Secretariat. William Nack

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СКАЧАТЬ clocking in the Belmont Stakes—clipping two-fifths of a second off War Admiral’s stakes record of 2:28^3/5 for the mile and a half—Princequillo ran the best race in his career. He defeated Bolingbroke, the great long distancer, beating him going a mile and five-eighths.

      Princequillo then hooked the older Bolingbroke and Shut Out, winner of the 1942 Kentucky Derby, at a mile and a quarter in the Saratoga Handicap. Princequillo won it. The farther they ran, the better he liked it. He would leave the gate and simply roll on. A week after the Saratoga Handicap, he raced Bolingbroke over a mile and three-quarters, thus far the longest race of his career, and he won a head-bobbing stretch duel in record time. He closed out his year with a triumph in one of the longest races in America, the two-mile Jockey Club Gold Cup at Belmont Park.

      Princequillo, by acclaim, was the best cup horse—that is, the best long-distance runner—in America, beating the most accomplished routers consistently. He won two more races in 1944, when he was a four-year-old, then pulled up lame at Saratoga. He won $96,550 and twelve of thirty-three races over three years.

      Arthur B. Hancock, Sr., liked Princequillo’s racing record—his ability to stay a distance of ground—and he liked his pedigree. So he installed Princequillo at Ellerslie in 1945. There were no breeders leaping over one another to get their mares to Princequillo. He may have been the best long-distance runner in America, but he was not a fashionable stallion like Count Fleet or War Admiral. Princequillo was held in such uncertain esteem, in fact, that Hancock was unable to get enough mares to breed to him, the thirty-five or so mares needed to fill his book. But those who did decide to send him mares at Ellerslie made the difference. One was William Woodward. Another was Christopher T. Chenery.

       CHAPTER 5

      Princequillo was bred to Chenery’s Hildene in the spring of 1946, a year that ushered in a quick succession of landmark years in the fortunes of Hancock and Chenery and in the course of breeding thoroughbreds in America.

      In 1946, the Hancocks sold Ellerslie, which had been losing money and declining as a stud farm for years, and consolidated all their thoroughbred holdings at Claiborne. Among the horses dispatched from Charlottesville to Paris was Princequillo. For him it was a long journey’s end. And Hildene, one of the last of the hundreds of mares bred at Ellerslie since the days of Richard Hancock’s Eolus, was returned to The Meadow in foal. The following year, in the spring of 1947, Hildene gave birth to a bay son of Princequillo. Chenery named him Hill Prince.

      The racing fortunes of the Chenery horses were rising. More pivotally, 1947 was also the year that Chenery attended a dispersal sale of the estate of W. A. La Boyteaux at Saratoga and decided to join the bidding when the mare, Imperatrice, winner of the 1941 Test Stakes, was led into the sales ring. It was perhaps the most important decision of Chenery’s extraordinary career as a breeder.

      Imperatrice was not much to look at, but she liked to hear her feet rattle. She was a big-barreled, short-legged, floppy-eared bay mare with a stirring gust of speed. Sprinting was her trump, but she had a depth of quality about her that almost carried her home in the 1941 Beldame Stakes, an important middle-distance race at Aqueduct. She finished a close second.

      At her side in 1947 was a colt by the stallion Piping Rock, and the gallery at the sale was advised that she was in foal to him again. So Chenery, seeing a once-speedy race mare with a Piping Rock foal beside her and another advertised within, jumped into the bidding and moved it upward, finally upward to $30,000. The gavel slammed down, and they were his. Then down to The Meadow went Imperatrice. Later in the year Dr. William Caslick, a veterinarian, made his regular rounds of the Chenery broodmares to pronounce them either in or not in foal.

      Chenery happened to be at The Meadow that day. Caslick moved from mare to mare, coming finally to the stall of Imperatrice. He walked inside and began the examination, inserting his hand in the mare’s rectum and reaching far inside, to where he could feel the outside of the uterine wall through the intestines. He was feeling for the fetus.

      Moments passed. Caslick probed carefully for the signs of life. More time passed. Chenery, standing by Howard Gentry, wondered out loud what was taking so long.

      “That mare’s empty,” Caslick finally said.

      Chenery plopped down on a bale of straw: “Thirty thousand dollars, and empty!”

      Imperatrice did not stay empty long.

      In the autumn of the year, another kind of milestone was reached. Hundreds of men and women drove or walked the twelve miles from Lexington to Faraway Farm, filing through the gates until all of them, some horsemen and some not, gathered near the grave and listened as the mayor of Lexington gave a speech, and the head of the American Horse and Mule Association, Ira Drymon, delivered a eulogy. Bull Hancock was among the breeders there.

      The mood was reverential. Man o’ War was lying in an oak coffin at the edge of an open grave. The top of the coffin was open. Man o’ War had died with an erection, and someone had discreetly placed a black cloth or blanket over it. He had suffered a series of heart attacks within a forty-eight-hour period, getting to his feet repeatedly until the last one put him down for good. He was thirty then, extremely old for a horse. The crowd listened as the eulogy ended, watched as the coffin was closed. They had paid the ultimate tribute to a racehorse—giving him a funeral fit for a prince of the blood, celebrating the cherished belief in Kentucky that Man o’ War was the greatest horse America had ever produced.

      In the winter of 1948, trainer Jimmy Jones saddled Citation for the Ground Hog Course at Hialeah Racetrack in Florida, where many top three-year-olds would begin their campaigning for the Triple Crown. On May 1, he won the Kentucky Derby by three and a half, beating a stablemate, Coaltown. Two weeks later he won the Preakness Stakes at Pimlico by five and a half lengths. On June 12, at Belmont Park on Long Island, he raced to an eight-length victory in the Belmont Stakes. Thus Citation became the eighth Triple Crown winner in American turf history and earned a reputation as one of the greatest runners of all time.

      In 1949, the winnings of the Chenery horses soared to $141,005, with Hill Prince winning the World’s Playground Stakes at Atlantic City, worth $11,275, and the Cowdin Stakes at Belmont Park under Eddie Arcaro. Hill Prince was voted the leading two-year-old in America. The value of Princequillo’s stud services started climbing. At Claiborne Farm, meanwhile, Bull Hancock was engineering the masterstroke in modern American breeding, the pièce de résistance.

      Toward the end of 1949, sometime in the fall of the year, Dr. Eslie Asbury, a Cincinnati surgeon, received a telephone call from Hancock, his long-time friend and counselor on thoroughbred breeding. The call concerned Nasrullah, the Irish stallion that Hancock wanted to import to America. He had tried twice without success to purchase him. Foaled in 1940 at the Aga Khan’s Sheshoon Stud in Ireland, Nasrullah was a son of the unbeaten Nearco, the greatest racehorse of his day in Europe. Nasrullah was a stubborn if gifted animal, a rogue at the barrier, a rogue sometimes in the morning. If the spirit did not move him to gallop on the racetrack, which was often, an umbrella opened behind him usually did; that became one of the techniques used to make him run at Newmarket. He was a champion two-year-old in England, and Hancock believed the horse was unlucky when he finished third in the 1943 Epsom Derby. Bull Hancock liked him.

      In fact, Hancock tried to buy him once in 1948 for £100,000 in partnership with Captain Harry F. Guggenheim, the copper baron, and banker Woodward, but the pound was devalued and the deal caved in with it.

      And now a year later Hancock had tried again and finally succeeded in getting him. Nasrullah, at last, was coming to America.

      “We have the horse,” Hancock said СКАЧАТЬ