Native Dancer

by John Eisenberg

  There was little suspense when the sport’s end-of-the-year honors were announced in December, as voted on by various panels of racing secretaries and writers. The Dancer was the champion male three-year-old. Tom Fool was the champion male handicap horse.

  They were the only candidates for overall Horse of the Year honors, but the balloting wasn’t close. Tom Fool won all polls easily, almost unanimously.

  The voting results were hard for some of the Dancer’s fans to fathom. The Grey Ghost had won nine of ten starts, two-thirds of the Triple Crown, and $513,425 in 1953. He ranked fourth on the sport’s all-time earnings list. He had lost one race in his life; Tom Fool had lost nine. How could Native Dancer not be the Horse of the Year? On the other hand, Tom Fool had, indeed, accomplished more in some ways in 1953. He had carried 130 or more pounds in four starts; Native Dancer never carried more than 128. He had won every time out, whereas Native Dancer had lost the Derby. And he had often dominated, winning many races by sizable margins; Native Dancer had often needed to rally in the stretch. The public loved the Dancer’s sense of drama, but racing insiders were more impressed with Tom Fool. John Turner, the director of racing at Pimlico, told the Daily Racing Form that Tom Fool as a four-year-old was the best horse he had seen in twenty-five years.

  Interestingly, when various panels of experts almost a half century later were asked to rate the best horses of the twentieth century, the Dancer always finished ahead of Tom Fool, the Greentree colt being penalized in the long run for not winning a Triple Crown race or winning at any distances longer than one and a quarter miles. Tom Fool was the experts’ choice at the time, but the Dancer was judged superior in the end.

  “Native Dancer and [1979 Kentucky Derby and Preakness winner] Spectacular Bid are the two greatest horses I have ever seen; they did things even the Triple Crown winners never did,” Joe Tannenbaum said. “Native Dancer’s victorious races were awesome. He had an all-conquering run once Guerin let him loose. He gave the impression that if there was a brick wall in front of him, he would just run right through it to finish first. He had a charisma when racing that made you think that if you didn’t know who he was, just by watching him you’d say, ‘There goes a champion.’ His stride, his drive, his nerve, everything about him was exceptional. It was almost like he shouldn’t even be running against other horses, he was so much in a class by himself.”

  A race against Tom Fool would have provided the ultimate test for him, but it never happened. The horses were on the track together only once, when they paraded through the stretch on Red Cross Day at Belmont in early November 1953. The fans cheered and longed to see them loaded into the starting gate and sent running, but instead they went their separate ways, Tom Fool to a stud career and the Dancer to Sagamore Farm, where he would spend the winter recovering from his injury and prepare for 1954. The question of which would have won, had they raced, became one of racing’s great mysteries, endlessly debated, never resolved.

  TWENTY

  When the Dancer made his stakes-race debut as a four-year-old in the Metropolitan Handicap, a mile race at Belmont, on May 15, 1954, it was clear he was no longer just a champion with a large following. He had become a cultural landmark, his renown stretching beyond racing’s boundaries into crevasses and corners of the country that racing had seldom reached. Time, the nation’s foremost newsmagazine, had assigned a reporter to trail the colt and prepare a cover story. TV Guide, a weekly magazine devoted to the new medium, had named him one of the three most popular TV figures of 1953, along with comedian Arthur Godfrey and host Ed Sullivan. Millions of viewers, as many as watched the Triple Crown races, were expected to tune in to CBS’s national telecast of the Metropolitan, with Bryan Field calling the race.

  The Dancer hadn’t raced in a major event in nine months, and more than 39,000 fans came to Belmont on a cloudy Saturday afternoon to watch him run. His prolonged absence forged an insatiable curiosity before the race, similar to the scene before the Dancer’s 1953 debut in the Gotham Stakes. Hundreds of fans swarmed the paddock to get a closer look at a colt now standing 16.3 hands high and weighing 1,250 pounds, truly a grey monster in his racing tack. Old-timers couldn’t recall a larger crowd around Belmont’s saddling shed and walking ring.

  The riding tack was brought in and the Dancer reared magnificently when Winfrey tightened the cinch belt around his waist, drawing a gasp from the crowd, but the horse was composed again within moments, seemingly waiting to be led to the track. “He’s the coolest horse I’ve ever seen,” Winfrey said to a reporter. “He knows when it’s time to race, and he anticipates it. But none of this bothers him in the least.”

  Blue-coated security guards had to cut a swath through the herd to get the Dancer and his eight rivals to the track for the race. A wide-eyed stew of horsemen and racing officials huddled inside the ropes, fixated on the colt.

  Other champions had raced to the forefront of the American public’s consciousness before, but never, safe to say, had one become such a popular figure, such a hero to so many. Television was partly responsible, of course. The Dancer’s career was the first of equine distinction to have unfolded live in living rooms across the country, and it did so just as the powerful sense of intimacy that TV generated was being realized, with viewers feeling, however irrationally, that the actresses, newsmen, athletes, and horses they saw on the screen were so familiar they were almost part of the family. Fans drawn to their sets by the spectacle of racing and the phenomenon of the medium had watched the Dancer win and lose and win and win, always dramatically, with a closing rush, and had become as attached to his races as they were to the other programs now dictating their nighttime routines, such as Dragnet, the police drama starring Jack Webb, I Love Lucy, and Sullivan’s New York-based variety show. The Dancer was, in a sense, like Godfrey and Sullivan, the star of his own show, and what a TV classic it was, faithfully incorporating danger, suspense, and, with one unforgettable exception, a happy ending.

  Tom Gilcoyne, a marketing executive from New Jersey who later became the historian at the National Museum of Racing in Saratoga, had followed racing since the 1920s and seldom seen such hysteria over a horse. “Native Dancer and Milton Berle made TV popular,” recalled Gilcoyne, who saw the Grey Ghost in person in the Futurity, Withers, and Belmont and otherwise followed him on TV. “He gathered up the sorts of fans who had never been to a track and brought them to racing. He was different, a grey. You could really watch him during a race. It wasn’t just a bunch of bays and browns running around. You could pick him up on the TV screen and follow him, and when he made his surge, you surged with him. People cheered him like they cheered their heroes on the football field.”

  It wasn’t just the power of the medium, however; the “message” in the Dancer’s races—his winning qualities—was also essential to his popularity. There were reasons why he had become America’s horse instead of Tom Fool as the public debated their respective merits. The two were equally gifted, exemplifying the thoroughbred breed at its finest with their power, speed, and heart, but the Dancer was more idiosyncratic, exuding the smoky allure of a legend. He preferred to take the harder road—coming from behind instead of dominating, relaxing in the stretch instead of pulling away—yet no matter how hard he made it on himself, he always prevailed. He also had a distinct personality: he was a cutup around the barn in the mornings and had been labeled “a lazy so-and-so” on national TV by Winfrey, yet as Evan Shipman had written, he was the consummate professional, always knowing when it was time to stop fooling around and go to work. Hard-core race-goers loved his class. Casual fans loved his coloring and individualism. Everyone, it seemed, loved being on his side.

  “No one has ever quite documented how or why the legend of a champion grows,” Time wrote of the Dancer. “The present has its press agents as the past had its poets. (Was Achilles really that good, or did Homer just make him seem so?) But a legend’s feats endure because of what he adds: an undying spirit of competition, an ability to inspi
re awe, a willingness to gamble on losing, the guts to lose and rise again, an elusive mixture of spirit and showmanship. Whatever it is called—flair, class, style or what Hemingway once termed ‘grace under pressure’—it is the quality that breeds sport legend.”

  The Grey Ghost had it. Jock Whitney, sending out the dangerous Greentree gelding Straight Face to try to beat the Dancer in the Metropolitan, gazed at the grey favorite being saddled in the crowded paddock before the race. “If anyone beats him, I hope it’s my horse,” Whitney mused, then reconsidered and corrected himself with a wan smile: “It’s strange, but I hope the Dancer wins.” The comments were overheard by the Time reporter, who later printed them. Even the opposition was rooting for Vanderbilt’s champion.

  The Dancer’s return to the races was welcomed by a racing public looking for action. The 1954 Triple Crown season was under way, the Kentucky Derby already run and the Preakness coming up, but it was a pale imitation of the 1953 drama featuring the Dancer, Dark Star, and Jamie K. A tough little grey named Determine had won the Derby, but his owner, Andy Crevolin, had shipped him back to California rather than run him in the Preakness. None of the three-year-olds had the makings of a star, and with Tom Fool at stud, every other horse seemed pint-sized compared to the larger-than-life Dancer.

  The Grey Ghost was more exciting just preparing to race than the others were at full speed. The colt had actually made his 1954 racing debut eight days before the Metropolitan in a weekday afternoon allowance at Belmont, “and as he stood in the stall with his handlers before the race, he was so massive and rock-like that he could have been hewn from New Hampshire granite,” Evan Shipman wrote. “Immobile, he was as weighty as a monument. But he did not remain immobile for long. Twice, he reared majestically while Les Murray clung to the shank. His eye, usually so calm when action was imminent, was wicked and fiery, like that of a seed bull.”

  Now, there was a racehorse.

  The Dancer had spent the winter under Ralph Kercheval’s care at Sagamore Farm instead of traveling with Winfrey and the rest of Vanderbilt’s horses to California; he had then rejoined the stable at Belmont in March and trained under Winfrey until now. Winfrey and Vanderbilt had chosen the obscure spot to prep him for the Metropolitan, and 21,792 fans came to Belmont to see him shake off the rust that had accumulated during his long layoff. John Campbell, the respected New York racing secretary, had assigned him 126 pounds, five more than Laffango, an old rival, and from twelve to eighteen pounds more than the rest of the field, mostly fringe four-year-olds. The race, titled the Commando Purse, was just six furlongs, the shortest distance the Dancer had raced since the spring of his two-year-old season.

  Even though the late-running Dancer was better at longer distances and there was a chance he could get caught in traffic and not have time to rally, the bettors, predictably, leaned heavily on him, backing him down to 3–20 odds by post time. Justifying the support, the colt raced as if he had never stopped, following his familiar blueprint of “rating” near the lead until the turn, then accelerating and zooming to the lead as he straightened for home. Showing no signs of the foot injury that had ended his 1953 season, he reached the finish line slightly more than a length ahead of Laffango, who was a neck in front of a colt named Impasse. It wasn’t an overpowering performance and the winning time of 1:11⅘ was modest, but “there is no way of knowing how fast the Dancer might have gone had he been urged,” the Morning Telegraph reported. “Guerin never touched him with his stick and had only to move his hands to take command, then scrubbed intermittently through the final furlong as the rivals behind him struggled desperately under whip, hand and heel.”

  His season was under way, and what a season of possibilities it was. Vanderbilt and Winfrey had charted a course for him unlike any ever outlined for a top American horse. First, the Dancer would try to emulate Tom Fool and win New York’s Triple Crown of handicap races—the Metropolitan, Brooklyn, and Suburban—along with the Carter Stakes at Aqueduct. He would then be shipped across the Atlantic Ocean and race in major events in England and France through the summer and fall. He had already been nominated for the King George VI Stakes and Queen Elizabeth Stakes, run in July during the Royal Meeting at Ascot, the historic racecourse near Windsor Castle in England. There was talk of entering him in the Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe, France’s most important race, at Longchamp in Paris. The trainer of Vanderbilt’s small British division had told reporters he was expecting the horse in Newmarket that fall. The thinking was that the Dancer was likely to exhaust his competition in America, so why not try to conquer a new world? If any horse could, it was the Grey Ghost.

  America’s handicap division was indeed weak, with few horses seemingly capable of beating the Dancer. Royal Vale was a threat—the British-bred five-year-old had given Tom Fool several scares the year before—but he hadn’t raced at the same level in recent months.

  A sprinter named White Skies would be dangerous at seven furlongs, but the Dancer would seldom, if ever, meet him. Jamie K. was still around but had never realized the promise shown in the Preakness and Belmont the previous year. The Phipps family’s Level Lea had emerged as a late-blooming three-year-old the previous fall, and Vanderbilt’s second-string four-year-olds, Social Outcast and Find, were improving, but it was hard to envision any of them beating the Dancer.

  Straight Face, at age four, was a mystery. He had finished sixth behind Dark Star and the Dancer in the Kentucky Derby the year before, hindered by ankle and leg injuries suffered during the prep season in Florida. Greentree trainer John Gaver had taken him out of training after the Derby to have his ankles fired, and he had ended up missing the rest of the year. Returning, sound, in 1954, the horse had won two allowance races in Florida in January, then finished out of the money in major races such as the Santa Anita Maturity, Widener Handicap, and Gulfstream Park Handicap. But just when it appeared he was destined to disappoint, he had come within a fifth of a second of the Pimlico track record for nine furlongs in winning the Dixie Handicap. That was his most recent race, a week earlier. It would be interesting to see which Straight Face showed up in the Metropolitan.

  That the Dancer would be assigned the highest weight in the race was a given, but how much weight was a fair handicap? Speculation had swirled at Belmont as John Campbell mulled his decision, announced six days before the race. Grey Lag had carried 133 to victory in the Metropolitan in 1923, ceding twenty-six pounds to a rival. Devil Diver had carried 134 in 1944. Tom Fool had carried 130 the year before, giving three pounds to Royal Vale. Some believed the Dancer might be assigned as many as 135, but Campbell ultimately settled on 130, two pounds more than the Dancer had ever carried, and the same weight assigned Tom Fool the year before in the Metropolitan. Campbell told reporters the Grey Ghost hadn’t yet shown he was as good as or better than Tom Fool, so he shouldn’t have to carry more weight. The Morning Telegraph’s Nelson Dunstan labeled the assignment “eminently fair.”

  In the end, Royal Vale and White Skies weren’t entered in the Metropolitan, and Find was scratched. The second-highest weight in the field fell to Straight Face, at 117 pounds, thirteen fewer than the Dancer. Jamie K. was at 110, getting twenty pounds from a horse he had almost beaten on the same track a year earlier. A four-year-old named Count Cain was getting twenty-three pounds from the Dancer, and a five-year-old named Flaunt was getting twenty-four. The Dancer would race at quite a handicap, finally facing the test many experts had wanted to see when he was forced to the sidelines in 1953. Could he carry crushing weights and beat quality opposition under a severe handicap? Vanderbilt himself had said the colt “still had things to prove,” and the Metropolitan loomed as a worthwhile opportunity, even without Royal Vale and White Skies.

  In the minutes before the race, the bettors made the usual rush to put their money on the Dancer, knowing they would get little in return if he won. Of the $210,712 in win bets pushed through the windows, 53 percent went with the Dancer, lowering his odds to 1–4 by post time. That mad
e it twenty races in a row in which he had left the starting gate as an odds-on favorite. Only in the first race of his career, at Jamaica in April 1952, had he been more than even money.

  Straight Face was the second choice at 7-1, the only other horse to garner much support, and it seemed he was resolved to justify the fans’ faith when the starting gate opened at 4:19 P.M., with the track rated fast and Bryan Field at the microphone for CBS. Breaking alertly from the seventh post with jockey Teddy Atkinson dressed in Greentree’s pink silks with black-striped sleeves, Straight Face immediately shot into the lead and dropped toward the rail. A trio of long shots gave chase up the backstretch along with Impasse, the third betting choice at 9-1, but the pace was fast, a quarter in 23⅕, and Straight Face quickly opened daylight on the field.

  The Dancer was sluggish. He broke sharply, but Guerin took him back as usual and the colt slowly drifted toward the rear, seemingly not in the mood to run. As the pack separated into two four-abreast waves of horses chasing the leader, with the Dancer and Magic Lamp at the back of the rear quartet, Straight Face hurtled ahead, covering the second quarter mile in 22⅘ seconds. Atkinson glanced back as he neared the turn, obviously trying to locate the Grey Ghost, but the grey colt was beyond the jockey’s view: there were too many lengths and too many horses between them. Atkinson turned back and asked for more from the gelding. His tactics were apparent he was going to try to steal the race from in front, building a lead so large that the Dancer couldn’t erase it down the stretch. “My goal,” Atkinson said later, “was to put as much ground as possible between my horse and Native Dancer.”

  Shockingly, Straight Face was ten lengths ahead of the Dancer halfway through the race, running about as fluidly and fast as a horse could run as he angled into the turn. A colt named Jampol tried to move up and run with him but quickly faltered and dropped back. Count Cain suffered the same fate when he tried to mount a charge. Straight Face’s lead grew to four lengths on the turn. Atkinson glanced back again, still trying to locate the horse he knew would come after him, but he still couldn’t find the grey favorite. Where was the Dancer? Fans at Belmont and across the nation were shouting the same question. Vanderbilt’s horse had made up ground in the stretch before, but he was testing his limits here.