The other ten horses in the race had made between four and ten starts in 1953 before the Derby, but the Dancer had only raced twice, his season set back by the firing of his ankles. One of his races had been canceled and replaced by a trial, and his last workout before the Derby had also been replaced by a trial. In addition, he had apparently gotten knocked around when his train lurched to a halt on the way to Louisville, and according to Harthill, was treated with electrolytes passed through a stomach tube during Derby week. Weighing all these factors in hindsight is impossible, but the fact that the Dancer’s form improved dramatically as the 1953 season progressed suggests that, as impressive as he was in the Derby, he might have fared better with more seasoning. Winfrey was a master, and the Dancer was in shape to run that day, but maybe he wasn’t in peak shape.
“My own opinion, I think he had a little ankle trouble that day,” Jerkens said. “His ankles had been fired and I think the track stung him. He might not have been at his very best that day.”
Alfred Vanderbilt III said, “After a number of years of thinking about it, I think my father believed that a number of factors were responsible for the defeat, aside from the ride and Money Broker laying for him. I think he felt that the stars were just in the wrong constellation, that the horse wasn’t quite as ready as he could have been, that he didn’t run as well as he might have run, and it was all those things.”
No one mistakes what happened. “The best horse got beat,” Moreno, the winning jockey, told Bolus in 1978. But the best horse that day? Maybe, just maybe, it wasn’t the favorite. Lost in the tumultuous debate about Money Broker, the bump, and Guerin’s ride was the fact that the winner raced brilliantly and Moreno rode him superbly; that no matter why or how the Dancer was done in, Harry Guggenheim’s unknown, underdog colt deserved to win.
In a wicked irony, Moreno won precisely as Guerin had won in 1947 on Jet Pilot: by taking the lead early and controlling the pace from the front. While the rest of the field was focused on Arcaro, waiting for the Master to move on Correspondent, Moreno raced just speedily enough to tire out those lacking the necessary stamina, yet just slowly enough to guarantee that his horse had enough left to hold off the Dancer down the stretch. Dark Star ran the final quarter mile in 252/5 seconds, two seconds faster than Citation. That strong finish enabled him to hold off the Grey Ghost’s final burst. “Moreno rode a wonderful race,” Arcaro said days later. “I say that because of the way he judged the pace just right.”
Hayward had instructed Moreno to lay third or fourth, watch Native Dancer up the backstretch, and make a move in the final quarter, but the jockey tore up that blueprint and used his own after taking the lead as he raced past the stands the first time. He was emboldened, he told the Knight-Ridder News Service years later, when Guggenheim grabbed his boot after his prerace conversation with Hayward and said, “Listen, you do what you think is best.” He heard that as a mandate to be more aggressive than Hayward had intended.
Equally important was Moreno’s decision to move to the rail down the stretch. Dark Star had raced beyond a mile only once and was beginning to drift wide after turning for home. Knowing the Dancer was on the rail with a clear path to the finish, Moreno swerved back to the inside, forcing Guerin to swerve off the rail in midstretch. The ground that this cost the Dancer probably decided the race. The Daily Racing Form chart caller noted that Dark Star was “alertly ridden” and “won with little left”—testimony to a job well done.
Moreno was kissed several times by movie actress Marilyn Maxwell on the victory stand after the race—photographers made her keep kissing until they all got a shot of it—and asked a valet to bring him a cigarette as soon as he arrived in the jockeys’ room. “I thought I had a wonderful chance all along,” the jockey told reporters. “As I was going out onto the track, I got the feeling I was going to win.”
Arcaro’s voice was the loudest in the jockeys’ room even though Correspondent had disappointed as the second choice at 2-1 odds. The Master, who had criticized the “building up” of Native Dancer before the race and then been criticized for voicing that criticism, was almost gleeful. “Well, you Native Dancer guys, wasn’t I right?” he shouted to reporters. “I said he was only a fair horse and that the only thing he’d beaten was Tahitian King. If you call that a great thoroughbred, well, I don’t.” Continuing later with a smile, the Master said, “You just can’t call a horse Citation or Man O’ War until they’ve done what those horses did.”
Guggenheim and Hayward joined Moreno in the jubilant winner’s circle, where the Derby cup and a garland of roses were presented. The trainer admitted to reporters that Moreno had ignored his conservative instructions but that Dark Star “had gone to the front so handily that the boy used his own judgment and let him go. A boy has to know those things. I can’t tell him. He’s on his own out there.”
As security guards led the owner and trainer back across the track and into the grandstand, heading for a reception for the Derby horse owners and dignitaries in Churchill president Bill Corum’s office, a fan reached out and clapped Hayward on the back.
“You did it, Eddie, you did it,” the fan shouted.
The low-key trainer cracked a smile. “Yeah,” he said, “I guess I did.”
Arriving at the crowded reception, Guggenheim immediately ran into Vanderbilt, hailed the next day by the Courier-Journal as “by all rights the most disappointed man at Churchill Downs.” Vanderbilt had lingered briefly on the apron and then headed upstairs to the reception. He was among the first arrivals. When Guggenheim arrived minutes later, Vanderbilt stuck his hand out with a smile and said gamely, “If it had to be anybody, Harry, I’m glad it was you.” Guggenheim was, after all, a family friend from Long Island and spent part of every summer with Alfred’s mother at Sagamore Lodge.
“Alfred regarded Harry as one of the pillars of the racing establishment and a person of the same high standards,” Clyde Roche said. “The fact that it was Harry was the reason Alfred could accept the defeat with equanimity. If it had been anyone else, I don’t know.”
As the two pillars of the American aristocracy shook hands, Joe Tannenbaum, the rookie Derby writer, was back at Barn 16, sniffing for scenes to include in his story. Guerin, too, was back at the barn,
having showered and dressed after speaking to reporters. “I wished I’d been a photographer,” Tannenbaum recalled. “Guerin was in the stall with the Dancer, talking to him. It was quite a touching scene. I wrote it. Guerin was saying, in effect, how sorry he was that the horse had lost. How very, very sorry he was.”
SIXTEEN
The Dancer was shipped by train back to New York, with Winfrey and his wife riding up front in an overnight berth and Lester Murray caring for the horse in a special car attached to the rear. There were no famous newspaper columnists on board, as there had been on the trip down. No crowds gathered at a switching yard just to get a glimpse of the famous—and now once-beaten—grey. Only a few photographers were at Belmont to record the horse’s return. But as a stew of unpleasant memories simmered, Winfrey was resolutely positive. “I have more confidence in the horse than ever,” he told reporters after the Dancer was back in his stall at Barn 20 early Monday evening. What about the controversy regarding the bump and Guerin’s ride? “We offer no excuse for the Derby defeat and feel he doesn’t need one,” the trainer said. “And I don’t care to look back.”
Such was the tone quickly established around the horse. Unmistakably, it came from the top. The Dancer’s Derby loss would haunt Vanderbilt for the rest of his life, but other than the one slip when he accused Popara of “deliberately going and getting” his horse, he accepted his fate. “Alfred took it well,” Jeanne Vanderbilt recalled. “We got on a plane and went back to New York. He was very controlled. He didn’t show anything except, ‘Too bad, what bad luck.’ Then it was, Okay, let’s get up and go to the barn and start all over again.’ ”
In a movie, the horsemen in Barn 20 would have determinedly set out to
exact revenge for the Grey Ghost as inspiring music blared. But this was reality, and the men weren’t neophytes who might yield to such a pitch of emotions. They were racetrack veterans hardened to the disappointment that was a constant in their sport, and they just kept getting up and coming to work, following Vanderbilt’s lead. “Losing the Derby was devastating, but was my father the type to come out of it more determined? No, he was more along the lines of, ‘It was a horse race. There’s another next week,’ ” Alfred Vanderbilt III said.
The Dancer’s next major race was in three weeks, actually. It was the Preakness, the second jewel of the Triple Crown, held at Pimlico, in Baltimore. Vanderbilt had once said, years earlier, that it was a race he wanted to win more than the Derby, a reflection of his many connections to the event. Baltimore was where Vanderbilt’s grandfather Isaac Emerson had amassed a vast fortune, and where Vanderbilt had spent many childhood vacations and first fallen in love with racing at age ten. Later, he had managed Pimlico and served as the track’s president and majority stockholder and had just recently sold his stock. And, of course, Sagamore Farm, just north of the city, was where the Dancer would retire to stud; Vanderbilt had already made that announcement, thrilling Maryland’s horse clientele. “Even though Vanderbilt lived in New York, whenever I ran into him on the road, he would say, ‘How are things at home?’ ” recalled the Baltimore Sun’s William Boniface.
As with the Derby, Vanderbilt had left nary a mark on the Preakness over the years, finishing third with Discovery in 1934 and fourth with Impound in 1939, and otherwise sitting the race out. Though his priorities had changed—the Derby was now the race he most wanted to win—his ties to the area remained strong, and there was no doubting his motivation, especially after the Derby.
The Preakness had been held either one or two weeks after the Derby since the end of World War II, but the Maryland Jockey Club had pushed the wait back to three weeks in 1953. Winfrey was grateful. Many of the reporters who had hung around Barn 20 all spring disappeared, their attention shifted to Rocky Marciano’s heavyweight title defense against Jersey Joe Walcott, which Marciano won with a first-round knockout. Winfrey had time to train the Dancer more purposefully than before the Derby, when things had seemed so rushed. He put the horse through several shorter works designed to add speed, and the Dancer responded, gaining a sharpness that hadn’t existed in Louisville.
The only drawback to the long interval was that it was a little too long. Winfrey didn’t want the Dancer to go three weeks without racing, so he entered the horse in the Withers, a one-mile landmark on New York’s racing calendar, first held in 1874. Man O’ War and Count Fleet were among the horses that had won the event, which was scheduled now for Belmont on May 15, two weeks after the Derby and one week before the Preakness, fitting neatly into the Dancer’s schedule.
The announcement that the Grey Ghost would run in the Withers scared away most of the opposition. Only three other horses were entered: Social Outcast, who had run seventh in the Derby; Invigorator, who had finished third in the Derby; and a long shot named Real Brother. Then Winfrey and Vanderbilt scratched Social Outcast because of rain late in the week, leaving the Dancer with just two opponents. Chuck Connors of the Morning Telegraph warned that the race had been reduced “to the quality of a soggy pretzel at a brewmaster’s picnic,” but the public didn’t mind. More than 38,000 fans came to Belmont to see the Dancer’s first race since the Derby, and millions watched on NBC.
It was the Dancer’s fourth national TV appearance in twenty-eight days, and the impact of the publicity was beginning to sink in. “Perhaps nowhere in America is the miracle of TV more appreciated than here on the West Coast,” wrote Oscar Otis, the Morning Telegraph’s California correspondent, “for in this somewhat isolated [region] racing fans are avidly tuning in not only the Triple Crown classics but also the Gillette series of races from New York on Saturdays. The latter is easily one of the most popular programs on the air.” The Dancer was becoming “the horse in the living room.”
Belmont officials limited wagering on the Withers to win bets, and all but $27,168 of the $154,909 pushed through the windows was put on the Grey Ghost. He was sent to the post at odds of 1-20, the legal minimum. “Those odds were staggering, quite a statement from the public about what it thought of the Derby,” recalled the Baltimore Sun’s William Boniface. “That 1-20 wasn’t just coming from all the women who said, Oooh, look at the pretty grey’ Dyed-in-the-wool horsemen were betting on him, too. And 1-20 said people really had dismissed the loss to racing luck.”
Vanderbilt, Winfrey, and Guerin met in the paddock before the race. The Big Apple railbirds who had lost money on the Dancer in the Derby shouted wickedly at Guerin, whose ride was still being debated. Riders of other famous horses had occasionally lost their mount in such circumstances, but if Vanderbilt contemplated taking Guerin off the Dancer, he never admitted it publicly. “I wasn’t there,” Carey Winfrey said years later, “but I would suspect that Eric felt terrible, and Alfred and my father said, ‘Don’t be silly,’ trying to make him feel better.”
The Dancer looked resplendent in the paddock, although some horsemen noted that his “off ” ankle appeared even larger than usual. Winfrey insisted again that the ankle was not a problem, explaining that a compound he was using on the ankle had bleached the skin white, merely making it more noticeable, not more troublesome. Anyone doubting that explanation was likely convinced by the Withers, in which the Dancer gave no indication that he was troubled by a sore ankle, his loss in the Derby, his trip to Louisville—or anything.
He was anxious to run, frisky through the post parade, and his hurried first step out of the gate resulted in a stumble. Real Brother shot into a clear lead along the rail, with Invigorator trailing and the Dancer in third after a quick recovery. They held their positions up the backstretch, with Real Brother two lengths in front and the Dancer just behind and to the outside of Invigorator. When Invigorator was sent toward the lead on the turn, Guerin loosened his grip and let the Grey Ghost run.
The three horses were virtually even as they came out of the turn and headed into the stretch. By the eighth pole, the Dancer and Invigorator had pulled away from Real Brother, but not from each other. Guerin refrained from using his stick, merely waving it in front of the Dancer at the sixteenth pole. The colt responded immediately and dramatically, surging two lengths ahead, then three. Guerin’s gesture and the horse’s response occurred right in front of the grandstand, and the crowd roared as the Grey Ghost thundered toward the finish, covering those famed twenty-nine feet with every stride. He was four lengths ahead at the wire.
Although the merits of a victory in a three-horse race are debatable, there was no doubting the quality of the performance. The Dancer’s time of 1:36⅕ for a mile wasn’t eye-popping, but his finish had been devastating, and the horse he pulled away from had finished third in the Kentucky Derby. “What a pleasure it is to watch a really good thoroughbred!” Evan Shipman wrote in the Morning Telegraph. “So sure is the Dancer’s attack, so deadly in execution. The decision, when it comes, is a matter of a few strides at the most.”
As he waited to receive a trophy in the winner’s enclosure, Vanderbilt told reporters the Dancer would train lightly at Belmont on Monday and van down to Pimlico on Tuesday, arriving four days before the Preakness. Six other horses were set to run against him in Baltimore, including Dark Star, the surprising Derby winner; Royal Bay Gem, the stretch-running colt who had finished fourth in the Derby; Correspondent, the colt who had stalled badly in the Derby stretch after going to the post as the second betting choice; and Tahi-tian King. Filling out the field were Ram o’ War, who had run ninth in the Derby and was owned by a Baltimore businessman; and a rangy bay colt named Jamie K., winner of just three of nineteen career starts.
Much had transpired on the Triple Crown trail since the Derby. In a stunning move, Correspondent’s trainer, Wally Dunn, had changed jockeys, replacing the peerless Arcaro with Bob Summers, Cor
respondent’s California jockey, who had never ridden in the Preakness. Evidently, Dunn wasn’t happy with Arcaro’s Derby ride and was turning to a jockey more familiar with the colt. Arcaro, a four-time Preakness winner, picked up the mount on Jamie K., who had recently won two allowance races in New York and, despite his poor overall record, appeared to be improving. “He might be able to beat Correspondent,” Arcaro told the Baltimore Sun.
Five days before the Preakness, Dark Star, Royal Bay Gem, and Correspondent—with Summers riding him—went to the post at Pimlico in the Preakness Prep, a one-mile event often used by Preakness horses as a tune-up. It was Dark Star’s first race since the Derby, and he swaggered in the post parade with his ears pricked as the crowd cheered the only horse to beat Native Dancer. He was the favorite, carrying four more pounds than the other two Triple Crown horses and also Ram o’ War and a pair of long shots, Country Gossip and Lord Jeffrey.
The race was a surprise, run far differently than expected. After two straight front-running victories in Kentucky, Dark Star was outfooted to the lead by Country Gossip and Lord Jeffrey as jockey Henry Moreno settled the brown colt in third going around the turn. Jimmy Combest, Royal Bay Gem’s jockey, also tried a new tactic, keeping his colt closer to the lead in the early going. When Country Gossip and Lord Jeffrey predictably faltered, Dark Star, Royal Bay Gem, and Correspondent went to the front, running evenly as they turned for home. The crowd expected Dark Star to pull away, but Moreno went easy on the colt through the stretch instead of pushing him to go faster, and Royal Bay Gem nosed in front and stayed there, hitting the finish line three-quarters of a length ahead of the Derby winner. Ram o’ War was third, Correspondent fourth.
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