Secretariat. William Nack

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СКАЧАТЬ history, American or foreign, that ever attempted to do anything so tremendous or came anywhere near Discovery to doing it so successfully,” wrote turf historian John Hervey.

      Vanderbilt, for his part, did not confine his activities to racing during his first years as an owner. He was buying mares at auction to build up breeding operations. The most crucial purchase he ever made at a sale occurred at the dispersal sale of W. Robertson Coe in 1935, when a mare named Sweep Out was led into the sales ring. The mare was in foal to Pompey, a fast and game horse who won the Futurity Stakes at Belmont Park in 1925.

      Vanderbilt bought her for $2000, and the following year she had a filly foal by Pompey that Vanderbilt named Outdone. In 1943, he bred Outdone to Discovery for the third time. She produced a good-looking filly foal in 1944. In fact, they were a grand bunch of foals at Sagamore that year, but Vanderbilt was not there to tend or race them. He had joined the navy in 1942 and was in command of a PT boat in the Pacific. While there, he instructed his farm manager and trainer to “go to the field and pick out twelve yearlings you like best, before they’re broken, and sell the rest.” Of the yearlings kept, none went on to any distinction either at the racetrack or in the stud. But of the twelve they sold, six eventually won major stakes races. One was Conniver, a daughter of Discovery, who was voted the leading handicap mare of the year in America in 1948. Another was the bay filly by Discovery from Outdone.

      Sidney Schupper, not a major owner, bought the filly for $2000 and named her Miss Disco. Schupper raced her from 1946, when she was a two-year-old, until 1950, when she was six. She was a strikingly handsome, racy-looking mare with a beautiful head—a prominent forehead and the face penciled like that of an Arabian. She carried herself elegantly and liked to get her work done in a hurry. She won ten of fifty-four races and $80,250 for Schupper. Nor did she shy away from tangling with the boys. Miss Disco won the Interboro Handicap as a four-year-old, whipping colts over three-quarters of a mile, a sprint. She also won the New Rochelle Handicap. As a three-year-old, Miss Disco won the Test Stakes at Saratoga, a race in which a number of good fillies have run, if not won, over the years.

      Miss Disco had speed, and she would transmit it to her many foals, one by one, especially the seal brown bay colt she foaled in 1954. Schupper did not own her then, not when she served in the stud.

      At the close of Miss Disco’s racing career, Bull Hancock saw the potential in her as a broodmare, so he bought her from Schupper for himself, privately, for an undisclosed price. Bull had the Vanderbiltbred mare shipped to Claiborne Farm to join the bands of other mares. That was in 1950, when a rebirth at Claiborne Farm was in the making, and when Gladys Phipps prevailed upon Bull to sell the mare and he gave in, since she was an old client and wanted to own Miss Disco so badly.

      Owned by Mrs. Phipps, the bay daughter of Discovery was bred to Nasrullah in 1951, and the following year she foaled a bay colt that Mrs. Phipps called Independence, a horse who would become one of the nation’s finest steeplechasers. Miss Disco was returned to Nasrullah in 1953, and in the spring of 1954 the whirlwind came, the horse for which all breeders tap their feet and wait.

      The evening of April 6, 1954, at Claiborne Farm was perhaps the most remarkable of any in the long history of the American turf, certainly in the annals of Claiborne.

      In the foaling barn set back off the road that winds through the farm, two foals were born that night thirty minutes apart. One was a bay son of Princequillo out of a mare called Knight’s Daughter. His name was Round Table, and by the time he retired as a racehorse at the end of 1959, running for Oklahoma oilman Travis Kerr, he had won forty-three of sixty-six races, been named America’s Horse of the Year in 1958, become regarded as the greatest grass runner in American history, and won more money than any horse in the history of the sport, $1,749,869.

      Down the row of stalls Miss Disco gave birth to her son of Nasrullah who, by the time he retired in 1958, had been voted America’s Horse of the Year in 1957, won twenty-three races and $764,204, and earned a reputation as a magnificent cripple—one of the fleetest runners the American turf had ever known, and one of the gamest and most generous of horses. He was Bold Ruler.

      Bold Ruler had a hernia as a foal, and he was so common looking that Hancock sequestered him in a distant paddock so that visitors to Claiborne Farm wouldn’t see him.

      “He was a very skinny foal,” Hancock would recall. “We had the devil’s own time trying to get him to look good, and I was never really pleased with his condition the whole time I had him. But he had a good disposition in many ways and he never missed an oat.”

      Bold Ruler suffered a painful accident as a yearling, almost cutting off his tongue in his stall one night, and the experience made him forever sensitive about his mouth. Nor was that all. One morning, while being broken under saddle, he fell and got tangled under a watering trough, almost breaking a leg while struggling to his feet. Somehow he survived all this, and made it to Hialeah Race Course in the winter of 1956. One of the first things he did was to begin ripping off quarter-mile sprints in 0:22 during morning workouts. Few quarter miles are run that fast in actual races.

      So Fitzsimmons had no trouble cranking up his speedball for his first start at Jamaica on April 9. He won it by three and a half lengths. “Easy score,” reads the official past performance charts.

      With that began the racing career of the fastest of all Nasrullah’s sons or daughters, a tall and leggy runner with a seal brown coat, phenomenal powers of acceleration, and a fiercely combative instinct that held him together when the oxygen was running low. Nothing ever seemed ready-made for him, nothing as easy as it might have been. There was always a measure of adversity to overcome, some trouble plaguing him. He raced three years, and at one time or another he was hounded by arthritis, by torn back muscles, and by what was called a “nerve condition” in his shoulder. A minor cardiac condition came and went during his three-year-old year. He developed splints—bony and sometimes painful growths on his legs—and later osselets, an arthritic condition in the ankle joint. He once wrenched an ankle. And throughout the last year he raced, when he won five of seven races and $209,994, he ran with an undetected two-and-a-half-inch bone sliver sticking into a leg tendon like a splinter. Bold Ruler carried 134 pounds in the mile-and-a-quarter Suburban Handicap of July 4, 1958—one of the epic duels of the turf—spotting the talented Clem 25 pounds. Bold Ruler did not take the lead early in the race, but then bounded past Clem after a half mile. Clem stalked him from there as they raced for the far turn. Banking for home, Bold Ruler was two on top. The crowd grew deafening as Clem moved up on Bold Ruler down the lane, charging on the outside and actually getting the lead at one point in the stretch. Most horses, losing such a lead, would have hung or quit. But jockey Eddie Arcaro dug in and Bold Ruler battled back, getting up just in time to win it by a nose.

      He was almost rheumatic in the way he walked from his stall in the morning, but he was capable of tremendous speed, of dazzling bursts. In 1957, his three-year-old year, after spending the winter at Hialeah and Gulfstream Park trading blows with Calumet Farm’s Gen. Duke—perhaps the fastest horse Calumet ever produced, though he died before he could prove it—Bold Ruler came north to New York for the Wood Memorial on April 20 at Jamaica. The close of the race was an eyepopper, something like the Suburban a year later, with Bold Ruler and Gallant Man in a desperate stretch fight. Bold Ruler actually lost the lead with about 200 yards to go, but he came back at Gallant Man to win it by the snip of a nose.

      He might have won the Kentucky Derby May 4, his next start, but Fitzsimmons and Arcaro decided that the colt should be restrained off the pacesetting Federal Hill, a horse with sharp early speed. They feared Federal Hill would drag Bold Ruler through a dizzying early pace and set it up for a stretch-running Gallant Man. Whether as a son of the temperamental Nasrullah or as a youngster whose tongue had almost been severed as a yearling, Bold Ruler clearly resented the tactic, fighting Arcaro’s exertions to restrain him. Iron Liege, Calumet’s second-string colt substituting for the injured Gen. Duke, won by a whisker over Gallant Man in СКАЧАТЬ