Laffango took the early lead and held it around the first turn and up the backstretch, with his jockey, Nick Shuk, determinedly slowing the pace, covering the first half mile in 48 seconds. That was fine with Guerin, who kept a tight hold on the Dancer as they rolled along in fourth place, behind several long shots as well as Laffango. The favorite at 1–5 odds, the Dancer started to run on the second turn, easily passed the long shots, and bore down on the leader when turning for home. With Shuk also asking Laffango to run, the possibility of a duel down the stretch briefly loomed. But even with Guerin just waving his stick and tapping it on the Dancer’s neck instead of using it, the Dancer’s finishing kick was too strong. He caught Laffango with a furlong to go and quickly put daylight between them, opening a two-length lead. He slowed just before reaching the finish line, but was still one and a half lengths ahead at the wire and ten lengths up on the rest of the field. His unbeaten record was intact, his first distance test passed.
He was breathing harder than usual after the race, but Guerin dismissed suggestions that he had been pressed in his first race over a distance. “He had no trouble at all,” the jockey said. “He always does just what you ask him to do. He tried to pull himself up before the finish, like he always does, but I kept him going.”
The winner’s purse of $38,525 pushed the Dancer’s earnings for the year to $230,495, a record for a two-year-old. The old record belonged to Top Flight, a filly that had earned $219,000 in 1931. There were no longer any doubts about the Grey Ghost ranking with the finest two-year-olds American racing had seen.
After the race, several newsmen pressed Winfrey about the horse possibly running yet again in 1952, in the Pimlico Futurity. The trainer quickly quashed the idea. Within hours of the East View, he announced the Dancer was done for the year. “Native Dancer has done everything asked of him this year, and he has been asked to do a lot,” Winfrey said in a statement that was circulated in the press box.
The fans wouldn’t see the horse again until the spring of 1953, when—no doubt about it now—he would loom above the crowd as a heavy favorite to win the Kentucky Derby. At last, it appeared, if all went well over the winter, Vanderbilt would get another chance to win the famous race that had eluded him.
SIX
Winfrey wasn’t sleeping well. Though only thirty-six, he had spent his life around racing, and he knew what he had on his hands. He had never trained a horse as talented as Native Dancer, and neither had his father, George Carey “G.C.” Winfrey, a respected horseman who had trained a public stable since World War I. Trainers often toss and turn through the night, their minds cluttered with options and concerns, especially when they have a star horse capable of demolishing fields and spawning headlines. The fear of blundering with such a horse and having to live with regrets is enough to fray any trainer’s nerves, and the Dancer was obviously such a horse.
“As the situation developed, my father could scarcely believe it,” Carey Winfrey, Bill’s son, said years later. “His attitude toward Native Dancer was one of enormous gratitude, that he had been given the gift of this fabulous horse when he was relatively young in the game, at least compared to his father. He approached it with a sense almost of humility, that something so talented could come into his hands, like a gift from the gods. He just felt so lucky.”
Born in 1916, Winfrey was originally named William Colin Dickard. His biological father, Claude Dickard, came from a prosperous family that owned a cotton gin in Wills Point, Texas, a small town fifty miles east of Dallas. Claude married a Wills Point woman named Mary Russell, went to college, and took a job with General Motors in Detroit, but he began drinking and the couple divorced after having two children, Bill and an older sister, Janis. Mary took her children back to Wills Point. Claude committed suicide, putting a rifle to his chest in a hotel room in Dallas and pulling the trigger. “He left a poignant note saying, ‘Take good care of my baby boy Bill,’ ” Carey Winfrey said.
Mary soon found another man in Wills Point. George Carey Winfrey was genial and dependable, and he adopted Mary’s children and raised them as his own, doting on the boy, now named William Colin Winfrey. “My grandfather was just a lovely man, wonderful to everyone, totally nonjudgmental, and funny,” Carey Winfrey said. “When he was in his prime, he would drive quite fast and accelerate into turns; he was very robust and outgoing. He adopted my father, but he was more of a father than most people are with their real sons. They had a very close relationship. Early on, they went places, just the two of them.”
In a 1985 interview with the Blood-Horse, Bill Winfrey said, “I had a thing about going out to the track with him in the morning. I didn’t want my father to go without me. He’d be out there at the crack of dawn. He was a world champion hot coffee drinker. He’d have his finished, I’d be half done, and he’d say, ‘Come on, Bill, let’s go.’ I loved it. It would be just Pop and me.”
George Carey Winfrey had become familiar with horses while working in a livery stable as a youngster in Wills Point before the turn of the century. He dropped out of school to join the racing circuit and came to New York as a groom for Tokalon, winner of the 1906 Brooklyn Handicap. He stayed in the East, worked for top trainers, and finally went out on his own. Thorough, indefatigable, and more interested in horsemanship than self-promotion, he operated a small New York-based stable that featured mostly claiming horses, lower end thoroughbreds available for sale whenever they race. Mary’s bracelets and rings were in hock as often as they were on her hands, and there were times when George Carey’s gambling successes kept the family afloat But he was an astute trainer and won his share of races. Known for jogging horses to keep them fit rather than putting them through fast works, he was a favorite of knowing New York bettors. One spring, he won with ten of his first sixteen starters at Jamaica.
“He’d stay in New York all winter, stabled at Jamaica, and you’d go up there in the spring and his horses would be big and fat with long hair, and they didn’t look like they were fit, but they could outrun a spotted-ass ape,” recalled 1950s jockey Charles Ray Leblanc, Guerin’s cousin. “[George Carey] Winfrey was a hell of a trainer. He and Hirsch Jacobs were probably two of the greatest there ever was.”
Bill and his sister were inured to the nomadic racing life as Depression-era youngsters, spending winters in New Orleans and summers in New York, Maryland, or wherever their father raced. When Bill was six, he rode a circus pony named Sparkle to a victory in a staged-for-grins race at Hialeah. At ten, he was handing out betting numbers on the backsides of tracks. At fifteen, he dropped out of school while on a winter sojourn to Miami with the stable and became his father’s fulltime assistant. He had started at John Adams High School near Aqueduct in New York, but his parents hadn’t come south with the proper papers to enroll him in school in Florida, and he convinced them he preferred the racetrack to higher education anyway. Although he was thrilled that his goal of becoming a jockey was near, he later regretted that he had ended his academic career prematurely.
He took out a jockey’s license at age sixteen, intent on proving his mettle despite his youth. But he weighed ninety-one pounds when he took out the license in January in Florida, and he was up to one hundred ten pounds by the Saratoga meeting in August. He won just four races in nine months before giving up on the project. “I was long on weight and short on talent; just plain no good as a jockey,” he told John McNulty in their New Yorker interview in 1953. He became an exercise rider and a groom, and that fall his father gave him a small string of horses to take to Laurel, a track in Maryland. He handled the assignment deftly, and his future as a trainer began taking shape.
Before that happened, though, he left the track for two years in the mid-1930s to work for Eddie Burke, an indomitable bookmaker who had played on pro basketball’s original Boston Celtics and mar-
ried Winfrey’s sister, Jan. Bookmaking was still legal in New York—pari-mutuel wagering didn’t arrive until 1940—and Winfrey wrote prices and ran information in Burke’s
betting rings. He was good with numbers, but he had to return to the barn when his father suffered a heart attack in 1937. He ran the stable until his father returned the next year, then started his own public stable in New York.
The young Winfrey lived on the edgy flow of the claiming game, buying cheaper horses right off the track and then—hopefully—raising their value and selling them for a profit after a few wins. Winfrey was twenty-two years old, competing against keen veterans such as Calumet’s Plain Ben Jones, but he held his own. It was said you could count on one hand the trainers who had claimed useful horses off Jones over the years, but Winfrey pulled it off when he claimed a filly named One Jest, earning a smiling rebuke from Jones; the Calumet trainer and Winfrey’s father were old friends.
He won his first stakes race in 1938 with Postage Due, a horse he had claimed off Vanderbilt, then turned a filly named Dini he had claimed for $2,000 into a top sprinter, winner of twenty-seven races. Raised among old school racetrackers, he was as businesslike and taciturn as he was insightful, preferring to let his horses do his talking. In 1940, he took on several wealthier clients, married a pretty brunette, and soon fathered a son. “He was developing a reputation as a good horseman and a square shooter,” Carey Winfrey said.
When World War II broke out, he first tried to join other horsemen in the Beach Patrol, a Coast Guard unit patrolling Florida’s beaches on horseback, looking for German submarines. He wound up enlisting in the Marines and becoming a rifle coach.
“Before he went into the service, they were having a party,” Carey Winfrey said. “He asked his sister to take a walk around the block. She didn’t know if he was going to impart some wisdom or ask her to take care of me or my mother or whatever, but they walked all the way around the block and he didn’t say a word. Then, when they got to the end, he said, Want to go around again?’ She said sure. They went around again and he still didn’t say anything. And then he left the next day. To her dying day, she wondered what it was he was trying to say that day.”
After serving in the South Pacific on Guam and Truk, he was discharged in 1946, came home, and began rebuilding his public stable. He soon had fifteen horses, including several stakes winners. Then Vanderbilt hired him. “Alfred used to come by when I was running Dini; he’d be there in the paddock, and we’d chat, but I didn’t think anything of it,” Winfrey told the Blood-Horse in 1985.
The wealthy young sportsman and his new trainer had a lot in common. Both had halted their education prematurely to pursue racing. Both were on their second marriage; Winfrey’s first had collapsed, the long separations caused by war and racing taking a toll. Both were reserved in public and indifferent about spending their afternoons with society swells in trackside boxes, preferring mornings at the barn. Though raised in different circumstances, “they were kindred spirits,” Carey Winfrey said. And as much as both loved racing, they had facile minds and broad interests beyond the game.
“My father felt the greatest mistake his parents made was letting him quit school to become a jockey,” Carey Winfrey said. “He felt it totally circumscribed his life and eliminated options. I don’t think he went through a day when he didn’t contemplate another career. Not that he didn’t love what he was doing. He just felt there were so many other things he might have done that he didn’t get to do. He went water-skiing one day, then never again. He just wanted to experience things. He talked about being a lineman on a telephone line. He was always fantasizing about other professions.”
Elaine Winfrey, to whom Bill was married for forty-two years, until his death in 1994, said, “It was strange, a man so accomplished in one field wanting to do other things. But he was quite intelligent for a man that didn’t have a formal education. He took night classes and thought about getting into real estate. He felt it was somehow beneath a man to spend his life training horses.”
It wasn’t beneath him in the early 1950s. Short, trim, and well dressed, he took Vanderbilt on smiling strolls to winner’s circles across the country. “They had a great relationship, the best,” Elaine Winfrey said. “Bill respected Alfred, and Alfred respected Bill. Alfred never interfered with what Bill wanted to do. There was no one better to train for. Bill knew it.”
Vanderbilt, in turn, introduced Winfrey to Fred Astaire, Gregory Peck, and a high life he had never imagined as a boy. “Bill and Fred Astaire became good friends,” Elaine Winfrey said. “We’d go over to his house, and Bill and Fred would play pool and I’d watch a movie in the screening room.”
But success never swelled his head. Winfrey was loath to accept applause for his training, preferring to credit his father, his horses, and racing luck. “He never took credit for anything,” Carey Winfrey said. “He thought bragging, being boastful, was sinful. He would say, ‘Well, you know, it’s the luck of the draw’ or ‘Good horses make a trainer look good.’ Who knows how much of it was true? He knew what he was doing. He’d learned a lot from my grandfather and he put it to use. On the other hand, once he was with Alfred, he certainly had the kinds of horses he’d never had before. But regardless, he was modest, always modest. Once we went into a store and the guy behind the counter was going on about what a great trainer Winfrey was and how great Native Dancer was, and my father said, ‘Yeah, yeah,’ and never identified himself. At some fundamental level, he was insecure or shy or something, because he was always self-deprecating. Just a modest man. He almost made a fetish of being modest.”
That was never more evident than when he was interviewed by McNulty for The New Yorker. “Tell the truth, a man my age doesn’t deserve a horse like this,” Winfrey said. “My father is sixty-eight, training horses all his life, and he’s never had the luck to handle a horse like this grey. I know many trainers who are seventy, seventy-five, training horses for fifty years or more, working hard, knowing the business much more than I know it, and they never had the luck to get a horse like this grey. Tell the truth, a man of thirty-six doesn’t deserve it, that’s all.”
His respect for the older man who had shown him how to train a horse was enduring. Whenever strangers introduced themselves at Barn 20 and asked for “Mr. Winfrey,” Winfrey waved in the direction of George Carey’s barn across the backside and said, “I’m Bill Winfrey; my father, over there, he’s Mr. Winfrey.”
“My father, to his dying day, claimed my grandfather was much the superior horseman, and that was probably the case,” Carey Winfrey said. “My grandfather could make bad horses run faster than just about anyone. My father was probably a better manager of the stable and better at the politics and stuff, but as far as a horseman, he always felt my grandfather was the real horseman.”
But it was Bill Winfrey, not George Carey, into whose hands Native Dancer had dropped, and now, with an undefeated juvenile season behind them and the Kentucky Derby looming, it was up to the son, not the father, to make sure the horse realized his full potential in front of a nation of racing fans.
“There was a great deal of interest in the horse,” Dan W. Scott recalled. “I spent a lot of time with Bill, went to some races with him. He had a great time. He would paint Native Dancer’s ankles with iodine just to make people think he was worried about them, when he wasn’t. He was having fun. And he did a wonderful job. Native Dancer had all those muscles, and Bill took care of them and made sure they kept growing. The horse was lucky to have such a trainer. But Bill wasn’t sleeping well. He was constantly worried about doing the right thing. He’d say to me, ‘This horse can train himself, he’s that good.’ A horse like that is a gift. I knew it. Alfred knew it. Ralph Kercheval knew it. Bill certainly knew it. And Bill didn’t want to be the one to mess it up.”
SEVEN
One evening in November 1952, a train pulled away from Baltimore’s Pennsylvania Station with twenty-eight horses and an army of grooms attached to the rear in three special cars. The Vanderbilt stable’s annual trek to California was under way. Horses such as Indian Land, Half Caste, First Glance, Whiffs, Parlor Pink, Newsmagazine, and Next Mov
e—young and old, male and female—stood in hay-lined stalls, wearing protective leather headgear and swaying with the train as it navigated the curving rails of central Maryland, bound for Chicago and ultimately Los Angeles. Native Dancer, with Lester Murray hovering, was in a car with Social Outcast, his fellow two-year-old. The Dancer’s favorite barn pet, an old black cat called Mom, was curled up in a box in the corner. The Dancer occasionally leaned over and nuzzled the cat, who wasn’t the least bit afraid.
Vanderbilt had taken a stable of horses west for the winter racing season beginning in the mid-1930s, when he was young and single and gambling had just become legal in California. Santa Anita was a splendid new track, opened on Christmas 1934, and Vanderbilt, like many easterners, had been fascinated by news accounts of horses racing for substantial purses before large, sun-drenched crowds of movie stars. He shipped Discovery out for the Santa Anita Handicap in February 1936, and although Discovery ran poorly, finishing seventh, Vanderbilt, then twenty-three, so enjoyed attending the races and Hollywood parties that he returned in December with twenty-seven horses, Bud Stotler, and his top grooms, jockeys, and exercise riders. He took over a barn just inside the backstretch gate and stayed for the entire winter racing season. His colors were seen each day at the races, and he made the rounds at night with such actresses as Joan Crawford and Ginger Rogers.
In the beginning, the size and scope of his westward trek made headlines. The cost and labor required to ship more than two dozen horses from coast to coast boggled Depression-era minds. Horses had long traveled by train, but not so many at once. It took hours just to get the animals from Sagamore Farm to the Baltimore rail yard and loaded onto the Capitol Limited; then, halfway through the journey, they changed trains to the Chief in Chicago and continued on to the West Coast. Vanderbilt himself made the trip with Stotler, residing in a private car. The massive adventure didn’t seem as outlandish to him as it did to others. His father, Alfred Sr., had shipped seventy horses from America to England on a steamship before making a run at the London-to-Brighton coaching record. Compared to that, this was easy.
Native Dancer Page 8
