Native Dancer by John Eisenberg

Author:John Eisenberg [EISENBERG, JOHN]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780759528017
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Published: 2003-05-01T07:00:00+00:00

FOURTEEN

The sun shone on the Dancer’s Derby. The weather forecasters had called for storms and a sloppy track, but Saturday dawned clear and bright, with temperatures headed for the seventies, no ominous clouds in the distance, and a fast track assured. An existential handicapper might have suggested that the racing gods wanted the Grey Ghost illuminated in the ultimate spotlight on his most important day.

The colt had gobbled down four quarts of oats at 1 A.M. and slept in the straw until dawn, when Lester Murray brushed him and put fresh bandages on his legs. Bernie Everson took him to the track for a jog after Winfrey, Vanderbilt, and Kercheval arrived. Everson was wearing a cerise and white sweater over a cerise sports shirt with cerise diamonds on white sleeves—no doubt as to whom he worked for. The Dancer cantered up the backstretch and around the turn, accelerated for a quarter mile, then eased up at the finish line and jogged all the way around the track again. Just stretching his legs. Ever curious, he breezed with his head cocked at a detachment of National Guardsmen mustering in the infield.

Red Smith, the columnist for the New York Herald Tribune, was spending the morning at the barn, recording a minute-by-minute account of the Dancer’s day, as if it were destined to become racing history. According to the column, which ran the next day, Everson was on the shank as the horse cooled out, circling the barn with two blankets over him at first, then one. “Don’t let’s walk all the speed out of him,” Winfrey said after twenty minutes. The horse was put back in his stall, which was freshly laid with new straw. Murray tied his tail up, removed his bandages, and rubbed him down, and he snoozed upright—“like Joe Louis sleeping in the dressing room before a fight,” Smith wrote—before eating two more quarts of oats and snoozing again.

Someone brought in a copy of Saturday’s edition of the Morning Telegraph, which included long profiles of Winfrey and Vanderbilt. Winfrey glanced at the story, which noted that he had already been a trainer for twenty-one years even though he was just turning thirty-seven. “Why, I just started shaving,” he told Smith. His father, George Carey Winfrey, who had taught him so much, was back in New York, putting his horses through their morning works at Jamaica. The elder Winfrey had never run a horse in the Derby, so when a reporter asked Bill Winfrey if the hullabaloo of the past week had aged him, he knew better than to sound a jaded note. “Far from it; this is what I’ve waited for for 37 years,” Winfrey said.

Churchill Downs’s gates had opened at 8 A.M., and a great crowd was steadily building. The backside was overrun with grooms, fans, horsemen, reporters, and children, and a steady stream of visitors dropped by Barn 16 to offer best wishes. One, Smith wrote, was a man who had served in the South Pacific with Winfrey during World War II.

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