Native Dancer

by John Eisenberg

  Guerin had won it on Blue Peter in 1948, and after navigating an easy half mile on the Dancer, he inched the horse out of the pack and toward the front. It was time to make the winning move the crowd had expected. But just as the Dancer’s ears went back, Arcaro, a jockey so adept at measuring pace and timing moves he was nicknamed the Master, struck boldly. He drove Tahitian King, a 10-1 shot, through a hole on the far rail, past Little Request and into the lead. The crowd screamed with surprise as Caposella’s pitch rose and Little Request, suddenly fading, blocked the Dancer’s path and stalled the favorite in the pack. The big grey had never experienced anything like this.

  If any jockey could take a lesser horse and steal the Futurity, it was Arcaro. At age thirty-six, he was still in the prime of a career that had included five Kentucky Derby victories and dozens of other triumphs in major races such as the Futurity, which he had won three times. He was at his best in the big events, and his move on Tahitian King was a classic. Knowing he wasn’t on a horse that could beat the Dancer in a stretch duel, he had preemptively grabbed the lead, hoping the favorite might get blocked long enough to cause problems. The plan had worked, and Arcaro, sensing a possible upset, asked Tahitian King for a finishing kick.

  That the Dancer was behind so late in a race wasn’t unusual. He had trailed in all of his races until making a late move, then often, curiously, loafed to the finish line once he had established his superiority, almost as if he wanted the others to catch him. After months of observation, Winfrey had deduced that the horse preferred the company of others when he raced; running alone and in front bored him, it seemed. Winfrey had thus conditioned him to race behind the front-runners, in traffic, until it almost seemed too late, accelerating just in time to win at the end, leaving little time for loafing.

  But if it was normal that he was behind Tahitian King with a quarter mile left in the Futurity, it wasn’t normal that horses were in front of him and on either side, leaving him without a running lane. Guerin knew he had to react quickly. A successful rider on the New York circuit, known for his cool head and steady hand, he recognized that the race was on the verge of getting away. He hesitated, hoping the pack around him would begin to break up, and knowing he was in trouble if it didn’t Magically, it did: Little Request dropped toward the rear, fading fast, and a sliver of daylight opened to Guerin’s right. He steered the Dancer into the opening, loosened his grip on the reins, and shouted at the horse. Back went the Dancer’s ears and out went his stride, his reach so extended that, it was said later, you could see the bottoms of his hooves at midstride.

  In the career of every top athlete, equine or otherwise, there is a moment when it becomes clear this is no ordinary competitor. For Native Dancer, that moment came in the final two hundred yards of the Futurity. Once he had found running room and accelerated, he drew even with Tahitian King so quickly that Arcaro had no chance to react. It almost resembled a deft magician’s trick: he was pursuing Tahitian King one second, eyeball-to-eyeball the next. Cheers soared into the air, and just as quickly, the Dancer wrested away the lead and took aim at the finish. He had gone from fourth to first in five remarkable steps without Guerin even drawing his stick.

  A combination of factors would send the horse’s popularity soaring in the coming months: his prodigious talent; his come-from-behind style, which exhausted his fans but left them wanting to see more; the timing of his arrival, at the dawn of the TV age; and the sheer humanness he exuded with his limpid eyes and charisma. But of all the factors, none were more important than, simply, his color. His grey coat stood apart in any equine crowd, discernible not only to fans at the track but also to those watching on TV.

  A fast grey was a phenomenon. Only one of every one hundred thoroughbreds was grey in 1953, and through the years, other than a stallion named Mahmoud that C. V. Whitney had imported from England and a colt named First Fiddle that had won some races during World War II, greys had not distinguished themselves in American racing. Many horsemen had long considered them unlucky, lacking stamina, or even diseased, as the legendary Italian breeder Federico Tesio had written. “It wasn’t prejudice so much as a sense of caution and reservation,” longtime Daily Racing Form columnist Joe Hirsch recalled years later. “Greys just were different. It was a sense of racism, I suppose.”

  Greys would have disappeared entirely from racetracks around the world in the late 1800s if not for a French stallion named Le Sancy, the single horse from which all modern grey pedigrees are traced. Le Sancy’s son, Le Samaritain, won the French St. LÉger, a major race, and sired a colt named Roi Herode. After a respectable racing career, Roi Herode retired in Ireland and sired a brilliant colt named The Tetrarch, a light grey with white patches dotting his coat. Nicknamed the Spotted Wonder, he won all seven of his races as a two-year-old in England in 1913, then was injured and retired to stud, where he sired a speedy filly named Mumtaz Mahal and many other winners.

  The Tetrarch restored enough faith in greys to keep the line alive in England and America, yet many owners, breeders, and horsemen still avoided them, and racing secretaries were still writing “grey only” races into their condition books as late as the 1940s, believing the curios would draw women to the track. Even in the early 1950s, many horsemen still saw them as sissified novelties and claimed, only half jokingly, that if you came across a grey or a horse with three or four white legs, you might as well cut off its head and feed it to the crows.

  There was no substance to the notion that greys were genetically inferior, of course. Coloring had no effect on a horse’s ability to race. The grey tint in the Dancer and others was attributable to a lack of pigmentation in some hairs, leaving the coat a blend of dark and light hairs that appeared grey from a distance. Many greys were born dark and died white, and spent much of their lives in a state of transformation from one extreme to the other. The Dancer, colored chocolate brown at birth, was now a rich dark grey with patterns of light rings just visible in his coat. His sire, Polynesian, was a bay, but the genes of his dam, Geisha, had dominated his coloring. Geisha was a grey great-great-granddaughter of Roi Herode and a daughter and granddaughter of greys. Now her son was a grey, becoming more famous every day.

  Those who still doubted him because of his color had no argument left after his move to the front in the Futurity. Many in the crowd had thought he was beaten, but he had broken free from the pack with a breathtaking burst, and now, with seventy-five yards to go, embarked on the triumphant sprint many had envisioned. He drove forward in a grinding gear, for once not easing up with the lead as his slanting shadow bobbed farther ahead of the others. His rivals were left behind, their inferiority underlined. The Dancer was two and a quarter lengths ahead of Tahitian King at the finish line, and nine lengths ahead of every other horse except the distant third-place finisher, Dark Star.

  There was a cheer, and then another, even louder, when the winning time was posted. The Dancer had run the race in 1:14⅖, as fast as any horse anywhere had ever covered six and a half furlongs on a straightaway course. He had tied a world record! A two-year-old named Porter’s Mite had set the record on the Widener course fifteen years earlier, carrying three fewer pounds than the Dancer. “I’m sure he would have broken the record if we hadn’t been fighting a headwind the whole way,” Guerin told reporters. The jockey had won a Kentucky Derby and stood in hundreds of winner’s circles, but clearly he was moved by what he had just experienced. “I don’t believe,” he said, “that I have ever ridden a better horse.”

  More cheers rained down as Lester Murray, the Dancer’s elderly black groom, attached the shank and held him in the winner’s enclosure at the foot of the grandstand. Vanderbilt and Winfrey posed for win pictures as reporters surrounded Arcaro, who could only shake his head. “I wish the race had been six furlongs instead of six and a half,” the Master muttered. “I thought I had it won until that grey horse just smothered us.”

  It was a busy sports Saturday in New York and across the country, with Notre Dame pla
ying Pennsylvania in college football before a national TV audience and 75,000 fans in Philadelphia, the pro football season kicking off, and tickets selling for the World Series between the Yankees and Brooklyn Dodgers beginning the next week. Baseball was dominating the talk on the streets of New York. There wasn’t much room in the papers for big news from Belmont But Native Dancer had given the sports editors no choice. As Joe H. Palmer, the esteemed racing writer for the New York Herald Tribune, wrote in his column the next day, the grey colt had “just plain murdered the field in the Futurity,” raising glorious echoes of past champions such as Count Fleet, Citation, and Man O’ War. America’s next great horse had arrived, and he was a grey, of all things, a pale specter sprinting through the stretch. People were calling him the Grey Ghost, his coloring and shadowy dominance stirring imaginations. If his victory in the Futurity didn’t warrant a bold headline at the top of the sports page, what did?

  TWO

  Twenty minutes after the Futurity, with the crowd still buzzing about the Dancer’s charge, the colt headed back to Barn 20 on the backstretch at Belmont, where Vanderbilt’s horses in training were permanently stabled. Harold Walker, the stable’s mammoth night watchman, held the lead shank as the Dancer pranced through the track’s treelined barn community. Lester Murray brought up the rear. Clothed in the white coat and broad-brimmed hat he always wore to the races, the groom gripped the Dancer’s tail tightly with both hands and chattered nonstop. “You done good, you bum, you done real good,” Murray huffed at the horse as they moved along.

  None of the men who worked for Vanderbilt could remember where Murray had come from, but they also couldn’t remember the barn without him. With his round head perched on his round body as he waddled across the straw, forever spinning a yarn, he was a sixty-three-year-old lifelong horseman, steeped in the backyard remedies and unerring instincts of racing’s old school. His wisdom was incalculable, his devotion to his horses immutable. No one loved the Dancer more. Murray and the Grey Ghost spent hours together in the stall every day, Murray wrapping and unwrapping bandages, passing out dandelions as treats, and engaging in nonstop conversation, his rumbling voice pitched in the melodious, intimate tone a mother might use when alone in a room with a child. He sprawled on the floor as he worked, often dozed in the straw when finished, and when it was time to rise, grabbed the Dancer’s tail and held on for leverage as he hauled himself up. The horse never responded angrily to the tugs, seemingly understanding that he was helping his friend. On some level, it could safely be said, the Dancer and his groom were in love.

  Murray handled the groom’s chores by himself on most days, but the colt was such a handful, so immense and unpredictable, that Winfrey had assigned the responsibility of the lead shank to Walker on race days. Murray’s aging grip just wasn’t enough, especially with the swirl of people and noise around the horse seemingly increasing with every victory. What if the Dancer abruptly reared, as he occasionally did during morning workouts? Murray alone wouldn’t be able to keep him under control.

  There was no reason for concern once the entourage reached Barn 20 after the Futurity, so Walker handed the shank to Murray and the groom led the Dancer around and around the long indoor enclosure, cooling out from the race. Once his breathing eased, the horse was bathed and deposited in stall 6, his kingly lair. Murray took off his coat and hat and went to work, removing the tight racing bandages on the horse’s legs and replacing them with looser stall bandages. “You just want to eat,” the groom groused good-naturedly. “You hungry, you are.”

  The barn was immaculate and efficient, radiating the crisp glow of a wealthy family’s country home. Two dozen well-bred Vanderbilt horses were on the premises, operating on a tight schedule of training, racing, feeding, and sleep. Their stalls were piled deep with hay. Pampered black cats dashed about wearing collars with cerise and white diamond stitching. During morning workout hours, the exercise riders were dressed in uniforms of boots, jodhpurs, and cerise and white sweaters, and the grooms bustled through their chores with precision.

  The family ambience wasn’t happenstance. At a time when many of racing’s top stables belonged to society families such as the Wideners and Whitneys, a job with Vanderbilt was a job to keep. Most of the staff, like Murray, had worked in the barn for years, becoming as associated with Vanderbilt as his colors and silks in the insular back-stretch world. There were exercise riders such as Bernie Everson, who rode the Dancer every morning, and Claude “Apples” Appley, who had worked for Vanderbilt since the Depression; grooms such as Walker and Murray; and J. C. Mergler, the stable foreman who paid the feed man and made sure Vanderbilt’s high standards were met. They had hummed along for years, a racing family, working together through Vanderbilt’s prosperous times in the sport, and also his many disappointments.

  A handful of top horses such as Bed o’ Roses, Next Move, Loser Weeper, and Cousin had passed through their hands in the past few years as Vanderbilt’s stable experienced a renaissance after falling off badly during the war. Now there was Native Dancer, the best yet. Physically, he was awesome. Though still a gawky equine teenager as a two-year-old with growing to do, he was already fearsome at 16.1 hands tall (5'6'') and 1,100 pounds, with rippling muscles, firm withers, and brawn over his kidneys and in his hindquarters and back, where horses were seldom so defined. He was a fullback in football, a cleanup hitter in baseball, a muscle-bound intimidator who could throw one punch and knock you cold. He loomed over his opposition in his post parades, yet where some horses his size were too bulky to race effectively, the Dancer was coordinated and graceful, a heavyweight as nimble as a lightweight, never taking an awkward step.

  Everything about him was outsized. Great whooshes of air passed through his nostrils as he charged down the track, hammering the ground with every step and violently throwing his front legs out and down, as if the goal was to see how far he could reach or how much dust he could raise. Early in 1953, Life magazine measured his stride at twenty-nine feet, one foot longer than Man O’ War’s and seven feet beyond the average for a thoroughbred. The effort required to propel his massive frame should have exhausted him, but he was never out of breath at the end of training or a race. Seemingly blessed with lungs the size of circus balloons, he had a limitless capacity for work.

  Even his flaws were amplified: his ankles were pocked by bulbous, fleshy lumps that horrified most horsemen, many of whom be-

  lieved the defect would prevent him from surviving the rigors of training and racing. Winfrey downplayed the issue, dismissing reporters when they suggested the ankles might become problematic. Privately, he was at times concerned: a horse that pounded the ground so hard was always susceptible to ankle problems. But the matter hadn’t yet caused him to miss a race, and Winfrey and Vanderbilt were optimistic.

  Through the years, other equine champions had entranced the public by winning despite shortcomings or infirmities. Exterminator, winner of fifty races from 1917 to 1925, was nicknamed Old Bones. Seabiscuit, hero of the Great Depression, was undersized and had a troublesome right foreleg. Assault, a Triple Crown winner in 1946, limped when he walked and had such nicknames as Cripple and Club Foot. But the Grey Ghost generated no such disbelief. No one who watched him race wondered how or why he was winning. He exuded exactly what the public thought a champion should exude. His muscles were intimidating, his coordination fascinating. His walk was proud, his trot graceful, his sprint the stuff of poetry. When he walked down the track, people on the fence just looked at him and sighed.

  He was such a robust, healthy individual that he didn’t require the hormone injections, vitamins, penicillin, and heat treatments so many other horses needed; his doctoring consisted of little more than dabs of liniment rubbed on his ankles. His appetite was vast; when you put food in front of him, it was gone: two quarts of oats at 11 A.M., four quarts at four in the afternoon, four quarts at 1 A.M. and so much mixed clover in between meals that his hayrack needed filling twice a day. “The clover has those sweet
buds and he’s like a child with a Tootsie Roll or something; he stuffs himself with it,” Winfrey explained to writer John McNulty in a 1953 New Yorker article. The clover was replaced with straight timothy four days before a race, Winfrey told McNulty, because it wasn’t as sweet and “he’s more sensible about it.”

  The pros in Barn 20 loved him. With his 8-0 record after the Futurity, he was a star shooting across racing’s constellation, wiring the barn with the electricity a good horse produces. But although his success reflected well on the barn’s horsemanship, he wasn’t treated with deference. Visitors to the barn were shocked to see Winfrey give the horse a harsh slap across the bridge of his nose to get his attention, or Murray tug on his tail as he rose from the straw. That was how they handled the Dancer, as a wise older brother might treat an immature but gifted younger sibling: with tough, heartfelt love. Such treatment was necessary. The horse was unpredictable, at times a ham who pricked his ears for photographers and made funny faces for strangers; but also occasionally lashed out without warning. When visitors to the barn or horsemen he didn’t know or trust tried to pet him or work with him, he nipped at their fingers and sometimes even chased them out of his stall. Years later, he chomped a finger off a groom’s hand. You didn’t want any novice dealing with him. He could be just plain dangerous.

  Yet, remarkably, he seemed to know the difference between whom he could bully and whom he should respect. He played endlessly with his favorite black cats and never gave Murray or Winfrey any trouble, but a police dog who entered his stall one morning was sent flying into a wall. Visitors to the barn were warned to keep their distance, but Vanderbilt’s young children could yank on his tail without fear. “One time Dad ushered Heidi and myself into his stall and let us pull on his tail—hard—while Lester stood at his head. An incredible scenario,” Alfred Vanderbilt III recalled. “Dad told us: ‘Don’t worry. He won’t kick anyone, and he won’t kick you.’ We ran up and down both his sides in the stall, making a terrible racket. All he did was calmly look back over his shoulder at us. It was magic.”