Part 5 Excerpt from Ruffian: A Racetrack Romance

written by Bill Nack

We had no way of knowing this then, no way anyone could know, but we had just begun to witness the dawning of the golden age of thoroughbred racing in America—a twelve-year stretch that saw the ascent of three Triple Crown winners, a raft of brilliant grass horses, sprinters and weight carriers, and some of the swiftest female runners of all time. Out of this veritable herd of talent, which began with Dark Mirage, the Big D and Dr. Fager and ended, in 1980, with Spectacular Bid, Genuine Risk and the coming of John Henry, the two most effulgent luminaries were Secretariat and Ruffian. And it was only by one extraordinary whorl of chance, a moment twisted by the bourbon in the eggnog, that I had a front row box to watch the whole glorious show. By mid-December of 1971, I had become Newsday’s resident expert in freshwater aquifers and sewers, in all their malodorous manifestations. I could discourse eloquently on secondary and tertiary treatment of sewage. I entertained whole dinner parties on the miracles of phosphorous and nitrogen removal, on the evils of septic tanks and saltwater intrusion. I drank with limnologists. Owl-eyed conservationists called me at wee hours. I became a wastewater raconteur. I flew a bumper sticker that read: “Save the Wetlands.” I had spent my university years assiduously preparing myself to be a Latin-American correspondent, studying its history and culture and learning to speak fluent Spanish, but the closest I had come to Chapultepec Park was Pepe’s Big Burrito in Queens.

And then, alas, at the perfect intersection of time and space, just as the only other world I really cared about was turning towards the sun, the fates intervened for me in ways never really expected. Late at the Newsday Christmas party with all of us far gone into the nog, I mounted the desk in the middle of the city room and summoned from memory the names of all ninety-seven Kentucky Derby winners—year by year—from Aristides’ inaugural victory in 1875 to Canonero II’s in 1971. I dismounted the table to boozy ripples of applause. The editor of Newsday, Dave Laventhol, at once sidled up next to me and asked, “Why do you know that?” I told him that racing was my passion, and I had memorized those names years before—the week after Swaps had run a mile in a blazing 1:33 2/5 in the 1956 Washington Park Handicap, a clocking that was only a fifth of a second off his own world record set that earlier summer. Laventhol knew I was restless and wanting to move on.

“Would you like to cover horse racing for us?” he asked. I thought I hadn’t heard him right and I leaned in. “Seriously,” he said. “We’re adding a Sunday paper in the spring and we’ll need someone to write about racing. It would be the perfect job for you.”

Five minutes later, I accepted the job.

I felt like Papillon as he leapt off that cliff.

Jupiter was just beginning to align with Mars. On April 10, 1972, a month after I first walked into that stable area at Belmont Park, a copper-colored two-year-old who had just arrived from Hialeah Race Course in Florida, a colt untested and unknown, worked for the first time in his life at Belmont Park, breezing a half-mile in :36 2/5s second and His name was Secretariat. Seven days later, on April 17, at Claiborne Farm in Kentucky, Shenanigans dropped her foal by Reviewer. They called her Ruffian. No horse in modern times would rise higher and faster and larger than Secretariat in 1972 and 1973, culminating in his record-shattering Triple Crown, when his mug appeared on the front of three national newsmagazines in one week—Time, Sports Illustrated and Newsweek—and now I was nearly finished telling that tale when John Pricci called to say that this whole new comet had just sailed into our ken at Belmont Park. And then he called a second time.

“Remember that filly I was telling you about, Ruffian? She’s in Wednesday. The Fashion Stakes.”