Native Dancer

by John Eisenberg

  The winning celebration continued back at the barn as the Grey Ghost cooled out. In a Preakness tradition, the Stevens catering company delivered a case of champagne for the stable hands.

  “I didn’t even know Jamie K.’s name until he came after us,” Lester Murray said, holding a glass of champagne.

  Winfrey spoke to reporters. “We had hoped he would win a little easier,” the trainer said. “Frankly, I was more impressed with his race in the Derby.”

  Many others in the racing industry would feel similarly, that the Dancer, despite winning the Preakness, had added little to his legend. His move at the head of the stretch had been impressive, but he had wobbled to the finish line, some thought, barely holding off the charge of a horse with an inferior record. It was later estimated that Jamie K. had gained ten lengths on the winner down the stretch. A superhorse was not supposed to yield so much ground.

  On the other hand, he had made a powerful move that smartly disposed of the Kentucky Derby winner at the three-eighths pole, relatively far from the finish line, yet still summoned enough strength to hold off Arcaro at the end. That was not a feat to be diminished. “He raced the speed horses into the ground, then held off a great challenge,” Evan Shipman wrote in the Morning Telegraph. “Jamie K. had collared him at the eighth pole. If the Dancer had been any less than outstanding, Arcaro’s tactics would have worked. But Native Dancer was equal to the challenge.”

  An hour after the race, Winfrey looked the horse over and pronounced him in “perfect” condition. “We’ll van him back to New York tomorrow, and we’ll run him in the Belmont,” the trainer said. He needed to leave to attend a victory celebration the Vanderbilts were hosting at Sagamore Farm that night, with the Preakness trophy serving as a centerpiece. It would be a happy affair. The trip “home” to Maryland had turned out splendidly for the horse and his owner.

  Vanderbilt knew the experts were right to criticize the Dancer’s poor finish, but he didn’t care. He had won a Triple Crown race, his first after almost two decades in racing. The thrill was incomparable, and he was grateful to those who had helped make it happen. Back in New York several days later, he pulled Bernie Everson aside after the Dancer’s morning workout at Belmont and told the exercise rider to go pick out a car. Vanderbilt was buying. Everson selected a light blue Mercury Marquis.

  The mood was not nearly so buoyant at Harry Guggenheim’s Cain Hoy Stable. In fact, the news was grim: Dark Star had seemed fine at the barn after finishing fifth in the Preakness, leaving trainer Eddie Hayward without an excuse for the colt’s failure in the stretch, but a veterinarian had examined the colt on Monday and, shockingly, discovered a “bowed” tendon in the right foreleg. Such tears in the superficial digital flexor tendon, while not a death knell, tend to heal slowly, with scar tissue replacing the torn fibers. That severely compromises the racing mechanism. Guggenheim’s only choice was to retire Dark Star to stud. The horse’s racing career was over just twenty-three days after he had won the Kentucky Derby. “It is a sad occasion to have to retire such a game horse,” Guggenheim said. “I am very proud of his accomplishments.”

  In time, his Derby triumph would be known as one of racing’s all-time surprises, an unthinkable upset propagated by a group of onehit wonders. Hayward would never bring another horse to the Derby. Moreno would finish out of the money in his two other chances. Guggenheim, encouraged by the Derby success, would invest considerably more time and money in his stable, but although Cain Hoy grew into one of racing’s better outfits, especially after Woody Stephens was hired as trainer in 1955, it never produced another Derby winner.

  Dark Star and Native Dancer would become linked—quite an irony, as they opposed each other only three times in their careers and finished near each other only once, in Louisville. But the setting for Dark Star’s victory and the arc of the rest of the Dancer’s career assured their unlikely coupling as the main characters in one of racing’s unforgettable dramas.

  Could Dark Star have become a great rival for the Grey Ghost?

  His unspectacular overall record didn’t suggest it, but his last three races did. He won the Derby Trial, then led the Dancer from start to finish in the Derby and also led him through the first mile of the Preakness. In other words, he had raced in front of the favored grey for more than two miles of Triple Crown turf, faltering only after suffering a career-ending injury. “I thought Dark Star was vastly underrated,” Tannenbaum said. “He had tremendous speed. Native Dancer was pounds better, and I feel he would have won the Preakness even without the injury to Dark Star, but Dark Star, in any other year, would have been a top three-year-old.”

  Whether he would have continued to compete at the level he exhibited in his Triple Crown races was unknown, of course. The Preakness was Dark Star’s final race. The second jewel of the 1953 Triple Crown had been labeled a rematch of champions, a race that would decide who belonged at the top of the three-year-old class, but in the end, one was eliminated. Dark Star went back to the obscurity from which he had come, shipped to Kentucky to stand at Claiborne Farm. The Dancer went on, his grey coat shining ever brighter in the spotlight’s glare.

  SEVENTEEN

  Was the Dancer a horse for the ages, already assured of mention in the same breath with Man O’ War, Whirl-away, and Citation? His millions of fans certainly thought so. Or did he still need to accomplish more before such high praise was warranted, as many horsemen, racing writers, and insiders believed? The debate boiled over in the three weeks between the Preakness and the Dancer’s next race, the Belmont Stakes, the final jewel of the Triple Crown, which, many felt, would go a long way toward settling the argument.

  The public’s voice on the issue was united and strong. After making five national TV appearances between April 18 and May 23, the Dancer was as popular as any American horse that had ever looked through a bridle. The public, quite simply, had a hopeless crush on Vanderbilt’s majestic, charismatic grey.

  Part of the attraction, unmistakably, was Vanderbilt himself. He was a public figure in his own right, beloved by the big-city gossip columnists and sportswriters, who seldom let a day pass without finding a reason to mention him. His appeal crossed societal boundaries: the swells knew him and admired his grace and humor, and the standing-room crowd loved his passion for racing. The rich men who backed racing stables were media celebrities, and Vanderbilt was the most popular and accessible among them, the young, dashing, iconic racing man who could relate to the common fan. That he, and not another society owner, had produced the Dancer was critical.

  But, of course, the horse himself was the font of the public’s affection, the origin of the love story welling higher with every race. He was different, his grey coloring setting him apart. And though his blood was blue, he never took a day off, exuding an “always coming to run” work ethic that crossed his royal mien with a working-class mentality. What fan couldn’t relate to a horse that procrastinated in his races, putting off his moves until the last moment before firing to the front with a rallying drive as imposing as any ever seen on the American turf?

  The Dancer was somehow powerful and cuddly; attractive to women as well as men; indefatigable, yet vulnerable after the shattering Derby loss. “It was amazing: we started receiving stacks of mail,” recalled John Derr of CBS radio. “It was the first time we had ever had fan mail for a horse. It came addressed to Native Dancer care of CBS in New York. Children from all over the country were falling in love. People were falling in love. I opened a letter one day from a high school girl from Kansas. She railed on about how much she loved Native Dancer, and she said, ‘But you only race him on Saturday. Could you please race him twice a week?’ As if we dictated when he ran.”

  Stacks of letters and telegrams were also arriving at Vanderbilt’s Manhattan office and Barn 20 at Belmont. An attorney from Annapolis, Maryland, wrote asking for one of the Dancer’s shoes, which he pledged to hang on his office wall alongside one of Whirlaway’s shoes. A congressman from Maryland also a
sked for a shoe for “a very prominent actress.” The mother of an eight-year-old with rheumatic fever asked if her child could come to the barn and meet the famous grey. Many of Vanderbilt’s friends from business, politics, and entertainment also sent regards after the Preakness.

  The combined viewing audience for the Derby and Preakness telecasts alone had totaled almost 28 million, and even with racing fever at a zenith across the country, many of the viewers were newcomers to the sport, without a yardstick of other champions to measure the Dancer against. They were baffled by the debate over his greatness and annoyed by the criticism of his accomplishments. He had won thirteen of fourteen starts, including eleven stakes races, by a total of thirty-two lengths. His one loss, by a head, had been dismissed as bad luck. What more did he need to do to be assured of mention as one of the greats?

  He needed to do a lot, if you listened to the horsemen and newsmen who, rightly or not—and with some smugness—saw themselves as far more knowing and insightful than the public, and thus, far better judges of greatness. “There is skepticism in turf circles about Native Dancer being a really great horse, germinated by his reversal in the Derby and the heavy weather he made of it winning the Preakness,” Charles Hatton wrote in the Morning Telegraph.

  Proudly disdaining the fans’ emotional assessment of the Dancer, the experts didn’t disagree that he was a splendid horse and that, indeed, he might one day rate with the best. But they also felt that his credentials as a legend still lacked certain essential achievements. They were right. The Dancer had never beaten an older horse, never carried more than 126 pounds, and never won a race longer than one and three-sixteenths miles. He still had major tests to pass. Moreover, he had set only one record in his career, in the Futurity, and had seldom won any race easily, even though his rivals were of debatable quality. (Correspondent had disappeared in the Triple Crown. Jamie K. had done little before the Preakness. Dark Star had come out of nowhere to win the Derby. Royal Bay Gem was forever too late charging down the stretch.) His loss in the Derby would keep him from the ultimate equine trophy, a Triple Crown, but it was his narrow Preakness victory that really had the experts doubting him.

  “The question remains: Is Native Dancer a genuine champion against top-notch competition?” pedigree expert J. A. Estes wrote in the Blood-Horse after the Preakness. Everyone, it seemed, was asking the same question. “Is the Dancer the super horse the experts believed him to be? Most assuredly, he didn’t look it in the Preakness,” Arthur Daley, one of his biggest fans, wrote in the New York Times. “When the great ones came on with an invincible rush… they blasted away with a surging power that was awesome to behold. As yet, the Dancer hasn’t awed anyone.”

  Willard Mullin, the dean of American sports cartoonists, summed up the issue with an illustration in the New York World-Telegram. Man O’ War, Citation, and Count Fleet were pictured sitting in a grandstand overlooking a track, arms folded, expressions haughty, a jury of dubious peers shouting “Prove it!” as Native Dancer jogged on the dirt below.

  Vanderbilt and Winfrey weren’t insulted by the doubts; to the contrary, they knew that, indeed, the Grey Ghost had more to prove. Arthur Daley had quoted Vanderbilt on the issue before the Derby, when Eddie Arcaro was refusing to concede greatness to the then-unbeaten Dancer. “It will be an awfully long time before we know for sure,” Vanderbilt told Daley. “Greatness doesn’t come in a single race or even a series of races. It comes in perspective. Sometimes you have to wait until a horse is retired before you can point a finger—politely, of course—and say, ‘There’s a great horse.’ ”

  Conveniently, a chance for the Dancer to make a powerful statement was just ahead. If the Derby was America’s most famous race and the Preakness was a celebrated stepping-stone to the Triple Crown, the Belmont, known as “the test of champions,” was the ultimate measure of equine quality. A lesser horse could navigate the Derby’s choking traffic jams and the Preakness’s sharp turns and, with some luck, come out ahead, but the Belmont’s mile and a half suffered no imposters. The three legendary horses in Mullin’s cartoon had won the race, as had Whirlaway, War Admiral, Gallant Fox, Omaha, Colin, and Assault, all horses near the top of America’s pantheon of greats.

  “The function of the Belmont is to establish a champion, or to reveal the latent weakness depriving some over-praised young horse of that rare distinction,” Evan Shipman wrote in the Morning Telegraph. “Judging by the class of its winners, the Belmont is pre-eminent among America’s races for three-year-olds. [Over many years] every renewal of the race, with but two exceptions, has been captured by a high-class thoroughbred. Hurryoff in 1933 and Bounding Home in 1944 weren’t much, but those two aside, the Belmont has always been the reward for outstanding merit.”

  The race offered a distinct crossroads for the Dancer. A defeat, giving him one Triple Crown victory in three tries, would leave many suggesting that, indeed, he was a classic example of what Shipman had called an “over-praised young horse.” On the other hand, a victory in the Belmont, always a mark of distinction, would silence the doubts about his pedigree and provide a solid foundation for the rest of his climb toward greatness.

  As if to emphasize what he was seeking, the pages of New York’s weighty fleet of daily papers—the Times, Post, Daily News, Herald Tribune, World-Telegram, Journal-American, and Morning Telegraph—were brimming with other examples of greatness in the days just before the Belmont. The Yankees, winners of every World Series since 1949, were running away with the American League pennant again, pounding the Tigers and Indians on the road as they stretched a winning streak toward eighteen games, remarkable even by their standards. Ben Hogan, the taciturn Texan golfer with the classic swing, was dominating the U.S. Open at Oakmont Country Club near Pittsburgh. Edmund Hillary, a beekeeper from New Zealand who, with the help of a Nepalese guide, had recently become the first man to climb to the summit of Mount Everest, the world’s tallest peak, was giving interviews about the experience. The Dancer wasn’t in that company yet. He was still just a hugely gifted and popular horse who had somehow lost the Derby. He needed to win the Belmont, then prevail later over the obstacles of weight handicaps, travel, unfamiliar tracks, and stern opposition—the hurdles all great horses cleared—before being declared one of the best ever.

  Winfrey’s workout regimen was designed to build the colt up to the Belmont’s twelve-furlong distance, which was a quarter mile farther than he had ever raced. He worked five-eighths of a mile on May 30, a mile on June 1, a mile and a quarter on June 5, a mile and a half on June 9, and finally, six furlongs on June 12, a day before the race. Trackside observers found little fault with any of his training. “The grey colt appears ready for the race of his life,” the Morning Telegraph reported on the day of the Belmont.

  The field of horses that would oppose him was in flux in the days before the race. Jamie K., with Arcaro up, was a certainty, and Royal Bay Gem would try again after finishing third in the Preakness and fourth in the Derby. Ram o’ War, fourth in the Preakness, would also give it a shot, as would Kamehameha, a long shot owned by the King Ranch, sired by Polynesian, and named for a Hawaiian monarch from the 1800s. It appeared that those four would constitute the Dancer’s opposition, but two more horses were entered a day before the race: Bassanio, fourth in the Peter Pan Handicap in his last start, and The Preem, an overmatched colt owned by bandleader Louis Prima. The Preem, winner of just one of his thirty-five career starts, had once run for a $7,500 claiming tag, and “the best thing you can say about him is that his owner blows a hot trumpet,” James Roach wrote in the Times.

  The race was being billed as a rematch of the Preakness, a virtual two-horse affair with the Grey Ghost the likely odds-on favorite and Jamie K receiving his share of support. Arcaro’s horse had raced once since the Preakness, finishing second in a six-furlong allowance race against older horses at Belmont, a performance that furthered the notion that he was a late-blooming horse on the rise. Arcaro had kept him near the front despite a fa
st early pace, and he had blown past a six-year-old in the stretch, then just missed catching a five-year-old carrying three fewer pounds.

  The colt was owned by James D. Norris Jr., a Chicago sportsman better known as the president of the International Boxing Club, one of boxing’s major governing bodies, and also as the owner of the National Hockey League’s Detroit Red Wings, winner of three Stanley Cup titles. His father, James D. Norris Sr., had run the family’s thoroughbred operation for years, first at an Indiana farm near Chicago, then at Spring Hill Farm in Paris, Kentucky. After breeding a top filly named Nell K. in the late forties, the elder Norris had bred the mare back to the same sire and produced Jamie K.

  John Partridge, the veteran trainer who oversaw Norris’s stable, had visited Spring Hill in 1951, scouting the youngsters he would soon take on. A dog’s bark sent the half dozen youngsters scurrying through a field, with Jamie K. lagging far behind the others.

  “That one’s going to make a fine racehorse,” Partridge told the farm manager, pointing to the laggard.

  “You don’t mean him!” the manager shouted.

  He did. Partridge’s insights were keen: after all, he had worked with horses for almost seven decades, since he started walking hots as a child in Detroit in the 1880s. He had worked for E. R. Bradley and other outfits along the way and had conditioned Norris’s horses since the thirties, succeeding Eddie Hayward, now the trainer of Dark Star. He liked the way Jamie K. ran through the field that day at Spring Hill Farm, and he was usually right when he predicted success for a horse.

  The colt had disappointed as a two-year-old, consistently breaking slowly from the starting gate, lagging far behind the leaders, and winning just one minor race for maidens. He did win the Remsen Handicap at Jamaica in October but was disqualified for drifting out in the stretch and bumping Vanderbilt’s Social Outcast. He had performed no better early in 1953, continuing to break slowly and finish out of the money as Partridge and James Norris Jr. shuffled through jockeys including Dave Gorman and Conn McCreary. The elder Norris had died in December 1952, leaving his son in charge.