Secretariat

1. Secretariat

2. N e w Y o r k
Secretariat
William Nack
The Making of a Champion

3. chapter 1
It was almost midnight in Virginia, late for the farmlands north of
Richmond, when the breathing quickened in the stall, the phone
rang in the Gentry home, and two men came out the front door,
hastily crossing the lawn to the car.
They swung out the driveway onto the deserted road and took
off north. It was one of those hours when time is measured not by
clocks but by contractions; the intervals between were getting
shorter. In a small wooden barn set off at the edge of a nearby field,
beneath a solitary light in an expanse of darkness, a mare was about
to give birth. The men were rushing to the barn to help her.
The man behind the wheel was Howard M. Gentry, sixty-two
years old, for almost twenty years a manager of the Meadow Stud in
Doswell, one of the most successful breeding farms in America. Sit-
ting with him in the front seat was Raymond W. Wood, a railroad
conductor, fifty-four years old, Gentry’s long-time friend and neigh-
bor, for years his steady companion at straight pool, and himself a
modest breeder of thoroughbred horses.
It was the night of March 29, 1970, not the kind of night for
anyone to leave the velvet green warmth of a pool table and rush
outdoors. The weather had been bleak all day—the sky perpetually
overcast, a drizzle falling through the morning and afternoon, and
a fog that clung to the farm and the uplands and the bottomlands of
Caroline County. A wind, mounting occasional gusts, blew out of
the north from Washington. The temperature had been in the high
forties during the day, but by evening it had dropped into the thir-
ties, and sometime past eleven o’clock, when the call came, it was
almost freezing.

4. William Nack 2 3 Secretariat
Helen (Penny) Chenery Tweedy, Christopher Chenery’s young-
est daughter, once wrote in a personal family history that poverty
was a central emptiness in their lives:
The boys went barefoot from March first to October first to
save their shoes. They did not have servants other than a
cook, but they were too proud to admit it, so Chris would
wait until after dark to carry the laundry in a wagon down to
a colored washerwoman so the neighbors wouldn’t know.
The best Christmas present was a tangerine in the toe of
their stockings—a rare luxury. But they were a close family,
fiercely fond of each other and fearful of insult. . . . Each of
the boys grew up craving something—mostly to be relieved
of poverty. Bill wanted books, Charlie, the third son, loved
cards and girls, but Chris loved horses. A distant cousin,
Bernard Doswell, still had a half-mile track at his place ad-
joining The Meadow, and when they weren’t out in Caro-
line, Chris would walk the seven miles to exercise the few
remaining horses. He not only loved them, but they became
a symbol to him of all the things he couldn’t have. . . . His
mother kept his feet on the ground, however, and ruled him
and his brothers with a magnificent and ladylike temper. If
they got out of line, they spent a week in the yard or cut an
extra cord of wood. There was no appealing for clemency or
using boyish charm with her. She stiffened their spines and
sent them out into the world with a great sense of family
obligation.
The children shared their opportunities for education. Each
boy was allowed to attend Randolph-Macon College in Ashland for
two years, but was then expected to quit and work three years to al-
low another of the boys his two years of study.
That mare is what put an edge on the moment for Gentry. He
had delivered hundreds of foals in the years he worked around thor-
oughbreds, but that mare was not just another broodmare carrying
a foal by just another sire. Down in Barn 17A, the two-stall foaling
barn near the western border of the farm, an eighteen-year-old
broodmare named Somethingroyal, a daughter of the late Prince-
quillo, was going into labor for the fourteenth time in her life. She
was carrying a foal by Bold Ruler, the preeminent sire in America,
year after year the nation’s leading stallion. It was a union of estab-
lished aristocracy.
Somethingroyal was the kind of mare breeders seek to raise dy-
nasties. She was the dam of the fleet Sir Gaylord, probably the most
gifted racehorse of his generation, the colt favored to win the 1962
Kentucky Derby until he broke down the day before the race. She
was the mother of First Family, a multiple stakes winner in the mid-
1960s. In 1965 she bore her first Bold Ruler foal, a filly called Syrian
Sea, winner of the rich Selima Stakes in 1967. Another Bold Ruler
filly, The Bride, was a yearling, and tonight Somethingroyal was
having her last Bold Ruler foal: the stallion was dying in Kentucky.
So Howard Gentry felt more anxious than usual to get the foal
delivered. The foal would be virtually priceless, and Gentry hoped
the delivery would be easy. Gentry had stopped to see Some-
thingroyal earlier that night, just before he went home for supper at
six. She didn’t appear to be near labor then, but when he and South-
worth made the rounds two hours later, as they often did together
during breeding season, her condition had begun to change. Labor
seemed imminent. The mare was “waxing heavily,” as Gentry
called it, with milk congealing at the tips of her nipples like beads of
candle wax—the tentative sign that labor is near—perhaps a few
hours away, perhaps a day. It was then he decided to stay awake, in-
stead of going to bed at nine, his regular time, and to call Wood and
ask him to wait it out over a pool table.

5. 5 Secretariat
Chapter 3
In the end it was the land that made them all—the land that raised
the horses and made room for the people and supported the em-
pires of chance they built on it.
It was blocked off in white and creosote fences and planted in
clover and grass, a deep green shag rug that ran, as if unrolled,
across a boundless countryside. The land is where the horses were
born, on farms such as Hamburg Place in Kentucky, where still
stands a single barn—a historic marker now—in which five Ken-
tucky Derby winners were foaled: Old Rosebud (1914), Sir Barton
(1919), Paul Jones (1920), Zev (1923), and Flying Ebony (1925). It is
where the horses were raised and weaned, where they romped and
grazed and grew to young horses on the racetrack. Some were re-
turned to it as pensioners, many more to serve in studs and nurser-
ies. A chosen few were buried on the land, the best beneath granite
headstones chiseled in their names and, at times, in epitaphs ren-
dered in the style of Boot Hill:
here lies the fleetest runner
the american turf has ever known,
and one of the gamest
and most generous of horses.
That is the epitaph on the monument of Domino, the “Black
Whirlwind,” who was buried in 1897 in a grave outside of Lexing-
ton. There was no faster horse than Domino in the sprints—he was
the Jesse Owens of his species in the Gay Nineties—and when they
retired him to stud, he whirled the wind again as a progenitor.
But most of the horses sent back to the farms, the many fillies
and mares and the few colts and horses, were pressed into the ser-
vice of breeding enterprises, of large stud farms such as Hamburg
Place and Himyar, Rancocas and Idle Hour and Calumet Farm.
The fortunes of the farms and their owners, in some ways, ran with
the fortunes of the horses and the bloodlines they produced. All of
them would rise to prominence in their day, wane, reemerge, or die
away. There is no great Himyar anymore, no flourishing Idle Hour
since Colonel E.R. Bradley died, though the land still raises horses.
Sinclair sold the last of the Rancocas horses in 1932, all but Zev and
Grey Lag. Hamburg Place, once the showplace of American breed-
ing, is no longer what it once was, though it still exists. And Calu-
met Farm is no longer the 1927 Yankees it was when Bull Lea filled
the farm’s stable with so many high-classed runners, three Derby
winners and all those nimble-footed tomboys. But what is behind
them, behind all the young horses and the new owners and breeders
of thoroughbreds, is the land.
While Christopher T. Chenery was piecing together the shards of
his family homestead, the descendants of Richard J. Hancock
emerged as the leading breeders of thoroughbreds in America. It
had taken seventy years.
R. J. Hancock founded Ellerslie Stud and within ten years of the
war had bought his first stallion, Scathelock, and his first brood-
mare, War Song. That was the start.
Hancock’s rise to prominence as a Virginia breeder actually be-
gan after he acquired the stallion Eolus from a Maryland breeder,
swapping Scathelock in an even trade. The transaction revealed
Hancock’s shrewd eye for horses. Eolus sired a number of winners,
giving a measure of prestige to the Hancock name among Virginia
horsemen. Among the best was Knight of Ellerslie, who not only

6. William Nack 8
den decline, but he was beginning to suffer moments when his
thinking lacked clarity, moments of limited lucidity and impaired
judgment; a mind as precise as a surveyor’s compass had been
dulled by age. The lapses in clarity were threatening to affect the
way he handled his corporate affairs and his management of the
Meadow Stable and breeding farm. It was just such a matter involv-
ing the horses, in fact, that prompted John Fager to call Penny
Tweedy. If anyone could help in dealing with C. T. Chenery, she
could.
“Hey, Frank,” a reporter whispered to him. “Es la hora de la
verdad?”
Pancho looked up. He grinned. His voice was huskier now,
more gravelly from the extensive use he’d made of it, and he raised
his right hand to his face, as if holding a baton to it, and sang in his
Cuban bass:
When you’re smiling
Keep on smiling,
The whole world smiles with you.
All the horses were in the paddock now. Eddie Sweat was lead-
ing Secretariat around the ring and into one of the saddling stalls.
Lucien fitted Turcotte’s saddle to Secretariat, drew up the cinch,
and fastened it. All was done. The jockeys started moving down the
stairs, the cameras following them. They joined the trainers. Tur-
cotte’s expression was severe. Then a stoical Pincay came into the
paddock, wearing the green and yellow silks of Sigmund Sommer.
He was restless and uneasy, and the same thought kept turning over
and over in his mind; “Get position and don’t get in traffic trouble
on the turns.”
Just before noon the horse was led haltingly into a van next to the stal-
lion barn, and there a concentrated barbiturate was injected into his
jugular. Forty-five seconds later there was a crash as the stallion col-
lapsed. His body was trucked immediately to Lexington, Kentucky,
where Dr. Thomas Swerczek, a professor of veterinary science at the
University of Kentucky, performed the necropsy. All of the horse’s vi-
tal organs were normal in size except for the heart.
“We were all shocked,” Swerczek said. “I’ve seen and done thou-
sands of autopsies on horses, and nothing I’d ever seen compared to it.
The heart of the average horse weighs about nine pounds. This was
almost twice the average size, and a third larger than any equine
heart I’d ever seen. And it wasn’t pathologically enlarged. All the
chambers and the valves were normal. It was just larger. I think it told
us why he was able to do what he did.”
In the late afternoon of Monday, October 2, 1989, as I headed my
car from the driveway of Arthur Hancock’s Stone Farm onto Win-
chester Road outside of Paris, Kentucky, I was seized by an impulse
as beckoning as the wind that strums through the trees there, min-
gling the scents of new grass and old history.
For reasons as obscure to me then as now, I felt compelled to see
Lawrence Robinson. For almost thirty years, until he suffered a
stroke in March of 1983, Robinson was the head caretaker of stal-
lions at Claiborne Farm. I had not seen him since his illness, but I
knew he still lived on the farm, in a small white frame house set on
a hill overlooking the lush stallion paddocks and the main stallion
"Pure Heart"
—William Nack from Sports Illustrated