In their first workout in New York that year, Angle Light and Gold Bag beat Secretariat badly on a sloppy racetrack, running a half mile in 0:49. Secretariat ran in 0:501/5 with urging, not a sharp move. A fifth of a second is equal to a length, so Gold Bag and Angle Light beat him by six.
In mid-April, on a gray wet morning when the track was a mire, apprentice jockey Paul Feliciano, who worked under contract for Lucien, hopped aboard Secretariat for a routine gallop on the training track about a quarter mile away.
Feliciano had his feet out of the stirrups, dangling them at Secretariat’s side, when Laurin spotted him and raised his voice in warning.
“Put your feet in the irons!” he yelled. “Be careful with that horse! Don’t take no chances. He plays and he’ll drop you, I swear to God.”
Feliciano’s feet rose into the stirrups, which he was wearing too short, and someone dimly recalled Laurin’s calling to Feliciano, “Drop your irons.” What Laurin wanted Feliciano to do was lengthen his stirrups for surer balance.
The horses moved toward the training track, and Laurin turned to Dave Hoeffner, Henny’s son, and said, “Hey, you want to take a ride to the training track with me?” They slipped into Lucien’s station wagon.
Laurin, muttering and still peeved at Feliciano, told Hoeffner in the car, “I bet that horse throws this kid. He’s frisky and I bet he throws him. The kid’s not listening to what I’m saying.”
Secretariat, and the other horses in the set, strode through the stable area to the gap leading to the training track. They walked onto the muddy surface and began, one by one, to take off at a slow gallop. Feliciano, his reins loose, guided Secretariat near the outside rail and stood up in the saddle as the colt cantered through the long stretch toward the clocker’s shed, passed the shed, and began heading into the first bend. He heard a horse working to his left, on the rail, his hooves slapping and splashing at the mud as he drilled past on the rails.
“I heard the noise. It was a split-second thing. He stopped, propped and wheeled, and turned left and I knew what was going to happen. I think he knew I was going off, too, already slipping, because he turned around from under me. I landed on my face.”
Secretariat, riderless, his head and tail up and his reins flapping across his neck, took off clockwise around the racetrack, the wrong way, racing back toward the gap. Laurin saw him and, in an instant, was speeding out of the training track infield.
The car zipped through the tunnel and reentered the fence at the stable area. Laurin and Hoeffner saw Secretariat standing calmly at the gap by the training track, as if he were waiting for a taxi.
Dave Hoeffner climbed out from the car, walking with stealth toward Secretariat, who stood looking at him curiously. He reached out and grabbed the reins. Laurin immediately took off back to the barn, leaving Dave to walk Secretariat home alone. The colt walked like a prince for a quarter mile.
Paul Feliciano unscrewed his face from the mud at the seven-eighths pole and started walking around the oval toward the stable area.
He did not want to return to Barn 5, where Lucien Laurin was waiting for him. Paul Feliciano, twenty, born and raised on Union Street in the Park Slope section of Brooklyn, feared Laurin. Earlier, the headstrong Gold Bag had run off with him, as he had done with other riders, and Laurin had ranted at him. Paul had not forgotten the incident, so he had no illusions about what Lucien would say to him.
It was a ten-minute walk to the stable. By then Secretariat was standing in his stall, with blankets stacked up on his back. His back muscles were tied up so badly he couldn’t move. Secretariat wouldn’t leave the barn for almost two weeks.
“That son of a bitch ain’t worth a quarter!” Laurin howled. Paul arrived shortly after.
He would remember only bits and pieces of what was said. “You better listen to me right now, young man! You better pay attention when you’re on those horses! Wake up!” Then Feliciano saw the unmistakable sign of the Laurinian anger, the tipoff that he was in dead earnest. Lucien tilted his hat to one side as he walked away, setting it askew. Turning, Laurin said, “I want to see you in my office.”
In the screened-in porch, just at the top of the staircase by the office, Feliciano stood and listened for five minutes as Laurin reproached and scolded him. He told him at last, “You come by in the morning and pick up your contract and your check.”
“What could I do?” Paul said. “He stopped when that other horse came by and I lost my balance.”
It was no use.
Laurin had told him the same thing after Gold Bag had run away with him earlier, and the next day had acted as if nothing had happened. But this time, Feliciano thought, Laurin had raised such hell, seemed so angry, that he had to be dead serious. Feliciano took that home with him to his apartment in Elmont, despondent and confused. He believed Laurin had given him a good chance to ride all but the best horses. Laurin was known for helping young people start in the game. He certainly had been generous about giving Feliciano good mounts, live mounts, not bums. Now that was finished, and with it any good chance to make it as a jockey. Feliciano wondered where he would go.
The following morning, he walked under the shed of Barn 5, coming early to pick up his contract and look for another job. Lucien, arriving about seven, came into the shed telling Henny Hoeffner what exercise boy to ride on what horse. He looked at Paul, who was waiting for his contract, and said, “Put Paul on that horse to gallop.”
And that was the last Feliciano heard of it.
Jimmy Gaffney drove past the Meadow Stable office in April, waving to Henny Hoeffner from his Oldsmobile, saying hello and jumping from the car and moving quickly, as always, a reedy stick of a man with a hawkish set of eyes, a fine sculpted jaw, and a love for horses.
He was thirty-seven years old. He had just returned to work as a mutuel clerk selling five-dollar place and show tickets in the grandstand section at Aqueduct. The clerks had been on strike for three weeks, but that was over, and once again Gaffney was working his artistry behind the window.
Gaffney was also an exercise boy, riding and working horses in the mornings. He had worked for Lucien briefly in 1963, and they had liked each other. They had gone fishing on Lucien’s boat, and when Gaffney left him several months later, they had parted on friendly terms. Now, seven years later, Gaffney saw Henny as he drove past the Meadow Stable. He stopped to chat, and in the course of the conversation, Henny asked him if he was working. When he said no, Henny offered him a job as an exercise boy and Gaffney took it.
Gaffney joined the Meadow Stable at a time of heightened expectations and morale raised by Riva Ridge, who, on April 27, went to the front not long after the start of the Blue Grass Stakes, shook off one challenge deep in the stretch, and ran off to win by four. That was only the prelude.
Nine days later, in front of 130,564 people at Churchill Downs and millions more on nationwide television, Riva Ridge galloped to the front in the run past the stands the first time, running easily under Turcotte, repulsed three challenges by the gritty little Hold Your Peace, and won the ninety-eighth running of the Kentucky Derby by more than three.
Turcotte, wearing the blue and white silks of the Meadow Stable, had just won his first Kentucky Derby, and he fairly glided on the colt toward the grassy winner’s circle. There was Lucien Laurin beaming, a man on the brink of retirement who woke up suddenly one morning with Riva Ridge in his barn.
There was Penny Tweedy, wearing a white and blue polka-dot dress and a choker of pearls, pivoting through the crowd like a princess newly crowned, her gestures contained but emphatic, her voice husky and assured on television, her manner courteous yet exuberant. She was too good to be true, and the press promptly collapsed at her feet.
On to the Preakness