needed medical treatment because of Slew’s teeth, he kept quiet about it. No need to malign the horse when the groom was the one at fault. “He was a horse who had his limits,” said Wade. “Early in the morning, you could do anything in the world with him. In the afternoons, he’d get tired of the heat and the humidity.” Then he could be cranky and one had to be careful with him.

  Wade remembers Slew as an honest horse (if he took a chunk out of you, it was always straight on, never from behind) and an extraordinarily smart one. The eyes said it all. They were amber, as if some alchemist blending golds had added a tincture of silver to make an amulet for a king. Seattle Slew’s eyes, said many who saw them, pinned you with their brilliance and intelligence.

  Above all, he was a horse in love with run. Wade would release him in his paddock, and any frustration in that horse would immediately reveal itself, for he would explode into motion. Secretariat had the same penchant and need. Speed was his friend, his brother, his tonic.

  And despite their two-decade-long relationship, Tom Wade said, “I never took for granted that Slew knew me personally. I didn’t treat him like no dog. I didn’t treat him like a pet. I treated him like he was a serious horse.” Wade saw himself as Slew’s caretaker—the one who fed him, bathed him, took him in out of the storm, and solved his problems. Let’s get through that part, Wade took Slew to be saying, before we get into anything else.

  Wade was making a critical distinction: Slew loved the service, not necessarily its provider. I had never heard a longtime horse–human relationship put in quite those terms. The groom as British butler— loyal to his master, professional to the core, discreet, cool, and above-board.

  “It sounds,” I told Wade, “as if you don’t belong to the mystical school of horsemanship.”

  He couldn’t agree quickly enough. “I don’t whisper,” he said (as in “horse whisperer”). When it comes to humans and horses, Wade believes, it is the horse’s world the human enters, not the other way around.

  If you give your life to being around a horse, said this lifelong groom, you literally ask that horse’s permission to be included in his world. “You don’t drag that horse into your world. My time around Seattle Slew, I followed him; he didn’t follow me. He taught me; I didn’t teach him. That’s honestly how I saw it. That’s not just blowin’ smoke.”

  But whatever transpired in the groom’s life between 1982 and 2002—losing both parents, getting remarried, becoming a stepfather— the horse was somehow part of it.

  “I don’t worship no horse,” the groom said as he tried to explain a point that I took to be fundamental for him. “But I wanted to live my life for Slew to be proud of me. That’s how I looked at Seattle Slew.” Later, when the groom rediscovered his Christian faith, he would often ask himself if that’s what the horse would have wanted. Wade believes the horse did.

  It is tempting to put a simple spin on Tom Wade’s profound sense of his own good fortune. What groom—and a high-school dropout at that—would not be grateful to be living as he does? His house outside Lexington is part of a new subdivision carved out of a Thoroughbred farm, so home is a rather splendid place, and the aquamarine pickup truck in the driveway looks new. The tangible benefits of “doing right by the horse,” as Wade puts it, are all around him, and he admits quite frankly that he has been well looked after by the owners of Seattle Slew (who, in turn, insist that this largesse comes from Slew and not from them). I’ll wager that no groom in all of horsedom has what Tom Wade has. In his heart of hearts, Tom Wade must look at the fate of Eddie Sweat, lying in his humble grave in South Carolina, and say to himself, There but for the grace of God go I.

  I talked with Wade
about Sweat’s visit to Three Chimneys. “In that week you two spent together in November of 1985,” I asked Tom Wade, “what did you talk about?” I wondered if the two esteemed grooms might have shared some horse philosophy or traded tips and stories. But no, they talked about money.

  “He had a family,” said Wade, “and he didn’t get home much and he didn’t get much money. He talked to me about whether it was worth it. We had a serious conversation once about—I think he had bought a car, and I don’t know that he always had a car when he worked. With Lucien, I doubt it. And he talked to me about buying a car and taking a few weeks’ vacation and being right back where you started. I don’t think he had a big nest egg and I think there was a lot of doubts at the time.

  “Chief’s Crown’s people,” Wade went on, “were a little bit more in tune to Eddie and Eddie’s needs and things than in Secretariat times. So times had changed. Lucien Laurin had trained Secretariat, and Lucien’s son Roger had trained Chief’s Crown. Roger was a classy guy.” It was Roger who flew Eddie’s family south for the burial.

  Before I left Tom Wade, I asked him if he had a photograph of himself and Slew—maybe like the one I had seen showing Will Harbut and Man o’War cheek-to-cheek on the cover of The Saturday Evening Post. He knew just what I was talking about and tried, but failed, to find in another room the photograph he had in mind. Maybe it was the one I found in the Seattle Slew file in the Keeneland Library: That photograph shows Wade to the front and left of the horse, with the halter loose in his left hand while the index finger of his right hand rests on the horse’s nose and may be lightly rubbing the nose. Slew’s eyes are soft, his ears are forward, and his mouth is a little open in pleasure.

  It says a lot that Tom Wade did not choose to describe that shot, or one like it, as his favorite. He offered, instead, this image: “He’s standing in the middle of his paddock. There’s yellow dandelions on the ground. He’s standing there ... no distractions.” The groom wanted only what the horse wanted. Seattle Slew was a horse who loved mornings, winter snow and cold, and, above all else, his quiet time.