Secretariat

By then his son Arthur was a student of breeding, too. “I grew up at Claiborne and when I was twelve, my father was paying me fifty cents a day to sweep out after the yearlings,” he once said. That was in the summer of 1922, the year before he left the public school system in Paris and went to Saint Mark’s Academy in Southborough, Massachusetts, a bastion of righteous Episcopalianism, where he subscribed to the Daily Racing Form, the industry’s trade newspaper and the horseplayer’s bible. He transferred to Woodberry Forest, a Virginia school, and there picked up his nickname, Bull, by which he would one day be known throughout all the major world marketplaces for the blooded horse. His central ambition was to be a thoroughbred breeder.

In the summers of his youth, when his jobs went beyond sweeping out after the yearlings, he worked with the broodmares, the stud horses, the yearlings, the farm veterinarian, alternating jobs summer after summer. He went to Princeton, played baseball and football, and earned letters. He was a six-foot-two raconteur with a reverberating baritone voice.

At Princeton he studied eugenics, French, and genetics. And when he graduated in 1933 he returned to Claiborne, as his father had returned to Ellerslie almost forty years before, to become his father’s assistant. He learned, as his father learned, from the grass up—about the care and feeding of the yearlings and the broodmares and the stud horses, starting from the beginning. He learned about the land, too, walking it so often that one day he would know every tree and plank on it.

“I never wanted to be anything but a horseman,” Bull once said. “I just never thought of anything else.”

CHAPTER 4

Claiborne Farm was no empire of prepotent young stallions and mares of promise when Bull Hancock returned to it in 1945, the year the air corps released him after his father suffered the first of several heart attacks.

Bull was thirty-five then and much had begun to wane since he became his father’s assistant. What he came back to was a farm with a twilight presence to it—old stallions and old mares and an aging, ailing owner who would not let go. Arthur Hancock, Sr., had been the leading breeder again in America, but there had been no infusion of fresh bloodstock. Breeding blooded horses is an enterprise that flourishes most vigorously with recurrent transfusions of young horses and mares of quality, with the culling of the failures and the replacement of the aging stock with younger animals. Stallions and mares—with some notorious exceptions—usually produce their finest offspring before they reach the age of fifteen.

In 1945, Blenheim II was already eighteen years old and beyond his prime, though he later sired several excellent runners. Sir Gallahad III, whose influence as a broodmare sire was growing, was a ripened twenty-five and only four years away from Valhalla. The younger stallions were not successful. In general, the 250 mares living on the farm, most of them owned by Claiborne’s clients, who boarded them there, were well bred but not exceptional producers. Hancock was unenthusiastic about the quality of Claiborne’s own mares. “We had gone twelve years without replacing stock,” he once recalled. “He [Arthur, Sr.] had sold everything. When I took over he had about seventy-five mares and I didn’t like any of them, except two. I started rebuilding. I made up my mind that my children wouldn’t have to go through what I did.” And by 1950, when he was refreshing the bloodstock with mares like Miss Disco, he already had two sons. The oldest was Arthur B. Hancock III. And the youngest, an infant at the time, was Seth.

The rebirth of the Hancock breeding dynasty actually began to take place six years earlier, launched by an event so inconspicuous that it stirred only the mildest notice of a day. It occurred when the Georgian Prince Dimitri Djordjadze and his wife Audrey, a Cincinnati heiress, decided to retire their little bay colt, Princequillo, and arranged to have him stand at stud in Virginia.

Almost two decades earlier, in 1928, two figures connected with the Belgian turf purchased a weanling—a colt by the stallion Rose Prince out of a mare named Indolence. The cost was 260 guineas. The weanling, shipped to Belgium, was named Prince Rose.

Prince Rose became the greatest racehorse in the Belgium of his day—probably the best that had ever run in that country—and one of its greatest sires. He had the bloodlines: Prince Rose’s sire, Rose Prince, was by Prince Palatine, a son of Persimmon, who was himself a son of one of the greatest sires in thoroughbred history, the undefeated St. Simon. As a direct male-line descendant of St. Simon, Prince Rose descended in what is called “tail male” from St. Simon, a potentially valuable genetic trait. The St. Simon male line produced an unusual number of superior horses.

As Prince Rose was establishing himself as Belgium’s leading sire, the American representative in France for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Laudy Lawrence, obtained the horse from Belgium on a three-year lease. Lawrence brought the horse to France in 1938 and installed him in his Haras de Cheffreville. In the spring of 1939, he bred Prince Rose to his mare Cosquilla, a daughter of Papyrus, winner of the Epsom Derby. She conceived. The breeding occurred in a turbulent time. War was coming to Europe. The German armies were menacing France. Pregnant, Cosquilla didn’t stay there long. She was dispatched across the English Channel, while in foal, to be bred in England the next spring.

In early 1940, as the Battle of Britain was about to begin, Cosquilla gave birth to her bay colt at the Banstead Stud at Newmarket, near Suffolk, about ninety miles outside of London. The air war over England began in July of 1940, and later that summer or fall—after the colt had been weaned—he was sent to Lawrence’s farm in Ireland. Then, in 1941, he and a number of yearlings were shipped across the North Atlantic, by then a lair of submarines, to New York. The colt disembarked as a refugee of sorts.

Named Princequillo, he was broken at the Mill River Farm in New York and put in training there. Prior to leaving the country again, Lawrence leased Princequillo to Chicago owner Anthony Pelleteri. One of the clauses of the lease permitted Pelleteri to run Princequillo in claiming races—in which the horse could be bought or “claimed” for a specific price—even though Pelleteri did not own him.

Pelleteri raced Princequillo for the first time under a $1500 claiming tag. No one took him.

He then ran the colt back for a $2500 claiming price, and again there were no takers.

Pelleteri then raced Princequillo for $2500 in his fourth start, winning with him then, and that was the last time Pelleteri had him. Trainer Horatio Luro, acting for the Boone Hall Stables of Princess Djordjadze, claimed him for the price. Luro ran him as a claimer, too. Aside from his pedigree, there was no apparent reason for anyone to believe that Princequillo would develop into the best longdistance runner in America in 1943. But he did, running best beyond a mile and an eighth.

In 1943, the spring classics were dominated by Count Fleet, an extremely fast horse who raced to easy victories in the Kentucky Derby, Preakness, and Belmont stakes and became the sixth horse in history to win the American Triple Crown. He won the Belmont Stakes by twenty-five lengths, the longest margin by which it had ever been won. Princequillo began his three-year-old year modestly. He won an allowance race in New Orleans, not a major racetrack compared with those in New York, then lost two others there, but he quickly became sharp. On June 12, seven days after Count Fleet rushed to his record-breaking clocking in the Belmont Stakes—clipping two-fifths of a second off War Admiral’s stakes record of 2:283/5 for the mile and a half—Princequillo ran the best race in his career. He defeated Bolingbroke, the great long distancer, beating him going a mile and five-eighths.

Princequillo then hooked the older Bolingbroke and Shut Out, winner of the 1942 Kentucky Derby, at a mile and a quarter in the Saratoga Handicap. Princequillo won it. The farther they ran, the better he liked it. He would leave the gate and simply roll on. A week after the Saratoga Handicap, he raced Bolingbroke over a mile and three-quarters, thus far the longest race of his career, and he won a head-bobbing stretch duel in record time. He closed out his year with a triumph in one of the longest races in America, the two-mile Jockey Club Gold Cup at Belmont Park.

Princequillo, by acclaim, was the best cup horse—that is, the best long-distance runner—in America, beating the most accomplished routers consistently. He won two more races in 1944, when he was a four-year-old, then pulled up lame at Saratoga. He won $96,550 and twelve of thirty-three races over three years.

Arthur B. Hancock, Sr., liked Princequillo’s racing record—his ability to stay a distance of ground—and he liked his pedigree. So he installed Princequillo at Ellerslie in 1945. There were no breeders leaping over one another to get their mares to Princequillo. He may have been the best long-distance runner in America, but he was not a fashionable stallion like Count Fleet or War Admiral. Princequillo was held in such uncertain esteem, in fact, that Hancock was unable to get enough mares to breed to him, the thirty-five or so mares needed to fill his book. But those who did decide to send him mares at Ellerslie made the difference. One was William Woodward. Another was Christopher T. Chenery.

CHAPTER 5

Princequillo was bred to Chenery’s Hildene in the spring of 1946, a year that ushered in a quick succession of landmark years in the fortunes of Hancock and Chenery and in the course of breeding thoroughbreds in America.

In 1946, the Hancocks sold Ellerslie, which had been losing money and declining as a stud farm for years, and consolidated all their thoroughbred holdings at Claiborne. Among the horses dispatched from Charlottesville to Paris was Princequillo. For him it was a long journey’s end. And Hildene, one of the last of the hundreds of mares bred at Ellerslie since the days of Richard Hancock’s Eolus, was returned to The Meadow in foal. The following year, in the spring of 1947, Hildene gave birth to a bay son of Princequillo. Chenery named him Hill Prince.

The racing fortunes of the Chenery horses were rising. More pivotally, 1947 was also the year that Chenery attended a dispersal sale of the estate of W. A. La Boyteaux at Saratoga and decided to join the bidding when the mare, Imperatrice, winner of the 1941 Test Stakes, was led into the sales ring. It was perhaps the most important decision of Chenery’s extraordinary career as a breeder.

Imperatrice was not much to look at, but she liked to hear her feet rattle. She was a big-barreled, short-legged, floppy-eared bay mare with a stirring gust of speed. Sprinting was her trump, but she had a depth of quality about her that almost carried her home in the 1941 Beldame Stakes, an important middle-distance race at Aqueduct. She finished a close second.

At her side in 1947 was a colt by the stallion Piping Rock, and the gallery at the sale was advised that she was in foal to him again. So Chenery, seeing a once-speedy race mare with a Piping Rock foal beside her and another advertised within, jumped into the bidding and moved it upward, finally upward to $30,000. The gavel slammed down, and they were his. Then down to The Meadow went Imperatrice. Later in the year Dr. William Caslick, a veterinarian, made his regular rounds of the Chenery broodmares to pronounce them either in or not in foal.

Chenery happened to be at The Meadow that day. Caslick moved from mare to mare, coming finally to the stall of Imperatrice. He walked inside and began the examination, inserting his hand in the mare’s rectum and reaching far inside, to where he could feel the outside of the uterine wall through the intestines. He was feeling for the fetus.

Moments passed. Caslick probed carefully for the signs of life. More time passed. Chenery, standing by Howard Gentry, wondered out loud what was taking so long.

“That mare’s empty,” Caslick finally said.

Chenery plopped down on a bale of straw: “Thirty thousand dollars, and empty!”

Imperatrice did not stay empty long.

In the autumn of the year, another kind of milestone was reached. Hundreds of men and women drove or walked the twelve miles from Lexington to Faraway Farm, filing through the gates until all of them, some horsemen and some not, gathered near the grave and listened as the mayor of Lexington gave a speech, and the head of the American Horse and Mule Association, Ira Drymon, delivered a eulogy. Bull Hancock was among the breeders there.

The mood was reverential. Man o’ War was lying in an oak coffin at the edge of an open grave. The top of the coffin was open. Man o’ War had died with an erection, and someone had discreetly placed a black cloth or blanket over it. He had suffered a series of heart attacks within a forty-eight-hour period, getting to his feet repeatedly until the last one put him down for good. He was thirty then, extremely old for a horse. The crowd listened as the eulogy ended, watched as the coffin was closed. They had paid the ultimate tribute to a racehorse—giving him a funeral fit for a prince of the blood, celebrating the cherished belief in Kentucky that Man o’ War was the greatest horse America had ever produced.

In the winter of 1948, trainer Jimmy Jones saddled Citation for the Ground Hog Course at Hialeah Racetrack in Florida, where many top three-year-olds would begin their campaigning for the Triple Crown. On May 1, he won the Kentucky Derby by three and a half, beating a stablemate, Coaltown. Two weeks later he won the Preakness Stakes at Pimlico by five and a half lengths. On June 12, at Belmont Park on Long Island, he raced to an eight-length victory in the Belmont Stakes. Thus Citation became the eighth Triple Crown winner in American turf history and earned a reputation as one of the greatest runners of all time.

In 1949, the winnings of the Chenery horses soared to $141,005, with Hill Prince winning the World’s Playground Stakes at Atlantic City, worth $11,275, and the Cowdin Stakes at Belmont Park under Eddie Arcaro. Hill Prince was voted the leading two-year-old in America. The value of Princequillo’s stud services started climbing. At Claiborne Farm, meanwhile, Bull Hancock was engineering the masterstroke in modern American breeding, the pièce de résistance.

Toward the end of 1949, sometime in the fall of the year, Dr. Eslie Asbury, a Cincinnati surgeon, received a telephone call from Hancock, his long-time friend and counselor on thoroughbred breeding. The call concerned Nasrullah, the Irish stallion that Hancock wanted to import to America. He had tried twice without success to purchase him. Foaled in 1940 at the Aga Khan’s Sheshoon Stud in Ireland, Nasrullah was a son of the unbeaten Nearco, the greatest racehorse of his day in Europe. Nasrullah was a stubborn if gifted animal, a rogue at the barrier, a rogue sometimes in the morning. If the spirit did not move him to gallop on the racetrack, which was often, an umbrella opened behind him usually did; that became one of the techniques used to make him run at Newmarket. He was a champion two-year-old in England, and Hancock believed the horse was unlucky when he finished third in the 1943 Epsom Derby. Bull Hancock liked him.

In fact, Hancock tried to buy him once in 1948 for £100,000 in partnership with Captain Harry F. Guggenheim, the copper baron, and banker Woodward, but the pound was devalued and the deal caved in with it.

And now a year later Hancock had tried again and finally succeeded in getting him. Nasrullah, at last, was coming to America.

“We have the horse,” Hancock said to Asbury. “Do you want in?”

Asbury did not hesitate. Nasrullah was not new to him. Years later he recalled that he and Hancock had often spoken of Nasrullah’s prospects as a sire, his racing record, his temperament, and the vigor he might infuse into American strains. Hancock had always wanted a stallion from the Nearco line, a powerful line only tokenly represented in America at the time. Nearco had been the leading sire in England in 1947 and 1948 and was on his way to being the leading sire again in 1949. Asbury recalled that he and Hancock had spoken specifically about the invigorating effect the Nasrullah blood might have on the blood of Sir Gallahad III and Bull Dog, the sons of Teddy. “We had felt Nasrullah was an out-cross for all the Teddy blood here,” said Asbury. “We had so much Teddy blood here, especially at Claiborne and in my own mares.”

Hancock told Asbury that the syndication was almost complete: the stallion had been acquired for $340,000 and the price was $10,000 per share. The syndicate included some of the most prominent names in American turf: Guggenheim and Woodward, H. C. Phipps, and George D. Widener, chairman of the Jockey Club, among others.

The announcement that appeared on page 572 of the December 10, 1949, issue of The Blood-Horse began ironically in the passive voice:

The purchase by a syndicate of American breeders of the nine-year-old stallion Nasrullah was announced this week by Arthur B. Hancock Jr. of Claiborne Stud, Paris. The son of Nearco-Mumtaz Begum by Blenheim II … was purchased from Joseph McGrath of the Brownstown Stud, County Kildare, Eire.

The resurgence of the Hancock dynasty was now at hand.

The following year, in 1950, Hill Prince finished second in the Kentucky Derby, a race Hancock and Chenery always wanted to win. The son of Princequillo romped to a five-length victory in the Preakness Stakes, worth $56,115 to Chenery, and to victories in the Withers Stakes and the Jerome Handicap. As Hill Prince was making a run for Horse of the Year honors on the East Coast, a five-year-old horse named Noor beat Citation fairly four times. For the showdown, Noor came east to meet Hill Prince in the two-mile Jockey Club Gold Cup. Hill Prince rolled to the lead and never lost it, easily winning the race his sire won in 1943. Noor, an Irish-bred horse, finished second. The significance of these events was only gradually dawning.

Hill Prince was named Horse of the Year in 1950.

Prince Simon, another son of Princequillo, was among the best three-year-olds in Europe. He was owned by William Woodward. And Noor was a son of Nasrullah, one of his first sons imported to America.

Nasrullah had arrived in America in July 1950, and he started his first days in stud there—his paddock was near that of Princequillo—in the early part of 1951.

That same year, with one champion son of Princequillo in his barn, Chenery sought another from him. But he didn’t return Hildene to him. Instead, in 1951, Chenery sent Imperatrice to Princequillo, and on January 9, 1952, she had a filly foal at The Meadow. She was a bay, and Mrs. Helen Bates Chenery—who named most of the horses—called her Somethingroyal.

CHAPTER 6

Jockey Eddie Arcaro was riding Bold Ruler toward the winner’s circle late that afternoon of 1956, moments after the colt had raced to a two-length victory in the Futurity at Belmont Park, when Mrs. Henry Carnegie Phipps stepped forward to meet them. Bold Ruler had just beaten the fastest two-year-old colts in America, running in near-record time, and he was dancing home, his nostrils flaring hotly, his neck bowed and lathered with sweat, moving powerfully toward his seventy-three-year-old owner. Turfwriter Charles Hatton watched her meet him.

“Mrs. Phipps was out at the gap to get him and lead him down that silly victory lane they had there. And she must have weighed all of ninety pounds, and here is this big young stud horse—and she walked right up to him and held out her hand, and he just settled right down and dropped his head so she could get ahold of the chin strap, and Bold Ruler just walked like an old cow along that lane and she wasn’t putting any pressure on him to quiet him down or make him be still. It was one of the most amazing sights I’ve ever seen. It was incredible to me because anyone else reaching for that horse—and he was hot!—you’d have had to snatch him or he’d throw you off your feet or step all over you. But not with her. For her he was just a real chivalrous prince of a colt. He came back to her and stopped all the monkeyshines, ducked down his head and held out his chin, and here was this little old lady with a big young stud horse on the other end and he was just as gentle as he could be.”

Even growing old, as her walnut face withdrew inside a frame of white hair, she had a mind as quick as a crack of lightning and always drove to the racetrack in the morning by herself, without a chauffeur, steering her Bentley south from Spring Hill, the marble palace on Long Island.

Mrs. Phipps must have seemed the picture of some innocent eccentric—the way she tipped back her head to see the road above the dash, the way she gripped the wheel with both hands, the way she climbed from the car with the poodles beside her and walked into the barn at Belmont Park. Her horses turned to watch her coming. She carried sugar, and she wore a plain dress, sometimes a stocking with a run in it and sometimes moccasins or gym shoes. The men at work in the stables stepped gingerly around her when she walked up the shed, some nodding deferentially and saying hello, and she returned the salutations but did not speak at length to them, only to Sunny Jim Fitzsimmons, her crippled trainer.

On summer mornings they would sit as if enthroned like ancients from another time. He was the sage, a former trolley car motorman from Sheepshead Bay in Brooklyn who became one of the finest horsemen of all time, the only man to train two winners of the Triple Crown, Gallant Fox and Omaha, and almost three and four in Johnstown and Nashua. She was the patron, fulfilling the aristocratic role, racing horses for the sport of it and never complaining, win or lose. She was the stable bookkeeper and knew how much each horse had won. She would ask how they were doing, how they were eating, and when and how they were working, and when and where they would race again. She was an independent little statue of a woman who went her own way, and she would walk up to the shed and stop to pet and feed her horses, complimenting those who had won, scolding softly those who had just lost: “You dope,” she would say, holding a cube of sugar. “I don’t know if I should give you one.” But she always did.

She was the grande dame of the American turf, and she hardly ever spoke in public. The news accounts in words attributed directly to her are sparse, and one newsman confided that he always left her alone when he saw her sitting in the box seat because he sensed a privacy inviolate.

She was born Gladys Mills on June 19, 1883, in Newport, Rhode Island, a twin daughter of Ruth Livingston and Ogden Mills, her name minted from a marriage between heirs of two of the largest family fortunes in America. The Livingstons were old American wealth and aristocracy, pre-Revolutionary real estate and later steamboats up the Hudson. The Millses were nineteenth-century nouveau riche. Darius Ogden Mills made millions in the California Gold Rush. His son Ogden became a financier, and a sportsman. He went into a racing partnership with Lord Derby of England, and together they operated a strong stable of racehorses on the Continent—so strong that in 1928, the year Mills died, it was the leading stable in France. The Mills-Derby racing venture continued to endure when Gladys Mills’s twin sister, the Right Honourable Beatrice, Countess of Granard, replaced her father and helped to carry the stable. By then Gladys Mills was an owner, too.

In 1907, when she was twenty-four years old, Gladys Mills married into one of the wealthiest and most powerful families in America, the steel family of her husband, Henry Carnegie Phipps. He was a son of Henry Phipps, who, with Andrew Carnegie, founded a steelworks so profitable that when J. Pierpont Morgan bought them out in 1901, Phipps’s share alone came to $50 million.

Gladys Mills and Henry Carnegie Phipps settled down in New York, in a home with a marble facade at Eighty-seventh Street and Fifth Avenue, and on the Long Island estate off Wheatley Road in Roslyn. Phipps was tall, distinguished, and played polo. Mrs. Phipps was small, with a flinty New England dignity about her, and a crack shot. In her later years she climbed into a swivel seat mounted on a swamp truck in Florida, and shot birds with a 12-gauge as she spun in circles. She bagged her limit in quail at the age of eighty-six.