Native Dancer

by John Eisenberg

  Kercheval sat in his den in Lexington, Kentucky, as he recalled the moment. He was almost ninety now, able to reflect on a long and vigorous life that had included playing college and pro football and working with top thoroughbreds for decades. The fact that he had helped plan the mating that produced Native Dancer touched him with awe. “He was the strongest horse I ever saw,” Kercheval recalled, “more like a big, powerful draft horse than a thoroughbred. He just had immense strength. And he was the smartest horse I was ever around, bar none. They say horses don’t think, and I guess horses don’t think, but some are able to reason within their wisdom, and a few operate on another level altogether. Native Dancer was that way. After that day that he flipped over, which, I believe, scared the hell out of both of us, if I ever pulled on the shank, he’d stop and look at me and say, Okay, boss, what’s next?’ It was amazing, the way that colt thought. God, what an animal he was.”

  EPILOGUE

  The Dancer roamed Sagamore Farm’s fields for thirteen years, maintaining his vigor and playfulness as his coat gradually turned a startling, distinguished white. “I was at a race at Laurel [in Maryland] in the early nineties, and a man came up to me and said, Was that your dad’s farm?’ ” Alfred Vanderbilt III said. “I told him it was, and he said, Oh, I used to drive by there all the time and see Native Dancer in the field. It was like seeing Winston Churchill.’ ”

  He was voted Horse of the Year for 1954 in every year-end poll of writers and racing officials, taking such honors for a second time even though he had raced only three times during the year.

  Gradually, the Dancer grew accustomed to his new life as a stallion. A troublemaker at first, he bit a finger off one groom’s hand, then bit the groom’s replacement on the arm. A wily veteran groom named Joe Hall came to the rescue and developed a lasting bond with the Dancer similar to Lester Murray’s relationship. “Joe Hall could walk into a stall and talk to a horse, and it was like a principal talking to a kid,” recalled Laura Riley, a Maryland veterinarian who worked at Sagamore breaking yearlings in the 1970s. “When I met him, he was immensely proud of having been the big horse’s groom. So proud to have been entrusted with the great horse. Also proud that he was the only one who could deal with him. Otherwise, the horse may not have gotten to stand stud.”

  The Dancer was never less than one of the world’s foremost stallions, his stud fee starting at $5,000 in 1955 and rising over the years to $20,000, the highest advertised fee in the world. But money was no object to the horsemen who wanted their mares bred to the Grey Ghost. A succession of top mares from across America as well as from Canada and Europe made the trek to the Worthington Valley north of Baltimore. Harold Ferguson, hired as Sagamore’s office manager in 1951, replaced Ralph Kercheval as the overall farm manager in 1958—Kercheval went back to training a stable—and carefully guided the Dancer’s stallion career along with Vanderbilt, limiting the horse’s bookings to between twenty-five and forty a year.

  With the racing industry watching, the Dancer’s sons and daughters began competing on tracks across America and Europe in 1958. The first crops were mildly disappointing, compiling respectable totals of wins and earnings but lacking horses of distinction. The Dancer’s first champion was a filly named Hula Dancer who raced in Europe and was undefeated as a two-year-old in 1962. The first American-based star was a brilliant colt named Raise a Native who raced only four times but won the 1963 Futurity Stakes in a romp and set a track record for five furlongs at Aqueduct. Vanderbilt raised the Dancer’s stud fee by $2,500 solely because of the furor the colt caused.

  A bowed tendon prevented Raise a Native from running in the Kentucky Derby and possibly avenging his father’s only defeat, but the Dancer’s blood soon began to haunt Churchill Downs. In the same year Raise a Native was unable to run, one of the Dancer’s grandsons, a small, fiery Canadian-bred colt named Northern Dancer, won the 1964 Derby. Foaled out of Natalma, a Native Dancer-sired mare, Northern Dancer also won the Preakness before finishing third in the Belmont in his bid to become the first Triple Crown winner since Citation. Two years later, a dark brown colt named Kauai King, sired by the Dancer himself, scored a front-running win as the 5-2 favorite in the 1966 Derby and also won the Preakness before faltering in the Belmont, finishing fourth in his Triple Crown bid.

  Respect for the Dancer as a sire was on the rise. Forty-five Dancer-sired horses won races in 1965, the total up sharply from thirty-one two years earlier. In 1966, with Kauai King leading the way, forty-three Dancer-breds combined to win one hundred races and $977,254, the second-highest total of the year for any sire, behind only Bold Ruler.

  Another strong year was ending and the Dancer was already booked to breed to twenty-eight mares for the coming season when he refused to take a carrot from Joe Hall on the afternoon of November 14, 1967. Massive and white at age seventeen, he usually eagerly took a carrot in exchange for letting Hall put a shank on him. He refused the carrot again in his stall and glanced back at his sides several times, as if he were experiencing pain there. Hall suspected a mild case of colic; the groom had walked the Dancer through a bout with colic six years earlier and detected some of the same symptoms.

  A farm superintendent phoned Dr. Irvin Frock, a local veterinarian. Colic medicine was administered and the Dancer’s condition fluctuated through the night; he pawed the ground and was restless at times—traditional signs of intestinal distress—then seemed relieved. When his condition worsened the next day, Dr. Frock, fearing an intestinal blockage, advised that he be transferred to a clinic.

  The Dancer was taken by van to the University of Pennsylvania’s New Bolton Center in Kennett Square, Pennsylvania. Barely able to stand during loading, he was severely dehydrated and in shock by the time he arrived in the evening, his temperature and heart rate soaring. He was immediately sedated and wheeled into surgery, and when the surgeons opened him up, they found a tumor the size of an orange looping over the small intestine and “strangling” it They also found other small tumors throughout the abdominal cavity.

  Ten feet of intestine were removed during three hours of surgery. The Dancer was then taken to a recovery stall shortly after midnight, still under sedation. Hall, who had made the trip with the Dancer in the back of the van, recounted what happened next in an interview with turf writer Snowden Carter that appeared in the December 1967 issue of Maryland Horse magazine: “We all stand around and watch him as he comes to. Dancer tries a couple of times to get up, but he can’t make it. All the time, I’m talking to him. I keep saying to myself, ‘This ol’ horse ain’t gonna die.’ But he does. About 5:30 [A.M.] I’m standing beside him. He draws a deep breath and then he don’t breathe no more.”

  It was hard to imagine, but the mighty Dancer was dead.

  “After a while they wheel him back to the van,” Hall continued in his Maryland Horse interview. “We’re bringing him home to bury him, but I still don’t think that Dancer’s dead. We get to the farm at about 11:30 in the morning and there’s nobody around. I’m sitting up front with the driver. I tell him to blow his horn so they’ll know we’re here. He reaches up and pulls that cord to the horn. When I hear that horn, then all of a sudden I can’t hold the water back to save my life. The water runs down my face. I don’t know why the horn did that to me. It sounds so far away. I said to the driver, ‘Man, don’t blow that horn no more.’”

  The Dancer was buried in a field at Sagamore Farm, his grave marked with a headstone alongside those of Discovery and some of Vanderbilt’s other top horses. Vanderbilt was disconsolate. “He got letters from people from all over the world, and he didn’t want to answer them,” recalled his daughter Heidi. “I was surprised that he wasn’t going to take that on himself. I don’t know why. He could be very reticent about things that were painful. So I told him I would answer the letters. They were from people who remembered watching the horse on TV, or he’d won them some money. Some of them had followed his entire life and knew everything about him. They were heartbroken that he
died. These were genuine letters of condolence. There were many. It took me a long time to answer them all, and they kept coming and coming. It was sad, but also wonderful that he had been such an important horse to so many.”

  The Dancer’s success as a stallion was illustrated in his career production statistics. Of the 304 foals he sired in thirteen crops, 224 reached the races and 194 of those who raced won at least once; both figures were well above industry averages. Most significant, an exceptionally high 15 percent of his foals won stakes races, the ultimate barometer of class. Though generally regarded at the time as a mild disappointment when measured against what had been expected of him, the Dancer had passed along quality to the generation that followed him.

  As if to honor him, one of his sons, Dancer’s Image—a grey with tender ankles, no less—won the first Kentucky Derby run after his death, rallying from tenth on the second turn to win by a length and a half. Dancer’s Image was later disqualified and placed last, in one of the Derby’s greatest controversies, when his postrace drug test allegedly turned up traces of phenylbutazone, or “bute,” a painkiller legal at some tracks but not Churchill Downs.

  Still somewhat uncertain at the time of his death, the Dancer’s influence on pedigrees soon became far more profound than anyone could have imagined. His son Raise a Native was an enormously successful stallion, siring Alydar and Mr. Prospector, two dominant American sires of the 1980s. And Northern Dancer, Native Dancer’s grandson, surpassed them all as the most successful sire of the second half of the twentieth century, with many of his champion sons and daughters racing in Europe.

  Through the greatness of Raise a Native, Alydar, Mr. Prospector, and Northern Dancer, Native Dancer’s name emerged as one of the great and enduring markers of class in a pedigree. He was a greatgrandfather of Affirmed, a Triple Crown winner in 1978. His descendants won many of the major races around the world, including the Breeders’ Cup Classic, England’s Epsom Derby, and France’s Arc de Triomphe, and they dominated the Kentucky Derby. The Dancer was a great-grandfather of Derby winners Genuine Risk (1980), Alysheba (1987), Strike the Gold (1991), and Fusaichi Pegasus (2000); a great-great-grandfather of Ferdinand (1986), Unbridled (1990), Thunder Gulch (1995), Real Quiet (1998), and War Emblem (2002); and a great-great-great-grandfather of Sea Hero (1993), Grindstone (1996), Charismatic (1999), and Monarchos (2001). The latter, racing forty-eight years after the Dancer in the Derby, was a virtual clone of his famous forefather, a powerful grey.

  With War Emblem’s victory at Churchill Downs in 2002, five straight winners and seven of the past eight were traceable to the Dancer within four generations. To say the Grey Ghost was haunting America’s greatest race would be an understatement. It was as if there was no end to the revenge to be exacted for his loss to Dark Star.

  Remarkably, Vanderbilt wasn’t among the many owners and breeders who won major races with horses that traced to the Dancer. Though he bred mares to the Dancer every year and certainly benefited in the 1950s and 1960s as the owner of such a sire, Vanderbilt himself never bred another horse of the same caliber. After Kauai King was purchased out of a sales ring and won the Kentucky Derby, Vanderbilt joked, “I guess I should be buying Native Dancers instead of trying to breed them.”

  He tried to breed another with the same sire and dam in the 1950s; once the Dancer’s greatness was known, Geisha was never bred to any stallion other than Polynesian. They had five full brothers and sisters, all bred by Vanderbilt, but none had their famous brother’s class. Only three made it to the races, and just one, Geisha’s last foal, was able to win a race. “The full brothers and sisters were nice horses with that good conformation and vigor, but they didn’t want to run like Native Dancer,” Dan W. Scott told the Thoroughbred Times in 1998.

  When Heidi Vanderbilt turned eleven in 1959, she received one of the full brothers as a present from her father. “His name was Noble Savage,” Heidi recalled. “He had started on the track, but he was a terrible handful and not a good racehorse, and that combination got him demoted. He was a dappled gray, about 16.1 or 16.2 [hands tall], not as pretty as the Dancer. I was riding a lot and looking for a show horse, a hunting horse. It was not a great match. I was eleven and he was three. He was too much horse for me at that age. When I was fourteen or so, we sold him. He was a very, very good jumping horse. I went and saw him jump at Madison Square Garden. He went white-gray like his brother.”

  Vanderbilt’s racing stable dwindled significantly after a phone call from Bill Winfrey, his trainer, in 1956, less than two years after the Dancer’s retirement Vanderbilt, Winfrey, and jockey Eric Guerin had continued to race and win in 1955 with a large stable including Social Outcast and Find, but then Winfrey, who had always eyed other professions somewhat enviously, abruptly decided to retire.

  “As my father told the story years later, he was literally leaving the house to go on a trip to Africa and the phone rang,” Alfred Vanderbilt III said. “It was Winfrey saying, ‘I’ve raced the best for the best, I’ve had it, I’m through, I’m going to retire.’ Dad said, ‘All right, I’m leaving, too. I’m going to retire, too. Sell the horses.’ It was a huge decision absolutely made on the spur of the moment.”

  Vanderbilt’s marriage to Jeanne had collapsed—their divorce was finalized in December 1956—and he was traveling extensively as president of the World Veterans Fund, the money-raising arm of a federation of veterans’ groups in twenty-nine countries. He had toured Asia through the first months of 1956 and was headed to Africa when Winfrey called. On May 21, 1956, a dispersal of Vanderbilt’s racing stock was held at Belmont. Thirty-seven of his forty-two horses in training were sold, leaving only old-timers Social Outcast, Find, Beachcomber, First Glance, and Crash Dive to race in cerise and white. Winfrey continued to train the horses through 1957, fulfilling what he saw as his obligation to the stable before retiring. In the end, Find earned more than $800,000, Social Outcast earned almost $670,000, and Vanderbilt’s foal crop of 1950 was regarded as one of the greatest in history.

  In 1958, Winfrey moved to San Clemente, California, with his wife Elaine, “certain as anything can be certain that I’d never go back [East],” he told the Blood-Horse in 1985. Vanderbilt hired George Poole to train the stable—Poole had been John Gaver’s assistant at Greentree—but the stable was no longer a powerhouse and Poole resigned in 1962. Vanderbilt continued to race a small stable through the years with other trainers such as Mike Freeman, Bobby Lake, Rick Violette, and Mary Eppler handling the stock. Vanderbilt “never stopped trying” to lure Winfrey back, according to Winfrey’s son Carey.

  After moving to California, Bill Winfrey took real estate classes and pondered a career change but always came back to the track. He spent most of the rest of his life in California, raising eight children. His family came first. “He felt that the separations caused by the nomadic life of a trainer had ruined his first marriage,” Carey Winfrey said, “and by God, he wasn’t going to let that ruin his second.”

  Winfrey did come back East in 1962 when Ogden Phipps asked him to replace retiring legend Sunny Jim Fitzsimmons as the trainer of the family’s Phipps and Wheatley stables. “It was my ego, I guess, that took me back,” Winfrey told the Blood-Horse. The job was the best in the country with Phipps-owned champion sire Bold Ruler filling the barn with talented homebreds, and Winfrey won $1.35 million in purses in 1964 to break the record for a trainer held since 1947 by Calumet’s Jimmy Jones. That year, Winfrey had the champion two-year-old colt, Bold Lad, and also the champion two-year-old filly, Queen Empress. Bold Lad was a disappointment in the 1965 Kentucky Derby, finishing tenth as the 2-1 favorite, but another two-year-old star, Buckpasser, came along that year and Winfrey again earned more than $1 million, finishing second in the country to Hirsch Jacobs.

  With many years of certain success ahead, Winfrey stunned the racing world by walking away from the Phipps job in December 1965. The Phippses were more hands-on than Vanderbilt, and while Winfrey told the Blood-Horse in 1985 that he was
never second-guessed, he also said, “I just didn’t have a feeling of freedom there.” Carey Winfrey said, “He walked away on principle from the best job in the country.” His replacement dominated the trainers’ earnings list for the next three years, but Winfrey, ever the iconoclast, moved back to California and took his family to Europe for a year. Elected to the National Museum of Racing’s Hall of Fame in 1971, he continued to train a few horses through the years. He died in 1994 of complications from Alzheimer’s disease.

  Unlike Winfrey, Eric Guerin had tasted victory in the Kentucky Derby, winning aboard Jet Pilot in 1947. He had three more chances after losing on the Dancer, finishing third in 1955 on Summer Tan, sixth in 1956 on Career Boy, and thirteenth in 1971 on Impetuosity. Although his career peaked during his association with Vanderbilt, which ended in the late 1950s, he continued to ride through the 1960s and early 1970s, finally retiring at age fifty-one. He was still active when elected to the Hall of Fame in 1972.

  After retiring, he worked as a mutuels clerk in New York for three years in the late 1970s, then underwent heart surgery and, improbably, went back to the track and found work as an exercise rider, galloping horses for Hall of Fame trainers Allen Jerkens and Woody Stephens. “He did it because he loved horses and wanted to be around horses,” said his nephew Frank Curry. “He was in his sixties and still doing stuff teenagers do, just so he could be around horses.”

  A costly divorce years earlier had lowered his lifestyle, but he remarried happily and spent more than thirty years with his second wife. “He wound up later in life not having that much money, but the nice thing was, he had none of the surliness that he might have had because he was winding up that way,” Jerkens said. “He was just as nice and easygoing as when he was riding and winning. He was galloping horses for me, and he had the same wonderful patience with the horses that he’d had when he was on top.”