Secretariat. William Nack

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СКАЧАТЬ was no way of telling, Robinson said, when Somethingroyal actually got pregnant that spring. But she did.

      That year, The Meadow sent Cicada to Bold Ruler as the second mare in the arrangement with Phipps, but she proved barren.

      In the summer of 1969, Penny Tweedy was in Saratoga to meet Phipps and Phipps’s trainer, Eddie Neloy, in the offices of the chairman of the board of trustees of the New York Racing Association, James Cox Brady. It was time to flip the coin.

      Each knew the consequences of winning the toss.

      Under the rules of the flip arrangement, the winner of the flip would automatically get first choice of the first pair of foals—the two born in 1969—either the Somethingroyal filly or the Hasty Matelda colt. The loser, while getting the second choice of the first pair, automatically would get the first choice of the second pair of foals. And the winner would get the second choice of the second pair.

      But there would be no second foal in the second pair. Somethingroyal was pregnant, but Cicada was barren.

      So neither party wanted to win. The winner would get only one of the three foals, the first choice of the first pair. The loser of the flip would get the second choice of the first pair but also the only foal to be born in 1970—the foal that Somethingroyal was carrying on that day in August.

      The coin sailed in the air. Ogden Phipps returned to his box seat and dourly told his son, Ogden Mills Phipps, “We won the toss.” And that was it. The Phippses took the filly foal from Somethingroyal. They called her The Bride; she couldn’t run a lick, finishing out of the money in four starts as a two-year-old before she was retired to the Phippses’ stud at Claiborne. The Meadow Stable got the Hasty Matelda colt, who was named Rising River because he was foaled when the river below The Meadow was flooding. He always had more problems than future.

      The Bride was weaned at Claiborne in the fall of 1969 and taken from her mother at Claiborne. On November 14, Somethingroyal was loaded on a van and returned across the Alleghenies to Doswell. She was almost seven months pregnant. She spent the winter that year at The Meadow, with the other broodmares, her belly growing larger and rounder until came that chilly night of March 29, 1970, when Southworth rang Gentry from the foaling barn in the field.

       CHAPTER 7

      The newborn Somethingroyal foal gained his legs just forty-five minutes after birth and began suckling when he was an hour and fifteen minutes old. He was well made, well bred, healthy, and hungry, and that made him as much a potential Kentucky Derby winner as any of the other 24,953 thoroughbreds born in America in 1970.

      The mare and the foal were turned loose together the following day in a confined one-acre paddock behind the foaling barn. So that the newborn foal does not injure himself trying to stay at her side, a mare is not given much room to run and roam about. After the foal had gained the strength to stay with her—four days later—the pair was turned out with other mares and their foals in a three-acre pasture near the broodmare barn. The routine of farm life began.

      For six weeks the mare and foal were pastured in the daytime, and returned at night to their single Stall 3 in the broodmare barn. The routine changed in mid-May, when groom Lewis Tillman began taking them outdoors in the early afternoon, leaving them out all night, and then returning them in the morning to Stall 3. The foal subsisted on Somethingroyal’s milk for the first thirty-five days of his life. Then Tillman began to supplement the youngster’s regimen with grain, preparing him for the day of weaning in October. Tillman would tie up the mare in the stall and give the colt small portions of crushed oats and sweet feed. He grew quickly as the summer passed. Christopher Chenery’s personal secretary of thirty-three years, Elizabeth Ham, visited the farm and looked at the foals. Miss Ham noted in her log, dated July 28, 1970:

      Ch. C Bold Ruler-Somethingroyal.

      Three white stockings—Well-made colt—Might be a little light under the knees—Stands well on pasterns—Good straight hind leg—Good shoulders and hindquarters—You would have to like him.

      Summer cooled into October. The daily rations of the Bold Ruler colt were boosted periodically, up to five and finally to six quarts of grain a day by the time he was separated from Somethingroyal on October 6, 1970. Like other newly weaned colts, the youngster howled and stomped around the stall and field, but that passed in a couple of days. Somethingroyal was far into pregnancy once again by then, this time carrying a foal by the Meadow stallion First Landing. The aging Imperatrice, the colt’s maternal grand-dam, had been bred for the last time in 1964, and since then had been pressed into service as baby-sitter for nervous, young, and uncertain mares, especially for broodmares visiting the farm. They would gather around her in a field, as if around a grandmother, within the apron and circumference of her calm. Chenery had bought her twenty-three years before, when she was nine in 1947, so while her grandson was romping around toward his yearling year, which would begin January 1, 1971, Imperatrice was already pushing thirty-three. She was aging visibly, three dozen ribs and elbows dressed up inside an old fur coat, but her eyes were clear. Everyone hoped she would live to reach the milestone age of thirty-five.

      Her chestnut grandson had begun to fill out into a striking if still pony-sized colt by the day of his weaning, and on October 11, Miss Ham was moved to note: “Three white feet—A lovely colt.” Lovely was twice underlined.

      In autumn it was time to name the weanlings, a tiresome process for many owners. Nine of ten names submitted to the stewards of the Jockey Club, which administers the naming of all thoroughbreds, are rejected for various reasons. Under the rules of the Jockey Club, a name cannot be that of a famous horse, such as Swaps; or advertise a trade name, such as Bromo-Seltzer; or be that of an illustrious or infamous person, such as Jesus Christ or Hitler; or duplicate the name of a horse having either raced or served in the stud during the last fifteen years, such as Virginia Delegate or Imperatrice; or have more than eighteen characters, including spaces and punctuation marks (Man o’ War, for instance, counts ten characters). Nor are names of living persons allowed unless they give their written consent, as have Shecky Greene, Pete Rose, and Chris Evert. Most names are rejected because they are identical to the names of existing horses.

      The Bold Ruler colt was named with a formidable assist from Miss Ham. The Meadow sent in a total of six names, two sets of three names each, for the colt. The first five were rejected.

      The first choice of the first set was Scepter, a name Penny Tweedy liked. The second name, suggested by Miss Ham, was Royal Line. The third was Mrs. Tweedy’s Something Special. The three were submitted and quickly rejected. So the owners were forced to try again. A second set of names was submitted for the Bold Ruler colt. Mrs. Tweedy suggested Games of Chance and Deo Volente, Latin for “God Willing.”

      Miss Ham suggested the third name on the second list. She had once been the personal secretary of Norman Hezekiah Davis, a banker and diplomat who served in a number of ambassadorial posts for the United States. Davis was the financial adviser for President Wilson at the Paris Peace Conference, and later an assistant secretary of the treasury and undersecretary of state under Wilson. Later still he was the chief American delegate to the disarmament conference in Geneva, Switzerland, the home of the League of Nations’ secretariat.

      Secretariat, Miss Ham thought, had a nice ring to it. It was submitted as the third and last name on the second list. The following January, after rejecting the first two names, the stewards advised The Meadow that the colt by Bold Ruler-Somethingroyal, by Princequillo—with the white star and the three white stockings, born on March 30, 1970—had been registered under the name of Secretariat.

      Secretariat grew out above the СКАЧАТЬ