A great deal of light was shining, but it was neither the warm glow of adulation nor the harsh glare of the spotlight. It was the unforgiving noon sun crashing down on a small patch of dirt in East Baltimore and on the weary, unhelmeted head of Ronnie Franklin. Many years earlier Franklin had been an American sensation, emerging from utter anonymity to the front pages of newspapers and magazines all over the United States. After only two years or so of experience around the racetrack, he was already the dominant rider on a horse that won twelve straight stakes victories, set speed records, and won the Kentucky Derby and the Preakness.
But that was all long behind Franklin. Twenty-five years later, while yet another rider and horse were preparing for the Belmont Stakes and a run at the Triple Crown later that week, Ronnie was doing the grunt work, lugging heavy supplies and tools to a worksite where he was breaking up concrete, mixing mortar, and laying bricks and blocks on the site of an old gasoline station. His employer was “improving” the now empty lot by building a few new row houses in a city that already had thousands of them that were crumbling to the ground.
Franklin’s unprotected bald head glistened under the assault from the sunbeams, and his eyes, without glasses, squinted in the glare, proof of his burdensome life. He was indistinguishable from any other laborer in America that day except for one thing. A newspaper reporter was there to ask him questions and write a story about how he had squandered his money and opportunities.
The reporter asked Ronnie a series of hard questions. He wanted to know about the former jockey’s embarrassing loss in the Belmont Stakes, and he asked him about the cocaine addiction that ruined the rider’s once-promising career. After that, the scribe also hunted down Buddy Delp, Franklin’s so-called mentor and father figure, who had brought the boy into the racing world when he was but fifteen years old. Buddy had given Franklin a job at his barn, a bed at his house, and a seat on the best goddamned horse in the world.
Franklin earnestly blamed himself for losing the Belmont Stakes. He said he “got too antsy” lagging behind and chased an 85–1 shot, exhausting his horse.
“I probably rushed him,” Ronnie confessed.
Franklin also led the reporter to believe that the trauma and “shame” of that bad ride in the biggest race of his life was the reason for his addictions. “[The Belmont] was a big downfall in my life,” he said ruefully. “I held on to it.”
Buddy Delp corroborated for the reporter that all the blame was Franklin’s: “Ronnie rode that day like he was in a hurry to get the race over with,” Buddy said for the record, never shy and ever the boss.
But about Ronnie’s out-of-control drug use, Delp spoke in the nomenclature of a disappointed dad. He told the writer that he had cautioned the boy: “Ronnie,” Buddy had said, “you better settle down because sooner or later there’ll be some rainy days.”
Finally, Delp mournfully explained how he had in the end fired Franklin for “blowing a $2,300 paycheck on drugs.”
It all added up to a great yarn; the only problem was that none of it was true.
I came into the story as Franklin lay in an East Baltimore hospice gasping his last breaths. I was aided and abetted by one of his friends who had decided it was time that the truth came out.
Right away I could see that Spectacular Bid’s story was actually two stories. There was the one that everyone knew. That one was about the miraculous horse who lost the biggest race of his career due to the ineptitude of his young, out-of-control rider. That narrative was formed during the Bid’s career, and it was so powerful and pervasive that even many people in the horse’s inner circle believed it, convinced either by lies or self-deceptions.
In just a few cursory interviews, however, I could see just how wrong it all was. Talking to people in a position to know, people who were closest to both Franklin and Buddy Delp, I could see a far different and more sinister story beginning to appear. The key to understanding Spectacular Bid’s greatness and failure was all in the hidden relationship between Buddy Delp and Ronnie Franklin. If the bonds between those two men could be unlocked, the real story would emerge.
While the two principal characters were dead or dying by the time I began my exploration they had nevertheless left behind the spores of their existence, strands of who and what they really had been. I went to see their friends, their family members, and their colleagues. I talked to their competitors and their haters. And I spoke with members of the press from their era. I found people who had briefly but memorably brushed up against them. I went to the physical spaces they had inhabited.
The farther I paddled down the river of the story, into the dense jungles of the truth, the more I realized that nothing was as it had seemed. And every mistaken notion hinged on just one fallacy, and that was the supposed father-son relationship of Delp and Franklin.
Spectacular Bid’s story may have been more about the father than any horse story ever written. The only question was: Whose father?
The Bid himself was the son of Bold Bidder and the grandson of Bold Ruler. Both were legendary winners and sires. He was owned by the father-and-son team of Harry and Tom Meyerhoff and Harry’s second wife, Teresa.
Harry, then close to fifty, was an extraordinarily successful developer with a huge fortune of self-generated wealth. In Baltimore, Harry was also considered a town father with the strength and wisdom to guide things.
Tom Meyerhoff, then in his early twenties, still felt the sting of a boyhood in which his busy and distracted father was mostly absent, not present physically or emotionally. By the time the Bid came into their lives, Tom was still yearning for a closer relationship with his dad.
And Buddy Delp was the ultimate father figure. He was an iron-skinned man who mastered his career while also handling the burdens and responsibilities of raising two young sons all by himself. Delp was well respected by the press and horse racing fans, who admired him for outlasting crippling reversals and achieving the trappings of a winner.
Buddy was paterfamilias not only to his boys but also to a string of aspiring jockeys whom he generously mentored. The last of these was Ronnie Franklin.
Franklin was written up in the news reports of the day as though he was a Babe Ruth–like orphan, an urchin off the streets of Baltimore. Like Ruth, Franklin had parents, but he was painted as an incorrigible whose defiance of his mother, father, and educators led him to drop out of school at age fifteen for the dismal prospects of a full-time fast-food worker.
But Franklin’s fortunes changed in a thunderbolt when a family friend brought him to Pimlico Race Track and presented him as an aspiring hot walker, the lowliest job in a community of low wages. Nevertheless, that’s where Ronnie came under Delp’s attention. Buddy took him into his home and then took him to the winner’s circle at the Kentucky Derby, all in the span of about three years.
To the press of that era, the connection between the boy jockey and the tough-guy trainer was good copy. Reporters wrote cloying stories about Franklin and Delp and often referred to them as a “father-and-son team.” Few mentioned, however, that Ronnie had a real father, Tony Franklin, a good man whom he loved and idolized. They usually failed to say he had been brought up in a clean and happy home where his hard-working parents provided him with every comfort that they could.
Even I wasn’t immune to all of the talk of fathers and sons. As I wrote this story and immersed myself in it, it affected me in deeply psychological ways. For one thing, I couldn’t help but notice that over the course of my work my own son passed through the same progression of ages that Franklin does in the book. My boy was about fifteen when I started researching and writing. When I finished, he had just celebrated his nineteenth birthday.
I tried to imagine the kid I saw in front of me, my son, in the same situations as Ronnie Franklin. When I looked at my fifteen-year-old, I couldn’t imagine him out of my grasp and away from my protection. I couldn’t fathom watching that boy risking his life to make a living. My son is a smart young man, but I had no idea how he would handle it if he was forced to speak on national television in moments of extreme pressure. I couldn’t say for sure what he might do in the face of temptations like women and illicit drugs, especially if others were urging him on.
I tried to give my son the very best upbringing and stressed level-headed thinking to him. I often discussed with him the importance of making sound moral choices and stressed decency over decadence. But at fifteen or sixteen or even nineteen I couldn’t say for sure what he would do in the moments when I wasn’t looking.
My years-long obsession with these questions and thoughts even resurrected my own father, who visited me twice in incredibly realistic and vibrant dreams. My dad had been dead for a few years—he had had a stroke when he was in his early eighties—and yet there he was right in front of me, looking all of about twenty-seven years old, with perfectly barbered, shiny blue-black hair and a jawline drawn with a T square.
He came two times in the late hours before the Jewish high holiday of Yom Kippur. That was an odd and exalted point of arrival since we were both utterly assimilated. Yet those sacred midnight hours became his gateway to my mind and a symbol of our indestructible bond.
In his first visit, he didn’t have anything of great importance to tell me. We only chatted about books for a little while, and then he was suddenly absent. I awakened happy to have seen him for a little while but with a tight and aching throat.
But the night before I wrote the very last page of this book, he visited me again. This time his words were a little more mysterious. He spoke to me about his deep brown eyes, so similar to my own, and he said he had an unusual request for me: “I don’t need these anymore,” he said, referring to his eyes. “I want you to give them to someone who can use them.”
Well, the last I had seen him alive, he was wearing thick bifocals. When he couldn’t find the elusive ketchup bottles right in front of his nose in our refrigerator, my mother used to call him “Magoo,” like the old cartoon character who wore impossibly thick glasses but couldn’t see a thing.
So I teased my old man a little: “Dad,” I said with a laugh, “who would want your eyes? They don’t work!”
But the next day, reflecting on the wild and imprecise iconography of dreams, I realized that his eyes worked all too well. I suddenly understood exactly what he was trying to tell me, and I am writing these words to fulfill his request.
In this book you will see the elusive true story of Spectacular Bid more clearly, and understand it far better than you ever have before because you will see it through a father’s eyes.
As my dad knew, most men live their entire lives in there.