Eddie had gone along, and he posed with a glass of champagne for a picture with Secretariat. But he took only a sip and tossed the rest. There was work to do.
Often called “the first lady of racing,” Penny Chenery has for decades promoted the sport, its charities and worthy foundations (including the Grayson–Jockey Club Research Foundation, which funds equine research—about $800,000 annually—from a $20 million nest egg). We have the Ed Bogucki sculpture of Secretariat because Penny Chenery auctioned off most of her Secretariat memorabilia in 1999. Sold were, among other things, a Secretariat horseshoe with dirt still caked in it, a feed bag from the Meadow, a bridle worn by Secretariat, the blanket awarded after the Belmont victory, dresses the owner wore to his races, seat tickets, dried carnations. The Belmont Stakes blanket fetched $43,000, the Bogucki maquette brought in more than $44,000, Secretariat’s tack box went for $13,000, and the Triple Crown bridle and bit fetched $28,000. In total, $336,675 was raised.
When Chenery was trying to save the family farm back in 1973, with estate taxes looming after the death of her father, she formed a syndicate. Thirty-two shares, worth $190,000 each, entitled the holder to breeding rights to her superhorse. The Chenery family retained four shares, and the six million dollars raised did indeed save the farm. Grooms almost never partake in this division of spoils. But Eddie Sweat, at least late in his life, apparently did not accept his fate or take it as a given. He was, some insist, resentful (though others close to him vehemently deny this).
I think of another man, a black man, from Secretariat’s early days. Howard Gregory, seventy-eight years old, worked at the Meadow for thirty-one years and was around the young colt from the day he was born. The Blood-Horse tracked him down in 2002 and got him to reminisce. He remembered, for example, burying Somethingroyal, Secretariat’s dam, when she died at thirty-one—an advanced age for a Thoroughbred.
Howard Gregory loved his work, and he thought there were no nicer bosses in the world than Christopher Chenery and, later, his daughter, Penny. Money, Gregory said, was never a problem then, and they all got bonuses and shares in winnings. When Gregory wanted to build his own house, Christopher Chenery helped him out. “I live in a six-room house on five acres, and it’s all mine,” he said, still thankful to the man he calls “Mr. Chenery.” Growing up, Howard Gregory would have heard himself referred to as “Negro,” “colored,” “black,” “African-American,” each age with its own nomenclature for the pigmentation of a person’s skin. But a black person of his era—Eddie Sweat’s time—would have always referred to his white employer as “Mr.”
Gregory busies himself these days with little landscaping jobs and fixing engines. He lives on Riva Ridge Road, part of a settlement known as Duval Town, built after emancipation to house freed slaves. In the early 1970s, when Secretariat was growing up, grooms at the Meadow were black and most lived at Duval Town. A farm truck would pick them up in the morning and take them to the Meadow. Sadie Lane, in Duval Town, is named after “Aunt Sadie,” who cooked for Penny Chenery’s mother in the 1940s.
Raymond Woolfe told me that “Mr. Chenery was a class act all the way. All his instincts were in the right place.” I wonder where his spirit of kindness went to and why the racetrack seems to follow his example more by exception than as a rule. Was his generosity like some rare orchid that thrived on the Meadow’s Virginia soil and only under his tending, defying any attempt at transplanting? Did it, like the fraternity of black grooms, simply fade away?
Penny Chenery, as the owner of Secretariat, would have paid Lucien Laurin 10 percent of purses won. She managed the Meadow Stable; she saw the checks going out. The groom was supposed to get 1 percent of that take, and Chenery finds it hard to believe that Lucien Laurin would have pocketed any money meant for Eddie. As for the groom’s unseemly circumstances at the end of his life, she learned of it only after the fact. Eddie had faded from view. It was why, Penny Chenery said, neither Eddie’s family nor Charlie Davis were invited to the Secretariat unveiling in Lexington. No one in her circle, she said, could find them.
Even Ron Turcotte, with all his contacts and despite issuing many feelers, could not track down Charlie Davis. “I would have paid his way,” Turcotte told me. “I wanted him to be there for the unveiling.” As for finding Eddie Sweat’s relations, there are so many Sweats around Vance, South Carolina, it could easily be called Sweatville. Eddie’s son and siblings would have attended the unveiling had they been invited, and they were not happy, at all, about the oversight.
When I asked Penny Chenery how we might improve the lot of grooms, she had no easy answer. “Give them better horses,” she said, joking just a little. The better the horse, of course, the greater the chance of victory and of a groom sharing in the spoils. “Grooms,” she conceded, “are an exploitable pool of labor, and many trainers do shortchange them. They should be adequately paid. I would hate to advocate unions. Maybe if tracks insisted on standards of accommodation, maybe if there were more inspections. And fewer gyp trainers.”
I was struck repeatedly as I did my research by how valuable grooms are and yet how invisible they are. Everyone at the track has a hand out, hoping for a bonus or a share, and virtually the last hand is the groom’s. Only the hot walker stands more removed from whatever largesse track society is willing to bestow.
I remember wading through files at the Keeneland Library and finding an article on Secretariat in the December 1997 issue of Western Horseman magazine, and being struck by the caption beneath one of the accompanying photographs. The photo showed Secretariat in the winner’s circle after the Derby, and the jockey, trainer, owner, even the owner’s sister, were all named. The black man holding the horse was tagged an “unidentified handler.” The author or editor of the piece had not bothered to look up his name. Eddie was dying when that piece was published—he was buried the following April—and I trust he never saw the insult.
This book was written in praise of Secretariat and other great horses and their grooms, but if the fabled horse was the book’s inspiration, Edward “Shorty” Sweat became its enduring ghost.
At nine o’clock on the morning Eddie died, his firstborn son, Marvin, got a cold chill, and he knew in that instant his father was gone. Marvin was in Miami and set to board a flight to New York later that day. The two men had talked on the phone the night before.
“My father,” said Marvin Moorer, “was a strong, strong man. He went to work every day of his life, whether he was sick or not. I never heard him say he was tired. But that night, he said, ‘Son, I’m so tired.’ ‘Hold on,’ I told him. ‘We’re coming up tomorrow on a plane.’ ‘I’ll try,’ said Eddie. ‘But I’m so tired.
The next day, Marvin saw his cousin Vincent Walker come around a corner with tears in his eyes and he knew without being told. “I could always call him and I felt better after,” Marvin said. “And sometimes he gave me tough advice. He might say, ‘You got yourself into this mess; now you get yourself out.’ Now I couldn’t call him anymore.”
I have seen photographs of Marvin, and he is the spitting image of his father, just a half foot taller. Like many of the Sweats, Marvin was athletic in his youth—he played point guard one year for a semipro basketball team based in Chicago. His cousins played college baseball or football and one tried out for the Miami Dolphins.
Eddie Sweat, said his son, was nineteen years old in 1958, when he met a local girl, Laverne Moorer, then seventeen. She bore his child, Marvin, but her father blocked Eddie’s proposal of marriage, insisting his daughter was too young. Later, it was Laverne who wanted marriage and Eddie who declined. They would have a love-hate relationship for the rest of their days.
“I saw the look in my mother’s eye the day of the funeral,” said Marvin. “I heard her say to the casket, ‘I always loved you and now you’re gone.’ That touched my heart, but there were days, I know, when she wanted to throttle him.”
The church was filled to capacity on the day they buried Shorty Sweat, and there were
some white people in attendance—exercise riders, mainly, and staff at Holly Hill Training Center, who had come to pay their respects. And while the jockey, in his wheelchair back in New Brunswick, was excused, the family did wonder why no owners or trainers were there.
“Had Lucien ever shortchanged Eddie?” I asked Marvin, for I had heard that charge often.
“There was a bit of that,” he replied. On the other hand, Lucien, said Marvin, had offered Eddie a nice home in South Carolina, and an opportunity to run Holly Hill Training Center. But Eddie refused to leave New York. Eddie was also offered training partnerships, and more lucrative offers with other trainers. But he would not leave Lucien. “He was loyal to Lucien,” said Marvin, “and he didn’t want the responsibility of being a trainer.”
As for Eddie’s awful finances, Marvin offered a simple observation. He remembered Linda Sweat taking him shopping when he was fourteen. Marvin was living with his mother in New York, and seeing Eddie and Linda on weekends. “She was more of a spender,” said Marvin of his stepmother, who taught preschool children. “ ‘If you like it, get it’ was her advice. I had always been taught to conserve. I used to do my father’s banking. I’d deposit his checks, and he had quite a bit of change. This was in 1994 and 1995.” What role, if any, Linda Sweat played in Eddie’s descent into poverty and where the money went, no one really knows with certainty. (Linda Sweat and her two daughters declined my request for an interview, as did Marvin’s mother, Laverne Moorer, who was in poor health and recovering from brain surgery.)
The home in New York was lost in a dispute over back taxes, and whatever nest egg Eddie had amassed, including land and investments, not to mention all the silver plates and trophies, the detail of the Bogucki bronze, and other Secretariat memorabilia, disappeared down some deep dark hole.
“It was so bad,” said Marvin, “that I had to put in fifteen hundred dollars to help pay for the funeral. The Jockey Club paid for part of the casket. All my father had to leave his kids was two acres of land, and I just gave my share to my sisters.”
Eddie’s youngest sister, Geraldine Holman, had to pay funeral home charges in both New York and South Carolina, along with the cost of transporting Eddie’s body, and she even bought the blue suit he was buried in. “I went broke paying for all that,” she told me, “but I know he’s in a better place, looking down on all of us with a big smile on his face.”
For all his money woes at the end, Eddie, his son said, had no regrets. “Until Secretariat,” Marvin told me, “my father was day-by-day, happy-go-lucky. Secretariat got him recognized. That was a great moment in his life. I have never seen him so happy. He had a nice house, a real nice house. One time we were in Saratoga, and we couldn’t walk anywhere without being stopped for autographs. He was on the cover of Ebony magazine and Jet magazine in 1973. But he hadn’t forgotten his friends and relations back in South Carolina. He got his nephews jobs on the track, with much more money than they were getting in South Carolina.”
“Did your father,” I asked, “try to help too many people back in South Carolina?” This was another accusation circulating on the Eddie Sweat grapevine.
“He would say he didn’t help enough,” Marvin replied without hesitation. And I thought, Marvin, you are your father’s son.
Marvin wishes he had known about the unveiling of the bronze in Lexington. “All Penny Chenery had to do,” he said, “was contact Holly Hill Training Center. I’m really not happy, but there’s nothing I can do about it now.”
There’s a kindly swagger about Marvin Moorer. (“I think like a seven-footer,” he told me, laughing as he recalled his basketball days. He fondly remembered playing one-on-one with the prominent trainer Nick Zito, who, he said, “loves punishment.”) Marvin will admit that the father-son relationship wasn’t always the best, especially during his teenage years, when he was doing badly in school and loudly resenting his father’s absence. They had confrontations, long periods apart. But in 1983, when Marvin was twenty-four and just out of the military, he started working with Eddie at Belmont, an arrangement that continued until 1987. For the first time, father and son “talked as men.”
Marvin fondly remembers a man who loved baseball and rhythm and blues (Tyrone Davis and Johnnie Taylor especially), who loved to cook and dearly loved a joke. Eddie laughed easily and often, and he did not lack for confidence. He died convinced that he could have saved Secretariat from laminitis, could have protected him from the disease and, failing that, could have treated it. Sweat’s genius with horses and his racetrack fame, though, were always tempered by something else.
He was a black man from the Old South. “My father,” said Marvin, “had a tendency to look down on the ground, with his hands in his back pocket, especially when he was talking to Roger or Lucien Laurin. I was raised in New York and I was taught to look a person in the eye when you’re talking. I didn’t grow up with the race thing.”
One day not long before our interview, Marvin Moorer was driving through Lexington and he stopped for a meal at a restaurant. The chef must have spotted him and came out from the kitchen to tell him that he looked very much like a man he knew and admired, one Edward “Shorty” Sweat. There was a painting on the restaurant wall, which the chef proceeded to show Marvin: It was the Richard Stone Reeves painting, of Eddie holding Secretariat, with the blanket on the ground between them.
“That’s my father,” said Marvin, who pulled out from his wallet his father’s obituary in the New York Times. There followed a great commotion, with the chef taking Marvin around and introducing him to patrons, who now sought Marvin’s autograph. “My father was a special man,” his son told me. “I miss him a lot. He was not a religious man, but he had God in his heart.”
David Walker, son of Birtha Lee Walker, Eddie’s eldest sister, adored his uncle. “He was bigger than life,” said this former groom, who had worked for more than a decade at Belmont. “When he walked into a room, the whole room would light up. He had an air about him.” I wondered if it was a princely air, and thought of Ted McClain’s first words to me about Shorty Sweat: “Eddie was a prince.”
Walker talked to his uncle in the last days of his life, and he does not believe that Eddie ever regretted his time on the backstretch. “Eddie was supposed to get one percent of race winnings,” said Walker, “and he didn’t always get what he was promised.” But bitter? No. “Other trainers desperately wanted Eddie to work for them. They knew that any horse with quality, in Eddie’s hands, would be better. Many trainers tried to seduce Eddie with offers of more money. He refused. He was loyal to Lucien Laurin.”
In 1973, when Eddie delivered Secretariat into the hands of the grooms at Claiborne Farm, Seth Hancock—then and still the farm’s owner—offered Eddie a job at the farm. Taking it would have meant steady hours, a solid wage (and not one that rose and fell with racetrack luck), relief from all the travel, and even the company of the horse he loved. But Eddie turned Hancock down. I have to think that he later regretted not taking that offer, but the thought of uprooting his family must have seemed too much at the time. And the backstretch still tugged at him.
This, too, is speculation, but perhaps Eddie—out of kindness and consideration—spared his blood relations any hint of his own rancor as he lay dying. His siblings adored him, and they might have found it unbearable to know that both cancer and regret were gnawing at him during his final days in that hospital bed in New York City.
His sister Mary Lee Council, the eighth of the nine Sweat children, told me that she and Eddie as very young children used to sleep in the same bed. Eddie called her “Duke” (she can’t remember why) and she raised one of Eddie’s sons, Eric. “He was real friendly and nice,” Mary Lee said of Eddie. “Always had a smile. I loved him and I miss him. He was a happy man.” And the family was close, she said. “The Sweats, we all stick together.”
In the days and weeks before finally succumbing to the Job’s list of ailments that assailed him, Eddie admitted to his nephew that he h
adn’t taken care of himself, hadn’t always gone to the doctor when perhaps he should have. Eddie also admitted to David Walker that Secretariat’s death nine years beforehand had taken a lot out of him. Drinking did not dull the pain and may have compromised his health even further.
“What should my take be on your uncle?” I asked his nephew. “Was he a lucky man who had doubts at the end, or was he content with his life?”
“Your take,” advised Walker, “should be that he was a great man with a lot of great horses. He never complained. It’s a happy story. He had a joy ride. The only sad part is that Eddie Sweat wanted to be the first groom to enter racing’s Hall of Fame.” What does it say about the sport of kings—whose history in America goes back several hundred years—that its hall of heroes recognizes only horses, trainers, and jockeys? There is no category for owners, which is understandable, but none for grooms, either, which is not. They should bend those rules at Saratoga Springs, make an exception, so Edward “Shorty” Sweat can get his dying wish.
I asked Ron Turcotte why he had given a thousand dollars in cash to both Charlie Davis and Eddie Sweat in the wake of the Triple Crown victories. “They were doing most of the work,” he said, as if his gesture were self-evident. “I always took care of the boys in the barn. Those guys were sleeping on cots in front of Secretariat’s stall!” Racetrackers call it “staking”—an owner, trainer, or jockey shares the wealth with the bottom rung when a horse posts a win. Ron Turcotte remembers an owner at Woodbine walking down the shed row and handing out fifty-dollar bills.
There is charity on the backstretch, but it’s hit-and-miss, and backsiders never know when they’ll need some or where it will come from. In 1972, set to ride Riva Ridge to victory in the Kentucky Derby, Turcotte flew to Louisville assuming that either the owner or trainer had booked a hotel room for him. They had not, and, at the eleventh hour, there was no hotel room for a hundred miles. On the street, Turcotte crossed paths with a trainer and a racing secretary he knew and they let him bunk in their hotel room. The night before the Derby, and the winning jockey was sharing a bed. Next year, with Secretariat, it happened again. Turcotte once more had to lean on the kindness of friends.
The Horse God Built Page 22
