Saving Baby Page 11

  Then the “Inquiry” sign came up and Jerry said, “Yup, we’re in trouble.”

  It was humiliating to have to leave the winner’s circle in front of the huge crowd. We went inside to watch the replay, a bird’s-eye view from above, and if the first bump Baby gave the other horse wasn’t bad enough, in the second, he really rammed his competition. I felt I had a sense of what he had been thinking, and although I had a sinking feeling we were going to be disqualified, I couldn’t help but let out a laugh. The move was vintage Baby, who couldn’t have cared less about the rules. “What do you think you’re doing?” he must have been saying to the other horse. “Hey, if you missed it the first time, here it is again. I’m winning this race. Didn’t you get the message?”

  So close, but not close enough. Baby lost his second race of 1995 by no more than a nose.

  “That’s it,” Jerry said upon seeing the second bump. “We lost it.” Baby then was officially disqualified, dropping from first place to fourth in a penalty.

  Scarlett, in the meantime, wasn’t running any races at all. She was still having constant problems with her cold, going off antibiotics as soon as she seemed better but then, three days back into training, dripping with copious mucus from her nose again and back on antibiotics, running another fever. Pam, at a loss, suggested I take her home and have my farm vet check her out, which at that point I was more than glad to do. In a stall, a horse can only stand and look out. But the best thing for a horse when she has a cold is to have her head down grazing. That lets the mucus drain rather than keep re-collecting in her respiratory tract.

  We were out a lot of money—we had been paying Pam thirty-five dollars a day for months to condition Scarlett to win a race—but her health came first.

  When it came time to load Scarlett into the trailer, Baby thought at first that it was going to be both of them. “Okay, where are we going?” But then he saw that it was just she was who leaving, and I could see he was wondering why I was taking Scarlett away from him; his expression became questioning. Till that point in the season, he could always just look out of his stall and see her right next door.

  They whinnied to each other as Scarlett’s trailer drove away, and then Baby became quiet once it was out of sight. His resignation hung in the silence.

  It turned out Scarlett had been on the wrong antibiotic all that time—a very expensive one prescribed by the track vet, who apparently had never taken a culture yet made a healthy profit from the costly medicine he sold us. Our vet at home did take a culture and in short order put Scarlett on a much cheaper antibiotic, identifying it as the one that would clear her up. She began improving right away. Poor Scarlett had gone suffering unnecessarily for months.

  I was glad to have her home, my piece of Secretariat, my curio cabinet valuable, away from the stress of the track. I was glad for her to be able to relax and graze, to settle in and let the medication do what it needed to do. I was also happy to be the one dispensing it and watching the discharge lessen.

  And Scarlett was glad to be home. I let her get close to Pat right away. I figured that Pat’s immune system wasn’t under stress—she wasn’t being ridden or asked to do anything—and that even if she did become infected, we knew which antibiotic to give her and she’d get better right away. But Pat didn’t get sick. She just got close to her daughter, and the two of them, along with Beauty and Pumpkin, enjoyed herding together.

  In the meantime, feeling thrown by Baby’s disqualification but still having great hopes for him, we waited eagerly for his next race, which was going to occur on May 29th. It, too, was an allowance race, and the newspaper picked Baby to win. Again, however, we didn’t get Terry—his agent was obligated to put him on a horse named I’ll Run for Terry—and Baby ended up coming in second by two lengths. The jockey allowed him to drift out a bit on the turn, losing ground.

  On June 18th, Baby entered his fourth race of the season, which was his third allowance race for nonwinners of two. Despite the fact that he “placed” in his previous race rather than won, the Daily Racing Form still said he would come in first, as did the racing program, a glossy brochure sold to serious bettors. Then, too, June 18th was John’s forty-ninth birthday, which we took as a sign. Baby would be giving John a wonderful gift.

  How great this was going to be! Back in the middle of the Belker season, a reporter for the Detroit Free Press, in a play on Baby’s racing name, wrote that it would be a “real surprise” if he won. It hurt to see it. Now here we were with two predictions in black and white that he would come out in front. “How do you like that?” I told the other reporter in my head.

  But again he came in second, by just a half a length.

  We were now five races into the season, feeling extremely frustrated. We were so close. And it was still the general feeling at the track that Baby was a horse who should be raced, a runner and a winner. The problem, time and again, seemed to be faulty communication by the jockeys. Baby was like a difficult bull, and other than Terry, jockeys just couldn’t control him. He would run right up to the rear of the horse in front of him, his nose literally in its behind, before the jockey could pull him back and coax him to run around the horse rather than try to go through it. And pulling a horse up at racing speed and asking him to turn to the side a bit and then regain his top speed—horses just aren’t able to do that. Even so, Baby would come within inches of a win; he was that good. But it wasn’t quite enough. If only jockeys other than Terry could keep him out of traffic trouble.

  I knew Baby could be dropped into a lower level race, if need be—a high-level claiming race rather than an allowance race. I didn’t like the idea of it, but it did provide a potential solution.

  The morning after that fifth race, however, Pam said, “we’ve got a problem. His tendon is swollen.” The tendons, fibrous cords in a horse’s legs, attach muscle to bone. Like rubber bands, they have to be able to stretch and then snap back with each step. But when there’s swelling, a tendon doesn’t work right.

  “We can inject him and go on,” Jerry said, “or you can take him home and rest him and let it heal.”

  I didn’t know what injecting Baby meant, but it didn’t sound like a good idea. “It would probably get worse if we keep going, right?” I asked the private track vet, Larry Wales, who was standing with us.

  “Yes,” Larry said. “But it isn’t very bad. It’s not even bowed out. Most people would inject and keep going, although taking him home is also an option.”

  I ordered an ultrasound and learned it was tendinitis. Larry explained that Baby had only about 30 percent damage there, with a little too much stretching having occurred and a concomitant loss of some necessary tautness. But I had already made the decision to bring Baby home. I wanted him to heal naturally, not have his pain masked with a drug, get worse, and then heal after the season. I would bring him back next year.

  Pam supported my decision. Although Jerry would have kept racing Baby, she was clear that I saw Baby as a pet, not an investment. And she herself wasn’t driven by money, trying to talk me out of doing what I needed to do.

  Baby came home on June 23rd. Scarlett pranced a floating trot for him as he came down toward the barn from the trailer. “Look, I don’t have a cold anymore,” she was telling him, and he honked to let her know how pleased he was at the news. All of the horses were bonded, but these two bonded in a way of their own.

  Our farm vet confirmed that Baby’s injury had a good prognosis without any major tearing or core lesions, and it felt wonderful to have him safe and sound in our backyard again, wonderful to know that he’d be there through summer and fall, then at Christmas and during the winter, rolling in snow. I was happy, too, that he was together with Scarlett and the others. Competing with my drive to win was my drive to nurture him, to see him relaxed and enjoying the company of the other horses in sight of my kitchen window. It was as if I had two gears—“win” and “love.” But they were not like the gears of a car. In a car, you can’t be in “drive�
�� and “reverse” at the same time, whereas to a certain degree I was pulled in opposite directions when it came to Baby. At the track, as much as my mind was on the race, a part of me did rue that he was missing the idyllic life he was entitled to at home. And when he was at home, while my heart would burst at his simply enjoying life as a horse, running around the pasture and grazing contentedly, I couldn’t help but wonder about his prospects and told myself that was okay because he truly did seem happy on the racecourse.

  So although I was glad to see Baby and Scarlett standing head to tail so they could shoo the summer flies from each other’s face, while they loved to stand next to each other like that and fall into a kind of doze together, I knew the gears were shifting again. I had already started thinking that we were in an excellent position for next year. We had gone from coming in last in claiming races with Belker to almost winning allowance races. With the right jockey and no infections, we were going to see more wins. Scarlett would even be able to go back that summer if her health was deemed good enough.

  We also were feeling good because just days before Baby arrived home we had received the news that Pat was in foal. Toward the end of May, we sent her to be bred to Baby’s sire, Reel on Reel. Because Baby had won his first race and was losing others by very little, we felt we had a recipe for success and wanted another “bake.” I suppose that at the end of the day, there was no doubt about it—our horses’ wonderful life at home notwithstanding, we were caught up with racing fever. “Win” was a mighty powerful gear.

  Some people had told me to wait till late January or February to breed Pat. Because all Thoroughbreds are given a universal birthday of January 1st, they said, it was important to have a foal born as early in the year as possible. A three-year-old racer born in January is going to have an advantage over a three-year-old born months later in the spring.

  But the only way to get Pat into heat in the winter would have been to install a bright light in her stall in late fall or early winter to trick her body. Mares come into heat in the spring because of sunlight. It insures that when the foal is born the next spring, the grass will be green and lush with nutrients. Mother and foal will eat well, giving the newborn the best chance of starting life out healthy. I wanted Pat and her next foal to have that natural experience—the ability to eat rich grass and become strong before the cold weather set in.

  It wasn’t too many weeks after Pat came into foal and Baby came home that it was time for Scarlett to go back to the track. She had been recuperating for almost two months by then and was ready to start over with another sixty days of training so she could run some races in late summer and fall. But once she was back at the track, we learned she had a disease called azoturia, or tying-up syndrome. It’s a condition, not all that rare, in which a horse’s large muscles cramp horribly after exercise. In some cases it gets so bad the animal dies from it. Think of a bad charley horse, but instead of solely in the leg, it’s in a horse’s back, pelvic, and massive hind limb muscles.

  I think it only started showing then because Pam had begun giving Scarlett Lasix to enhance her performance during timed works. One of the possible triggers of tying-up syndrome is an electrolyte imbalance, and Lasix affects electrolyte balance, too. Scarlett probably was always susceptible, but the drug pushed her over the edge.

  Racing rules specify that a horse is supposed to have Lasix only if she bleeds through the nose while running. But almost all the horses are given the drug. No one ever put a scope down Scarlett’s throat to verify that she bled. I certainly never saw any blood come out of her nose.

  We were able to keep her out of pain with muscle relaxants and analgesics, but clearing the tying-up syndrome was another story. We tried lots of treatments, none of which helped, and I was calling all over the country to see if anyone knew of a possible solution. Finally, a veterinarian at Cornell University, a Dr. Beth Valentine, said I had to take Scarlett off all forms of her usual carbohydrates and put her on alfalfa pellets with three cups of vegetable oil a day. She also advised me that a horse like Scarlett should never have a day off. She was always going to need to go out and do something so her muscle enzymes would metabolize properly.

  To my amazement, not to mention the amazement of other vets on the case who had been more than skeptical, Dr. Valentine’s instructions worked. Scarlett even ran three races in October and November. But she was still not completely herself—you could see she was a little stiff—and the best she did was to come in second in a race in November. That race, as opposed to the other two, was a full mile, so it was clear that she truly was a classic distance runner. But she was going to need more time to adjust to the new diet and come back to herself. The track would be closing for the season in a couple of weeks, and there were no more races for fillies, anyway. We decided to bring her home to regain her strength.

  My time with Scarlett alone at the track had been somewhat different from my time there with just Baby. I visited her every single day, just as I did him. But she didn’t whinny at the sound of my footsteps the way Baby did, although she did always pop her head out of her stall when I called out to her from the entrance to the shedrow. She never became aggressive as Baby did, either, although of course, Baby had been put on steroids.

  Unlike Baby, Scarlett liked to snooze standing up rather than lying down all stretched out. And whereas Baby always wanted me to put my hands straight out in front of me, palms stretched and thumbs touching, so he could rub his head against them, Scarlett enjoyed pushing her face all the way down the side of my body, from my shoulder to my thigh, then pushing all the way back up, rubbing her entire forehead, down to her nostrils, as she went. She waited for me to brace myself by holding onto the bars of the stall door before she started moving because she knew that if I didn’t hold on, she’d knock me over. Up and down, up and down she’d go, even rubbing her eyes against me in the process.

  A lot of people don’t let their horses do that. They say never to let a horse invade your space. But I didn’t mind the closeness. I liked it, actually. Scarlett never tried to bite or step on me. I was happy to be her rubbing post.

  Along with letting her rub, I would brush her, or perhaps take a comb through her mane. Sometimes Pam, who always kept Scarlett’s coat gleaming, would have the hair on her mane braided up with maize-colored yarn. Other times she’d braid her hair tightly overnight and then take out the braids the next morning, letting the curls adorn Scarlett’s neck. She looked so pretty because she had a gorgeous neck, not too long or short. Everything about Scarlett, in fact, was conformationally perfect. If anyone ever commented, “This is what a Thoroughbred horse should look like,” they’d be pointing at Scarlett.

  The same couldn’t be said of Baby. Stout, compact, and sturdy, with a shorter neck and a broader chest, he looked more ready for the football field than the track. But he felt bonded to me in a way Scarlett didn’t. She, too, was born into my arms, and I was so thrilled to have in her my Secretariat souvenir. I loved to hug and kiss her. But for Baby, when I was there, the whole world went away. He’d rather be with me than another horse. Nothing could distract his attention. Scarlett was more independent, aloof. It wasn’t that she didn’t love me. She knew I’d swat a fly off her, do anything for her. But she didn’t need me in the same way. If another horse walked by, she’d turn her attention away. I guess you could say Baby was a mama’s boy, tough as he was, and that endeared him to me on a different level.

  Shortly before we packed up Scarlett’s belongings for the trip home, Stan Wyle came over to talk to me. I knew him in two ways: as the president of the HBPA board, representing Michigan’s 1,200 owners and trainers, and as the owner of Reel on Reel, the sire of Baby and the foal with whom Pat was pregnant.

  “Are you getting that respiratory drug from Canada?” he asked.

  “No,” I said. I didn’t know what he was talking about.

  He came very close and said conspiratorially, “Well, you need to get it. It helps them breathe better during the
race, and the State Racing Commission lab doesn’t know how to test for it. This guy comes around and takes your order, and then he makes the drug run to Canada.”

  I knew this was illegal, but Wyle wasn’t somebody you argued with. I just said, “Okay, thank you. We don’t really need it.”

  “Yes, you do,” he said. “You should be using it.” It was all for him, I realized. If his Reel on Reel progeny did well, it made his stallion look good. He could charge a higher stud fee. It gave me a sinking feeling that the president of the HBPA, whose job it was to make sure that things went as they were supposed to, was advising me to give my horses an illegal drug.

  Still, I felt the year ended on a good note. Scarlett had shown the promise Jerry and Pam thought she would and was going to have all winter to become acclimated to her new diet. Baby was going to come back healed from his tendinitis and ready to tear up the track.

  Our farm vet suggested that to build up Baby’s muscles, which would protect his tendons, he start a regimen of swimming. There was an indoor pool for horses just two miles from our house, and Pam thought sending Baby there was a good idea because he’d return to the track with his muscles already built up some.

  So starting on January 18th, 1996, Baby went into the pool every day. There was a ramp with a gradual slope that he’d walk down and then, holding his head just above the water, he’d start swimming. It comes naturally to horses, just like it does to dogs. Each time he came around, his eyes would widen as he looked at me, as if to say, “What am I doing?” He looked so adorable, like a great big dog paddling.

  By that point, his tendinitis was essentially healed. I had been told he could start race training after four months at home, but this was now seven months later, and he wouldn’t be starting with Pam again until March—fully nine months after his injury. I didn’t send him or Scarlett to Florida that winter because I wanted to make extra sure about the tendon, and I wanted Scarlett to heal from a deep-cut biopsy that Dr. Valentine had ordered to make sure she really was on the right diet to treat her condition. Pam was okay with that because the first race wasn’t going to occur until the middle of April, unlike last year, when the meet began in March.