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"Native
Dancer: The Gray Ghost"
- chapter one -
( by John Eisenberg )
He was a sprinkle
of light on a dark canvas, the only grey horse in a dizzy tumble
of bays, blacks, and chestnuts coming down the stretch. The
40,000 fans crowded into Belmont Park on September 27, 1952,
could easily pick him out and see he was in trouble, trapped
between and behind other horses with the finish line fast
approaching. Only days earlier, a columnist for the New York
Morning Telegraph, a newspaper that focused on horse racing, had
wondered in print, "Is Native Dancer Invincible?" With
two furlongs left in the Futurity Stakes, one of American
racing's most important events for two-year-olds, the horse's
aura of invincibility was being challenged as never before.
He had reached
the finish line well ahead of his rivals in his prior seven
races at New York tracks in 1952, his renown building with every
success. The sportswriters at New York's seven daily newspapers
had hailed him from the beginning as a young horse to watch, and
he had yet to disappoint. Muscular and riveting, with a
gargantuan stride and an unyielding will, he had ambled along in
the middle of the pack in every race, constrained by his jockey,
Eric Guerin, until he was told it was time to sprint to the
finish line; then, in a transformation as stunning as it was
consistent, he lowered his head, lengthened his stride,
accelerated past his rivals, and left them behind, usually in
just a few moments. He had won such races as the Youthful
Stakes, Saratoga Special, and Hopeful Stakes, and now New York's
hard-boiled racetrack crowd had turned out to see if he could
win a race that often determined the best two-year-old in
America.
It was a typical
racing crowd, composed mostly of men dressed in coats and hats,
with a smattering of women and no children. Belmont's
grandstand, opened in 1905, seated just 17,500, so every inch of
the aisles, aprons, and terraces was filled. The crowd was
sweaty and testy, knowing and charged-up. Racing was at a
spectacular zenith of popularity across the country, with
stables such as Calumet Farm and jockeys such as Eddie Arcaro as
familiar to sports fans as baseball star Mickey Mantle and
heavyweight champion Rocky Marciano, and major tracks routinely
attracting 50,000 fans for important races. The hordes had come
to Belmont for one reason on this sunlit September Saturday: to
bet on Native Dancer in the Futurity, a mad dash of six and a
half furlongs down the Widener Straight Course, a straightaway
chute cutting diagonally across Belmont's main track.
The air had been
electric in the saddling paddock before the race. Hundreds of
fans surrounded the Dancer and shouted encouragement to the
familiar trinity of men responsible for the horse: Alfred Gwynne
Vanderbilt, the handsome millionaire who had bred the Dancer and
now campaigned him; Bill Winfrey, the youthful trainer who had
yet to make a false move with the horse; and Eric Guerin, the
twenty-eight-year-old Cajun jockey who rode all of Vanderbilt's
top horses under a contract arrangement. Long lines at the
betting windows snaked through the crowd as the Dancer's odds
dropped in the tense minutes before the race. He was 7-20 by
post time, his allure so powerful that the Big Apple wise guys
accustomed to angling for the slightest edge had just shrugged
and given in to getting thirty-five cents on the dollar.
The other nine
horses in the field were supposedly some of the nation's best
two-year-olds, but they had received scant attention from the
fans. They were just the supporting cast in this star vehicle.
The second choice, Tiger Skin, owned by Jock Whitney's Greentree
Stable, had provided a modest challenge to the Dancer in the
Hopeful weeks earlier at Saratoga before fading in the stretch.
A colt named Tahitian King had already lost three times to the
Dancer but was being ridden now by Arcaro, the king of America's
jockeys. Little Request was a California speedster expected to
set a fast early pace. Dark Star was the best of Harry
Guggenheim's Cain Hoy Stable. None were given much of a chance
of beating the Dancer.
Winfrey offered
Guerin a leg up with the advice he always gave: "Just ride
him with confidence." Wearing a white cap and Vanderbilt's
silks of cerise and white diamonds with cerise and white
sleeves, the jockey jogged the horse down the chute along with
the rest of the field. One by one, the horses were loaded into
the starting gate as early evening enveloped the track and a
slanting sun cast lengthening shadows. After a brief pause, the
gate doors opened and the horses came charging out. A roar went
up from the crowd. Was there a better sports moment than a fast
horse's reach for greatness?
Seen from the
grandstand, horses on the Widener course started as tiny, vague
shapes in the distance and grew larger and clearer to the fans
only as they neared the finish line in front of the grandstand.
The crowd relied on track announcer Fred Caposella's distinctive
nasal call, listening for any mention of the Dancer. Guerin
settled the horse five lengths behind Little Request as the
Californian set the anticipated fast pace, covering the first
half mile in 46 2/5 seconds.
Races on the
Widener course were often won by top jockeys, their skills
especially valuable on the seldom-used track. Any jockey could
tell when he had covered a half mile or was turning for home on
the main oval, but those markers were harder to judge on a
straightaway. Jockeys with less ability or poorer instincts
often moved at the wrong time, and in a short race for young
horses, that was usually fatal. "Jockeyship often took
effect on the chute," recalled Hall of Fame trainer Allen
Jerkens, who began his career in New York in 1950. "You had
to be pretty darn good to win the Futurity."
Guerin had won it
on Blue Peter in 1948, and after navigating an easy half mile on
the Dancer, he inched the horse out of the pack and toward the
front. It was time to make the winning move the crowd had
expected. But just as the Dancer's ears went back, Arcaro, a
jockey so adept at measuring pace and timing moves he was
nicknamed the Master, struck boldly. He drove Tahitian King, a
10-1 shot, through a hole on the far rail, past Little Request
and into the lead. The crowd screamed with surprise as
Caposella's pitch rose and Little Request, suddenly fading,
blocked the Dancer's path and stalled the favorite in the pack.
The big grey had never experienced anything like this.
If any jockey
could take a lesser horse and steal the Futurity, it was Arcaro.
At age thirty-six, he was still in the prime of a career that
had included five Kentucky Derby victories and dozens of other
triumphs in major races such as the Futurity, which he had won
three times. He was at his best in the big events, and his move
on Tahitian King was a classic. Knowing he wasn't on a horse
that could beat the Dancer in a stretch duel, he had
preemptively grabbed the lead, hoping the favorite might get
blocked long enough to cause problems. The plan had worked, and
Arcaro, sensing a possible upset, asked Tahitian King for a
finishing kick.
That the Dancer
was behind so late in a race wasn't unusual. He had trailed in
all of his races until making a late move, then often,
curiously, loafed to the finish line once he had established his
superiority, almost as if he wanted the others to catch him.
After months of observation, Winfrey had deduced that the horse
preferred the company of others when he raced; running alone and
in front bored him, it seemed. Winfrey had thus conditioned him
to race behind the front-runners, in traffic, until it almost
seemed too late, accelerating just in time to win at the end,
leaving little time for loafing.
But if it was
normal that he was behind Tahitian King with a quarter mile left
in the Futurity, it wasn't normal that horses were in front of
him and on either side, leaving him without a running lane.
Guerin knew he had to react quickly. A successful rider on the
New York circuit, known for his cool head and steady hand, he
recognized that the race was on the verge of getting away. He
hesitated, hoping the pack around him would begin to break up,
and knowing he was in trouble if it didn't. Magically, it did:
Little Request dropped toward the rear, fading fast, and a
sliver of daylight opened to Guerin's right. He steered the
Dancer into the opening, loosened his grip on the reins, and
shouted at the horse. Back went the Dancer's ears and out went
his stride, his reach so extended that, it was said later, you
could see the bottoms of his hooves at midstride.
In the career of
every top athlete, equine or otherwise, there is a moment when
it becomes clear this is no ordinary competitor. For Native
Dancer, that moment came in the final two hundred yards of the
Futurity. Once he had found running room and accelerated, he
drew even with Tahitian King so quickly that Arcaro had no
chance to react. It almost resembled a deft magician's trick: he
was pursuing Tahitian King one second, eyeball-to-eyeball the
next. Cheers soared into the air, and just as quickly, the
Dancer wrested away the lead and took aim at the finish. He had
gone from fourth to first in five remarkable steps without
Guerin even drawing his stick.
A combination of
factors would send the horse's popularity soaring in the coming
months: his prodigious talent; his come-from-behind style, which
exhausted his fans but left them wanting to see more; the timing
of his arrival, at the dawn of the TV age; and the sheer
humanness he exuded with his limpid eyes and charisma. But of
all the factors, none were more important than, simply, his
color. His grey coat stood apart in any equine crowd,
discernible not only to fans at the track but also to those
watching on TV.
A fast grey was a
phenomenon. Only one of every one hundred thoroughbreds was grey
in 1953, and through the years, other than a stallion named
Mahmoud that C. V. Whitney had imported from England and a colt
named First Fiddle that had won some races during World War II,
greys had not distinguished themselves in American racing. Many
horsemen had long considered them unlucky, lacking stamina, or
even diseased, as the legendary Italian breeder Federico Tesio
had written. "It wasn't prejudice so much as a sense of
caution and reservation," longtime Daily Racing Form
columnist Joe Hirsch recalled years later. "Greys just were
different. It was a sense of racism, I suppose."
Greys would have
disappeared entirely from racetracks around the world in the
late 1800s if not for a French stallion named Le Sancy, the
single horse from which all modern grey pedigrees are traced. Le
Sancy's son, Le Samaritain, won the French St. Léger, a major
race, and sired a colt named Roi Herode. After a respectable
racing career, Roi Herode retired in Ireland and sired a
brilliant colt named The Tetrarch, a light grey with white
patches dotting his coat. Nicknamed the Spotted Wonder, he won
all seven of his races as a two-year-old in England in 1913,
then was injured and retired to stud, where he sired a speedy
filly named Mumtaz Mahal and many other winners.
The Tetrarch
restored enough faith in greys to keep the line alive in England
and America, yet many owners, breeders, and horsemen still
avoided them, and racing secretaries were still writing
"grey only" races into their condition books as late
as the 1940s, believing the curios would draw women to the
track. Even in the early 1950s, many horsemen still saw them as
sissified novelties and claimed, only half jokingly, that if you
came across a grey or a horse with three or four white legs, you
might as well cut off its head and feed it to the crows.
There was no
substance to the notion that greys were genetically inferior, of
course. Coloring had no effect on a horse's ability to race. The
grey tint in the Dancer and others was attributable to a lack of
pigmentation in some hairs, leaving the coat a blend of dark and
light hairs that appeared grey from a distance. Many greys were
born dark and died white, and spent much of their lives in a
state of transformation from one extreme to the other. The
Dancer, colored chocolate brown at birth, was now a rich dark
grey with patterns of light rings just visible in his coat. His
sire, Polynesian, was a bay, but the genes of his dam, Geisha,
had dominated his coloring. Geisha was a grey
great-great-granddaughter of Roi Herode and a daughter and
granddaughter of greys. Now her son was a grey, becoming more
famous every day.
Those who still
doubted him because of his color had no argument left after his
move to the front in the Futurity. Many in the crowd had thought
he was beaten, but he had broken free from the pack with a
breathtaking burst, and now, with seventy-five yards to go,
embarked on the triumphant sprint many had envisioned. He drove
forward in a grinding gear, for once not easing up with the lead
as his slanting shadow bobbed farther ahead of the others. His
rivals were left behind, their inferiority underlined. The
Dancer was two and a quarter lengths ahead of Tahitian King at
the finish line, and nine lengths ahead of every other horse
except the distant third-place finisher, Dark Star.
There was a
cheer, and then another, even louder, when the winning time was
posted. The Dancer had run the race in 1:14 2/5, as fast as any
horse anywhere had ever covered six and a half furlongs on a
straightaway course. He had tied a world record! A two-year-old
named Porter's Mite had set the record on the Widener course
fifteen years earlier, carrying three fewer pounds than the
Dancer. "I'm sure he would have broken the record if we
hadn't been fighting a head-wind the whole way," Guerin
told reporters. The jockey had won a Kentucky Derby and stood in
hundreds of winner's circles, but clearly he was moved by what
he had just experienced. "I don't believe," he said,
"that I have ever ridden a better horse."
More cheers
rained down as Lester Murray, the Dancer's elderly black groom,
attached the shank and held him in the winner's enclosure at the
foot of the grandstand. Vanderbilt and Winfrey posed for win
pictures as reporters surrounded Arcaro, who could only shake
his head. "I wish the race had been six furlongs instead of
six and a half," the Master muttered. "I thought I had
it won until that grey horse just smothered us."
It was a busy
sports Saturday in New York and across the country, with Notre
Dame playing Pennsylvania in college football before a national
TV audience and 75,000 fans in Philadelphia, the pro football
season kicking off, and tickets selling for the World Series
between the Yankees and Brooklyn Dodgers beginning the next
week. Baseball was dominating the talk on the streets of New
York. There wasn't much room in the papers for big news from
Belmont. But Native Dancer had given the sports editors no
choice. As Joe H. Palmer, the esteemed racing writer for the New
York Herald Tribune, wrote in his column the next day, the grey
colt had "just plain murdered the field in the
Futurity," raising glorious echoes of past champions such
as Count Fleet, Citation, and Man O' War. America's next great
horse had arrived, and he was a grey, of all things, a pale
specter sprinting through the stretch. People were calling him
the Grey Ghost, his coloring and shadowy dominance stirring
imaginations. If his victory in the Futurity didn't warrant a
bold headline at the top of the sports page, what did?
Copyright
© 2003 by John Eisenberg |