Part 2 Excerpt from Ruffian: A Racetrack Romance
written by Bill Nack
I was Chicago-born, in a hospital not far from the great ivied haunt of Wrigley Field, but my parents soon joined the great post-War migration out of the city and we settled in Skokie, a village to the north, in ‘51. My sister Dee and I soon began mucking the stalls and grooming the inhabitants of a riding stable in nearby Morton Grove. We took aging livery horses down cindered riding trails that wended through the surrounding forests; by 1955, we had our own charger, a parade horse born with an all-white body and a mask-like black head that Dee called fittingly The Bandit, and I was riding in horse shows and passing my teens in the company of the world’s fanciest gaited saddle horses, from the legendary and undefeated Wing Commander to Bo Jangles, whose colored photos faced each other for years on my bedroom wall. They were hung in honor of that night in December 1955, when I saw the twelve-year-old Wing Commander’s final performance in that crumbling old amphitheater down by the Chicago stockyards; he and Bo Jangles went at each other in that hot arena minute by mounting minute and whip over spur, chillingly through the slow gait and the trot, until finally the crowds came bolting to their feet as the mane-flying Commander racked furiously past, his muscular legs pumping him right into history as the greatest five-gaited saddle horse of all time. The howls still sing in my ears.
This may not have been clear to me then, but the Commander’s ringing farewell to that world echoed my own goodbye to all that. As surpassingly lovely a creature as Wing Commander was, both in physique and in motion, he and his breed had already lost their emotional hold on me the summer before, on the afternoon I was hanging over the rail at Washington Park and this golden chestnut came walking past. He stopped in front of me and dropped his nose over the fence as if to say, “How do you do?” This was Swaps, three months after his Kentucky Derby victory over Nashua and just a week away from his rendezvous with Traffic Judge, one of his talented coevals, in the $100,000 American Derby. His rider, Bill Shoemaker, was on him. It was between races, and he and Bill were out for a stroll in the afternoon sun.
The horse I see in memory now looks tall and radiant. Swaps had a large, luminous brown eye, an exquisitely Aegean head and face that looked chiseled in cameo, and a warm, friendly breath that he held for a moment as your offered hand, cupped downward, rose and drew near him.
“You can touch him, he won’t bite,” said the Shoe. “He’s very kind.”
The horse sniffed the hand and settled, dropping his head for a pat. His jowl was large and soft. His demeanor was calm and poised. The Shoe nudged the rein and they turned and left. I was all of fourteen years and six months old, but that horse did own a piece of me from that hour on. A week later there he was again at old Washington Park, lunging through the homestretch like a panther in the gloaming, three in front, his powerful shoulders glinting in the light as he reached his forelegs far in front of him and galloped home in hand, beating Traffic Judge with ease and setting a new course record of 1:54 3/5.
He was magnificent. My dad rolled a stogie between his teeth, working his eyebrows like Groucho, up-down-up-down, as Swaps galloped under the wire. Turning to my mother, he said, “Wow! What a horse!”
That was all a young boy needed to hear. The clarity of that performance, the decisive finality that I had yearned for and missed in the world of horse shows ruled by fallible and sometimes idiotic judges, had won me to racing as a sport and to the memory of that horse forever. Eleven days after the American Derby, Swaps and Nashua met at Washington Park for the greatest match race run in America since Seabiscuit beat War Admiral at Pimlico in 1938. It was a national television spectacle, a mile and a quarter at full bore, and hundreds of turf writers from around the world descended on Chicago to cover it. The match race was on Wednesday and my father was at work, so I sat at home to suffer it in silence on a fifteen-inch Admiral television set. There were rumors all week that Swaps had had a recurrence of an old foot injury, it was oozing pus and he was lame on the morning of the race, but such news was of no solace after the two colts broke with a fury out of the gate and Eddie Arcaro on Nashua, racing on the inside, forced Swaps to the outside on the first turn, to the deeper, muddier, more tiring part of the track, prompted a blistering pace all the way around and then pulled away in the stretch, with Swaps physically wavering on that sore foot, to win by 6 lengths.
I burst out the front door of the house, got sick on a neighbor’s front yard tree, and then rode around the village for the next two hours, in an unfamiliar state akin to grief. This was not about the hapless, if beloved, Cubs dropping another two at Wrigley. This was not about the Go-Go White Sox failing again. This was not even about the Brooklyn Dodgers, our surrogate World Series team, losing yet another to the Yankees. This was a far more crushing blow and it had as much to do with loyalty and love as it had to do with pride and loss. That week, I found a photo of Swaps, patrician head in a magazine; in an act of defiant loyalty, the bitter defeat be damned, I cut it out and slipped it into the first of a dozen or so wallets I would own over the years: so many years and wallets that, in 1965, I had the photo undergo an emergency lamination in order to save it from disintegrating entirely until, alas, the last swatch of genuine leather was lifted from me in Madison Square Garden before a fight I was covering between Roberto Duran and Davey Moore, on June 16, 1983, and I never saw it again.
What I did bring with me from that darksome day in August, what was not picked from that pocket, was a deeply ingrained suspicion of match races and anxiety over the unseemly pressures of their invariably hot and insane pace, and beyond that the fears of loss and heartbreak that attended them.
Part 1 Excerpt from Ruffian: A Racetrack Romance
written by Bill Nack
Undefeated two-year-old Filly Champion of 1974
And then the names of all the big stakes that she had won: the Fashion, the Astoria, the Sorority, the Spinaway, the Triple Crown for three-year-old fillies at Belmont: the Acorn, the Mother Goose, the Coaching Club American Oaks. I crossed the infield and came to the fence along the backstretch where the pigeons, pecking at undigested kernels of oats dropped in the manure, had heard the colt and the filly hurtling towards them on the backstretch and burst upward in a flutter of wings, ten feet in the air and rising, as startled as flushed quails, and at that instant in July, thirty-one years ago, her world began to come apart, in splinters. So I turned and looked at the grandstand six hundred yards away and saw Ruffian flashing off the turn for home in the Fashion or the Acorn all her races looked so much alike. Vasquez leaning back with a long hold as she loped into the bridle on cruise control. I saw the way she came to the paddock for the Astoria, so clearly up to no good, moving into the walking ring as through a lobby bar, like some willowy hooker on the make, that black satin dress pulled tight around her full and nearly perfect derriere. And I saw her brilliant final quarter in the Spinaway Stakes at Saratoga that cloudy August afternoon, echoes from the ancient reaches of her pedigree, and heard and felt the electric exuberance of the clubhouse crowds, all those fancy breeders and owners, as it crackled like a blue spark up and down the rows of iron girders and the box seats.
Over there was LeRoy Jolley, the trainer of Foolish Pleasure, staring intently at Ruffian from that box seat at Belmont as she sped by him in the Oaks, on her way to the match race, and there was the way she showed up at Aqueduct the first time she ran at age three, turning the post parade into a kind of beauty pageant, looking more like a show horse than the thoroughbred that she was.
And let’s see, there was the first time that I’d ever heard her name, in that surprising telephone call that came the evening of May 22, 1974, as I labored to finish my biography of Secretariat, the 1973 Triple Crown winner. The caller was Newsday handicapper John Pricci, my friend and newspaper colleague, who had turned to a life of playing the horses and analyzing the races when his dreams of being a nightclub singer died in tone-deaf Queens. John rarely called me at home, but he had something to sing about that night.
“You remember Icecapade?” he asked.
“A gray horse, a very fast miler,” I said. “Wrote about him once, I think, when he won the Stuyvesant Handicap. Brilliant. Very well-bred. By Nearctic out of Shenanigans. The Whiteleys had her. David Whiteley, I think. Maybe Frank. Why? Did he die or something?”
Pricci laughed. “No, no,” he said. “I saw his half sister today, a two-year-old filly, in her first race. She wins by fifteen and ties the track record! In hand! Goin’ five and a half furlongs. I’m just callin’ to say you gotta see this filly!”
“What’s her name?”
“Ruffian. “
“Ruffian? Sounds like a colt.”
“She ain’t no colt,” John said. “She’s a freak. Unbelievable. I mean, when’s the last time you saw a two-year-old filly win by fifteen in her first start and equal the track record? Any two-year-old.”
“How fast she go?”
“Would you believe one-oh-three flat?” he said. A minute and three seconds.
“Who’s she by?”
“Reviewer. Remember him? One of those Phipps homebreds by Bold Ruler.”
I knew Reviewer all right. He could hum. Bold Ruler was among the greatest sires of the 20th century, an extremely fast racehorse who imparted his crackling speed to many of his progeny. Secretariat was by far the greatest of Bold Ruler’s many sons, a horse who could win from the sprints to the classic distances and beyond, and Reviewer was perceived as the second fastest horse the stallion ever sired, a horse who was endowed with world-class lick but whose career as a runner had been plagued by problems of unsoundness not unknown to branches of his mother’s tribe. Soft boned, Reviewer had suffered three physical breakdowns during his career and started only thirteen times in three years, winning nine, before they packed him off to stud at Claiborne Farm. There the usual bovine herd of Kentucky breeders, fairly drooling over a pedigree laced with the most coveted of all qualities the gene in which came bottled that mystical genie of speed would line up and give him ample opportunities to pass along both his surpassing athleticism and his Wedgwood fragility, until he broke down one day in 1977, while running in his paddock at Claiborne Farm, and two weeks later had to be destroyed.
The memory is vague but I think I saw Reviewer set a track record in the Nassau County Handicap at Belmont Park in 1970, nine furlongs in l:46 4/5, but all I can remember now is how homely he looked in the post parade, his Roman-nosed Bold Ruler head shaped like a brown jug. Oh, but how that beast could run!
“What does she look like?” I asked.
“She’s big, she’s black, and she’s beautiful,” John said. “What can I tell ya? You gotta see this filly to believe it. That’s all anybody could talk about. The place was, like, giddy. She goes to the lead out of the gate and opens five and then eight and ten and then fifteen. Vasquez never moved on her. Easy!”
It was growing late. I was beginning to feel anxious, vulnerable, edgy. I was mired in the middle of writing about Secretariat’s epochal thirty-one-length victory in the Belmont Stakes eleven months before, the greatest performance in the history of the sport by the most brilliant racehorse in history, and now the old crooner was telling me that a gorgeous black freak had emerged at Belmont Park, a rival to my hero, this fur coat draped in oyster pearls, and as insane and irrational as this may sound, I sensed at once this veil of resentment coming over me, of something quite as palpable as jealousy, and that disagreeable sensation did not begin to lift until I finally laid eyes on her, at that moment when she glided into the Belmont paddock for the Fashion Stakes, in the second start of her life, and even then it never wholly went away until the night of the burial on the Belmont infield, where you could see the jiggling headlights of the ambulance as it curved around the little lake and slowed as it approached the small band of mourners who had gathered around the grave, waiting for her there in silent grief.
