Saving Baby (13 page)

I had made a decision a few weeks earlier that I would check out the Florida facility for myself before training got underway in earnest and pull Baby and Scarlett out of there if I did not like what I found. So two days later I flew down, and I was overjoyed to see the place. It was immaculate, with a well-maintained track and hardly anyone there. It was as if Baby and Scarlett had been enrolled in private school. They were turned out when I arrived, and when I clapped, the two of them came running, first breathing into my nose over the fence, then letting me breathe into theirs. Baby out-jostled Scarlett to be nearer to me, pushing her out of the way with his shoulder. “No, she's
my
mother.”

Baby (left) and Scarlett came running as soon as I clapped.

Of course I had treats with me that I had bought at a farm stand on the way from the airport. It helped me immensely that my coming so soon might help them to think I was only thirteen minutes away from them by car, as if they were no farther than the Detroit Race Course.

Both Pam and Jerry showed me around without any defensiveness, and Jerry said the two horses had traveled very well. “We saw ‘Surpriser' come down the ramp,” he told me, “and I thought, Boy, he's lookin'
good
. Then Scarlett came down—“

“I grabbed Jerry's arm,” Pam said, interrupting him, “and told him, ‘Jerry, there's our Sire Stakes horse.'”

The Sire Stakes is the most important race in Michigan, with the largest purse—$200,000.

“She is just incredibly put together,” Pam went on. “She is a champion. You can see it in the way she walks, the way she moves. He's a good horse, but she's a classic distance horse. That's her conformation.”

I was caught off guard. I don't know that I loved Scarlett any less than Baby, but with Baby the bond was so strong. There was just something between us—he truly acted like my little boy, my rough-and-tumble boy with his shirttails untucked—so I was surprised to see anybody passing him by to lavish more attention on another horse.

“We're going to keep the two of them in their own pasture for now,” Pam said, pointing to a spot close by. The pasture was beautiful and even had automatic waterers. A horse could push on a lever when it was thirsty, and the water would come out into a big dish. That way, the water was always fresh. No standing water in dirty troughs.

The upkeep in the shedrows was immaculate, too. And the stalls themselves were huge, and very deeply bedded.

During the short time I was there, I could tell Baby and Scarlett were relaxed—and proud to show me what they could do. They were anxious to get out on the track. There was no dragging them.

Outside of practice times, I lavished as much attention on them as possible, even picking grass for them. They could chew grass of their own choosing in the pasture, but I would pull up grass right outside the fence, and they would eat it from my hands. They preferred it that way, standing there and waiting for me to pick more handfuls when they could have gone anywhere they wanted and eaten as much as they felt like.

I loved watching them get their baths, proud of them that they stood so quietly, and happy for them that they would stretch their heads forward just so as the water sprayed onto them in the warm Florida sun—“Ahhh.”

I flew home two days later, hugging Baby and Scarlett in their stalls before leaving and exchanging breaths with them through our noses, comfortable that they were in good hands. Letting go with Scarlett wasn't as hard as it had been with Baby, and not only because of my bond with him. It was like sending my second child off to school. I was more familiar. Also, they had each other. And Scarlett wasn't going to get green osselets or bucked shins, or any other problems of two-year-olds. She was closer to three now than two.

The plan was to stay in touch with Pam by phone, but it was actually she who called first, about four or five days after I arrived home. I hadn't wanted to appear overly intrusive.

“I've got to talk to you about these horses,” she said.

Uh-oh, I thought. Maybe she was going to tell me it wasn't worth pursuing with Baby. He had run eleven races, and nothing. And maybe Scarlett was going to be a pretty show horse rather than a racehorse.

“Are you sure Reel Surprise never won a race?” Pam continued.

“Most definitely,” I answered. “I can guarantee you that I have never stood in the winner's circle with that horse.”

“Well, this horse can run,” she responded. “Now tell, me, what is this problem with the gate?”

“He's reluctant,” I said. “They'd always announce it over the loudspeaker: ‘Reel Surprise is reluctant to load.' It wasn't that he was nervous,” I explained. “One of the jockeys had even told me that once he goes inside, he completely relaxes. Sometimes he even falls asleep. But he breaks from the gate really slowly, spotting the other horses ten to fifteen lengths before he takes off.”

“Okay,” Pam said after I finished my explanation, “but I have to tell you, when Jerry gallops him, he says, ‘there's a lot of horse there.'”

“I'm glad to hear it,” I responded.

“Now I want to talk to you about our star,” Pam said, referring to Scarlett. “You told me this horse is not broke to ride, right?”

That was correct. But Pam then explained that Jerry just basically got on her after leaning over her back a couple of times, and they rode together. She had no problem with a man on her, no problem with the saddle. Jerry just took her to the track, and she galloped beautifully.

It was, no exaggeration, astounding. It usually takes a couple of weeks to break a Thoroughbred. The process starts out in the horse's stall, with the rider simply laying his chest and arms over her back and someone at the horse's head watching for a reaction—holding a lead line in case the horse tries to buck the rider off and inadvertently steps on him. All the while, the rider is talking soothingly, trying to inch forward a little further without having the horse “erupt.” The goal is to eventually go from leaning over the horse to hanging over it with the rider's feet off the ground. From there, the aim is for the rider to be able to sit on the horse's back, first without a saddle, then with one. It's all two steps forward, one step backward, each short session infused with a lot of encouragement in a soft voice and ending on a positive note, just like with dog training, until the day the rider can actually ride the horse out to the track.

“If you hadn't told me,” Pam said, “I would have thought Scarlett had been in training before. She's not a typical Thoroughbred—not the least bit flighty or nervous, just interested. She is so smart, we can't get over it.

“
Both
horses will do anything Jerry asks them to do,” she continued. “They stand quietly while being hosed for their baths. They listen. They are just perfect to work with.

“I don't usually tell people too much about what I expect from a horse,” Pam said, “because you never really know, certainly not after just a few days. But I have to tell you, Jerry is very high on Scarlett. Not just him. When she came off that trailer, there were other people waiting around for their own horses, and you could tell, they were looking at her. And now she's showing us that she is that horse.”

I could feel my heart swell. I was bursting.

A month later, in the middle of February, John and I went down to check things out for ourselves. Even though the place was beautiful, and even though Pam said to call anytime and showed no reluctance to talk with me, we figured that in a month's time, things could change quickly. Once they really start training in earnest, they burn a lot more calories. Maybe Baby would lose weight again. And Scarlett was brand new to galloping. Maybe they were pushing her toward an injury.

But both horses looked fantastic. Each was gleaming. They were standing side by side in the pasture when I first came upon them, just like at home, grazing. I was so glad they had each other.

Because it had been a while, when I clapped this time, at first they looked up and stood still for a moment. Then, when it clicked, they came at a gallop to greet us. Baby beat Scarlett to the fence, but since John was with me, they both could get attention at the same time.

On our first day there, Jerry said, “I just have to show you about your horse. I don't know what the problem was with Surpriser at the gate. But he has no problem coming out of it. He breaks sharply.” And indeed Baby did.

“He's really on the muscle,” Jerry said. “He
wants
to run.”

Then Jerry explained about Scarlett. He said it can take a long time for a horse to feel familiar with the gate. “But I gotta tell you,” he went on, “she went through the whole process in a day. Nothing fazes her. Watch this!” he said, leading Scarlett through the gate. “She's just looking around, all relaxed. That's the sign of a class horse.”

It was clear that Scarlett was Jerry's favorite. He didn't just ride her. He sweet talked her, patted her on the neck. His grin with her was ear to ear. “Did you see that?” he would ask excitedly when he showed me something else she could do.

I truly felt like a proud mom, and proud of myself for working so carefully with Baby and Scarlett at home—teaching them not to be afraid of things, treating them like the intelligent creatures they were, even tying beach towels around them within weeks of birth so they would have some memory of that feel, that pressure around their middles, when it came time to put on a saddle.

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.