My Year of the Racehorse (17 page)

“Northern Dancer,” I tell Linda Lee, “was not only, indisputably, the greatest horse ever bred in Canada but is generally considered the twentieth century's most important sire.”

Linda Lee smiles. “You sound like a boy talking about dinosaurs.”

Born in Oshawa, the runty, dark bay winner of the Canadian Triple Crown, the Kentucky Derby, and the Preakness in 1964 not only fathered champions on dirt and grass around the world, but had babies and grandbabies who've become prominent sires in their own right. By the mid-eighties, his stud fee was $1 million without even the guarantee of a live foal.

Like other great Canadians who emigrated to fully realize their celebrity, from Celine Dion to Michael Ignatieff, “Canada's Horse” was shipped to Maryland, to be closer to potential broodmares, in 1969. According to Peter Gzowski's racetrack memoir, An Unbroken Line, Taylor brought Northern Dancer to Woodbine for one last trot around the oval before his admiring fans.

“In the van on the way over,” Gzowski wrote, “Northern Dancer must have thought he was being taken to the breeding shed, for he came down the ramp with an ambitious and generous erection, and before [trainer and exercise rider] Pete McCann had him saddled, he took him behind a willow tree and, to distract him, slapped him heartily on the nose.”

We arrive just after the second race. For much of the third one, we're in line for beer and rib sandwiches, which leaves us mere minutes to pick our winners.

I'm trying to carry on with my good betting habits and place a conservative $10 win-show bet on the second favourite, Venganza, in the third race, a mile-long turf race.

Linda Lee steps up to the window next to me. She places a win bet on Venganza, the one-horse, but also wants to make an exactor bet (i.e., one that picks the first two horses to finish the race, in their exact order—also known as an exacta) on Venganza with the other horse she likes, the race favourite. “What number is Captive Spirit?” she asks me.

I flip through my copy of the Form and see Captive Spirit as the race analyst's pick to place. “Two,” I say mistakenly.

We settle into one of the folding blue bleacher seats overlooking the eight pole. As the horses lope towards the gate, I look around the grandstand. It's a half-full, half-interested crowd. Some of them still wear the pastels of July; the others are already in the earth tones of autumn. Those in shorts and T-shirts wear them with an almost joyless defiance, and many of them tie sweaters and jacket sleeves around their waists. They all look like they'll be teetotalling or nursing a beer for the whole evening, wary of a Thursday morning hangover at work.

“Do you remember the last time we were at the track?” Linda Lee asks me.

“How can I forget?” I say. “That wasn't much fun.”

“I'm surprised we're here,” she says. “You really pick your spots.”

“I was hoping you wouldn't point that out.”

“You know I can't resist pointing things out.”

We visited Hastings Park a week before her appointment to end her pregnancy. The part of me that wanted to enact my own unlived life was heartbroken. By then, we had begun to half hate each other. We headed to the track, which she had never before visited, for some kind of novel distraction. I drank six plastic cups of draught beer and felt sick. Linda Lee disappeared for half an hour to call her sister.

I remember betting poorly that afternoon—on anything, for no reason—mainly because I felt I was owed some good luck. In psychological terminology, that feeling I had is known as “gambler's fallacy.” There have been moments this year when I've wondered whether my own recent engagement with the track hasn't been, in fact, an attempt at recapturing and mastering that situation. If I could be a handicapping genius, then that personal catastrophe—a nipple-twister for the ages—would be conquered.

Within two weeks of our trip to the track, I left to attend an artist's residency in a lighthouse on the east coast. When I returned, Linda had graduated and gone back to Toronto.

Back at Woodbine, the race begins and Venganza wins by three lengths from inside, but the real excitement for us comes when the two-horse, Spend Now and Save, prevails to place. Captive Spirit is actually running in the nine hole, but my error gave Linda Lee the winner.

“You got lucky,” she says to me.

“So did you,” I say.

We stay longer, but being at the track, and the memory it inspires, has made us both quiet and morose. It's a relief when Linda Lee suggests we leave. In the car, without any prompting, she mentions an unbreakable lunch date she has scheduled with her mother on Saturday. We sit in silence waiting for the voice of the GPS—smug, almost scolding—to tell us we've arrived at our destination.

PASSING THROUGH UPSTATE New York, I drive on two-lane highways that cut through wooded hills, towns with brick-lined Main Streets, and past apocalyptic biblical quotations handpainted on billboards, to Saratoga Springs, a town that's stuffed with Victorian homes and is equally famous for its mineral baths and its track.

With its gazebo-style entrance, red-and-white striped tented awnings, vendors hawking lemonade, pretzels, and oil paintings of Barbaro and Rachel Alexandra, the track nicknamed “the Spa” retains the genteel fairground atmosphere of its first meet in 1863. For five weeks between late July and Labor Day, over twenty thousand visitors come each day not only to see New York's finest thoroughbreds race, but also to enjoy the track itself. Although the clouds are heavy when I arrive late Friday afternoon, it still feels summery here.

The Saratoga crowd is dressed in seersucker suits, summer frocks, and hats. Their multitudes make it hard to find a seat. The grandstands at the Spa, under spiky cupolas, are only half-full, but you have to pay to sit there, and even spots on the benches inside facing the betting windows and television screens are, if not occupied, then informally reserved with newspapers or a baseball cap. I flatten out my Form on a trash can facing a hot-dog vendor while I make a bet, trying to factor in performances on turf versus those on artificial surfaces.

It does me no good. By the last race, I've lost $40, and I nurse two beers at a nearby bar as the traffic clears. Then I head out to find my accommodations. The hotels in Saratoga charge double their normal rates during the meet, and judging by the number of “NO VACANCY” signs I see, they could probably gouge deeper. It's for value and quaintness that I'm staying at the Triple Crown Motel, two highway exits down from the track. Across from a jockey's dummy with a ceramic Secretariat, the motel sign proudly advertises its “color TVs by RCA.” I wait fifteen minutes for the front-desk clerk, who's stepped out, to return with her tallboy in a brown paper bag and check me in.

Each room is named for a different Triple Crown winner. Room number seven, the Assault room, smells like someone's aged grandmother, bearing the traces of both conscientious cleaning and un-concealable decay. I settle into the lumpy double bed with the TV replaying the day's races and start making my picks for the biggest day on the Saratoga calendar, Travers Day.

The race day is highlighted by the Travers Stakes, the oldest stakes competition in the U.S. Along with the Breeders' Cup in November, it's one of the biggest race cards in the back half of the year. Like the Triple Crown races in the spring, the “Midsummer Derby” has its own mythology. Jim Dandy, a 100-to-1 shot, beat Triple Crown winner Gallant Fox at the 1930 Travers, which also feeds Saratoga's reputation as the “Graveyard of the Favourites.” After all, it's here that Secretariat, shortly after knocking off the Triple Crown in 1973, lost to a chestnut gelding named Onion, and Man o' War lost his only race, to Upset, in 1919.

When I arrive after the first race at 11:35 AM, the nine-furlong dirt track has turned to mud. I had planned my entire trip around the possibility that all three Triple Crown winners—Mine That Bird, Rachel Alexandra, and Summer Bird—would be running at the Travers. Summer Bird is here, but his half-brother, Mine That Bird, was scratched a few days ago to recover from minor surgery. Rachel Alexandra, the super filly who beat both the boys this year in separate races, is kept out by trainer Steve Rasmussen to run in the Woodward Stakes, held here the next week.

The race begins. The horses bobble, en masse, as they tear into the mud. At various points, as the horses speed along the backstretch, the numbers on my tickets pulse to life. But then Summer Bird gains the lead and builds on it; Quality Road, the Florida Derby winner, falls back from contention enough to let Hold Me Back make a late charge for second. I get the top four horses, but not all on the same ticket.

Stepping out onto the apron on my way to the exit, I mill with the crowd that's gathered around the winning horse. Where I come from, no horse qualifies as a celebrity. Here, though, people swarm the Belmont and Travers champion not only to peruse the horse, but to take part in his veneration. Kent Desormeaux, Summer Bird's mud-encrusted jock, waves back to the crowd as his horse puffs.

Other Travers Day attendees begin dispersing to the lots and backyards they've paid to park in. I consider leaving, but realize there's no rush to get to Manhattan—my next stop. Driving alone has been, as expected, a miserable, clock-watching experience. I'm seeing the world, I guess, but doing it solo. Lingering in the mob, I aim my crappy digital camera at the champion thoroughbred, but only get the tops of other people's heads.

LESSON THREE: Never Settle for What You've Earned.

While horseracing was in a shabby state, it still brought me into daily contact with those who were better off than I. The racetrack confirmed my belief that there was no positive correlation between industriousness and material prosperity. Randi worked two jobs, but deadbeat owners and gimpy thoroughbreds regularly put her behind on her own bills. Meanwhile, Hastings was a sandbox for people whose fortunes were derived long ago, and who transferred their competitive urges onto their horses—equine athletes that generally raced several notches above my own. The intrinsic value of my own efforts wasn't recognized.

After resisting it for many years, I succumbed to the idea that life had its winners and losers, the prom queens and book-club members, the quarterbacks and the writing-workshop leaders, and the only reason to cry out against injustice was if it gave you an opening to pummel some groin.

Being a professional sports owner was grand, but I wanted to be vaulted into the winner's circle of life. I wanted to be an overlord and not a vassal; the man behind the curtain and not the puppet with a hand in its rear. I pictured myself sitting impassively in an owner's box, in a charcoal-grey suit and a camel-hair coat, chewing on the knob of my antique walking stick, unlit Cohiba in my fish stick-cold fingers, surrounded by my second wife; the children from my previous marriage; and the grandchildren from my children's previous marriages. I wanted to make decisions and eat free popcorn.

I returned from my trip to the east coast ornery and dissatisfied. Summer was ending. I deserved a finer life.

FROM
WHAT I LEARNED AT THE TRACK:
A Manual of Failure

FOR BLACKIE'S SIXTH race of the season, I rent a box seat with a view overlooking the eight pole. My friends and I might not get our own little TV screen to watch the simulcast the way we would in the boxes closer to the finish line—the ones people buy for the season—but waitresses come and take our orders for beer, and, for only $15, that small luxury makes me forget my owner inadequacy.

In the Form, I notice contenders from Blackie's last race; an overwhelming amount of the money is going to a horse named Kokeeno, a six-year-old chestnut mare who's dropping a class. Blackie nuzzles the pony as she's led down the post parade. It's a ten-horse field and she's at her longest odds this year, 10-to-1, to win. The owners of the horses in the race are announced, and I stand up and wave to the disinterested crowd as my name is called.

With under a minute to post, I find Randi taking her spot at the picnic table facing the top of the lane.

“How did the Girl do?” I ask. Another one of Randi's horses, Aubrey Road, ran in the first race, but I didn't want to get to the track too early, lest I lose more money.

“Second,” she says. “That's how it goes when you have no fucking luck.”

(At the time, I don't know that the day after Randi claimed the horse she couldn't even walk her. Randi turned her out to the farm for a month, Alex brought ice over on his bike for her legs—it was hours and hours of work just so she could enter the race. In this sprint, the horse is put in a ridiculous pace and is beaten by a horse that won five times.)

You don't often hear trainers or owners talk about luck actually going their way, how their horse might have profited from another's horse's misfortune, but any bad luck they experience becomes embroidered into their own ill-starred life story, and the length of the race, from the opening gate to the finish line, is rife with opportunities for a personal persecution narrative—be it a common stumble leaving the gate or some extraordinary hex—like one trainer in Randi's shed row whose horse led on the back turn until he hit a bird that had swooped down into his path. The horse was so rattled by the encounter that he allowed another horse to pass him for the win.

I have no time to commiserate before the race starts. Blackie starts well, coming out to an early lead.

“Don't do that!” Randi yells at her horse.

Blackie settles down on her own, moving behind Kokeeno and Notis Me, who finished ahead of her in the previous race, before drawing back to them midway through the backstretch. At the far turn, when the horses look like ten stooges trying to funnel into the same doorway, she takes the lead. Randi, who's not usually demonstrative when her horses race, steps towards the track and starts pumping her fist as she cheers Blackie on. Blackie should be pouring it on, but she just sits there.

We later learn that the rider, Perez, dropped his stick at the top of the stretch. Without the stick to “call on her for her best,” he tries to egg Blackie on by scrubbing against her neck with his hands, but she doesn't understand this improvised cue. The two-horse, Flower Hill, and the four-horse, Quickens, pass her. Randi bolts towards the racing oval, screaming about the rider, even before the photo finish reveals that Blackie managed to hang onto third.

I happen to make $100 on my show bet, but I'm indifferent. For the first time this season, the race result doesn't faze me. The horse could have won, she could have finished dead last. A sense of dissatisfaction sits in my chest like a throw pillow as I realize that my horse will never be one of the legends I've spent the summer reading about, not even a local hero whose soaring finishes and heart-wrenching close calls build up to a cathartic triumph. For a claiming horse, race one in the season is not much different from race six except for the changing seasons and extra mileage on your depreciating asset. Owning Blackie will not change my life. This is as good as it gets—for the horse and for me.

MY INTEREST IN owning a future equine legend leads me to the yearling sale, which is held in an airy barn at an equestrian park in Langley. Like most people here, I've come not only to gawk at the gawky colts and fillies but also to watch more prosperous folks blow their fortunes.

The horses auctioned today could end up never running, but they have the potential to become stakes calibre and win prestigious local races. Several years back, the eventual winner of the 2003 B.C. Derby, the biggest event in the local racing calendar, Roscoe Pito, was purchased here for only $2,993 by a group that included a bartender at Hastings; the lifetime earnings of the horse, who ended up racing in California, were $608,277. Unlike a claiming horse, a young horse purchased here won't run until the following spring, if training goes well, and only in a handful of races as a two-year-old, if at all. In that time, you will be paying for its training and upkeep with no money coming in. If horseracing is a slow poison, then buying a yearling is cyanide.

The hamstrung economy doesn't bode well for the auction. A recent sale in Alberta saw sales drop forty-five percent. Local breeders, whose horses are eligible for B.C.-bred bonuses and special stakes races, are likely selling at a loss. The horses, with numbered tags on their hips, are led onto a stage that has been decorated with leafy houseplants. Behind them in a desk, Mike Heads, the Hastings simulcast commentator, talks up a horse's pedigree.

“Number eleven, property of Susi Schaer, Canmor Farms, agent, is the filly by the mare Flirtatious Wonder,” Heads says. “Flirtatious Wonder is a stakes winner of over $200,000. She's the half-sister to Raise the Rent and In Gold We Trust. She's had three foals to the races, two of them winners, $34,000 in earnings.”

As the horses are brought onto the stage and circled around, an auctioneer calls prices in a musical gargle:

“Awww, diggiddydown, diggiddydown, diggiddydown, diggiddydown, three thousand. Aww, diggiddydo, diggiddydo, diggiddydo, diggiddydo, diggiddydo, diggiddydo, two thousand.”

Standing in front of the stage are a number of assistants, dressed in the cowboy equivalent of business casual—suit jackets and ties with Stetsons and boots. When someone nods or raises a hand to bid, they pump their fists and yell, “YEEEAAAAHHHHHH!” Occasionally, a horse will whinny in response. Even though I have no stake in the bidding, my heart pulses with joy every time one of these assistants offers this celebratory, encouraging scream. I suppose that's why it's done.

The auctioneer goes down to a thousand before eventually selling the horse for $1,100.

Most of the bidders are seated in folding chairs within sight of the auctioneer and his assistants. Horatio Kemeny of Swift Thoroughbreds sits in the front row for most of the afternoon. He and his partner Mark Mache disappear to get lunch outside. After they finish eating, I meet up with him on his way back to his chair. In a dark shirt and blazer, Kemeny has light brown hair, a neatly trimmed beard, and a sturdy build. Mache is tall like an NBA power forward, but, with his shoulder-length blond hair, has an amiable, youthful aura. So far, they've purchased three horses for $6,500, $20,000, and $19,000.

“One of them was good value,” he says, trying to catch the attention of Mache without accidentally bidding. “The other two were fair value.”

I've largely avoided interactions with other owners this season, rationalizing to myself that they are normally alpha-male business types with no time for my low-earning ilk. And, if I did speak to them, they'd be so guarded to the point of brain-gouging dullness. Some racetrackers I've talked to back me up on that count, suggesting that the entrepreneurs and executives who get into the sport do so to acquire a contained burst of the unpredictability, zest, and eccentricity that they've so fastidiously squelched from every other corner of their life. But in absolute honesty, I've avoided meeting other owners because they call to attention my huge wannabe status as someone who might be able to impress friends with his four-figure investment for part of a bottom claimer, but is only an owner in the loosest definition.

The Swift Thoroughbreds guys definitely incite these intimations of poseurdom. While both of them are only forty, Kemeny and Mache's attachment to the sport began in the early 1980s when Mache's grandmother brought them to the track for the first time as twelve-year-olds. The two friends would ride across town on their bikes to the track, recruiting desperate horseplayers to place bets for them using money they collected from bottle deposits.

“The place was hopping back then,” Kemeny says. “There was racing on five days, the handle was a million dollars a day. Now I don't think it's more than $200,000. It was the only game in town. The truth was that you came here on a Welfare Wednesday”—the day of the month when welfare cheques arrived—“and you couldn't move. Everybody wanted to be here.”

Later on, the two friends would team up to form MindSpan, a video game company that created the baseball video game HardBall. After they sold their business in 2002, they got into horses. Swift Thoroughbreds has forty-four horses listed on its website, each horse costing about $20,000 to maintain.

Kemeny and Mache not only employ an entire stable, but also bring in new horses that get absorbed into the pool of horses that change hands at the track. A couple of years back, they also belonged to the group of owners who helped restore the purses after a cut by track management. Maybe in other parts of the world racehorses remain fashionable instruments for flaunting wealth, but in this city and other places where the track's lustre has been worn down to its grimy base, the Swift guys are eccentric benefactors of a precariously unpopular cultural institution, like chamber music or metered verse. According to backstretch gossip, the annual budget for their stable is $3 million—a sum that their annual winnings don't come within fifteen lengths of matching.

Kemeny estimates that maybe half the horses he buys at the sale end up racing. “The other half we sell for cheap, find them good homes,” he says. Swift Thoroughbreds's trainer, Dino Condilenios, comes the day before for the parade to look at the horses and, with Mache and Kemeny, compiles A and B lists. “Conformation is at least as important as pedigree.”

Pleasantly surprised by the turnout and the prices the horses are going for, Kemeny, who says he's allergic to horses, excuses himself as he returns to his seat to bid on the next entry. “I don't think he'll come cheap,” he says, before returning to his spot. Kemeny keeps the assistants screaming as the horse goes for $42,000. At the end of the day, Swift spends $216,500 on ten horses.

Beyond the bidders in the folding chairs, on portable bleacher seats and in a beer garden to the side, are onlookers—trainers and jockeys and grooms who just want to be part of the fun. Compared with the auctions at Keeneland and Saratoga, where horses have been purchased for eight-figure sums, the amounts spent here are a trifle—barely enough to fill a briefcase with twenties. For most other people, these prices still equal their life savings or the equity in their homes, all of it kissed away with a nod to the auctioneer. Here, for now, everyone's spent his money wisely.

AT THE AUCTION, I hear my name called and see Kulwant behind the beer garden gates. “Pick up any champion horseflesh?” he asks me.

“Just window-shopping,” I say, leaning over the fence. “What brings you here?”

He shrugs, rolling the bottom rim of his empty plastic cup of beer against his table. “I had some friends driving out here, so I tagged along,” he says. “This is cheap fun. At least for me.”

Kulwant lets me buy him another beer. Work ended for him a few hours earlier, and maybe it's his fatigue and the beer, but his fangs are temporarily retracted. He even shows me a printout for a van that he's saving his money to buy, as though it were his own yearling. We talk about sports and books and movies.

It's in this hospitable conversational space that I allow myself to become philosophical.

“Do you ever wonder how much you'd be worth in an auction?” I ask him. “And whether you'd be worth your price?”

“A slave auction? Or the kind where you buy a date for charity?” he replies. “‘No' to both.”

“Say these horses are like newly minted holders of bachelor's degrees,” I continue. “Some of them come from good families, others have good grades, or display talent in their classes, and you bid high on the ones you thought would be the winners and avoided the ones with the weak knees. Do you think you'd live up to your potential? Would you have exceeded it?”