Secretariat

SECRETARIAT

William Nack

To my parents

and to Carolyne

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Preface to the 2010 Edition

SECRETARIAT

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 8

CHAPTER 9

CHAPTER 10

CHAPTER 11

CHAPTER 12

CHAPTER 13

CHAPTER 14

CHAPTER 15

CHAPTER 16

CHAPTER 17

CHAPTER 18

CHAPTER 19

CHAPTER 20

CHAPTER 21

CHAPTER 22

CHAPTER 23

CHAPTER 24

CHAPTER 25

CHAPTER 26

CHAPTER 27

CHAPTER 28

EPILOGUE

Author’s Note

“Pure Heart” by William Nack

APPENDIX A Secretariat at Stud

APPENDIX B Secretariat’s Racing Record

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

Preface to the 2010 Edition

Nearly forty years have passed since Secretariat swept to three record-smashing victories in the Triple Crown—an unprecedented tour de force that confirmed him as the most capable and charismatic racehorse in the modern annals of the turf—and today his legend as a Thoroughbred, with all that word implies, remains as vibrant and secure as ever.

Horsemen have always been loath to compare horses from different eras, seeing any attempt to do so as a diverting but futile exercise. Could Secretariat have beaten Man o’ War or Citation? Could either of them have whipped Swaps, Seattle Slew, or Native Dancer? Or run down the immortal Count Fleet or Dr. Fager? Or out-gutted Seabiscuit at his match-race best? To all such facile questions, of course, there are only facile answers. The only thing that is really certain, after the passage of two decades since his death at Claiborne Farm, is that Secretariat continues to be viewed as the modern standard against which all members of his tribe are judged.

“His only point of reference is himself,” turfwriter Charles Hatton wrote after witnessing the colt’s thirty-one-length victory in the Belmont Stakes.

If anything, time has only enriched and embellished his name. On ESPN’s acclaimed TV series portraying the fifty greatest athletes of the twentieth century, he was ranked thirty-fifth, the only quadruped honored in the series. In another end-of-the-century event celebrating the decade of the 1970s, the U.S. Postal Service put his comely mug on a thirty-three-cent postage stamp. A three-quarter-sized bronze statue of Secretariat, commissioned by philanthropist Paul Mellon and depicting the horse in full flight, his head and forelegs thrust forward, decorates the middle of the walking ring at Belmont Park—a symbolic centerpiece forever representing the best of the sport and the breed. And a full-sized statue in bronze, with jockey Ron Turcotte aboard and groom Ed Sweat trying to restrain the thoroughbred, was unveiled in 2006 at the Kentucky Horse Park in Lexington—just down the road from Claiborne Farm, where Secretariat died at age nineteen, on October 4, 1989, and where a loyal network of old friends, many of them anonymous, have kept his grave in flowers through the years, a symbolic reminder of the hold he has had on the memories of those who saw him run almost four decades before.

It was there at Claiborne, one early afternoon in 2009, that actress Diane Lane visited the storied horse cemetery behind the office, its rows of gray headstones engraved with names long celebrated in the richer histories of the American turf: Bold Ruler … Round Table … Gallant Fox … Damascus … Buckpasser … Mr. Prospector … and Secretariat. As she left through the cemetery gate, a gray-haired gent in a black windbreaker stopped behind her and bent over Secretariat’s grave, plucking a single red rose from a vase of flowers tipped against the headstone.

“Here,” the old gent said, handing the rose to Lane. “The horse asked me to give this to you. Wanted you to have it.”

Diane smiled, almost purring. “Thank you,” she said. Lifting the stem in both hands, she touched the rose like an artist’s brush to her exquisite face. “I will treasure this,” she said.

At the moment, the acclaimed actress was at the bustling center of the richest, most extravagant tribute ever paid to the life and legend of Secretariat—a full-length feature film starring Diane as Penny Chenery Tweedy, the woman who drove Secretariat’s career in place of her dying father (played by Scott Glenn), and the brilliant John Malkovich as trainer Lucien Laurin, the man with whom Penny shared the glories, the tumults, and the pressures that attended the leading of this magnificent chestnut, recently syndicated for $6 million, through the turbulent waters of the Triple Crown. I was down there, too, a hired hand observing the making of the film. Walt Disney Pictures, with Mayhem Pictures producing, had just begun shooting it at a rainy churchyard cemetery in rural Lexington, where the scene was the burial of Chenery’s mother, Helen Bates Chenery, and where Diane perfectly evoked Penny’s patrician reserve and grieving beauty beneath panoplies of black umbrellas.

It was, with Lane and Malkovich leading the way, a surpassing cast and crew. They all gathered later at Keeneland racecourse to film a reenactment of the scenes that unfolded at the ′73 Belmont Stakes, the race regarded by most horsemen as the greatest performance ever by an American thoroughbred; among the familiar faces dressed for their parts were James Cromwell as breeder Ogden Phipps, Fred Thompson as Claiborne president Bull Hancock, and Nelsan Ellis as Sweat. Behind the camera was the peripatetic Dean Semler, whose cinematography in Dances with Wolves had won him an Oscar in 1990. Movie locations mimic the collapsible world of the traveling circus, moving from place to place, and after a week at old Keeneland, in the middle of the Blue Grass, the Secretariat troupe packed up and hauled its cameras and trailers seventy miles west to Louisville. Since 1875, the year of its inaugural running, River City had been home to the Kentucky Derby, with its signature Twin Spires, its massive clubhouse and grandstand, and its ancient vault of echoing sounds and memories.

Disney had acquired the rights to this book for the making of the movie, and the film company, at Mayhem’s urging, had retained me as the technical consultant on the film. For those who had been at Churchill Downs on May 5, 1973, it was impossible to wander those historic grounds and that movie set last year—among throngs of extras dressed in the polyesters of the early ′70s, amid fleets of old cars imported from the late ′60s, and around the five attractive chestnuts wrangled from all over to play the horse—and not recall that sublime magic of Derby week some thirty-six years before.

I can close my eyes and see the scenes unfolding one by one:

 The morning of May 2, Thursday, two days before the witching hour, when a hand-wringing Lucien and Penny, still agonizing over Secretariat’s stunning defeat in the Wood Memorial eleven days before, sent him out for a last, crucial morning workout at the Downs. As the colt flew down that stretch, sizzling a final 220 yards in 0:113/5 seconds, Turcotte’s blue and white jacket was billowing like a parachute on his back. Later, Sweat, a rub rag dangling from his back pocket, was whistling as he led Secretariat back to the barn and washed him off with soap and water, the colt’s golden coat shining wetly in the sun.

 The late afternoon of May 5, Derby Day, when the backstretch silence was broken as the loudspeakers blared, “Horsemen! Bring your horses to the paddock for the Derby!” And there was Secretariat, Eddie leading him, walking around the clubhouse turn toward the paddock, the colt’s head bobbing, his mouth grinding on the bit, until he strode into the straightaway past the clubhouse seats, where thousands pressed forward to see him, and he stopped and raised his head and stared a few seconds at the mammoth stands and raucous crowds, still as a piece of statuary, before dropping his head and walking on.

 At the top of the stretch at Churchill Downs at 5:38 P.M., the hour had come round at last: Secretariat was battling his arch rival, Sham, and they were nose and nose through the first 100 yards into the lane when Secretariat began to pull away, slowly but inexorably, and Sham began melting down the wick of that fiery pace as 130,000 people sent up a roar and Secretariat bounded home alone in 1:592/5—the fastest Kentucky Derby ever run—the first horse ever to shade two minutes for the mile and a quarter. In the doing, he pulled off the unprecedented feat of running each successive quarter-mile split faster than the preceding one—0:251/5, 0:24, 0:234/5, 0:232/5, and 0:23 flat—literally running faster and faster as the race went on.

He electrified the crowd that afternoon, and I can hear their echoes in that hallowed grandstand yet today. Secretariat had been voted the nation’s Horse of the Year as a two-year-old in 1972, and he had already shown himself to be a horse of gusting speed and highest quality, but the Kentucky Derby was his first transcendent moment as an equine athlete, the performance by which he joined the racing gods—the likes of Man o’ War and Count Fleet, Citation and Native Dancer, Swaps and Dr. Fager—and announced that he belonged in their pantheon. The Preakness reaffirmed his Derby brilliance, while his pièce de résistance, the Belmont Stakes, left him spinning in an orbit all his own, alone.

By the close of the 2009 Triple Crown season, a total of 1,382,316 thoroughbreds had been born and come of age in North America since 1970, the year of Secretariat’s birth, and not only did he still own the Kentucky Derby record by himself, no horse had come remotely close to equaling his world record at Belmont—a mile and a half in 2:24 flat.

He was sui generis, to be sure, an inspiration not only for documentarians and big-screen movie makers, but also for journalists and novelists and would-be poets.

Charles Hatton had been the dean of American turfwriters for decades before the rise of Secretariat, and he had seen them all since the era when Man o’ War and Sir Barton strutted their stuff on the racing stage; in the end he declared Secretariat to be the most capable racehorse he had ever seen. Nothing delighted Hatton more than seeing the colt fly through his morning workouts. The week before the Belmont Stakes, on the morning Secretariat worked a mile in the astonishing time of 1:344/5, faster than the best older horses were racing in the afternoons, New York Times columnist Red Smith climbed to Hatton’s eyrie above the giant Belmont grandstand and asked how fast the colt had worked.

“The trees swayed,” Charlie told Red.

Upon the colt’s retirement, it was Hatton who penned the most lyrical farewell:

Weave for the mighty chestnut A tributary crown Of autumn leaves, the brightest then When autumn leaves are brown Hang up his bridle on the wall, His saddle on the tree, Till time shall bring some racing king Worthy to wear as he!

SECRETARIAT

CHAPTER 1

It was almost midnight in Virginia, late for the farmlands north of Richmond, when the breathing quickened in the stall, the phone rang in the Gentry home, and two men came out the front door, hastily crossing the lawn to the car.

They swung out the driveway onto the deserted road and took off north. It was one of those hours when time is measured not by clocks but by contractions; the intervals between were getting shorter. In a small wooden barn set off at the edge of a nearby field, beneath a solitary light in an expanse of darkness, a mare was about to give birth. The men were rushing to the barn to help her.

The man behind the wheel was Howard M. Gentry, sixty-two years old, for almost twenty years a manager of the Meadow Stud in Doswell, one of the most successful breeding farms in America. Sitting with him in the front seat was Raymond W. Wood, a railroad conductor, fifty-four years old, Gentry’s long-time friend and neighbor, for years his steady companion at straight pool, and himself a modest breeder of thoroughbred horses.

It was the night of March 29, 1970, not the kind of night for anyone to leave the velvet green warmth of a pool table and rush outdoors. The weather had been bleak all day—the sky perpetually overcast, a drizzle falling through the morning and afternoon, and a fog that clung to the farm and the uplands and the bottomlands of Caroline County. A wind, mounting occasional gusts, blew out of the north from Washington. The temperature had been in the high forties during the day, but by evening it had dropped into the thirties, and sometime past eleven o’clock, when the call came, it was almost freezing.

Gentry instantly recognized the voice of Bob Southworth, the nightwatchman at the foaling barn. In a characteristic monotone Southworth told him what he had been waiting to hear. “Mistah Gentry! You better come on down here to the foalin’ barn in the field. That mare’s gettin’ ready to foal.”

That mare is what put an edge on the moment for Gentry. He had delivered hundreds of foals in the years he worked around thoroughbreds, but that mare was not just another broodmare carrying a foal by just another sire. Down in Barn 17A, the two-stall foaling barn near the western border of the farm, an eighteen-year-old broodmare named Somethingroyal, a daughter of the late Princequillo, was going into labor for the fourteenth time in her life. She was carrying a foal by Bold Ruler, the preeminent sire in America, year after year the nation’s leading stallion. It was a union of established aristocracy.

Somethingroyal was the kind of mare breeders seek to raise dynasties. She was the dam of the fleet Sir Gaylord, probably the most gifted racehorse of his generation, the colt favored to win the 1962 Kentucky Derby until he broke down the day before the race. She was the mother of First Family, a multiple stakes winner in the mid-1960s. In 1965 she bore her first Bold Ruler foal, a filly called Syrian Sea, winner of the rich Selima Stakes in 1967. Another Bold Ruler filly, The Bride, was a yearling, and tonight Somethingroyal was having her last Bold Ruler foal: the stallion was dying in Kentucky.

So Howard Gentry felt more anxious than usual to get the foal delivered. The foal would be virtually priceless, and Gentry hoped the delivery would be easy. Gentry had stopped to see Somethingroyal earlier that night, just before he went home for supper at six. She didn’t appear to be near labor then, but when he and Southworth made the rounds two hours later, as they often did together during breeding season, her condition had begun to change. Labor seemed imminent. The mare was “waxing heavily,” as Gentry called it, with milk congealing at the tips of her nipples like beads of candle wax, the tentative sign that labor is near—perhaps a few hours away, perhaps a day. It was then he decided to stay awake, instead of going to bed at nine, his regular time, and to call Wood and ask him to wait it out over a pool table.

Gentry edged his beige 1969 Chrysler across the highway dividing the farm, past the big house on the hill, past the towering stand of trees around the house, around the gravel driveway crunching underneath, down the gentle slope and past the fences and the pastures and through the gate where the broodmares walk to and from the fields during the day, and finally stopped about a hundred feet from where the lights were burning and where Bob Southworth, standing by the stall, was waiting.

Gentry and Wood cut across the wet grass on the field, walking briskly—hurrying—through the pasture toward the barn. Wood jogged to keep up, stumbling once in the dark, skimming through the pastureland to keep up with Gentry, midwife for Somethingroyal.

Gentry looked in the stall and walked quietly inside. Somethingroyal was breathing quickly now. Her nostrils were flared. She was walking the stall and seemed edgy, nervous. Gentry felt her neck and shoulder. She was warm and sweating lightly.

“She’s gettin’ ready,” Gentry said. A quick routine began. He checked for the iodine, the enema, the cup for the iodine, and the bowl for the water to wash the nipples for the suckling foal. Then he spotted his Unionalls, picked them off the hook, and slipped them on. The three men waited at the door, watching the old mare pace the stall, circling it as if caged, and they spoke idly in unremembered conversations.

At midnight, almost to the stroke, Gentry saw Somethingroyal stop pacing and lie down, collapsing her bulk on the bed of straw. She faced the rear of the stall, lying on her left side. Gentry slipped on his rubber gloves and dropped to his knees beside her. Her water bag broke, spilling fluid from her vagina. Any moment now, the foal.

Just past midnight, the tip of the left foot appeared, and Gentry waited for the other. In a normal birth, the front feet come out together, with the head between the legs, so Gentry watched and waited. When the foot failed to emerge, he decided to wait no longer. He feared the leg might be folded under or twisted, a position that could cause injury to the shoulder under the extreme pressures of birth. So, kneeling closer to the mare, he reached his arm inside the vagina and felt the head, which was in a good position, and then dropped his hand down to the right leg and felt for the hoof. As he suspected, he found it curled under, so he uncurled it gently, bringing the leg out of the vagina. “Won’t be long now,” he said to Wood.

Somethingroyal pushed, paused panting, and pushed again. Gentry guided but did not pull the legs—not yet. He always waited for the shoulder to emerge before pulling. The legs came out together. Then the head, with a splash of white down the face, slipped through the opening. A water bubble preceded it, and Gentry slit the bubble open. The neck slipped out, slowly, and finally the shoulders emerged. The mare paused, and Gentry took the front legs and waited for her to rest, always letting her lead: push and relax, push and relax.

Somethingroyal pushed, straining, and Gentry pulled on the legs, hard. It was a good-sized foal. Then he called Wood to his side, telling him to put on a pair of rubber gloves. Returning, Wood kneeled down next to Gentry and took one leg, Gentry the other.

“Take it easy now,” Gentry told him. “No hurry—and not too hard—take your time.” They pulled together for several moments. As the foal came out, and Gentry saw the size of the shoulders and the size of the bone, he feared the foal might hip lock—his hips were so wide—and have difficulty clearing the opening. When the rib cage cleared, Gentry guided the hips.

Moments later the foal was out and lying on the bed of straw, the mare was panting and sweating, and Gentry was asking South-worth for the cup of iodine. Southworth broke the umbilical by pulling the foal around to the mare’s head so she could lick him. Gentry cauterized the wound with iodine and gave the foal four milliliters of the combiotics—an antibiotic combination of streptomycin and penicillin—as a precautionary measure, and Southworth rubbed him down with a towel to dry him and circulate the blood.

Gentry looked at his watch. It was ten minutes after midnight, March 30, 1970, the moment the whole foal emerged. He was a chestnut, with three white feet—the right front and the two behind. The colt lay at his mother’s head when Gentry, looking at him, stepped back and shook his head and said to Wood, “There is a whopper.”

CHAPTER 2

The Virginia of Caroline County—acres of porous soil and roughly tree-mantled countryside—is not the Old South of cotton farms and magnolias under moonlight and willowy, straight-backed women drifting among the lawns and gardens of the Tidewater. This is not the Virginia where buses stop at overlooks on any of the approved tours, lying outside the limits of the Tidewater and far to the southeast of the Blue Ridge Mountains and the Shenandoah Valley, with its pungent orchards and its own haunting song.

Caroline County seems closer in spirit to Stephen Crane than Stephen Foster—a starker and less storybook Virginia than the mountains and the valleys, a place where old times are often just as well forgotten. It is tomato and melon country—watermelons and muskmelons—and it has fields for grazing horses and cattle and cultivated stretches for growing corn and soybeans, but it was not always so prosperous or so peaceful there.

The Meadow is part of a neck of land almost midway between Richmond and Washington. For four years, two armies crawled around it feeling for each other’s jugular. The fighting began just seventy miles to the north, at Bull Run, and it ended not far to the southwest, at Appomattox Court House. The Morris family, living on The Meadow at the time, hid the family silver in the well. Some of the largest set-piece battles of the war, with their cavalry sweeps and scouting parties, took place nearby. The land, and whatever civilization had been built on it, came out of the war years badly gored.

The war radically altered the course of the lives of the people who somehow survived it and left James Hollis Chenery the sole male support of three families, including the Morrises of The Meadow. The war had left the Morrises and other families nearly destitute, though it did not destroy them. Chenery ended up as a clerk in a dry goods store in Richmond.

The war also picked up Richard Johnson Hancock in the Deep South, marched him into Virginia, and then left him nearly dead outside a city in the Shenandoah Valley. Hancock was born in Alabama, the son of a farmer, but he was raised and ultimately orphaned in Louisiana, where he joined the Bossier Volunteers when the war broke out. Hancock’s unit was ordered to Virginia and eventually came under the command of Stonewall Jackson. Hancock was wounded three times in the next two years, the first time superficially at the Second Battle of Manassas on August 30, 1862.

The second wound gave him a limp, but it also remade him into a Virginian and in time led him to found what would become one of the largest and most important thoroughbred breeding establishments in the world. In July of 1863, Hancock was jumping a fence in an assault on Cemetery Ridge during the Battle of Gettysburg when a Union soldier turned on him and fired. The ball struck Hancock in the hip. He was dispatched to a Confederate hospital in Charlottesville. While convalescing, Hancock often attended Sunday services at the Christian Church, and one morning he met Thomasia Overton Harris. She was the daughter of John Harris, a prominent landowner on whose 1450-acre farm, called Ellerslie, about one hundred slaves bred and raised livestock and planted corn and tobacco.

The courtship that developed was interrupted when Hancock, recovered from the hip wound, rejoined the Bossier Volunteers. The fighting in the months that followed carried him to the mountains, to the Shenandoah Valley beyond the mountains, and finally to the city of Winchester in the valley. There, on September 19, 1864, a Union soldier shot him in the stomach as he and other members of the unit retreated south from the city. He was a prisoner of war and badly wounded, though he was not either very long. Hancock, with some help, contrived to escape, slipping away unseen and skirting Sheridan’s right flank at Cedar Creek, making his way to the Confederate lines and then on to Ellerslie. There, in November of 1864, he and Miss Harris were married. Richard Hancock had always liked thoroughbreds, and when he returned to the farm after the war, one of the things he wanted to do was raise them at Ellerslie.