Native Dancer

by John Eisenberg

Family issues aside, Guerin was on a roll, as popular as he was successful, as famous as he was dependable, and then Native Dancer came along in 1952, fitting seamlessly into the positive tide. Guerin knew by the Dancer’s second victory, in the Youthful Stakes, that this was a horse that could take him to a place few jockeys reached. Now, indeed, the possibilities lay in front of him as the Derby neared, a feast of temptations, unseen but indisputably available: another Derby victory, a Triple Crown, a place in history on a horse for the ages.

  If Vanderbilt and Winfrey had compiled a list of potential downfalls that could bring about the unthinkable, a loss in the Derby, a problem with Guerin’s ride wouldn’t have made the list. The jockey had overcome injuries, failure, and weight problems to become one of America’s best, and now he was riding a magnificent horse with supreme confidence, never moving too soon, always unleashing the Dancer’s powerful finishing drive at just the right time. There was pressure, sure, but what did that matter? Guerin and the Grey Ghost were, it seemed, an infallible team.

  THIRTEEN

  Few sports events were more important than the Kentucky Derby in the early 1950s. Along with college football’s Rose Bowl, auto racing’s Indianapolis 500, and golf’s Masters, the Run for the Roses was one of the few events affixed to a time and place. Just as the start of the World Series was a sign that autumn leaves would soon be falling, the running of the Derby on the first Saturday in May in Louisville had become an emblem of America’s spring.

  Inaugurated in 1875, the race had traveled an arduous road to prominence, surviving antigambling crusades, financial crises, political opposition, a depression, and two world wars. One man, Matt Winn, a Louisville businessman and handicapper at the turn of the century, had kept it going and built it into a landmark.

  Other races such as Chicago’s American Derby had been just as important in the late 1800s; Kentucky racing was struggling and the Derby was in jeopardy, with Churchill Downs on the brink of becoming the fourth Louisville track to fail. Winn put together a group including hotel owner Louis Seelbach and Louisville mayor Charles Grainger and saved the Downs in 1902, then sold his interest in a tailoring business a year later and became the track’s general manager. He was taking a great personal risk—Winn had eight daughters to support—but it was a turning point for the Derby.

  Over the years, Winn installed pari-mutuel machines and a public-address system, lured fans with bands and air shows, brought in celebrities and politicians, put the race on radio, and courted New York’s finest sportswriters, enhancing the Derby with a sheen of glitter and distinction. Kentucky was already horse heaven, the heart of the nation’s breeding industry, and the Derby evolved into the state’s signature event. By the time Winn died in 1949, the race faithfully transformed the nation into a community of railbirds for a few days every spring. The first live national telecast in 1952 had widened the audience, and now, a year later, with the lure of the undefeated Dancer, and the nation reaching out for assurances at an uneasy time, enthusiasm for the Derby was at a crescendo.

  A cadence of familiar customs marked the weeks before the race. The trainers of most Derby contenders arrived at the Downs in early April and drilled their horses on chilly mornings in the shadow of the twin spires atop the grandstand. The backside hosted a convocation of racing’s best horsemen, including Sunny Jim Fitzsimmons, Calumet’s Plain Ben Jones, Greentree’s John Gaver, and Whitney’s Syl Veitch. The Derby horses’ owners and jockeys trickled in later with reporters from across the country, and a crush of humanity descended on Derby eve, the fans coming by plane, train, and car and getting little sleep in between their Friday night parties and Saturday trips to the Downs.

  The event was an American Bacchanalia, the scent of big money and fast horses colliding with Kentucky bourbon and pretty women to create a weekend of Roman excess in a conservative Mississippi River town. Comedians and congressmen vied with starlets and sports stars for invitations to private clubs and all-night parties. Hotels and cabdrivers tripled their rates. High rollers came in private railcars, drank champagne for breakfast, and shoved fistfuls of bills through the betting windows at Churchill Downs. At least one new story of laughable extravagance made the rounds every year. In 1953, Dick Andrade, a flamboyant oilman and bon vivant, brought a horse up to his suite at the Brown Hotel to mingle with guests at his Derby eve party.

  Native Dancer, the horse everyone was talking about, took a train down from New York, his every step chronicled. Winfrey had wanted him to make the 757-mile trek from Belmont Park to Churchill in the White Ghost, the Vanderbilt stable’s massive van, but Vanderbilt preferred the train, having transported his horses by rail since Discovery’s days. The Dancer was booked on the Cincinnati Limited, departing New York on the Sunday afternoon after the Wood and arriving in Louisville a day later. Social Outcast was also on the trip, as was Invigorator, after having finished third in the Wood.

  The trip became a media event. Several of New York’s best sportswriters, including Frank Graham of the Sun, Joe Williams of the World-Telegram, Red Smith of the Herald Tribune, and James Roach of the Times, booked overnight berths and traveled with Winfrey and his wife. Lester Murray stayed with the Grey Ghost in a special car as the train chugged through Pennsylvania and Ohio during the night. Murray draped a blanket over the horse as temperatures dipped into the thirties.

  “Don’t want you catching no cold,” the groom said in the railcar illuminated by a dim lantern bulb. “You can’t be going and getting sick now.”

  In the middle of the night, outside Columbus, Ohio, the train stopped suddenly to avoid hitting a car, and the writers “were jolted almost out of their berths,” with one hurting a rib, reported Jerry Mc-Nerney in the Louisville Courier-Journal. Winfrey dashed from his berth to the Dancer’s car. “My horse!” he shouted worriedly. Murray said Invigorator had been lying down when the jolt occurred, so he was fine, but the Dancer and Social Outcast had been standing and the Dancer “got bumped plenty.” Fortunately, the Grey Ghost was wearing a leather headgear—standard equipment for horses traveling in trains—and wasn’t seriously injured.

  The jolt received little play in the papers and was quickly forgotten, but it resurfaced thirty-six years later when Ralph Kercheval told Los Angeles Times turf writer Bill Christine that Native Dancer had injured his right front ankle in the incident and “wasn’t in the best of shape” arriving in Louisville. The ankle was “this big around,” Kercheval told Christine, forming a sphere the size of a grapefruit with his hands. If it was, McNerney didn’t notice. “I’ve watched about 20 Derby winners arrive in Louisville, including Count Fleet, Citation and Whirlaway, and none gave the impression of such sheer power and bubbling-over energy as this big grey,” McNerney wrote in the Courier-Journal the next day. There was no mention of a lump on his ankle.

  The car carrying the Dancer, Social Outcast, and Invigorator arrived early in the afternoon at a small rail yard three blocks from the Downs. Tom Young, Churchill’s longtime track manager, drove over to greet Winfrey and the horses and guide them through the sea of reporters, photographers, and cameramen there to record their arrival.

  “Don’t block the platform with those cars!” Young shouted as they waited for the train. “Leave him plenty of room to walk!”

  Soon the engine and car chugged into the yard, eased up to the platform, and stopped. “Here he is!” someone shouted. The media horde gathered at the door of the car, and after a moment, the door slid open and Winfrey popped his head out.

  “Who’s he?” someone asked.

  They had come to see the horse, not the trainer.

  Winfrey jumped out and cleared a path for the Dancer to disembark. A wooden gangplank was set down between the car and the platform, with strands of straw littered on the plank and bales of hay banked on either side.

  “Okay, bring him out!” Winfrey shouted.

  The cameramen formed a semicircle around the door, and after a dramatic pause, out came the Dancer. As cameras whirred and cli
cked, the grey colt marched down the plank in his headgear, blanket, and leg wrappings, with Harold Walker in front of him, holding the shank, and Murray to the rear, holding his tail with both hands. Social Outcast and Invigorator followed. The caravan proceeded straight to a yellow truck, which the Dancer coolly boarded, as if he had reserved a seat. The truck drove Winfrey and the horses over to the Downs, through the stable gate, and down to Barn 16, where, like a diva at an opening-night gala, the Dancer made a second grand entrance, departing the truck to another round of camera clicks.

  “Easy now, no mistakes here,” Winfrey said.

  The trainer had asked Young to make sure a heavier bed of straw was laid in one of the stalls: the Grey Ghost liked a thick mattress.

  “We did what you asked,” Young said. “There’s extra straw in the second stall.”

  Calm and compliant, the Dancer moved into his stall and immediately dropped to the ground and rolled back and forth in the straw, gleefully kicking and stretching and shaking his mane. It was as if he knew the long trip was over and he could finally cut loose.

  “You like that, Pop? Well, go to it,” Winfrey said, smiling with relief now that the trip was over.

  McNerney asked Young, who had worked at Churchill since 1911, if he had ever seen a Derby arrival that looked more the part of a champion. Only one, Young said: Twenty Grand, the strapping bay that had won the 1931 Derby in record time and held the record until Whirlaway broke it in 1941. McNerney was also obviously impressed with the Dancer. “He’s a big, healthy athlete; just looking at him, you know he’s good,” McNerney wrote.

  The Dancer made his first trip to the track the next morning at nine o’clock, with Bernie Everson on him, Winfrey leading him on a stable pony, and a clattering mob of cameramen and reporters trailing him. He walked through the backside and entered the track on the backstretch at the height of rush hour for morning workouts, with horses and trainers and grooms and exercise riders coming and going. All activity stopped as the Grey Ghost stretched his legs and walked up the backstretch toward the second turn. Horsemen who had never seen the famed horse from the East flocked to the rail to look. Jockeys riding past on other horses slowed and looked back over their shoulders.

  The Dancer was on the slightly damp oval for fifteen minutes. He took a walk around the track, then jogged around a second time. “The most talked-about horse since Man O’ War seemed to know he was the center of attention,” the Associated Press reported. His reputation and physical appearance made an impression. McNerney wrote that “the big grey wins friends and influences people just by his looks.” Eddie Hayward, trainer of Dark Star, laughed when asked if he was still considering entering another Cain Hoy Stable long shot, Bimini Bay, in the Derby. “Oh, no,” Hayward said, “now that he’s gotten a look at that grey colt, he won’t eat for a week.”

  As the Dancer was leaving the track, he lashed out with his hind legs at a horse cantering close by. His aim was off, but the Morning Telegraph reported that the Dancer “corded up a bit” in his excitement and had to be massaged with oil to relax his tight muscles. The colt quickly cooled off and was back in his stall within minutes, seemingly unharmed, but in fact, the incident was the start of a major scare, according to famed Derby veterinarian Alex Harthill.

  The Dancer “tied up badly,” Dr. Harthill recalled years later. “It was a muscular spasm, like a charley horse. It was very painful and the horse broke out perspiring. Everyone was wanting to scratch him. I had just met Mr. Vanderbilt that winter at Santa Anita. He was keen to win the Derby, and he had a large entourage coming down from Maryland and New York as his guests for the race. He didn’t want to hurt the horse obviously, but he wanted to run. We gave the horse a large dose of what amounted to Gatorade, four or five gallons of electrolytes passed through a stomach tube. We did that for several days with him, as a matter of fact. He recovered very nicely.”

  The news that the Grey Ghost was being treated with a stomach tube would have generated headlines from coast to coast, but it went unreported, and neither Vanderbilt nor Winfrey mentioned it over the years in any of the many interviews they gave about the Dancer. “I never tried to keep it quiet, but horse trainers have never been ones to advertise the little things that go wrong with their horses,” Harthill recalled. “The boss [Vanderbilt] knew about it, I know that. I can’t say if it affected the horse in the race or not. He was fully recovered by then. But it certainly didn’t help him.”

  Vanderbilt was an old-school sportsman known for putting his horses’ best interests ahead of all else, and it is unlikely he would have allowed the Dancer to run in the Derby if there had been any risk of injury, even knowing how much the public—and Vanderbilt himself most of all—would have been disappointed. In any case, there was relief, no doubt, when the colt quickly returned to health.

  Winfrey set down stringent house rules for the rest of the week,

  probably reacting to the incident. The doors to the Dancer’s stall would be closed at all times. He would leave the barn only to train. There would be no posing for pictures, no afternoon grazes. The horse was just too fit and full of himself, Winfrey felt, to expose him to many new and different circumstances.

  Winfrey spoke to reporters outside Barn 16 after the Dancer’s workout, as he would every morning leading up to the race.

  “Is this a little different than last year?” he was asked, referring to the fiasco with Cousin.

  “What a difference from last year,” Winfrey said. “The press boys forgot all about me last year. I think they’re going to be flocking around this year.” He continued: “I guess I can stand one hectic week. This grey is the kind of horse you get only once in your life.”

  The Dancer’s first appearance on the track dominated Tuesday’s news dispatches from Louisville even though the Derby Trial was run later in the day before 23,000 fans. Fourteen horses were entered in the race, many being given a final chance to prove they belonged in the Derby, but they were “mostly second stringers,” according to the Associated Press, and the race was assigned little importance.

  The horse to watch in the Trial, many thought, was Royal Bay Gem, the undersized late-running colt that had come from fifteenth to win the Chesapeake Stakes. But after being sent to the post at 5-2 odds, he was blocked at the half-mile pole and was never a factor, with jockey Jimmy Combest strangely never asking for much effort The Gem did close hard, however, coming from last to fourth with his customary finishing kick, and he would still have his backers in the Derby.

  Dark Star won the Trial. The third betting choice at 9-2 odds, he sat in second behind a long shot for a half mile, then shot into the lead on the turn and pulled away to win by four lengths, with jockey Henry Moreno urging him to the finish line in 1:36, just three-fifths of a second off the track record for a mile. Money Broker, the Florida Derby winner, ridden by Al Popara, passed a quartet of horses in the stretch to finish second. Dark Star’s shaky credentials as a Derby horse had been solidified. “I just wish we could have run the Derby today,” trainer Eddie Hayward told reporters.

  But even though Harry Guggenheim’s little-known horse now had to be taken seriously, few really believed Dark Star would challenge the Dancer or Correspondent in the Derby. Correspondent, after all, had whipped Dark Star in an allowance race at Keeneland eleven days earlier, easily fending off a challenge in the stretch. After the Trial, Arcaro, who would ride Correspondent in the Derby, made sure reporters remembered that “Dark Star just made Correspondent look even better,” he said with a grin after finishing seventh in the Trial on a colt named Berseem.

  Leaving the Downs after the race, Hayward was sitting in traffic when the car behind him suddenly accelerated, ramming the rear of his car and causing significant damage. “I’m going to need to win the Derby to get my car fixed,” Hayward told the crowd at the annual Derby trainers’ dinner later that night at the Brown Hotel. Despite Dark Star’s victory in the Trial, it was hard not to see the horse and his trainer as star-crossed.
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  The Dancer was back on the track for a light workout the next morning, again stirring up a commotion. “This observer has been coming to the Derby since 1916, but never have I known a candidate for the Downs classic to excite quite such interest as Native Dancer,” columnist Charles Hatton wrote in the Morning Telegraph. “When the strapping grey colt walks beneath the shed in Barn 16, the rail is lined with fully as many of the curious as most paddocks before a race. A score or more of newsmen, feature writers for slick magazines, newsreel, Life magazine, TV and daily press photographers follow him to and from the track during training hours, and each morning there is a parking problem in the vicinity of his barn. Not even Citation stirred such keen interest. Clearly, Native Dancer is ‘the public’s horse.’ Thanks to TV, countless thousands of fans have become interested in him, as they used to be interested in outstanding ball players. Someone has well said that ‘all the world loves a champion,’ and Saturday, people will be rooting for the Dancer who will not wager a farthing on the outcome.”

  More reporters were arriving every day, with New York Times columnist Arthur Daley among Wednesday’s newcomers. He began his morning at dawn, trying to coax responses from Plain Ben Jones outside Barn 15. Jones, who had trained three of the past five Derby winners and six overall, shooed Daley away. “You get on away from here, there ain’t no Derby horses here,” he said. “Just go on down the line and look at that grey. That’s the horse to watch this year.”

  Winfrey was holding court again outside Barn 16. “One of the photographers asked me if I wouldn’t take his bridle and lead him out in the sun for a picture—‘not me,’ I said, ‘I wouldn’t dare,’ ” Winfrey said. “I’ve got a 260-pound man leading him around now. If I could find a bigger man, I would.”

  Vanderbilt was at the barn for the first time, having flown into Louisville late Tuesday night after watching Indian Land, another of his horses, run in the feature race at Garden State Park. He smiled at Winfrey’s caution. “That’s right,” Vanderbilt said. “He might decide to get playful and throw you over the roof.”