Secretariat

Mrs. Phipps, in partnership with her brother Ogden L. Mills and his wife, bought horses for the first time in the mid-1920s and raced them under the nom de course of the Wheatley Stable. The stable flourished early, launched to a quick success after the leading American breeder of the 1920s, Harry Payne Whitney, a Long Island neighbor of the Phippses, offered her a choice of ten of his yearlings in 1926, reportedly to satisfy a gambling debt incurred during a high-rolling card game with Henry Carnegie Phipps. Whether out of luck or shrewdness—probably part of both—Mrs. Phipps and trainer Sunny Jim Fitzsimmons chose five yearlings that went on to win stakes for her and more than once whipped Whitney’s horses. Incredibly, the other five were multiple winners, too, though not of stakes. The best of the ten were Diabolo, a long-distance runner who won the 1929 Jockey Club Gold Cup at two miles, and the unbeaten but ill-fated two-year-old Dice (who died of colic as a youngster), as well as Nixie, Distraction, and Swizzlestick.

Her passion was for horses purely as runners. “I just like to see them perform as thoroughbreds,” she once said, in one of her rare public remarks. Her interest in horses involved her as a breeder soon enough. In 1929, the same year Diabolo won the Jockey Club Gold Cup, she purchased a broodmare, Virginia L., in partnership with Marshall Field, who had just helped finance the importation of Sir Gallahad III. Mrs. Phipps never bought a farm of her own for the breeding and raising of thoroughbreds. But she did meet Arthur B. Hancock, Sr., early in her career as an owner, and when she finally did decide to breed as well as race her horses, she became a client of Hancock at Claiborne Farm. Through the next forty years, most of her homebreds were foaled and raised in Paris, Kentucky. It was she who decided which of her mares would be bred to which stallion; she became a student of the pedigrees of all her horses, and though she took advice, she made her own decisions.

In her first twenty-five years as a breeder, by far the fastest thoroughbred she bred was Seabiscuit, the bay horse who bumped off War Admiral in the famous Pimlico match race on November 1, 1938, though “The Biscuit” did not carry the Wheatley gold and purple silks for her then. He had raced eighteen times as a two-year-old before he won his first start for her, thirty-five times in all that year with only five wins. He was just a sluggish selling plater when Mrs. Phipps, becoming impatient and discouraged with him, sold him for $8000 to Charles S. Howard. It was one of the rare mistakes she made in the business. Seabiscuit retired in 1940 with earnings of $437,430, a world record at the time.

The Wheatley-breds won more than $100,000 for the first time in 1935, winning 106 races and $113,834. Never again did they earn less than $100,000 annually. Among the best horses Mrs. Phipps bred were Seabiscuit, High Voltage, and Misty Morn, a daughter of Princequillo who won $212,575. Yet nothing she ever did compared in import to the purchase she made early in the 1950s, when she prevailed upon Hancock to sell her Miss Disco, upon whom the Phippses founded a dynasty.

Miss Disco came to Gladys Phipps at the end of a curious, sometimes unlikely series of events that began unfolding late in 1933, the year Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt turned twenty-one. Vanderbilt had just begun to involve himself as an owner and breeder of racehorses, as a man of name, means, and ambition in the thoroughbred industry. He grew up, fatherless, with family fortunes on both sides of his pedigree.

He was the son of Alfred G. Vanderbilt, Sr., a wealthy sportsman who perished with 1152 others when a German U-boat sank the Lusitania off the Irish coast, and the former Margaret Emerson, the daughter of Isaac Emerson, a Baltimore chemist of modest means until he invented Bromo-Seltzer. Emerson acquired Sagamore Farm, an 848-acre stretch of rolling landscape in the Worthington Valley, and his daughter went into racing. Young Alfred acquired his mother’s passion for the sport, dropping out of Yale at the end of his sophomore year to raise and race the running horse.

In the photos taken of him in the early 1930s, he looks strikingly like the James Stewart of Destry Rides Again, and what adds to that impression is the whimsy of his humor. One year, prior to the running of a race in which his horse appeared to have no chance, Vanderbilt gave jockey Ted Atkinson a sandwich, a wristwatch, and a flashlight, advising him, “It may be dark before you get back.” He never took himself too seriously, not even as a breeder.

When Vanderbilt turned twenty-one on September 22, 1933, he was given $2 million in government bonds, the first of four such installments his father had left him. His mother gave him Sagamore Farm, which Isaac Emerson had given to her. With that, Vanderbilt had money and land, the means to buy and breed and raise and race horses of his own.

In August of 1933, he hopped into his sporty new LaSalle roadster, fire-engine red, and tooled north toward Saratoga. Beside him in the car was a set of his new racing silks, a modified version of his mother’s silks of cerise and white blocks. On the advice of trainer Bud Stotler, he was heading north with a check for $25,000 to buy a big, raw-boned chestnut colt named Discovery. Vanderbilt intended to buy him and race him in the Hopeful Stakes. Discovery had been bred by Walter Salmon’s Mereworth Farm, and he was a son of a fast if fiery rogue of a horse named Display. Display was a son of Fair Play, who also sired Man o’ War, and there was nothing docile about “Big Red.” But when bred to Ariadne, Display transmitted nothing of his unruliness to their offspring, Discovery, a colt of estimable poise and calm at the post. He launched his racing career in a blaze of indifference, but by the time of the Hopeful Stakes at Saratoga, he had matured considerably.

The sale was delayed until after the Hopeful Stakes, so Vanderbilt didn’t get to run Discovery in the race. After the horse finished a sharp third in the event—behind High Quest—his price jumped from $25,000 to $40,000, the equivalent of $400,000 today. Vanderbilt left Saratoga without the horse, but he had been impressed by Discovery and continued following the colt’s career. He bought the horse when he had the first chance.

Discovery won eight of his sixteen starts as a three-year-old, including the Brooklyn Handicap against older horses. But even that hardly suggested what was coming when he matured to a four-year-old horse, 16.1 hands high and 1200 pounds, about 200 pounds heavier than the average horse. (A horse is measured from the ground to his withers, the highest part of his back, in a unit of measure called “hands”—a hand is 4 inches, so Discovery at 16.1 hands stood 65 inches from the ground to the withers.)

Though Discovery lost his first five starts as a four-year-old, he came alive when he broke from the barrier in the Brooklyn Handicap in June and carried 123 pounds for a new world’s record for a mile and an eighth, 1:481/5, the second year he won the race. And for the next six weeks, until August 10, Discovery rolled across the east and midwest in a boxcar on what remains among the greatest six-week grinds in racing history. As a horse running mostly in handicaps, Discovery had to carry whatever weights the track handicappers decided to load on him. The aim of handicapping horses with weights (inserting lead slabs in the jockey’s saddle) is simply to weigh down the horses—with the superior horses carrying more than their inferiors—so that all finish at the same time, in a dead heat. That is the theory, anyway. Discovery, a sensible horse, never paid any attention to that theory.

After the Brooklyn, he won the Detroit Challenge Cup carrying 126 pounds and then the Stars and Stripes Handicap in Chicago, spotting his rivals’ weight and winning by six. He kept winning with high weights everywhere.

Known as the “Iron Horse” and the “Big Train,” Discovery retired after the 1936 season with a lifetime record of sixty-three starts—twenty-seven wins, ten seconds, and ten thirds—and with a reputation as one of the greatest weight carriers that ever lived, a touchstone by which other handicappers would be measured. Vanderbilt sent him to Sagamore for stud duty beginning in 1937.

“There is no other horse in the entire range of turf history, American or foreign, that ever attempted to do anything so tremendous or came anywhere near Discovery to doing it so successfully,” wrote turf historian John Hervey.

Vanderbilt, for his part, did not confine his activities to racing during his first years as an owner. He was buying mares at auction to build up breeding operations. The most crucial purchase he ever made at a sale occurred at the dispersal sale of W. Robertson Coe in 1935, when a mare named Sweep Out was led into the sales ring. The mare was in foal to Pompey, a fast and game horse who won the Futurity Stakes at Belmont Park in 1925.

Vanderbilt bought her for $2000, and the following year she had a filly foal by Pompey that Vanderbilt named Outdone. In 1943, he bred Outdone to Discovery for the third time. She produced a good-looking filly foal in 1944. In fact, they were a grand bunch of foals at Sagamore that year, but Vanderbilt was not there to tend or race them. He had joined the navy in 1942 and was in command of a PT boat in the Pacific. While there, he instructed his farm manager and trainer to “go to the field and pick out twelve yearlings you like best, before they’re broken, and sell the rest.” Of the yearlings kept, none went on to any distinction either at the racetrack or in the stud. But of the twelve they sold, six eventually won major stakes races. One was Conniver, a daughter of Discovery, who was voted the leading handicap mare of the year in America in 1948. Another was the bay filly by Discovery from Outdone.

Sidney Schupper, not a major owner, bought the filly for $2000 and named her Miss Disco. Schupper raced her from 1946, when she was a two-year-old, until 1950, when she was six. She was a strikingly handsome, racy-looking mare with a beautiful head—a prominent forehead and the face penciled like that of an Arabian. She carried herself elegantly and liked to get her work done in a hurry. She won ten of fifty-four races and $80,250 for Schupper. Nor did she shy away from tangling with the boys. Miss Disco won the Interboro Handicap as a four-year-old, whipping colts over three-quarters of a mile, a sprint. She also won the New Rochelle Handicap. As a three-year-old, Miss Disco won the Test Stakes at Saratoga, a race in which a number of good fillies have run, if not won, over the years.

Miss Disco had speed, and she would transmit it to her many foals, one by one, especially the seal brown bay colt she foaled in 1954. Schupper did not own her then, not when she served in the stud.

At the close of Miss Disco’s racing career, Bull Hancock saw the potential in her as a broodmare, so he bought her from Schupper for himself, privately, for an undisclosed price. Bull had the Vanderbiltbred mare shipped to Claiborne Farm to join the bands of other mares. That was in 1950, when a rebirth at Claiborne Farm was in the making, and when Gladys Phipps prevailed upon Bull to sell the mare and he gave in, since she was an old client and wanted to own Miss Disco so badly.

Owned by Mrs. Phipps, the bay daughter of Discovery was bred to Nasrullah in 1951, and the following year she foaled a bay colt that Mrs. Phipps called Independence, a horse who would become one of the nation’s finest steeplechasers. Miss Disco was returned to Nasrullah in 1953, and in the spring of 1954 the whirlwind came, the horse for which all breeders tap their feet and wait.

The evening of April 6, 1954, at Claiborne Farm was perhaps the most remarkable of any in the long history of the American turf, certainly in the annals of Claiborne.

In the foaling barn set back off the road that winds through the farm, two foals were born that night thirty minutes apart. One was a bay son of Princequillo out of a mare called Knight’s Daughter. His name was Round Table, and by the time he retired as a racehorse at the end of 1959, running for Oklahoma oilman Travis Kerr, he had won forty-three of sixty-six races, been named America’s Horse of the Year in 1958, become regarded as the greatest grass runner in American history, and won more money than any horse in the history of the sport, $1,749,869.

Down the row of stalls Miss Disco gave birth to her son of Nasrullah who, by the time he retired in 1958, had been voted America’s Horse of the Year in 1957, won twenty-three races and $764,204, and earned a reputation as a magnificent cripple—one of the fleetest runners the American turf had ever known, and one of the gamest and most generous of horses. He was Bold Ruler.

Bold Ruler had a hernia as a foal, and he was so common looking that Hancock sequestered him in a distant paddock so that visitors to Claiborne Farm wouldn’t see him.

“He was a very skinny foal,” Hancock would recall. “We had the devil’s own time trying to get him to look good, and I was never really pleased with his condition the whole time I had him. But he had a good disposition in many ways and he never missed an oat.”

Bold Ruler suffered a painful accident as a yearling, almost cutting off his tongue in his stall one night, and the experience made him forever sensitive about his mouth. Nor was that all. One morning, while being broken under saddle, he fell and got tangled under a watering trough, almost breaking a leg while struggling to his feet. Somehow he survived all this, and made it to Hialeah Race Course in the winter of 1956. One of the first things he did was to begin ripping off quarter-mile sprints in 0:22 during morning workouts. Few quarter miles are run that fast in actual races.

So Fitzsimmons had no trouble cranking up his speedball for his first start at Jamaica on April 9. He won it by three and a half lengths. “Easy score,” reads the official past performance charts.

With that began the racing career of the fastest of all Nasrullah’s sons or daughters, a tall and leggy runner with a seal brown coat, phenomenal powers of acceleration, and a fiercely combative instinct that held him together when the oxygen was running low. Nothing ever seemed ready-made for him, nothing as easy as it might have been. There was always a measure of adversity to overcome, some trouble plaguing him. He raced three years, and at one time or another he was hounded by arthritis, by torn back muscles, and by what was called a “nerve condition” in his shoulder. A minor cardiac condition came and went during his three-year-old year. He developed splints—bony and sometimes painful growths on his legs—and later osselets, an arthritic condition in the ankle joint. He once wrenched an ankle. And throughout the last year he raced, when he won five of seven races and $209,994, he ran with an undetected two-and-a-half-inch bone sliver sticking into a leg tendon like a splinter. Bold Ruler carried 134 pounds in the mile-and-a-quarter Suburban Handicap of July 4, 1958—one of the epic duels of the turf—spotting the talented Clem 25 pounds. Bold Ruler did not take the lead early in the race, but then bounded past Clem after a half mile. Clem stalked him from there as they raced for the far turn. Banking for home, Bold Ruler was two on top. The crowd grew deafening as Clem moved up on Bold Ruler down the lane, charging on the outside and actually getting the lead at one point in the stretch. Most horses, losing such a lead, would have hung or quit. But jockey Eddie Arcaro dug in and Bold Ruler battled back, getting up just in time to win it by a nose.

He was almost rheumatic in the way he walked from his stall in the morning, but he was capable of tremendous speed, of dazzling bursts. In 1957, his three-year-old year, after spending the winter at Hialeah and Gulfstream Park trading blows with Calumet Farm’s Gen. Duke—perhaps the fastest horse Calumet ever produced, though he died before he could prove it—Bold Ruler came north to New York for the Wood Memorial on April 20 at Jamaica. The close of the race was an eyepopper, something like the Suburban a year later, with Bold Ruler and Gallant Man in a desperate stretch fight. Bold Ruler actually lost the lead with about 200 yards to go, but he came back at Gallant Man to win it by the snip of a nose.

He might have won the Kentucky Derby May 4, his next start, but Fitzsimmons and Arcaro decided that the colt should be restrained off the pacesetting Federal Hill, a horse with sharp early speed. They feared Federal Hill would drag Bold Ruler through a dizzying early pace and set it up for a stretch-running Gallant Man. Whether as a son of the temperamental Nasrullah or as a youngster whose tongue had almost been severed as a yearling, Bold Ruler clearly resented the tactic, fighting Arcaro’s exertions to restrain him. Iron Liege, Calumet’s second-string colt substituting for the injured Gen. Duke, won by a whisker over Gallant Man in one of the Derby’s most exciting renewals, with Bill Shoemaker standing up prematurely on Gallant Man, misjudging the finish and probably costing him the race.

Arcaro did not restrain Bold Ruler in the Preakness Stakes. He let him roll, and the son of Nasrullah and Miss Disco raced unchallenged through the mile and three-sixteenths, beating Iron Liege by two lengths.

Bold Ruler’s stamina—his ability to run a distance beyond a mile and a quarter—would always be suspect. The origins of this suspicion stemmed in large part from his performance in the mileand-a-half Belmont Stakes of 1957. Gallant Man’s fainthearted stablemate, Bold Nero, dragged Bold Ruler through a set of rapid early fractions, softening him up for Gallant Man’s finishing kick. Gallant Man blew past Bold Ruler at the turn for home and raced to an eight-length victory in a record-breaking 2:263/5 Bold Ruler, exhausted at the end, wound up third.

Bold Ruler came back later that year, gaining in stature as he went on. Like his maternal grandsire, Discovery, he began to show his gifts for lugging high weights at high speeds.

He won the Jerome Handicap by six with 130 pounds.

He won the Vosburgh by nine lengths under 130 pounds in the mud, shattering the track record that had been held by Roseben, the sprinting specialist, for fifty years. He raced the seven-eighths of a mile in a sizzling 1:213/5, three-fifths of a second faster than the old mark.

He won the Queens County Handicap under 133 pounds, spotting the second horse 22 pounds.

Under 136 pounds, an enormous burden for a three-year-old, he won the Ben Franklin Handicap by twelve. “Breezing all the way,” said the charts of that race.

The ending of the year was almost poetic. In the $75,000-Added Trenton Handicap at a mile and a quarter, Bold Ruler faced his two archrivals for Horse of the Year honors—Gallant Man and Round Table. The gate sprang, and Arcaro let Bold Ruler bounce, sitting as the colt opened up an eight-length lead at the end of the first three-quarters of a mile. He simply coasted for the final half mile, beating Gallant Man by two and a half. Round Table was third.

That made Bold Ruler Horse of the Year.

In 1958, as a four-year-old, even with that splinter in the tendon, he won the Toboggan Handicap under 133 pounds, spotting Clem 16 pounds, and grabbed the lead in the stretch of the Carter Handicap at seven-eighths of a mile, and won that by a length and a half under a crushing 135 pounds. He failed to spot Gallant Man 5 pounds in the Metropolitan Mile on June 14, losing by two lengths. But he won the Stymie Handicap by five lengths under 133 pounds, and that led to the nose-bobbing struggle with Clem in the Suburban, and finally to a last victory, under 134 pounds, in the mile-and-a-quarter Monmouth Handicap. He wrenched an ankle in the Brooklyn, finishing seventh with 136 pounds on his back; and then Fitzsimmons took x-rays at Saratoga, discovering the splint on the back of a cannon bone. And that ended it for Bold Ruler.

All through his campaigns on the racetrack, from his two-year-old year onward, he endeared himself to the frail old widow, Mrs. Phipps. He was always the first horse she went to in the mornings at the barn, the first horse she asked about, the horse she dwelled with the longest, the one she favored most with her time and sugar cubes. Groom Andy DeSernio used to braid a Saint Christopher’s medal into Bold Ruler’s foretop, the lock of hair between his ears, before each race. Mrs. Phipps was not a Catholic, but for Bold Ruler she overlooked nothing.

She never lost her fondness for Bold Ruler, certainly not in the dozen years since that day they sent him off to Claiborne Farm from Saratoga. Bold Ruler was led to the van waiting at the stable area. The colt hesitated a moment, balking at the sight of the van, but Sunny Jim poked him in the rump with a cane and he walked on dutifully. Inside the van, the lead shank was handed to Claiborne Farm groom Ed (Snow) Fields, and Fitzsimmons said, in parting, “Come on, Andy, we’ve done our job. It’s their horse now.” Moments later Bold Ruler was rolling southwest toward the Blue Grass.

He seemed destined for some measure of success from the outset. There was so much in his favor. Bold Ruler would begin with the choicest mares. Hancock, as well as Mrs. Phipps and her son, Ogden, and other clients at Claiborne had assembled bands of champion race and broodmares over the years—the foundations of all great studs—and to Bold Ruler many of them would be sent.

He had the pedigree himself, on both the male and the female sides, representing a popular foreign and domestic mixture of bloodlines in his ancestry: the son of a thoroughly European stallion and a completely American mare. Genetically, he was what is known as a “complete outcross,” with no name appearing more than once in the first four generations of his family tree.

Since siring Bold Ruler in 1952, Nasrullah himself had become a champion stallion in America, representing the flourishing Nearco male line, and his dam, Mumtaz Begum, was among the most prized of mares in the Aga Khan’s magnificent stud. She herself was a daughter of Blenheim II, the stallion later imported to stand at Claiborne Farm, and Europe’s “flying filly” Mumtaz Mahal. By the time Bold Ruler was sent to Claiborne, Nasrullah had already led all American sires in 1955, when his performers won 69 races and $1,433,660, and in 1956, when they won 106 races and $1,462,413. Bold Ruler was only one of several champion runners by Nasrullah: he also sired the 1955 Horse of the Year, William Woodward’s Nashua, who retired in 1956 with earnings of $1,288,565, a world record until Round Table broke it three years later. Nasrullah had also sired the 1956 two-year-old filly champion, Charlton Clay’s Leallah; the 1957 two-year-old colt champion, Nadir, eventual winner of $434,316; and Captain Harry F. Guggenheim’s Bald Eagle, America’s champion handicap horse of 1960 and the winner of $676,442.

Miss Disco, among the fastest fillies of her generation, was no doubt a source of some of Bold Ruler’s quickness, and as a daughter of one of the greatest weight carriers of all time, she gave bone and bottom to the underside of Bold Ruler’s pedigree. He had everything a sire should have.

Bold Ruler also had the brilliant speed of the Nearco tribe—speed is an important characteristic for a stud horse to have—and he had it in greater abundance than any other of Nasrullah’s sons and daughters. Moreover, he carried that speed the classic distance of a mile and a quarter, and he did it carrying high weights against horses who were just as serious about their business as he—Clem, Gallant Man, Sharpsburg, and Round Table.

Yet no one, not even a breeder as experienced and astute as Bull Hancock, could have foreseen the extent to which Bold Ruler would dominate the American sire championships. He became a phenomenon at the stud, and some believe the greatest sire in the history of American bloodstock.

For seven successive years Bold Ruler was the leading American stallion. Only Lexington, a stallion from a different era, was America’s leading sire more often, for sixteen years between 1861 and 1878. But the two horses are hardly comparable. The “Blind Hero of Woodburn,” as Lexington was known, competed with only 215 sires of runners in the last year he was the champion, 1878. In 1969, Bold Ruler was competing with 5829 sires of runners. Only three other stallions—Star Shoot, Bull Lea, and Bold Ruler’s own sire, Nasrullah—led the list as many as five times.