Native Dancer (3 page)

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 1:14⅖,
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 headwind 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?

T
wenty minutes after the Futurity, with the crowd still buzzing about the Dancer’s charge, the colt headed back to Barn 20
on the backstretch at Belmont, where Vanderbilt’s horses in training were permanently stabled. Harold Walker, the stable’s
mammoth night watchman, held the lead shank as the Dancer pranced through the track’s treelined barn community. Lester Murray
brought up the rear. Clothed in the white coat and broad-brimmed hat he always wore to the races, the groom gripped the Dancer’s
tail tightly with both hands and chattered nonstop. “You done good, you bum, you done real good,” Murray huffed at the horse
as they moved along.

None of the men who worked for Vanderbilt could remember where Murray had come from, but they also couldn’t remember the barn
without him. With his round head perched on his round body as he waddled across the straw, forever spinning a yarn, he was
a sixty-three-year-old lifelong horseman, steeped in the backyard remedies and unerring instincts of racing’s old school.
His wisdom was incalculable, his devotion to his horses immutable. No one loved the Dancer more. Murray and the Grey Ghost
spent hours together in the stall every day, Murray wrapping and unwrapping bandages, passing out dandelions as treats, and
engaging in nonstop conversation, his rumbling voice pitched in the melodious, intimate tone a mother might use when alone
in a room with a child. He sprawled on the floor as he worked, often dozed in the straw when finished, and when it was time
to rise, grabbed the Dancer’s tail and held on for leverage as he hauled himself up. The horse never responded angrily to
the tugs, seemingly understanding that he was helping his friend. On some level, it could safely be said, the Dancer and his
groom were in love.

Murray handled the groom’s chores by himself on most days, but the colt was such a handful, so immense and unpredictable,
that Winfrey had assigned the responsibility of the lead shank to Walker on race days. Murray’s aging grip just wasn’t enough,
especially with the swirl of people and noise around the horse seemingly increasing with every victory. What if the Dancer
abruptly reared, as he occasionally did during morning workouts? Murray alone wouldn’t be able to keep him under control.

There was no reason for concern once the entourage reached Barn 20 after the Futurity, so Walker handed the shank to Murray
and the groom led the Dancer around and around the long indoor enclosure, cooling out from the race. Once his breathing eased,
the horse was bathed and deposited in stall 6, his kingly lair. Murray took off his coat and hat and went to work, removing
the tight racing bandages on the horse’s legs and replacing them with looser stall bandages. “You just want to eat,” the groom
groused good-naturedly. “You hungry, you are.”

The barn was immaculate and efficient, radiating the crisp glow of a wealthy family’s country home. Two dozen well-bred Vanderbilt
horses were on the premises, operating on a tight schedule of training, racing, feeding, and sleep. Their stalls were piled
deep with hay. Pampered black cats dashed about wearing collars with cerise and white diamond stitching. During morning workout
hours, the exercise riders were dressed in uniforms of boots, jodhpurs, and cerise and white sweaters, and the grooms bustled
through their chores with precision.

The family ambience wasn’t happenstance. At a time when many of racing’s top stables belonged to society families such as
the Wideners and Whitneys, a job with Vanderbilt was a job to keep. Most of the staff, like Murray, had worked in the barn
for years, becoming as associated with Vanderbilt as his colors and silks in the insular back-stretch world. There were exercise
riders such as Bernie Everson, who rode the Dancer every morning, and Claude “Apples” Appley, who had worked for Vanderbilt
since the Depression; grooms such as Walker and Murray; and J. C. Mergler, the stable foreman who paid the feed man and made
sure Vanderbilt’s high standards were met. They had hummed along for years, a racing family, working together through Vanderbilt’s
prosperous times in the sport, and also his many disappointments.

A handful of top horses such as Bed o’ Roses, Next Move, Loser Weeper, and Cousin had passed through their hands in the past
few years as Vanderbilt’s stable experienced a renaissance after falling off badly during the war. Now there was Native Dancer,
the best yet. Physically, he was awesome. Though still a gawky equine teenager as a two-year-old with growing to do, he was
already fearsome at 16.1 hands tall (5'6'') and 1,100 pounds, with rippling muscles, firm withers, and brawn over his kidneys
and in his hindquarters and back, where horses were seldom so defined. He was a fullback in football, a cleanup hitter in
baseball, a muscle-bound intimidator who could throw one punch and knock you cold. He loomed over his opposition in his post
parades, yet where some horses his size were too bulky to race effectively, the Dancer was coordinated and graceful, a heavyweight
as nimble as a lightweight, never taking an awkward step.

Everything about him was outsized. Great whooshes of air passed through his nostrils as he charged down the track, hammering
the ground with every step and violently throwing his front legs out and down, as if the goal was to see how far he could
reach or how much dust he could raise. Early in 1953,
Life
magazine measured his stride at twenty-nine feet, one foot longer than Man O’ War’s and seven feet beyond the average for
a thoroughbred. The effort required to propel his massive frame should have exhausted him, but he was never out of breath
at the end of training or a race. Seemingly blessed with lungs the size of circus balloons, he had a limitless capacity for
work.

Even his flaws were amplified: his ankles were pocked by bulbous, fleshy lumps that horrified most horsemen, many of whom
be-

lieved the defect would prevent him from surviving the rigors of training and racing. Winfrey downplayed the issue, dismissing
reporters when they suggested the ankles might become problematic. Privately, he was at times concerned: a horse that pounded
the ground so hard was always susceptible to ankle problems. But the matter hadn’t yet caused him to miss a race, and Winfrey
and Vanderbilt were optimistic.

Through the years, other equine champions had entranced the public by winning despite shortcomings or infirmities. Exterminator,
winner of fifty races from 1917 to 1925, was nicknamed Old Bones. Seabiscuit, hero of the Great Depression, was undersized
and had a troublesome right foreleg. Assault, a Triple Crown winner in 1946, limped when he walked and had such nicknames
as Cripple and Club Foot. But the Grey Ghost generated no such disbelief. No one who watched him race wondered how or why
he was winning. He exuded exactly what the public thought a champion should exude. His muscles were intimidating, his coordination
fascinating. His walk was proud, his trot graceful, his sprint the stuff of poetry. When he walked down the track, people
on the fence just looked at him and sighed.

He was such a robust, healthy individual that he didn’t require the hormone injections, vitamins, penicillin, and heat treatments
so many other horses needed; his doctoring consisted of little more than dabs of liniment rubbed on his ankles. His appetite
was vast; when you put food in front of him, it was gone: two quarts of oats at 11 A.M., four quarts at four in the afternoon,
four quarts at 1 A.M. and so much mixed clover in between meals that his hayrack needed filling twice a day. “The clover has
those sweet buds and he’s like a child with a Tootsie Roll or something; he stuffs himself with it,” Winfrey explained to
writer John McNulty in a 1953
New Yorker
article. The clover was replaced with straight timothy four days before a race, Winfrey told McNulty, because it wasn’t as
sweet and “he’s more sensible about it.”

The pros in Barn 20 loved him. With his 8-0 record after the Futurity, he was a star shooting across racing’s constellation,
wiring the barn with the electricity a good horse produces. But although his success reflected well on the barn’s horsemanship,
he wasn’t treated with deference. Visitors to the barn were shocked to see Winfrey give the horse a harsh slap across the
bridge of his nose to get his attention, or Murray tug on his tail as he rose from the straw. That was how they handled the
Dancer, as a wise older brother might treat an immature but gifted younger sibling: with tough, heartfelt love. Such treatment
was necessary. The horse was unpredictable, at times a ham who pricked his ears for photographers and made funny faces for
strangers; but also occasionally lashed out without warning. When visitors to the barn or horsemen he didn’t know or trust
tried to pet him or work with him, he nipped at their fingers and sometimes even chased them out of his stall. Years later,
he chomped a finger off a groom’s hand. You didn’t want any novice dealing with him. He could be just plain dangerous.

Yet, remarkably, he seemed to know the difference between whom he could bully and whom he should respect. He played endlessly
with his favorite black cats and never gave Murray or Winfrey any trouble, but a police dog who entered his stall one morning
was sent flying into a wall. Visitors to the barn were warned to keep their distance, but Vanderbilt’s young children could
yank on his tail without fear. “One time Dad ushered Heidi and myself into his stall and let us pull on his tail—hard—while
Lester stood at his head. An incredible scenario,” Alfred Vanderbilt III recalled. “Dad told us: ‘Don’t worry. He won’t kick
anyone, and he won’t kick you.’ We ran up and down both his sides in the stall, making a terrible racket. All he did was calmly
look back over his shoulder at us. It was magic.”

His comportment on the job was what mattered, of course, and there, he was a pleasure. He had sailed through his schooling
in the fundamentals that troubled many other young horses, adapting easily to riding under tack, breaking from the starting
gate, and “rating” behind other horses early in a race to save energy for the stretch. Although he occasionally dipped his
shoulder without warning and dumped Everson—just to let everyone know he could, it seemed—he was adaptable and businesslike
in his training and racing, seemingly endeavoring to get the job done without wasting anyone else’s time—or more importantly,
his own. Winfrey had suggested to reporters that he could “train himself,” and horsemen familiar with the colt un-