Quietly, from deep in the field, the Dancer started to make his move on the turn. Without urging from Guerin, he lowered his head, picked up his stride, and shot ahead of the laggards, jumping into fifth place. Jampol and Count Cain were still in front of him when Atkinson looked back the second time, blocking the jockey’s view, but the savvy Atkinson didn’t need to see the Dancer to know the challenge was coming. Atkinson turned back around and smacked Straight Face with his stick, desperate for the effort he felt would be needed to maintain the lead to the wire. The horse passed the quarter pole just before straightening for home, having covered the first three quarters in a blazing 1:10⅕. His lead was three and a half lengths as he hugged the rail, in perfect position for the stretch run.
Guerin moved the Dancer wide to avoid traffic as he rallied. The colt was still in fifth as he passed the quarter pole, seven lengths behind the leader. There were three horses between them, and the Dancer almost casually swept around them all as he came out of the turn and straightened for home, moving into second place as he charged past Impasse. He was still five lengths behind Straight Face,
and it hadn’t taken much for him to put the others behind him, so Guerin reached back and struck the colt four times, eliciting gasps from the fans who had never seen the Dancer’s jockey get so tough with the horse. “I called for him on the turn and he didn’t answer with all that he had,” Guerin said later, “so I had to call for more, and he came on with his answer then.”
Two hundred yards to go, one horse ahead of him, the Grey Ghost careening down the middle of the stretch. His legs blurred as he picked up his pace, spotting Straight Face along the rail and feeling Guerin’s stick on his side. A challenge had been put down, and the Dancer picked it up, his intense competitive urge engaged. He veered sharply across the stretch, toward Straight Face. Even the lay fan could see what he had to be thinking: “If I’m going to beat that damn horse over there, I’m going to beat him like a champion, eye-to-eye, where he can see me and hear me and feel my superiority.” It wouldn’t be any fun beating him from a distance, in the middle of the track.
He started gaining ground, cutting the lead to four lengths, then three at the eighth pole as the crowd’s roar swelled. “He still had a ton of ground to make up; it looked like it was going to be impossible for him to get up to the lead, but he kept coming,” recalled Hall of Fame trainer Allen Jerkens, who was at Belmont that afternoon. The lead was down to two lengths, then one just inside the sixteenth pole, with the Dancer now hovering next to the leader. The grandstand was in an uproar, the crowd hoarsely imploring the Dancer to keep charging. Atkinson, sensing the challenge he had known would come, pounded Straight Face with the stick, once, twice, three times with a violent right-handed spank. The Greentree colt had raced magnificently—and been ridden magnificently—for more than seven furlongs, but there was little left to give.
Guerin had always ridden the Dancer with supreme confidence, knowing he could wait until deep into races to make a charge because the colt’s finishing kick was so strong. That confidence might have cost the Dancer in the Derby, when Guerin hesitated, perhaps fatally, at the top of the stretch; but since then, the jockey had all but perfected his use of the powerful racing machine underneath him. The zenith of their understanding occurred in the final furlong of the Met-
ropolitan, with the finish line approaching, the crowd shrieking, and the jockey on the horse in front of him furiously pounding away Guerin, cool amid the hysteria, put his stick away. He had seen and felt enough. The Dancer was still running second, within a head of Straight Face inside the sixteenth pole, the issue supposedly in doubt, but Guerin’s hands went down. The gesture, as simple as it was stunning, spoke volumes. The horse could take it from there. And the jockey knew the horse could take it from there.
The Dancer had made up seventh lengths in a quarter mile on a fast horse carrying thirteen fewer pounds—a move that almost defied belief. Starting from ten lengths behind on the turn, he had circled the field and run down a leader racing furiously on the rail. Anyone who had doubted him—and goodness knows how many doubts had been voiced along the way—would have to keep quiet now. With his jockey motionless, trusting him to complete what had been started, the colt pulled even with Straight Face with fifty yards to go. “The horse’s finish was superb, a spectacle of power; he was in perfect balance, with perfect equilibrium at all times,” Evan Shipman would write. The next jump put the Dancer in front by a nose. There was no doubt now. As the finish line approached, the Grey Ghost cocked his head to the side almost imperceptibly, glancing at Straight Face, seemingly seeking a nod from his opponent that the better horse had won. Then he took another step and reached the wire. The fans were jumping and shouting, lost in a delirium. The Dancer had pulled it off.
The stewards immediately called for a photo to check the finish, but that was just a formality. The limp crowd and exhausted jockeys knew that the Dancer had reached the wire first. “He was so far out of it, it was incredible,” Daily Racing Form columnist Joe Hirsch recalled almost fifty years later. “But he closed ground unbelievably! That was a very fine Greentree horse, and Native Dancer beat him right at the end. It was amazing that he could get up there, but he did. It remains, to this day, one of the greatest races I have ever seen.”
Vanderbilt and Winfrey rushed from their box seats to the winner’s enclosure to greet Guerin. The enormity of the performance was quickly sinking in. The Dancer had covered the final quarter in under 24 seconds and the mile in 1:35⅕—three-fifths faster than Tom Fool’s time in the Metropolitan the year before and just two-fifths off Belmont’s track record for a mile, set by Count Fleet in 1942 while carrying thirteen fewer pounds. It was a performance that left no wiggle room for doubters. Turf writers didn’t need to pause and reflect before passing judgment. “Magnificent; a dangling Pearl White never produced more suspense than the famous grey in the final half-mile,” wrote Pat O’Brien in the Blood-Horse, referring to the silent movie star who was always being rescued from train tracks just before the train ran over her. James Roach, in the New York Times, called the race “a five-star thriller,” and Shipman called the Dancer’s finish “one of the greatest final quarters ever run on the American turf.”
Almost a half century later, jockey Teddy Atkinson recalled the stretch run vividly, smiling and shaking his head. “Straight Face was a very good horse, and especially good that day,” he said from the home in Virginia to which he had retired. “But Native Dancer was always at his best when he was trailing like he was. He was so far back that day that he really had to come on. I thought that maybe I had opened up enough of a lead, but I was wrong.”
When reporters surrounded Guerin after the race, he just smiled. “Was I scared? Damn right I was, right down to the last fifty yards,” he said. “I wanted to start moving up at the half mile pole, but he wouldn’t go. Then he made up his mind to go. It was like always. You can try to explain to another rider how good it is, how strong he feels and what it’s like to ride him, but you can’t; a guy just had to ride him to know.”
Harold Walker and Lester Murray led him away, toward Barn 20, with Murray chattering as he gripped the horse’s tail.
“Come on, Daddy, and I’ll do you up nice,” the groom said. “You got a nice night coming after that.”
An hour later, after the horse had cooled down and been bathed and fed, Murray stood outside stall 6 and spoke to several reporters.
“He run every time,” the groom said, unable to suppress the pride welling inside him. “He make you think he isn’t gonna go, and he always go. He don’t need someone telling him when it’s time. He knows.”
The Dancer abruptly looked up, as if he had heard the compliment. Murray and the horse had been together for two years now, and anyone who spent any time around them could see that their connection was almost kinetic.
“You like that, huh,” Murray said. “You listening.”
The Metropolitan, it turned out, was the most impor
tant of the year. The miracle comeback ultimately convinced Horse of the Year voters that the Dancer deserved the sport’s highest honor in 1954. It also convinced the editors of Time that he was a public figure of the highest distinction. An illustration of the Dancer, in profile, made the cover of the issue of Time dated May 31, 1954, above a headline reading, “Native Dancer: A little heartbreak, then a burst of glory.” The colt’s light grey face was set against a luminous backdrop of blue sky, a horse farm pasture, and two strips of Vanderbilt’s cerise and white silks.
The sight of a horse’s face on the cover surely shocked some of Time’s readers accustomed to pictures and portraits of prominent, serious-minded figures from business and national and international affairs. Others who had made the cover in the previous year included Earl Warren, chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court; Allen Dulles, head of the Central Intelligence Agency; Queen Frederika of Greece; Chou En-lai, premier of the People’s Republic of China; and just the week before, Texas millionaire Clint Murchison. Now added to that roll call: the Grey Ghost.
“There were people who collected autographed covers of Time magazine, and after Native Dancer was on the cover, we suddenly got fifteen or twenty in the mail asking for them to be signed,” Bill Winfrey’s son Carey recalled. “We put them on the ground in his stall and got Native Dancer to stand on them, and then sent them back ‘autographed.’”
The magazine’s two-thousand-word article (printed without a byline) detailed the Dancer’s career and personality as well as those of Vanderbilt and Guerin, and also took readers minute by minute through the Metropolitan drama. “The Big Grey reigns as popularly chosen monarch over a domain that has grown into the nation’s biggest spectator sport,” the article reported.
The wording on the cover—“a little heartbreak, then a burst of glory”—referred to what the editors saw as the Dancer’s racing blueprint: he temporarily broke his fans’ hearts with his agonizingly slow starts, then mended them with his mad rushes to glory down the stretch. But the wording was even more appropriate as a summary description of the Dancer’s career, which, after the Metropolitan, now stood at twenty victories in twenty-one starts, with the past ten races all successes. The Derby had been his heartbreak, but the ensuing burst of glory had elevated him to the pinnacle where he now stood, hailed as one of America’s most famous athletes, the hero of racing’s golden age, his status papers stamped in ink in the wake of his greatest escape.
TWENTY-ONE
On the very day the Dancer’s issue of Time magazine reached newsstands across America, the horse was declared lame after a morning workout at Belmont. Battling what appeared to be a mild case of soreness in his right front foot, he was twelve days removed from the Metropolitan and four days away from a rematch with Straight Face in the Suburban Handicap when he came out of a three-furlong breeze in obvious distress. Bernie Everson jumped off his back as he pulled up, unsaddled the limping colt, and walked him back to the barn. After an examination, Winfrey announced the Dancer would miss the Suburban. “He seemed fine this morning, so we tried him out with a breeze—you saw the results,” the trainer told reporters.
The first sign of foot trouble had come several days earlier, after an excellent mile workout on a quiet Sunday morning. The Dancer cooled out nicely but appeared to miss a step as he entered his stall. Winfrey had him led back out for an examination and detected that the foot was, indeed, tender, but X rays showed no breaks and Winfrey lightheartedly dismissed the problem as “a sore tootsie.” The Dancer resumed training after taking a day off, walking for an hour on Tuesday and galloping two miles on Wednesday with Winfrey riding just ahead on a pony, monitoring every step. There was no sign of soreness, so the ill-fated breeze was scheduled for Thursday. “It goes without saying that we’re disappointed,” Vanderbilt said afterward.
Another set of X rays was taken, again indicating no broken bones. Vanderbilt’s vet, Dr. William Wright, settled on a complicated-sounding diagnosis: a bruised digital cushion with a secondary inflammation of the bursar between the navicular and coffin bones. Lay term: a bruise similar to the injury to the Dancer’s other front foot that had ended his 1953 campaign after the American Derby.
This latest injury had probably occurred during the horse’s spectacular rally in the Metropolitan, when his feet were asked to absorb the awesome thumping of his 1,250 pounds being hurled to the ground with a violence seldom seen from a thoroughbred. The possibility of a wicked irony surfaced with a “tootsie” problem having stopped the Dancer twice in nine months. It could be, now that he had matured from an equine teenager into an adult, that his immense body and powerful racing mechanism—the very assets that made him great—generated too much force, more than his feet could handle. “He is so heavy and hits the ground so hard that that may have caused the bruising,” Winfrey told the Blood-Horse.
The only antidote was rest. Amid whispers that he might never race again, the Dancer was taken out of training, much to the public’s dismay. Straight Face rolled to a four-and-a-half-length victory as a 7-5 favorite in the Suburban before a Memorial Day crowd of 56,736, New York’s largest racing crowd in five years. Hundreds of get-well cards arrived at Barn 20 and Vanderbilt’s New York office, and the Dancer embraced the “downtime” with his trademark charisma. As Vanderbilt’s other horses trained and raced out of Barn 20, the “lazy so-and-so” ate lavish hay “brunches” while soaking his sore foot in a hot bath, then slept standing up with the foot in a poultice wrap. It didn’t take much imagination to envision him winking and saying, “Beats working for a living.”
The foot improved enough for the colt to resume training in early July. Obviously, his summer trip to Europe was out, as was the New York handicap Triple Crown, but there were numerous other races on both sides of the Atlantic that he could win before being retired at the end of the year. Winfrey worked to have him back into racing shape as quickly as possible. The colt was breezing at Belmont by the end of July, his foot seemingly healed, and was shipped to Saratoga along with Find, Social Outcast, and the other Vanderbilt horses that would run at the Spa that year. The plan was to run him either in the Saratoga Cup, a one-and-three-quarter-mile weight-forage event near the end of August, or the Whitney, a straightforward Spa handicap in which he would surely be assigned a crushing weight.
If all went well in August, the colt would probably then travel to France to race in the Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe in October. Vanderbilt was optimistic enough about that possibility to take Winfrey with him on a trip to Paris in July to inspect Longchamp and gauge the challenge the race would pose. They were encouraged. The Dancer would have to race in a clockwise direction for the first time, and also race on grass for the first time, but Winfrey and Vanderbilt had long suspected the Dancer would be murderous on grass.
Back in America, the horse trained sharply at Saratoga in early August, and Winfrey and Vanderbilt decided to give him a prep race before returning him to stakes competition in the Whitney or the Saratoga Cup. They picked out the Oneonta Handicap, an obscure seven-furlong sprint on August 16, as the place for him to shake off the rust that had gathered since May. Saratoga handicapper James Kilroe assigned him 137 pounds, by far the most he had ever carried, but even with that massive handicap, he drew only two opponents. One was another Vanderbilt horse, seven-year-old First Glance. Joe W. Brown’s three-year-old Gigantic was the other.
With so few horses entered and the Dancer certain to attract virtually every dollar wagered, Saratoga elected to run the race without taking bets, essentially transforming it into a public exhibition. More than 14,000 fans came to the Spa on a muggy Monday, lured by the increasingly rare chance to see the Dancer race. A brief downpour left the track rated sloppy, with puddles on the turns and rivulets in the stretch. The heavy air didn’t dampen the crowd’s enthusiasm. After Lester Murray walked the Dancer from the barn to the paddock (Murray was celebrating his sixty-fifth birthday, so Winfrey let him handle Harold Walker’s customary chore of leading the Dancer
on race day), some 2,000 fans surrounded the horse as he was saddled underneath the Dutch elm in the paddock. He was giving eighteen pounds to First Glance, winner of the Wilson Handicap at Jamaica earlier that summer, and thirty pounds to Gigantic, winner of the Swift Stakes at Belmont in May. The Dancer figured to win easily, but he had been out of action for three months and the other two were capable horses. Who knew what would happen, especially with such a severe weight disparity in play?
The crowd cheered the Dancer’s appearance on the track and applauded him through the brief post parade. There was a hush when the horses were loaded into the starting gate on the backstretch, then a roar as they were sent running. The Dancer was first out of the gate, but Guerin quickly dropped him back, following the usual blueprint. First Glance jumped into the lead by a couple of lengths over Gigantic, with the Dancer in third, another couple of lengths back. They held those positions through the short run up the backstretch, then angled into the turn. “Gigantic will be able to tell his grandchildren he was ahead of Native Dancer after three furlongs,” James Roach wrote later in the New York Times.
The Dancer started to roll on the turn. It was a familiar sight. Down went his head, out went his stride, and away went the opposition. He quickly passed Gigantic, then pulled even with First Glance, gaining ground with every stride. He shot past his stablemate at the quarter pole, taking a clear lead. So much for any chance of a real race developing.
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