Читать книгу Secretariat - William Nack - Страница 14

By the morning of January 20, 1972, Secretariat had lived almost twenty-two months at The Meadow, but there was more than that behind him as the van rolled south past Richmond and more around him than the James River rushing toward Hampton Roads.

Behind him were the land, lineage, and ancestry stretching back through generations of blooded horses, rows of stone and creosote fencing, ships plunging the Atlantic, trains whistling through the Alleghenies, horsecars and vans rolling down the Catskills, straw beds, Gettysburg, the Aga Khan, gavels slamming, years of grass and snow on fields melting in a pool of a hundred Aprils draining into Stoner Creek, the ‘58 Suburban Handicap, and the passing of an old order.

Toward the end of August 1958, Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt headed for Sagamore Farm to see Discovery for the last time. Through the “Iron Horse,” Vanderbilt had become an enormously influential breeder. Miss Disco was not the only daughter of Discovery to bear an American Horse of the Year at the stud. Another daughter of Discovery, Geisha, foaled Native Dancer, Horse of the Year in 1954, winner of twenty-one of twenty-two starts. Discovery, twenty-seven years old that year, was debilitated in his old age when Vanderbilt came to see him, and on the morning of August 28, 1958, he was destroyed at Sagamore and buried in the farm’s horse cemetery on a small rise of ground near the training track.

A year later, on May 26, 1959, groom Snow Fields, Lawrence Robinson, and Bull Hancock were standing in the breeding shed at Claiborne Farm. Nasrullah was in his third year as the nation’s leading sire, the year his runners would earn $1,434,543 on American racetracks. Bold Ruler, his fastest son, was standing his first year at stud at Claiborne, a five-year-old who was just getting started. Nasrullah was only nineteen, and he was expected to stand at stud several more years. Princequillo was grazing in a paddock nearby.

Snow Fields cocked his ear and listened out the door of the shed.

“You hear that?” said Snow.

“Hear what?” said Bull.

“Nasrullah’s nickerin’, Mr. Arthur. Somethin’s wrong.”

“Hell, he’s nickered before. He nickers all the time!”

Robinson and Snow looked at each other, saying nothing for a moment, and finally Snow told Hancock that Nasrullah never nickered in the paddock.

“The only time you hear him nickering is when he comes to the breeding shed,” Snow said.

Snow and Larry Robinson walked quickly past the stallion barn and the row of hedges and to the lush acreage belonging to Nasrullah. He was still whinnying but he was sweating profusely, too, obviously in distress. Someone rushed off to call Dr. Floyd Sager. Sager arrived just in time to see Nasrullah walk away from the fence and topple over. Sager rushed to him—the most valuable stallion in America—but he was dead. Sager, seeing the autopsy report, could hardly believe it.

Nasrullah died after the left ventricle of his heart, one of the chambers through which blood passes in and out, burst like a tire with a blowout, torn to shreds. The heart kept pumping, but blood continued pouring from it and filling the thoracic cavity. He died by suffocation.

As Nasrullah lay dead in the field, Bold Ruler went wild, screaming and running up and down the wooden fence that ran between his paddock and Nasrullah’s. Fields was startled: “It was his daddy lyin’ there. It’s the only day I ever saw Bold Ruler fret. He was hollerin’ and pawin’ and runnin’ up and down that fence—Nasrullah, you see, never nickered, but he nickered that day.”

Bull Hancock’s decision to bring Nasrullah to America was perhaps the most momentous ever made in the history of American bloodstock, for the rugged bay stallion altered the breed in this country, infusing the domestic strains with the Nearco fire. The Nasrullahs were fast and they could stay the classic distances, like Bold Ruler and Nashua and Bald Eagle. He represented a milestone in financial investment in racing blooded horses, the beginning of big profits from what were only the most modest investments. An original $10,000 investment in a share of Nasrullah ultimately became worth about $700,000.

Now Nasrullah was dead at Claiborne in the paddock near the stallion barn. He was buried in a grave behind the farm office across from Kennedy Creek, along a gravel walkway that runs behind it shaded by a hedge ten feet high. He was the fifth horse buried there. The other headstones next to his, each a foot and a half high, were carved with the names of Claiborne stallions who had died before him:

SIR GALLAHAD III (1920–1949)

JOHNSTOWN (1936–1950)

GALLANT Fox (1927–1953)

BLENHEIM II (1927–1958)

And then:

NASRULLAH (1940–1959)

In 1964, the year Northern Dancer won the Derby and the Preakness but faded in the one-and-one-half-mile Belmont Stakes, the little bay Princequillo had a heart attack.

Princequillo was conceived in France, born in England, raised in Ireland, shipped to America as a yearling, and raced in claiming races as a juvenile. He won at the longest of American distances—the farther the better—and even then he stood for only $250 at Ellerslie, and Bull could not get enough mares to breed to him. Chenery’s Hill Prince helped change all that. Princequillo was the leading American sire in 1957, the year his offspring won $1,698,427—a world record until Bold Ruler broke it in 1966—and in 1958, they won $1,394,540. But his impact would be felt most forcefully as a broodmare sire—as the father of mares such as Somethingroyal. He first led the broodmare sire list in 1966, when his 191 daughters produced horses that won $2,007,184. Princequillo was the country’s leading broodmare sire for seven years, at last count, and he finally cracked the 1957 record of Mahmoud—whose daughters produced offspring winning $2,593,782—when his daughters’ offspring earned more than $2,700,000.

Princequillo declined after his heart attack, but he had the poise and sense to take it easy, never galloping or exerting himself in the paddock. There was nothing anyone could do for him but feed him and hope that death would come easy. He was relieved of stud duties that year.

The son of Prince Rose–Cosquilla died on July 18, at about nine o’clock at night, falling behind the hedge where the graves were lined up, and he was buried there with the others next to Nasrullah. His was the sixth headstone, and it, too, was carved in stone:

PRINCEQUILLO (1940–1964)

Snow Fields said he first began to sense something wrong with Bold Ruler in 1970. It was the smell of decay, and thinking it might be a dead rodent in Bold Ruler’s stall, he looked around for it, but found nothing.

A foulness hung about the horse, filled the stall, and eventually pervaded the barn, making Snow wince at the thought of it years later. Snow bathed the stall with a disinfectant more than once, dousing it more heavily each time, the corners and the sides, but to no avail. It was an odor that Snow Fields would never forget. It was the smell of death.

Dr. Walter Kaufman, the Claiborne Farm veterinarian, had given the horse antibiotics, and his distress cleared up, but it came back again.

There had been bleeding, just a trickle in the beginning, then a heavier flow. Bold Ruler had undergone tracheotomy to ease his breathing. A lighted tube had been inserted in his throat, but that exploration revealed only swollen and inflamed tissue, not the cause of it. Bold Ruler was losing weight steadily when it was decided, in early August, to van him to Lexington for exploratory surgery under general anesthesia.

It was a malignancy, deep in the nasal passage and hanging just below the brain. And when Dr. Irene Roeckel told Kaufman that it was not benign—Kaufman had been waiting, like a father, at the medical school for the biopsy report—he called Bull Hancock at Saratoga. Bull told the Phippses.

Gladys Phipps, nearing eighty-seven, ordered her horse destroyed if there were any signs of pain. Those close to the stable said she had a source at the farm, an unknown source, with whom she spoke regularly for reports on the condition of her cripple. They weren’t going to fool her, not at this late hour. In an effort to relieve and finally save the horse, she and her son Ogden agreed to send him to Auburn University to undergo a series of unusual and expensive cobalt treatments. Between the time x-rays were first taken and the time Bold Ruler arrived at Auburn, the tumor had grown to the size of a tennis ball and blocked nearly the whole of his nasal passage.

Eight times in eight weeks they bombarded him with cobalt, precision bombings since the tumor lay so near the brain, and each time he was knocked unconscious under general anesthesia. Robinson stayed with him, sleeping in a trailer at the university.

Bold Ruler’s condition improved substantially. He ate well, recovering quickly from the anesthesia, and comported himself with calm throughout his two-month stay at Auburn. By the end of the treatments, the mass had diminished in size, and the horse’s weight had increased by fifty pounds. Vanned back to Claiborne Farm in October with Robinson, Bold Ruler showed new life and new vigor, his spirits lifting. While there was hope he would continue to stand at stud, there was no definitive prognosis, only guarded opinions and speculation.

Gladys Phipps lived just long enough to learn that Bold Ruler had been returned to Claiborne and that growth of the mass had been retarded. A week after he returned to the farm, she died at the age of eighty-seven on her Long Island estate.

By the late spring of 1971, a full book of thirty-seven mares had been bred to Bold Ruler. The stallion had been behaving well since the cobalt treatments. Then his illness recurred sometime in June. Though he continued eating well, Bold Ruler started losing weight. X-rays taken in May had been clear, but now in June there was trouble again.

Eight months after Mrs. Phipps died, Miss Disco was destroyed “due to the infirmities of old age,” according to the farm files. The dam of Bold Ruler was twenty-seven.

Bold Ruler continued declining through June, his general health and vigor deteriorating. An entry in the farm veterinarian log, made June 25, noted: “The horse has lost considerable weight, and appears uneasy and unhappy. Considerable foul-smelling discharge from the nostrils. Horse not moving well. Appears stiff and sore.”

A piece of tissue, cut from the horse’s neck, was sent for a biopsy to the University of Kentucky. The report, dated July 8, read in part like an order for execution: “This tumor is the same as the first biopsy specimen but appears more anaplastic and malignant.”

Nothing more could be done. Bold Ruler grew pathetically ill. One side of his face became paralyzed. By then he had reigned seven years in succession as America’s leading sire, his performers having already earned $13,067,364. He was only seventeen years old, and he should have had several more years at stud.

Finally an orange van was rolled up to the office and parked along that gentle incline of a ramp where horses load and unload at Claiborne. Bold Ruler would be destroyed there and taken to Lexington for autopsy. The spot was near the office, the horse cemetery, and the breeding shed, beneath a large grove of trees.

Bull Hancock left almost immediately, as he always did when a horse was about to be put down, getting in his car and driving out along Kennedy Creek and out the stone gate. “Don’t even tell me about it,” Bull told Robinson, before leaving. “I don’t want to know anything. Just put him down and say no more to me.”

On July 12, 1971 (three weeks after Secretariat walked in caravan toward the training center from the yearling barn), Snow clipped a lead chain on Bold Ruler and, with Lawrence Robinson alongside, walked the horse from his stall. Leading him toward the van, they walked along the path past the breeding shed—and Bold Ruler raised his head and nickered.

“That rascal thinks he’s goin’ to the breeding shed,” Robinson told Snow.

They walked him to a gate leading to a grassy patch of land behind the shed and toward the gravel surface of the unloading area. They took Bold Ruler inside the van. There, Dr. Kaufman, with a hypodermic needle containing a heavy dose of a potent barbiturate, went into the van with the horse. Dr. Kaufman injected the drug into Bold Ruler’s jugular, emptying the syringe, and then jumped hurriedly from the side of the van. For the next several seconds they all stood there—Kaufman, Snow, Robinson, and the van driver—and waited. Forty-five seconds later there was a tremendous crash, rocking the van, and then silence.

He was buried behind the office with Princequillo and Nasrullah and all the others. The stone read:

BOLD RULER (1954–1971)

There were tributes, like that from thoroughbred breeding writer Leon Rasmussen, who wrote an obituary that opened: “The king is dead….”