Saving Baby Page 10

  I felt that we had found the right trainers, too. My making friends at the track had paid off in the most important way.

  John and I returned home after five days in Florida, brimming with excitement. I was only sorry that Baby had had to be the guinea pig, bearing the brunt of my mistakes in choosing the two previous trainers. Scarlett was going to get the benefit of all the mistakes I had made with him.

  The two horses arrived home a month later, in the middle of March. While we waited with Pam for the trailer to arrive, she told me she had picked out a race for Baby on the twenty-sixth. It was a $5,000 claiming race. “Pam,” I said, “we can’t risk losing our horse.”

  In Thoroughbred racing, there are basically three types of races: stakes races, allowance races, and claiming races. The fastest horses run in stakes races, and those races are graded—levels I, II, and III, with I being the best. The races people see on television are level I stakes races. After stakes races come allowance races, also meant for very fast runners. At the bottom are claiming races. If a horse is entered into a claiming race, it means someone can claim him for the price set, so that as soon as the race starts, the horse belongs to the new owner. The point is to keep racing fair. An owner is not going to enter a stakes horse or an allowance-worthy horse into a low-level claiming race for an easy win because it would mean the risk of losing him to someone who claimed him.

  Baby had been in $50,000 claiming races, in which the quality of the horses overlapped with allowance level horses. He had even been in a couple of $10,000 claiming races, which I wasn’t too worried about because at the Detroit Race Course, people didn’t have that kind of money to shell out. But $5,000—that was getting into territory that could possibly take Baby away from me.

  “We have to talk this out,” Pam said in reply to my alarm. “You need to understand something. The point is to place your horse where it can win. Because that’s what racing is all about. If you want to sit in the stands and enter your horse and watch it come in last or in the middle of the pack, don’t pay me. Take your horse out of racing.”

  Then she said, “Scarlett’s not going to start there. But nobody knows anything about Scarlett. Everybody already knows this horse has raced eleven times—three times his first season and eight times his second—and has not won once. No one is going to claim him in the hope that he can deliver for them when he hasn’t yet delivered at all. The Detroit Race Course rarely has horses claimed, anyway. Some other tracks, there’s a lot of claiming that goes on. But not here.

  “The next thing you need to consider,” Pam said, “is your horse and what’s best for him. His first race of the year should feel like a morning romp to him. It should take nothing out of him physically. We’ll move him up—he’s not going to stay there—but let him have this easy, relaxing ride that’s going to take nothing out of him.

  “I have never told an owner that they’re going to win a race,” Pam continued. “But I’m telling you, this horse is probably going to win this race, and it’s going to be easy for him.”

  I let Pam convince me and calmed down, but it looked like it might be a moot point.

  The trailer arrived at the track late, well after dark, and as soon as the driver opened it and Pam saw where Baby and Scarlett had been standing, she became angry. I could hear her murmur to Jerry, “Let’s get them out of there.” They were positioned very close to a half dozen other horses, with their heads tied in such a way that they could barely move them. That significantly increased their risk of catching an infection from any of the others.

  Sure enough, both had runny noses and had to be put on antibiotics. Pam was livid. Baby had been fit and ready to go, and here he was coughing and dripping with mucus. He felt so bad he wouldn’t even eat. He was completely off his feed.

  “He might not be racing on the twenty-sixth, like we planned,” Pam said. “We’ll just have to see how they do.”

  A week later, Scarlett’s infection had worsened—she was coughing, dripping, and now had a gutteral pouch infection in addition to her respiratory infection, and it needed to be flushed out. But Baby, he was okay. He had responded to the antibiotics almost immediately. Maybe he had built up more immunity because he had been around other horses before.

  I worried over whether I should bring Scarlett home, but by that point Pam felt responsible for her. Also, my farm vet said Scarlett would get better treatment at the track because track vets flush out gutteral pouch infections all the time, whereas he did it only rarely. His was a general practice.

  As for Baby, Pam got top jockey Terry Houghton to ride him—a great sign. But the handicappers knew nothing other than that Baby was undergoing yet another big drop in class—from $10,000 claiming to $5,000. His odds to win were placed at twelve to one.

  By the time we had gotten from the stall to the track, however, things had changed. A groom came toward me and said, “Ma’am, they made your horse the favorite.”

  I figured he just didn’t know who our horse was. “Our horse is Reel Surprise,” I told him. “He’s not the favorite.”

  “No, ma’am, they made your horse the favorite,” he repeated.

  I went a little further and passed a security guard, who said to me, “Hey, bet the ninth horse in the sixth race. It’s going to win.”

  That was Baby. “Who told you that?” I asked.

  “My boss.”

  What had happened was that so many people at the Florida training facility sent up money to be bet on Baby after seeing him run down there that his odds of winning went way up. Devices at the track called pari-mutuel machines automatically change the odds depending on how much is bet on a particular horse, up until the bell goes off.

  Had John and I been bettors, we would have been angry that word had gotten out, because originally, for every dollar we bet, we would have gotten twelve back if Baby won. Now it was much less on the dollar, closer to one to one. But we never bet more than twenty dollars, so we didn’t care. We were just so excited about Baby’s chances.

  Finally, there we were sitting in the stands after I shook hands with the jockey and murmured to Baby, waiting for the race to begin. There was no announcement over the loudspeaker that “Reel Surprise is reluctant to load.” Then bam, out they came, and Baby led from that first second, winning by five full lengths.

  Talk about screaming and jumping up and down. I cannot adequately describe the feeling I had right then, the feeling of having a foal born into your arms, breathing into his nose to try to help him live, then four years later, watching him come out first, never falter, and fly across the finish line. The win picture was incredible. Baby was so far ahead there was not another horse in the frame. He won $1,920—not significant money but everything to us at that moment.

  If I was hooked before, even with the sinister goings-on that I had seen at the track, I was addicted now. I didn’t wear a big hat, but all the glamour of racing, of the Sport of Kings—it was something I was now truly part of. It felt like a drug that at first gave a buzz but had now fully kicked in. It was a sensation, more than a feeling. It was as if I had been lifted off the ground.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  We went rushing down to the winner’s circle—a huge semicircle area between the track and the grandstand, decorated with flowers and surrounded by low hedges. You can see me beaming in a photo taken with Baby, thumb up, while Baby, jockey astride him, looks right at me.

  He seemed pleased with himself, pumped. Normally, Thoroughbreds are completely spent after a race. They make a big, loopy turn and kind of jog slowly back, although some horses are so exhausted, they can’t even jog and have to lumber along. You can see their sides heaving. But not Baby. He projected an attitude of, “Does anybody want to go again?” He wasn’t even breathing hard.

  I was so proud of him. He had done what we both knew all along he could do. He was showing me—you do your part by making the right decisions on my behalf, and I’ll do mine. We’re a team. I knew I’d hold his win picture from that
race dearest to me. There’d be a lot more wins to come, but this was the first we accomplished together.

  There were more than twenty people with us—our daughters, their friends, our own friends and relatives—and John and I told them all to go on to Steak ’N Ale, where we’d be treating them to a victory dinner, and start without us. I wanted to spend as much time with Baby as I could.

  Pam and I rode back to Baby’s stall in her golf cart, and he was doing great, completely unstressed and with a lot of race still in him. There was no heat or swelling, either. It was exactly as Pam had promised—a walk in the park for Baby. I felt justified in having him there, completely confident that I was doing the right thing.

  Baby’s win photo. Pam is between me and the groom, and John is to my left. I couldn’t have been more excited.

  It was hard to tear myself away from him. I kept rubbing his mane and breathing into his nose. He remained alert the whole time, aware of all the comings and goings in his shedrow, where he had been moved from the dark barn annex once we had switched from Belker to Pam.

  It was all so different from the year before, when he had been losing too much weight. I had seen him drooping with exhaustion after finishing races the previous season, not even wanting to pick up his head. This race, by contrast, had been so easy for him that the jockey did not even use the whip in the final stretch run. Baby won by running at the speed that felt comfortable.

  Finally, we went to join everybody else for drinks and dinner. But after they all went home, we went back to Baby’s shedrow to see him one more time, even though the restaurant was closer to home than to the track. I had to say good night and tell him again how proud I was. After all, it was his effort we had been celebrating.

  He was totally relaxed when we arrived, having had his bath and ready to settle in for the night. “Oh, hi, I didn’t expect to see you again today,” his eyes said. His nose went right back to his hay. “Oh, a little extra scratching from Mom—great!”

  “I can’t wait to show you the win picture,” I whispered to him, hugging and kissing him until we finally left for the night. I had to smile to myself on the way out; the following morning, Frank the Greek would be bringing doughnuts to Baby’s stall.

  Baby’s next race was scheduled for April 7th. Now it was no longer a maiden race. It was going to be a nonwinner of two—all the horses would have already won their first race and were now going for their second win. That meant it would be more of a challenge.

  I wasn’t worried. At the top of his game, Baby now had a cocky confidence about him, an aggressiveness, which was a good thing, because to race well, a horse can’t be timid. He has to feel himself at the top of the pecking order so he won’t be shy to overtake another horse on the track. Horses recognize body language; in a herd, they know who eats first, who drinks first. In the artificial herd a race creates, a horse has to feel okay about going in front of another, about splitting two horses and running through the middle of them. He has to not give a damn—the jockey wants me to go, we’re going.

  Baby had never been a shrinking violet—there was always something pushy, even bullish, about him. He was almost the dominant horse in our small herd at home, even though he was one of the youngest. But now he had no kindness for horses at the track other than Scarlett, to whom he always gave a nod when he walked by. He would stand off to the side in his stall where he couldn’t be easily seen, and then, when someone would come by walking a horse, he would charge toward the stall door. People he was fine with, always, but if they were leading a horse, they now made a wide berth around his stall.

  It wasn’t just his great physical shape that made Baby so aggressive. Pam had him on a medicine called Equipoise. She said it kept a horse on his toes, kept him wanting to compete, and gave back some of the fire that’s lost when a horse is gelded. I didn’t know it was an anabolic steroid, and even if I did, I don’t know that it would have registered. This was well before baseball players began getting caught with anabolic steroids in their systems, before the public knew anything about their effects. Everybody at the track gave them to their horses. But in retrospect, it explains why Baby was so feisty with other horses that Pam had to restrain him from attacking them.

  I would see her hold him back rather frequently, as I would go with her when she hot-walked Baby after training. We had developed a comfort level with each other. She saw that I wasn’t just this crazy person who was always kissing my horse but that I also knew a lot about horses, their physiology and temperament.

  One day, after we had grown more friendly and were in her shedrow taking care of Baby and Scarlett, a man came by with a clipboard. “Who do we have, Pam?” he said, and she named Baby’s stall. He looked in, made a quick notation, and said, “Okay, see you.”

  “Who was that?” I asked.

  “That’s the Racing Commission vet,” Pam told me. I knew he was employed by the state of Michigan and that his purpose was to make sure the horses were sound and that there was integrity and fairness in racing. I had read it in a guidebook.

  “What does he want?” I said.

  “Oh, he was doing the prerace lameness exam,” Pam replied. I knew what a lameness exam was. We had had plenty done at home. The vet flexes various joints on the horse’s legs. He makes the horse go from a standstill to a jog. He feels the horse’s legs for swelling, heat, or pain.

  “But he didn’t do anything,” I replied.

  “Yeah, how ’bout that,” Pam said.

  “But shouldn’t he do something?” I pressed.

  “Well, you saw what he did,” Pam answered. Which was nothing. He hadn’t even flipped Baby’s lip and looked at his tattoo. The tattoo number, a Thoroughbred’s Jockey Club registration number, assures that the horse racing is the horse thought to be racing. For all the veterinarian knew, he wasn’t even checking off his clipboard for Baby.

  It was at that moment that it clicked for me that horses were out there running lame even though it was the responsibility of someone hired by the state, someone whose salary was paid by taxes, to keep lame horses off the track—not only for their safety and that of the jockeys riding them but also to insure that bettors were wagering on an even playing field. If some horses were lame and some were not, it meant people were wagering on races that were in essence fixed, even if unintentionally. It could not be a fair wager if some horses were running on unsound joints, tendons, and bones but nobody knew which horses were affected and which were not.

  I was very glad at that moment that Pam was not the kind of trainer who wanted a horse to save himself for the end of a race, to be forced by the jockey to hang back. If a horse liked to come out in front from the start, which was Baby’s style, that was fine with her. It meant Baby wouldn’t trip over a lame horse who broke down in the middle of a race while he was going thirty-five miles an hour just behind it.

  I also liked that Pam had advised me to take Baby home once he ran through all his conditions—nonwinner of two, nonwinner of three, and nonwinner of four. Just three more, in other words. “It gets too hard for a horse after that,” Pam advised. “The way to make money in racing and keep your horse sound is to run him through his conditions and then retire him.”

  I appreciated that Pam wasn’t money hungry, that she wasn’t interested in running a horse to death. I appreciated her knowledge, too. I enjoyed discussing with her the fact that there were four main entities in racing in the state of Michigan, all with potentially competing interests: the breeders, who wanted more of the money wagered set aside for them should a horse they bred win a race; the horse owners and trainers, who wanted purse money for themselves as well as a track maintained in top condition; the State Racing Commission, which wanted to run as many races with as many horses as possible, because it was paid a percentage of the money people wagered; and the owners of the track, who wanted as much money as they could get off the top of each wager while spending the least amount of money possible on maintaining the barn area and race track itself.<
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  * * *

  April 7th, the date of Baby’s second race, came quickly. It, too, was a claiming race, but for $10,000 instead of $5,000. Baby was moving back up in the ranks. Unfortunately, jockey Terry Houghton was riding a different horse that day, but our hopes still remained high.

  Baby came in second, however, beaten by only a nose. Having now had the taste of winning, I felt terribly disappointed, maybe more than at the end of any other race Baby had run. It was a race he should have won, and had Terry been available, we all believed, he would have. Terry had what it took to bring out the best in him.

  Baby’s third race of ’95, scheduled for May 5th, was to be an allowance race—a huge move up from the relatively cheap claiming races he had been running. He had a full month for Pam and Jerry to get more training into him, and they felt he was ready for the next class. That kept my hopes high. When your horse is slated for an allowance race, he’s in top company. Few horses ever reach that level.

  The bell rang, and Baby flew out of the gate, just as we all wanted. But then a horse started coming between him and the rail. Baby moved over and, in his forceful, aggressive fashion, bumped it, throwing the other horse off stride. The horse came up on Baby again, once more attempting to pass, and he repeated the action.

  “We’re in trouble,” Jerry remarked. Bumping was not allowed.

  But Baby won, and Jerry, along with the rest of us, rejoiced, although he did slip in soberly, “I hope there’s not an inquiry, because I think we could have a problem.”

  As we walked toward the winner’s circle, people in the stands were yelling horrible epithets: “You cheaters! Get that nag out of there! You won’t be in there very long.” It was awful. Imagine an adult calling your child names. Of course, they simply wanted the horse on whom they had bet money to win instead of Baby. But if I could have picked out whoever called Baby a nag, I would have run into the stands to engage them—in what way I don’t know. I was so angry that someone would refer to him that way.