No one was happier to return home to Baltimore than Harry Meyerhoff. He had enjoyed himself immensely on the road, watching his team’s success, showing off his tall and handsome young son and his beautiful wife, and sitting for interviews in which the biggest names in print and broadcast journalism came to him and hung onto his every word.
Despite these heady days, Harry could never be entirely himself when he was on the road. He didn’t quite fit in with the other owners. Although he was rich like they were, he always felt a little out of place in their company. At the Flamingo Stakes, where Bid had won by twelve lengths, all of the other owners were invited to a soiree called the Flamingo Ball.
All but Harry.
At the Kentucky Derby, Harry and Teresa attended a dinner party in a restaurant one evening, but when they returned to the exact same place a day or two later as private diners, they were turned away in their nice clothes and refused service. Harry knew what it was all about. He ascribed these anomalies to anti-Semitism. They didn’t want him around because he was a Jew.
Baltimore was more than a hometown or a safe harbor to Harry. In Baltimore, he called the shots. He and his family were aging, but they were still prime movers.
Nineteen seventy-nine kicked off four years of major Meyerhoff family accomplishments in Baltimore. There was the Bid, of course. A year later, Harry’s father and his organization, the Rouse Company, unveiled Harborplace. It was only a shopping center, but it was Baltimore’s first major downtown retail and restaurant venue in many years. In 1982 Harry’s uncle, Joseph, revealed his pet project, the Meyerhoff Symphony Hall. It opened to great acclaim. More than mere wealth was involved in achieving these goals; it required powerful connections and the capability to get things done.
In Baltimore the Meyerhoffs were like town fathers. If anyone gave a damn that Harry once went to Hebrew school, they kept it to themselves; Baltimore, in a very real sense, was his town.
Being back in Maryland also meant that Harry could return to his beloved farm on the Eastern Shore, far away from the eyes of others. He could drink all day there, as much as he wanted, and smoke a little pot too. At Harry’s farm no one but his family was there to look in on him and judge him.
The other members of the team were happy to be home too. Buddy returned like a colossus to the racing scene, where he had labored so long and hard with claimers and where he had fought the other trainers for supremacy. Now they could all see for themselves what he was capable of accomplishing under the right circumstances. He was showing them all who the top dog really was. Many of the other trainers had achieved great things in their careers too, but Buddy had the Kentucky Derby winner in his stable now, and he had trained the horse and the goddamned jockey too!
The greatest redemption story in Baltimore belonged to Ronnie. He went back to his parents’ home to find Dundalk lit up like Christmas with colorful congratulatory signs hanging off the row house porches, each one containing good wishes just for him, blessings for his success and bright future. Even more impressive was the front parlor of his parents’ home. In the last twelve months it had become a shrine to Ronnie, his own personal hall of fame, filled with saddles, trophies, horse blankets, and other hard-won memorabilia from his sensational, almost miraculous career.
When Ronnie’s parents went out to dinner, to the same simple haunts they had enjoyed for years, they were no longer the same simple people. They were gawked at, congratulated, and toasted by their own neighbors. They were asked to sign autographs and fielded requests for Ronnie to make personal appearances at the mall and car dealerships.
Dundalk’s newspaper, The Eagle, did a front-page feature on the new favored son. There was a big illustration of his boyish face, surrounded by a horseshoe of victory flora. Businesses bought up print ads and spent their marketing capital just to congratulate him and find some way to associate themselves with his magic name.
As far as Spectacular Bid was concerned, everything was cute and sweet and positive as it could be. The local politicians, of course, latched onto him. They came out to have their pictures taken with the wonder horse and grab a little of the refracted glory for themselves.
Baltimore’s mayor, William Donald Schaefer, a rising star with a flair for the dramatic, went so far as to write a proclamation naming the Bid an honorary citizen of Baltimore. He read the official copy to the assembled press and got himself—bald head, suit, tie, and all—in the papers next to the superstar equine.
But as Bid’s team was about to find out, celebrity and publicity cut two ways. For instance, when members of the press came to Hawksworth Farm to see Harry and Teresa in their natural habitat, they quickly and inevitably noticed Harry’s hands, the ones that always carried a drink. No one came right out and said he had a problem, but every one of them devoted at least a sentence or two to his ever-present beverages. In essence, they described a functional alcoholic.
Worse than that, very few could resist delving into the Meyerhoffs’ relationship. Of course many of the details were highly personal and embarrassing. The writers often alluded to the fact that Harry and Teresa were in a liaison before his first marriage had ended. The wide gulf in their ages was considered fair game and inevitably brought up by every reporter. They wrote with wide-eyed astonishment about the jumbo-size diamond in Teresa’s engagement ring. And the highly offensive expression “gold digger” resurfaced again and again.
Some noted that the young, glamorous Teresa looked better suited to Harry’s elegant son, Tom, than to Harry himself. At one point, poor Tom felt compelled to say, “At the end of the day, there is no confusion as to who goes to bed with Teresa.” It was a pseudo-Oedipal admission pushed out of his mouth by an invasive press scratching and clawing at the family to find some new angle on an over-covered story.
At least the coverage of Buddy and his outsized personality was understandable. There was a comically prototypical photograph of him in all of his bald-headed swagger. A long cigarette holder was clenched between his teeth, pugnaciously jutting from his mouth into the world. He wore a polyester polo shirt with a long and wide collar. The tails of his shirt were neatly tucked into the wide waistband of his dress pants, which were pulled way up above his navel, old-man style. His globous belly was encircled by his belt like a wide leather equator. No one could deny that the photo had captured the animal himself in full swagger.
Even that picture paled in comparison to the one painted by an enterprising reporter who sought out Buddy’s rival Maryland trainers to hear what they had to say about him. These men described the Delp they knew. One journalist noted their grudging admiration. “[Buddy] is not universally liked,” he wrote, but “he is universally respected by his peers.”
Those peers were mostly willing to give the devil his due. All of them acknowledged the extraordinary work Buddy did with both the Bid and Ronnie. But it didn’t take them long to also light into his massive ego and bellicose personality.
Nate Heyman, an assistant to King Leatherbury, one of Delp’s most prominent Maryland rivals, brought up the fact that Buddy had only recently thrown a punch at an exercise rider whom Buddy believed had endangered Spectacular Bid during a workout. Delp was suspended for that one, but Heyman chalked it up to Buddy’s being Buddy. “[Delp] flew off the handle,” Heyman said. “He does that, blows his stack.”
That aggressiveness also manifested itself in truculence, something the others believed came naturally to Buddy. “He’s shooting off his mouth,” Heyman said, “and enjoying it.”
If Delp was loud, he didn’t appreciate the same quality in his employees. They knew better than to say anything at all that might set him off. And they feared his wrath. “A whole lot of times he has gotten on me,” Mo Hall, Bid’s groom and a loyal Delp employee, said, “but I don’t pay him no mind. If you say something, that’s when you get in trouble.”
The reporter also dredged up Raymond Archer, Buddy’s racing mentor and stepfather, just to hear his thoughts on the man of the hour. Raymond was eighty, and he and Buddy had been estranged for years. Whatever bad blood there was between them, Archer allowed that he was “rooting” for Buddy. But he also took a shot at his “son.” “I guess this horse makes him feel awfully big,” Archer said.
But the worst thing anyone said about Buddy came out of his own mouth, though no one seemed to notice the implications. “I play just as hard as I work,” Buddy revealed, “and that’s pretty hard.”
He was alluding, right there in the family newspaper, to his hidden dark side, the drinking and cocaine use alongside his own sons and Ronnie. It didn’t much matter. The incurious reporter didn’t bother asking Buddy to elaborate on the meaning of “playing hard.”
There was no concern shown about how Delp’s recreational habits might be affecting the boys who were in his care. Anyway, the press was also inflicting its own damage on Ronnie. The Tuesday before the Preakness the Baltimore Sun wrote a piece about him, complete with a jubilant photograph of Tony and Marion Franklin beaming in front of their Dundalk row house with a flock of neighbors cheering them on. The article was supposed to be flavorful and congratulatory. But the writer turned into a junior Woodward or Bernstein. He investigated to uncover a once “bratty kid,” and his article went into some detail about Ronnie’s youthful indiscretions. He quoted one of Ronnie’s old schoolteachers, who unprofessionally and ungenerously reminisced that Ronnie had been a boy who “was wasting his time going to school.” Another one recalled how he refused to sit down in class. And still another brought up the fact that tiny Ronnie had been a target for bullies. The article was chock full of negative anecdotes that would have embarrassed anyone.
As the Preakness drew closer, it was even newsworthy, at least in Baltimore, that Ronnie had waited too long to acquire reserved tickets for his parents, putting their ability to attend the race in doubt. The story subtly suggested that Ronnie was an ungrateful or neglectful son.
This mean view extended beyond Ronnie to his whole community. It was as though white-collar Baltimore was looking down its nose on blue-collar Baltimore. Given the fact that Franklin’s ascendancy on Spectacular Bid was a big moment for the entire unglamorous town, the semi-insulting coverage was an act of self-loathing.
Of all the responsible people making editorial decisions, no one seemed to consider the various parties’ ability to weather embarrassing publicity. The rich, beautiful, and worldly Meyerhoffs personified power and success. They could simply retreat into their huge farm and ignore the noise. Anyway, their persona was pure confidence. A week before the race they had already planned a huge victory celebration at Baltimore’s swanky Prime Rib Restaurant, paying to have the entire place shut down on a Saturday night so that they and their friends could enjoy the afterglow of a victory that had not yet been won.
Buddy Delp was also unperturbed by negative press. He was a veteran of the service and of the horse wars at the track. He was an experienced, even bare-knuckled, practitioner of his trade. Whatever people wrote or broadcast about him, he could take it, and he could dish it back out.
But what about Ronnie?
Unlettered and unsophisticated, Ronnie was just a boy, really. Could he possibly handle the media scrutiny with the same savoir fare? He had pens, pads, and microphones, hot lights and huge audiences, shoved in his face night and day. How could he be expected to deal with all of these pressures? And all of that didn’t even consider the many secrets he was also harboring.
The members of the media were not distinguishing between fully-formed adults like Delp and the Meyerhoffs and a young man like Franklin still in the midst of emergence. The mere presence of the press was a tightening vice on all of them, yet no one thought to accommodate the least experienced and most vulnerable person in the mix.
In comparison to the media hordes, the race was starting to look easy.
The Kentucky Derby had had ten horses crowded into the field. But at the Preakness the owners of the fastest horses in the United States saw the hopelessness of racing Spectacular Bid. The Preakness field thinned out like Buddy’s hair. There were only five horses entered, including the Bid. It was the smallest field since the great Citation had beaten only three other rivals in 1948.
All of this was great news for Ronnie and Spectacular Bid. Franklin’s strategy was much as it had been in the Derby. All he needed to do was find an opening on the outside and then stroll to victory. His horse was that good.
As the day of the race drew near, controversy kicked up. The Preakness had traditionally been a public relations boon for Baltimore—and one of the few that the city had. For one spring day every year, the eyes of the sporting world turned to this decaying city, and they did so in an admiring way.
The Preakness was steeped in tradition and full of mystery. Only in Baltimore was the most compelling question of the season answered: Did the winner of the Kentucky Derby have a chance to win the Triple Crown?
But in this year, when the favorite lived at Pimlico, and his trainer, rider, and owner were all Baltimoreans, the publicity machine went a little awry. First, Edwin Pope, a highly respected veteran columnist from Miami, revealed a little secret about Pimlico that most people around the country didn’t know. “Aesthetically,” Pope wrote, “Pimlico rates a zero—a scenic cipher with the rim rubbed off. It is little more than a large structure fronted by what appears to be a cow pasture edged by a dirt strip.”
It was a mean statement but true. In the years since the track’s heyday, when its antebellum clubhouse was the most magnificent and dramatic backdrop in racing, both Baltimore and the rich men who controlled Pimlico had let the entire facility fall into a calamitous state of disrepair. By 1979 the venue was a magical name and little more. The mere mention of Pimlico harkened back to mythological horses and great and flawed men, but that was all that was left; it was a discarded shell filled with nothing but stories.
The dilapidation of both Pimlico and Baltimore became the subject of a column by the Louisville Courier-Journal’s Billy Reed. Reed looked like a gentile, cigarless Groucho Marx with his large glasses, bushy black eyebrows, and long black mustache.
To pay back Andrew Beyer for his tasteless column about Louisville, Reed did a literary hit job on Baltimore. Never mind that Beyer had gone to school in New England and worked in Washington; for some reason Reed felt that bashing Baltimore was some kind of retribution.
Toward that goal Reed wandered the town in search of material and found plenty. He slandered Baltimore for everything from overpriced crab cakes and liquor to its sleazy red-light district, known as “the Block.” His puritanical revulsion for the Block didn’t stop him from spending a few hours and a fistful of reimbursable dollars there, gazing at the strippers. He became well acquainted enough with the place to ask for the whereabouts of Blaze Starr, a famous but fading exotic dancer who was by then closing in on fifty.
Later on, Reed saw two men kissing in his hotel parking lot. He was disgusted by that sight of ordinary love between two adults and included it in his list of grievances against Baltimore. To him, it was further proof of the city’s decay and depravity.
The ugly sentiments that the puerile journalists hurled at each other had no bearing on a race run by animals, but they did make for a discordant moment for the racing industry. The sport was at its apex in excellence and interest. Three Triple Crown winners had already arrived in the decade, and some thought Spectacular Bid might be the fourth, better than any of those who had come before him.
Instead of enjoying the moment for their beautiful and fascinating sport, Beyer and Reed cannibalized it. Meanwhile, their petty and theatrical columns missed the real story, the one unfolding right in front of them.
There were no questions or articles about Ronnie Franklin’s state of mind or how he was handling the pressure of the moment. No one inquired about the efficacy of his living with and working for the same man and what the negative implications of that might be. No one knew or asked if Buddy Delp was providing a healthy environment for his young rider, though he himself seemed to hint that he wasn’t.
No one asked pertinent questions about Ronnie, even though there were clues everywhere that he was working in a toxic culture. In all those puff pieces that everyone wrote and ran, the journalists could see plenty that might concern them. Harry drank all day. Buddy was a bully, a brawler, and an admitted “partier.” Ronnie was erratic and asking for vodka in the jockeys’ room.
The journalists were on the spot and hungry for stories but found the mystery of how many carats were in Teresa’s diamond a more intriguing question than anything about Ronnie’s state of mind, finances, or care. It was as if every single sports journalist in the country was asleep on the job. Perhaps some were too focused on the race, while others, like Beyer and Reed, had their professional senses dulled by ego and pettiness, so much so they didn’t notice the big story.
Ronnie Franklin, the boy everyone was talking about that magical springtime in America, was on the verge of coming unglued.
Jerome Blum was an unfamiliar name to horse racing fans, but in 1979 the strategies that he had devised in the weeks and months leading up to Preakness Day would change the trajectory of everything.
Blum was a Baltimore-based lawyer who handled a variety of issues, including domestic cases. Robert Campbell had just such a case for him. It was Campbell’s daughter, Shirley, who’d had a single midday tryst with Ronnie at a motel near Pimlico and gotten pregnant. She had given birth to their son, Chris Campbell, in December 1978.
In the six months since his son was born, Ronnie had neither acknowledged nor supported the baby boy. He hadn’t even seen him. Shirley, who was still just seventeen and working at the track, would have liked both. She felt that the child needed his father in his life, and she had so little money to raise him that she had to live at home with her parents.
Her father’s chief concern was Ronnie’s money. He said he wanted it for his daughter, but even Shirley suspected he wanted at least some of it for himself. And Ronnie looked like he had plenty. He was all over their TV sets day after day. The newspapers were full of stories of his victories on Spectacular Bid and many other horses. Campbell and his lawyer could infer that Franklin’s purses must have added up to a tidy sum.
Jerome Blum believed that celebrity and publicity were the keys to Ronnie’s money. “Ronnie Franklin is a public person,” Blum said, running his fingers through his thinning hair, “so let’s take this public.” The plan, Blum explained to Campbell, with his diploma framed and hanging on the wall and his shelves of law books behind him, was to serve Franklin with paternity papers in the jockeys’ room on the day of the Preakness. He told Campbell that he also intended to release the news to the press.
The embarrassment and distraction were meant to humiliate Franklin and to put maximum pressure on Delp and the Meyerhoffs to encourage a quick and generous settlement. No one, Blum reasoned, would want a major distraction in the heart of the Triple Crown. Too much was invested in the success of the horse and rider to see it all go down in a scandal, especially one that could quickly be resolved with a few fat checks from people who could easily afford to write them.
All of this notwithstanding, Shirley herself still wasn’t entirely sure who the father of her baby was. She had had only one quick and meaningless encounter with Ronnie. But she regularly slept with her boyfriend, jockey Edwin Canino.
One of the things Shirley’s team was asking for in the papers that were being prepared was a blood test to determine paternity. The child could still technically belong to either rider, though little Chris did not have swarthy Hispanic coloring, and he already bore a strong resemblance to Ronnie. Certainly Robert Campbell and Blum knew who they were rooting for. If Franklin was the one in the winner’s circle, they would finish in the money. Or so they thought.
Ronnie was served in the jockeys’ room, the papers pressed into his chest and punctuated with a jaunty “Have a nice day” by the server. It was a humiliating and scary moment on what was supposed to be the biggest day of Franklin’s life. Nevertheless, there was nothing to be said or done about it, so he went out and faced the day.
To help him acclimate for the big race, Ronnie was scheduled to ride a couple of tune-up races. Having the jockey ride in one or more of the preliminaries was a common practice. It allowed the rider to get a feel for the track conditions and an adrenaline rush for focus.
In the fourth race, Ronnie’s horse, Bear Arms, was the favorite, but he had a rough ride. Starting from the number one post position, Bear Arms broke out of the gate and was immediately out of control. He veered right and went into the horse next to him, permanently removing that horse from contention. Franklin regained control but rode erratically for the rest of the race, going in diagonals instead of straight lines before finishing second.
Franklin rode again in the seventh race. He and Angel Cordero were side by side on two horses with similar names. Angel was on Bold Ruckus, while Ronnie was aboard Bold Road, a Delp-trained horse.
Cordero was up to his old tricks. At the quarter pole he brushed Franklin’s horse with enough force to enflame Ronnie, and the two men fought it out all the way to the finish line. Cordero’s Bold Ruckus edged out Franklin’s Bold Road, but Ronnie made a foul claim related to the action at the quarter pole. The stewards were ambivalent. They deferred to Angel, disallowed the claim, and the results stood as originally posted.
Regardless of what the stewards saw, Franklin was livid. But there was little time to dwell on it. The next race was the Preakness, and the horses were already in the paddock.
Between the seventh and eighth races a huge, portentous black cloud had appeared and swallowed the wide sky above Pimlico. It menaced the proceedings, threatening to soak the infield throngs and utterly change the track conditions.
It was under this cloak of darkness that Buddy gave his final instructions to Ronnie Franklin. The trainer was dressed well in an elegant camel-colored sports jacket, a brown and white tie with wide stripes, and nicely tailored brown dress slacks.
The tall trainer jammed his fists into his pants pockets so that no one could see them and sternly leaned into his young protégé’s face. He glared at the boy and spit out the ingredients for success to him one more time: Don’t do anything stupid. Steer clear of trouble. And don’t get caught on the inside. The horse is good enough to take care of the rest.
Franklin listened intently, but the day’s pressures began to show on his face. He was wide-eyed and could not hide the fear and stress, the fright, of everything that had happened so far and that still might happen.
As Angel Cordero got a leg into his irons, he knew Delp’s strategy, had known it for some time, and felt that he could cope with it, if not defeat it entirely. He was ready to take on Franklin, Delp, and the Bid and use their strengths against them.
The five horses paraded to the post without incident, each one looking gallant and game under a brilliant jockey. First were Flying Paster and Don Pierce in his pink silks; next was the Bid, looking calm and content with the familiar Franklin on his back; after that came the highly respected Canadian jockey Sandy Hawley and Golden Act; number four was the indomitable Angel on Screen King; finally, the five horse was General Assembly with Laffit Pincay Jr. up. It was an extraordinary collection of riding talent. Every single jockey in the race, save Ronnie, was a future Hall of Famer.
Because there were so few horses, everyone expected an easy run. The animals did their part to comply; each one in his turn was loaded with ease. But the thunder clouds were a better indicator of what was about to come than the docile horses were. Nature’s anger only foreshadowed the hot and swirling winds of human rage that were about to present in jagged bolts of spiteful energy.
And then the gates opened.
The well-trained horses burst out of their confinement with passion and purpose. General Assembly and Flying Paster predictably took the lead; they were neck and neck and setting an extraordinarily fast pace. At the quarter pole they were at twenty-three and two-fifths seconds, tied with Pimlico’s track record.
The Bid was immediately “in good stride,” Ronnie said later, but he was also content to be second from last and many lengths behind the leaders. Any keen observer could easily see that Ronnie hoped to employ the same relaxed tactics that had worked so well for him in Kentucky. He was biding his time and hoping to sneak up on the leaders.
But that wouldn’t happen in Baltimore. This time Angel Cordero was between Spectacular Bid and the leaders, and he knew exactly where Ronnie was.
At the first turn Cordero finally revealed the strategy he’d long claimed would defeat the Bid. When Ronnie’s horse leapt to the outside to make a move on the leaders, Angel, directly in front of him, sensed Franklin’s desire and made a move of his own, maneuvering Screen King to the outside too, kicking dirt in the Bid’s face and blocking his path.
At this point, Ronnie was forced to decide. He could continue on the outside of Cordero, but that would mean taking the longest possible path to the wire. It would be a risky move considering the excellence of the other horses in the race. His other option was to find the inside hole on the other side of Screen King, but that would mean potentially getting ensnared in another Cordero web with slow horses in front of him and the rail to his left.
With the embarrassment of his panicked Florida Derby ride still fresh in his mind, Ronnie remained calm and maintained his composure. He made the calculated decision to go farther outside, confident in the belief that no matter how wide he went, the Bid was rapid transit and more than enough horse to come home first.
But as the two horses worked their way around the backstretch, Cordero continued to herd Spectacular Bid to the outside. It was as if Angel was riding a collie instead of a thoroughbred. Farther and farther out they drifted, practically to the parking lot.
Finally, Ronnie had had enough. He was side by side with Screen King, but the Bid had gained the upper hand. With that advantage Franklin pushed back on Cordero and aimed the Bid right at him. Screen King was the one forced into a small, suffocating pocket of air right behind a gassed out General Assembly. Ronnie was on Cordero’s right, bearing in on him, and the grinding rail was to Angel’s left. With nowhere left to go, Cordero turned to theatrics and stood up in his irons.
Ronnie lingered there momentarily, sadistically, so that Angel could taste a generous helping of the Baltimore clay flying off the filthy heels of General Assembly and right into his face. Franklin, on the other hand, got to savor the sweet flavor of revenge. And then, with a gust of air, he was gone.
In a fraction of a second Cordero and Screen King were distant memories. A heartbeat later, Flying Paster and General Assembly went from thundering pacesetters to has-beens. In a violent burst of electricity, the Bid whooshed by them at the head of the far turn and opened a gap that demeaned the other horses.
With extreme suddenness it was obvious that Cordero could not win the race, but his day was far from over. Boiling underneath his festive helmet, he found himself stride to stride with Golden Act, though he was far to the outside while Golden Act was on the rail. It was already abundantly obvious that both of them would finish many lengths behind the Bid, though an ignominious third place was still at stake.
It was there that Cordero’s impotent frustrations got the better of him. While the rapt attention of everyone in the grandstand and infield was focused on the Bid’s burst of speed, Angel sharply moved to the inside, going a long distance to intimidate Golden Act and Sandy Hawley. In a move as fast and destructive as a snakebite, Cordero darted in a violent burst and pushed Hawley against the rail. Then, just as quickly, Cordero bolted out. It was venomous aggression misapplied by a thwarted bully in need of an outlet.
When Ronnie and the Bid crossed the finish line, acres of North Baltimore seemed to separate them from the other horses and riders. They were only a fifth of a second off the track record and had run a faster Preakness than either Affirmed, the celebrated winner from the year before, or the sainted Secretariat, who had buried the field in 1973. (Later it was determined that due to an equipment malfunction that incorrectly determined Secretariat’s time too slowly on the day of his Preakness, Secretariat was the real Preakness record holder.) Had Ronnie not wasted time encumbered with Cordero, Spectacular Bid surely would have smashed the record. But what did that matter? Ronnie got to hold the shiny Woodlawn Vase, the Preakness trophy, like it was a golden calf.
The Preakness winner’s circle featured the Meyerhoffs, Buddy, Ronnie, and the Bid but no Gerald. Buddy’s son missed the historic photo because he was already on his way to find his regular drug dealer and score some “blow” and other treats for later.
As soon as their photo was snapped and the Bid was safely in Mo Hall’s capable hands, Ronnie and Buddy hustled over to meet Howard Cosell and Jim McKay on their makeshift ABC Sports set so that they could take the broadcasters through the highly eventful race.
Buddy started off by complaining about Cordero’s behavior, how his horse had lingered in front of the Bid and thrown dirt in his face. “It didn’t bother [Spectacular Bid],” Buddy said. “It just made him a little bit mad.”
And then Ronnie took over. Like Buddy, he was impulsive and overly candid about the things that bothered him out on the track. He complained, of all things, about Cordero’s ability to play nicely. “He brought his horse way out,” Ronnie told the American people. “He took him clear out to the outside fencing. To me, that’s not really good sportsmanship.”
It was an exaggeration but not by much. Cordero had taken him out about thirty feet. Cosell, as always, stirred the pot. He sensed the drama of the moment and probed, hoping to get even more from Franklin. “So you felt Cordero was out to make trouble for you?” the great broadcaster asked Franklin.
Hearing Cosell put it more bluntly than he liked, Ronnie walked back his remarks a little. He took a breath, smiled a boyish grin, and then changed the script in his distinctive grammar-resistant dialect. “No, no I’m not goin’ to say that,” Ronnie responded. “I don’t want to start no trouble or nothin’.”
And then, in an attempt to undo the damage, the young jockey laid it on a little thick. “[Cordero] is a nice guy and everything,” Ronnie said, alibiing for the jockey whose shenanigans had just robbed him of the track record. “He’s just doing his job.”
But back in the jockeys’ room it was a different story. Ronnie reminisced with pleasure about how he had been the aggressor, shoving Cordero behind General Assembly and making Angel swallow his own bitter medicine. “Payback is payback!” Ronnie loudly crowed, and the phrase, in its vengeful, spiteful simplicity, delighted the laughing scribes.
But when the writers went to Cordero and told him what the kid had said, Angel failed to find the humor. Instead, a fuse was lit, and a burning fever stoked inside the brilliant Puerto Rican’s brain. He was livid, but he couldn’t do what he surely would have loved to do: bust Ronnie in the chops. So instead he aimed his profane rage at the reporters. “You fucking guys write anything you fucking want,” he sputtered.
When they told the great rider that Ronnie had called him a poor sport, Cordero laid it all on the line. “He better not say that to my face,” Angel warned, and everyone knew that he meant it.
Ultimately Cordero’s “conversation” with the press degenerated into a shouting match. He became so animated that a Pimlico security guard had to be called over to break it up.
The crux of Angel’s argument was: “It’s my ground, my race track. I can go where I want to go.” He also accused Franklin of “cutting up [his] horse” when Spectacular Bid shoved him behind General Assembly. He had a point, but as usual he had taken it to extremes. He could ride Ronnie way to the outside if he wanted, it was technically legal, but it meant that he was going way to the outside too.
Why would he do that if his goal was to win the race?
That was Luis Barrera’s question. Luis, Angel’s trainer for the Preakness, didn’t necessarily see things the same way Angel did. About the cut legs of his horse, Barrera said, “Cordero tell me it happen at the half-mile pole and that it’s Spectacular Bid [who did it]. I don’t know.”
Barrera was a little bit more certain when it came to the subject of Angel’s questionable ride. He said it had cost his horse “seven or eight lengths.” His horse had had to “go around all the [other] horses,” Barrera said, and he had had to do it “with cut legs.”
It was an embarrassing moment for Cordero. He’d lost to Franklin—again. And now he was being chastised by his own trainer for a poor ride.
Was it possible that Ronnie was in his head?
Cordero was convinced that Franklin was a terrible jockey. “He’s an asshole rider,” Angel said. And yet he was obsessed with Franklin too. It had become clear to everyone but Cordero that his fixation was self-destructive. He was more interested in ensuring Ronnie’s defeat than he was in gaining his own victory.
If Angel was in a foul mood and tormented, at least he wasn’t alone. Buddy, too, was spoiling for a fight; instead of enjoying his historic victory, he had Cordero on his mind like a migraine. Buddy accused Angel of trying to “sucker” Ronnie to “make [him] go inside.” When one of the old-guard New York columnists, Dick Young of the Daily News, asked Buddy what would have happened had Ronnie taken that inside path, Delp gave him a cold glare and a few hot words.
“That’s a dumb question,” Buddy barked.
“Okay,” Young responded, “I’m a dummy.”
“Well, I don’t answer dummies,” Buddy shot back.
A more introspective man than Buddy Delp might’ve asked himself how and why he could be so angry on the most triumphant day of his competitive life.
Regardless, the battle was over. Bid’s team was at home in Baltimore and on top of the world. There was nothing left to do but celebrate. “I’m just going to party,” Ronnie told one of the stodgy old white men who covered him. “I think there will be some partying going on in Dundalk tonight.”
“The word party was equally prominent in the conversations of Delp and the Meyerhoffs,” one clueless writer pecked out for his column. “The whole gang of them had one coming and you can bet it was a prize-winner.”
For the Meyerhoffs that meant hosting their friends at the fancy restaurant they had rented just for themselves. Among their many invitees there were two prominent no shows: their trainer and their jockey.
Ronnie did indeed go home to Dundalk. He stopped in to briefly enjoy the moment with his family and his ardent fans in their world of steelworkers and other organized laborers. He let them all enjoy a sliver of his refracted glory, and he understood how much it meant to them. But then he was called to another place to answer a different siren. He left his mother and father behind and went to Buddy’s house, his adult home, to convene with his new inner circle. It was there that the Delps and Ronnie celebrated their way.
Buddy and the boys, the new rock stars of horse racing, went into the “playroom” and shot pool and played ping pong. They drank whiskey straight out of the bottle and mixed drinks. And they did line after line of cocaine. Eventually, they were so spent that they popped a few Quaaludes and went to bed.