One dark bay filly by Fusaichi Pegasus, with dollops of blood from Northern Dancer, Riva Ridge, Mr. Prospector, and Nijinsky II, goes this day for a cool $450,000. But sometimes a horse fails to garner even the rock-bottom price—maybe seven to ten thousand dollars—set by the seller. “Sold to Woody,” one auctioneer will proclaim, his own euphemism for “back to the seller.”
A jet black horse whom Amy Gill and I both admired—for his look, his bearing—appears to suffer that fate. Hip number 126, one of the few horses at auction with a name (Available Light), is a bay colt with a link to Secretariat: The colt’s sire’s second dam (grandmother, in human terms) was Terlingua. We dash around the corner and into the sales pavilion to see how he fares. But the lordly young horse fails to impress much and sells for a mere thirty thousand dollars.
I try to imagine what it’s like to come here as a buyer empowered to bid up to, say, $500,000 on a horse. To be a player. Maybe you like the dam In Excelsis Deo (you are an old Catholic). Or Seattle Belle because you are a Slew guy. Or My Irish, because your name is Scanlan, or Scanlon. Or, on a hunch, you take a horse by Songandaprayer. (The records will later show that agent Robert N. Scanlon bought Hip number 6, a black colt by Songandaprayer out of Peppy Lapeau, for $200,000.)
Or you decide to hold off. You have read that Seattle Slew covered a mare, May Day Ninety, before he died in 2002, and that the dark bay filly is coming up for sale at Saratoga Springs in August. That hip book, too, is free for the taking here, like some freshly baited hook.
(And that hook continues to catch fish. A fourteen-day auction at Keeneland in September of 2005 took in close to $400 million, a record, with 40 of the 3,545 horses sold fetching $1 million or more.)
I go back to the bar at the Springs Inn, but there is no sign of the Irishmen. I watch more TVG—simulcasts of horse racing all over North America. A young horse almost flips over in the starting gate; long shots come through and favorites hang on; jockeys flail their mounts down the stretch.
In the morning, I see the smallest of the Irish bunch—I take him to be the jockey among them—outside the inn’s little breakfast nook.
“Did you buy any horses yesterday?” I ask him.
“Mebbe,” he replies.
For Amy Gill, being at the sale is a chance to meet friends and network. Every five minutes, it seems, she encounters a client or an acquaintance. One such is Kirsten Johnson, and within minutes of meeting me, she is extending an invitation to her clinic, just outside Lexington. Called the Kentucky Equine Sports Medicine and Rehabilitation Center, or KESMARC, it offers help for the hurting horse.
Amy, Kirsten, a scribe from Canada: We lean on the rail, watch all the pretty horses, and our talk turns to Secretariat. The Belmont, of course. “I can still see it,” Kirsten says. “It’s timeless. It is absolutely timeless.” The Derby. “The most amazing thing about Secretariat, though,” says Amy, “honestly, this is the greatest thing: that he ran each quarter of that Derby faster. No horse has ever done that.”
And the two women talk about the Smarty Jones stab at the Triple Crown, and how that horse (whose pedigree traced back to Secretariat) tugged at them. “It’s the feeling,” says Kirsten. She is a strawberry blonde with a natural passion for the world of the horse. “We all want the same feeling we got when Secretariat ran,” she says. “There isn’t anybody in the business who isn’t searching for that horse. It’s a kind of greatness that leaves the equine realm.” Like a couple finishing each other’s sentences, Amy and Kirsten together tell the story of Jack Nicklaus on his knees in his den, weeping as Secretariat played Pegasus in the Belmont.
Both women express the wish that the contemporary science of computerized photography existed in Secretariat’s day, so that his biomechanics, stride, and motion could all have been analyzed and, better, cataloged for posterity. It seems that Amy Gill and Kirsten Johnson want to see Secretariat run again, but in slow motion, up close, so his legs fill the wide and split screen, fold and touch, fold and touch, over and over again.
Out on Shannon Run Road, a chestnut filly is going for a swim at KESMARC, aided by two men with fifteen-foot blue lead ropes clipped to either side of her halter. As the horse churns the water and makes counterclockwise circles of the pool, each man must stay just ahead of her. This is tricky business, for the men must watch both the horse and what lies ahead—such as the little raised bridge to the pod that lets one man stand and turn in the middle of the pool and that enables this whole procedure. The handlers, especially the one making those wide outside turns, are getting almost as much exercise as the horse.
Kirsten Johnson is giving me, as promised, the grand tour. Her clinic offers sports medicine for high-end equine athletes—mostly Thoroughbreds, but horses from all breeds and all disciplines are treated here. The center features a fourteen-foot-deep pool, a submerged hydraulic treadmill, a mechanized horse-walking machine, a miniature track, and fifty-six stalls.
“We deal with everything here,” says Johnson, “from minor arthroscopic surgery and horses that just need a freshen-up to what could be catastrophic life-threatening and career-ending injuries— and everything in between.” A horse might, by degrees, go from treadmill to pool to light workouts on the track—with its soft footing of crushed polymer. A rider is up as we cross the track, and I feel like a pedestrian on a crosswalk, looking both ways. There is a busyness to the clinic, with horses just arriving, or getting a bath, some going to their treatments or being turned out. About a thousand horses come to the center every year.
A horse, says Johnson, will tell you what is wrong. Even a back problem can be diagnosed simply by applying touch to the horse’s pressure points. A flinch, a hard turn of the head, pinned ears—all might be tantamount to “Ouch!” Enter the chiropractor, the acupuncturist, the therapist with massage machines.
There is also a hyperbaric oxygen chamber, whose healing powers Johnson calls “profound.” A decompression chamber like the ones used to treat divers with the bends, this one is barrel-shaped and large enough to accommodate the tallest horse. The gleaming white chamber looks like a space capsule and strikes me as claustrophobic, but for a horse it is no more menacing than entering a trailer. The idea is to have the horse breathe pure oxygen and thereby to get more oxygen into the bloodstream, which induces a cascade of effects: Any inflammation decreases, and a good thing, too, since swelling may impede the antibiotics meant to kill an infection. Both blood and medicine reach the problem area.
As we walk the grounds and peer into stalls, I am reminded—for all their rugged size and power—just how delicate and fragile the horse is, especially the sport horse. A Thoroughbred takes a mere six strides from the starting gate to hit forty miles an hour and start taking in five gallons of air a second. The force of all that weight and speed exerts an impact on the horse’s cannon bone of ten thousand to twelve thousand pounds. I know this courtesy of a display at the National Museum of Racing and Hall of Fame in Saratoga Springs. The so-called red line in racing is dangerously close: At eighteen thousand pounds, the stress on the cannon bone is too much to bear. A moment of imbalance, a push from another horse, lousy luck, and the bone may snap like a branch.
Some horses at KESMARC have taken “a bad step.” But toss in parasites, bacterial infections, respiratory ailments, torn ligaments and tendons, and nature and man have many ways to fell a horse.
When I ask Johnson about the state of the Thoroughbred breed, she says she worries about the lack of diversity in breeding, wonders about the soil in pasturelands not possessing the nutrients it once did, wonders if some of these immensely valuable horses are babied, kept indoors when maybe a day in the rain is not a bad thing, may even be a good thing.
I expect Kirsten Johnson to say she loves her work, and she does not disappoint. “I grew up a hopeless romantic with horses as a child,” she tells me, “and I must say I don’t feel any different about them today than I did then.” Only one thing has changed, she says. “I have better taste. I have the
knowledge to enjoy a great one.”
But if the track is a world of light and dark, Kirsten Johnson is by no means spared the latter. “I see the best,” she said, “and I see the worst. Don’t ever think that I don’t have horses that come in here where I don’t want to shoot whoever did it to ‘em. It doesn’t make me feel any less for the horse. I refuse to become skeptical. I refuse to stop trying to educate, because a lot of it comes from ignorance. Trust me. I live both sides. There are farms here I won’t work for. There are trainers I won’t take horses for.”
Kirsten’s tour of the center began in her office, where both she and the office secretary have photographs of Secretariat on the wall by their desks. Kirsten’s, taken in 1988, shows her nose-to-nose with Secretariat, the horse in his paddock and Kirsten on the other side of the fence. And it is there in the office, as she tucks into her sandwich at lunch, that I put the question: “Why, with all the improvements in equine nutrition, breeding expertise, track conditions, has no horse challenged the chestnut’s Triple Crown times? While human runners set new records every year, why are equine athletes unable to best times set in 1973?”
“He was just that good,” Kirsten says. And for whatever reason, she adds, the training of racehorses has not changed in all that time. But Kirsten then tosses the question over to KESMARC’s bookkeeper, Terry Trossen, who is a horseman from a family with deep roots in the horse-racing industry. He thinks training has changed since Secretariat’s time.
“Horses today,” he says, “are bred and built for speed. Some of those records you’re talking about are for longer distances, endurance. Horses are just not trained that way anymore. Trainers get them as two-year-olds and they’re trying to break twenty seconds for two furlongs. That’s what they’re selling. They’re selling speed. They want ‘em to win early because they have to recoup their investments.”
Times for six- and seven-furlong races and the mile: Those are all tumbling, says Trossen, as owners and trainers take the money and run. But the Triple Crown tests speed and endurance. The Derby is a mile and a quarter; the Preakness a mile and three-sixteenths; the Belmont a grueling mile and a half. If horses could talk, Funny Cide and Smarty Jones would surely say how hard it is to be both a sprinter and a stayer.
Secretariat was not supposed to be both. He was a son of Bold Ruler, and those genetics were supposed to gift the colt with dash that would peter out over the longer distances, races that track people call “routes.” Maybe the Princequillo blood on his dam’s side kicked in—Princequillo get “can run all day.” We can only guess. Secretariat was a freak of nature and he remains, says Johnson, his own point of reference. No true horseman, she says, casually compares a contemporary horse to Secretariat. “The comparison to Secretariat,” she says, “is saved and very rarely used. And when it is used, it’s used in a very careful way.”
ADULATION
I’m in a diner in Ocala, Florida, with Charlie Davis, Secretariat’s old exercise rider. Before we leave our corner spot by the window, I show him a photograph taken at Saratoga Springs— most likely in August of 1973 (the time of the loss to Onion). Charlie had never seen the image, even though he is in the photo, wearing the Meadow’s blue and white, and he is up on Secretariat.
They are on the track, the tote board behind them. There is white lather at Secretariat’s loins and chest and his mouth is nicely foamed, so they have clearly just finished a gallop and are walking back to the barn. The summer wind has tossed up the horse’s mane, and his coat shines as if someone had taken steel wool to a penny. Charlie looks pleased, his hands low on the horse’s neck, his stick lined up with the angle of his lower leg. The horse was two, Charlie thirty-two.
I had casually mentioned to Sonny Sadinsky, a friend of mine in Kingston, Ontario, that I was working on a book about Secretariat and his groom. And Sonny said, “You should see this photo I have.” The image, on heavy stock, was small poster size— fourteen inches wide by eleven inches high—photographer unknown.
I brought with me on my trip three color photocopies of that image, two to be signed for friends back home, one for Charlie. His eyes brightened when he saw it; then he kissed the photo and said he was going to frame it. “Ohhhhh,” he kept saying, as if someone had given him a birthday present months after the date.
As we leave the restaurant, Charlie proudly shows the photo to three waitresses huddled at the cash register. Charlie, it seems, is a regular.
“It’s him!” one waitress shouts.
“Yes,” I say, “and the horse he’s on is Secretariat!” Instant bedlam. The waitresses fall over themselves in a rush to hug Charlie, who doesn’t mind a bit. And in that moment, I get a sense of what it must have been like for Eddie, to be that close to all those hosannas, to feel the adulation.
7
THE GHOST OF EDDIE SWEAT
“WE LIVE ON HOPE,” JOE BIGGS, JR., said that July day in 2004 at his farm in Kentucky. He was walking me to my car, and I took a last, lingering look at the broodmares and foals in his sloping fields and that gutted shell he hopes one day to call home. (“Hope springs eternal in the human breast,” wrote Alexander Pope. “For fools rush in where angels fear to tread” was also his turn of phrase.)
Where there is hope, maybe faith is close by, but what about charity? One of the abiding myths of the racetrack is that the track “looks after its own.” In my travels for this book, I heard of several trainers helping grooms weather storms in their lives. The aid offered was discreet, and when I asked one trainer if he had ever helped out one of his grooms, he denied it—though his old partner had earlier assured me he had. Why would a trainer hide his own generosity? Because if you help one groom, they’ll all want it? By what name do we call such kindness? Is it philanthropy? Or paternalism (its poor cousin)? And however defined, was it denied “the groom of grooms”?
I am still searching for the words to describe how I feel about Eddie Sweat lying there in his pauper’s grave. Mystified, appalled, angry: All variously apply. But what I feel most strongly is an overwhelming sadness. Eddie had played a critical and acknowledged role in the success of perhaps the greatest racehorse who ever lived. (“Smart, informative, a groom’s groom,” Bill Nack called Eddie Sweat. “The one person the colt visibly responded to, the one he recognized and waited for.”) But like gold miners who must empty their shoes and pockets of gold dust at the end of every shift, Eddie Sweat worked with gold but took home almost none of it.
Did Eddie bring on his own poverty by trying to support his offspring, his many siblings and their families? Did Lucien Laurin, whom Eddie looked upon almost as a father, ever shortchange him? To what extent did Eddie—by his drinking in the later years, by giving away money to every outstretched hand on shed row—invite his own Dickensian end? What role, if any, did Eddie’s color play? Why is Tom Wade, Seattle Slew’s groom, sitting pretty, while Eddie’s sole legacy to his children was a tiny plot of land? Were Eddie’s savings poorly or badly managed? Should any of the owners and trainers Eddie Sweat worked for in his lifetime on the track have dug into their own pockets to ease his plight, or were any of them even aware of how badly off he was in his final days?
Everyone I talked to had a different explanation for Eddie’s frightfully impecunious end. The various parties, some of them, clung to self-serving notions. No one had a clear or untainted grasp of the truth. And even were he alive, Eddie, I’ll wager, would not point fingers. He would shield and protect reputations. Privacy, a jockey once told me, is much honored at the racetrack, and Eddie would have felt bound by its rules and governances. And so, at a point late in my quest, I stopped trying to fathom Eddie’s cruel deathbed finances, stopped weighing the stories and sifting through them, stopped seeking some final truth. I would let the stories run, let them jostle and butt against one another—like bumper cars at a small country fair.
It seemed to me that the only easily comprehensible and undeniable aspects of Eddie’s life were two elements: the man’s essential kindness a
nd his gift with the horse.
When Eddie Sweat died in 1998, Penny Chenery told The Blood Horse, “Eddie was very important to Secretariat, and to me… . He respected the horse, but he was never afraid of him. I used to say that he was an important part of the team, but he really was the team.”
On other occasions, Chenery dubbed Eddie “one of the finest men around a horse I ever saw” and a steadying presence for Secretariat when fans, reporters, and photographers besieged the horse. She called Eddie “Secretariat’s stability.”
Eighty-three and still rebounding from a severe heart attack the previous fall, Chenery talked to me in the spring of 2005 about what set Eddie Sweat apart as a groom. “It was his devotion to his horses,” she said on the telephone from her home in Lexington (she has since moved to Denver). “He was a very professional groom. He knew exactly what his job was. He was never late, and he loved his horses. Secretariat was feisty, and a less skilled and intuitive horseman might have tried to fight with Secretariat. Eddie would say, ‘Now c’mon, Big Red.’ He would kid and jolly him and dodge him if he kicked out. The only negative thing,” she added, “was that we forgot to give Eddie advice on attire.” Eddie’s dandyism, those plaid pants on Derby day, did not go down well in the Chenery camp. It wasn’t that she disapproved of those loud clothes, but she did think they were “unprofessional.”
Penny Chenery and Eddie Sweat did not have actual conversations. Most grooms and owners don’t. “Eddie was class-conscious,” Chenery said. “He was a ‘Yes ma’am’ and ‘No ma’am’ kind of man with me.”
She well recalls the friendship between Eddie and Charlie Davis. She told me, “Charlie was the clown; Eddie was the professional. I remember after Secretariat won the Derby, someone sent a case of champagne to the barn at Churchill Downs. We”—she was with Lucien Laurin and Ron Turcotte—”were stuck with the press for an hour. We get back to the barn and here’s Charlie, three sheets to the wind. The horses were walking Charlie. He’s singing, ‘How sweet it is to be loved by you
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