It was a testament to just how ugly and hidden this story was that the list of people who would not return my calls or speak to me was almost as long and prominent as the list of those who did.
One retired journalist from Spectacular Bid’s era, now working in racing instead of covering it, not only turned down my interview request, but he also sent me on a wild goose chase to waste my time. Another ex-journalist who had covered the story back in the 1970s refused to answer my questions unless I provided them to him in advance. Prominent Hall of Fame jockeys who were friends or business associates of Buddy Delp ducked me, undoubtedly not wanting to be connected to the behaviors I would dredge up. Some of Buddy Delp’s family members ignored me too.
But the people who spoke to me left an indelible image on me. Without fail, they were candid, honest, and even courageous. Three of these happened to be most connected to the center of the story.
The first one was Tony Cullum. I met him at his aunt’s house just days after Franklin had succumbed to cancer. It was the same house where Ronnie spent his last days before moving on to a hospice. Tony was the first one to speak up to me and tell me about Buddy Delp’s role in Ronnie Franklin’s drug use and demise.
Cullum said that Delp had “humiliated” Franklin early on and “set him up” to “take the fall” if and when the Bid lost or failed to achieve his potential. More troubling than that, Cullum claimed that “Bud Delp did more cocaine than Ronald did.” He said that Buddy used cocaine side by side with Franklin and his own teenage son, Gerald. “Ronald lived in that house with the Delps,” Tony said, “and it was a 24-7 party.”
Frankly, it was hard to believe Tony. Buddy was a revered figure in Baltimore. He had a huge reputation. Not only that, but he also worked for Harry Meyerhoff, one of the richest and most respected men in the state. It was awfully difficult to imagine Delp and Meyerhoff leading an operation that turned a fifteen-year-old child into a coke addict. It simply didn’t seem plausible.
Nevertheless, I decided to look into Tony Cullum’s allegations and see if I could substantiate some of what he said, but candidly I didn’t expect to find any corroborating evidence. My feeling was that Tony was still angry and in shock at having lost Ronnie, his uncle, a man he loved and looked up to. I thought perhaps that he was merely lashing out.
With a little investigation I found Gerald Delp. He was living in a rented house north of Philadelphia. I wrote him a text message and asked him if I could talk to him about the Bid. I didn’t explain everything I wanted to know, but I didn’t expect to hear back from him. But he almost immediately answered me, and sight unseen he invited me to his modest home for a visit.
I accepted, but I was a little apprehensive too. I had to ask Gerald some very uncomfortable questions about his father, a man he probably loved and looked up to. I thought there was a better chance that he would haul off and slug me then tell me anything useful.
I needn’t have worried. When I got there, Gerald was shuffling along in bed clothes, severely weakened from advanced lung disease. He had to have the assistance of an external oxygen tank and a plastic tube forcing air into his nose just so that he could breathe. But more than that, Gerald was a kind and gentle guy. He welcomed me in, offered me a seat at his table, and got me a cold drink.
When we got down to business, I went through my questions, beginning with a few that were noncontroversial. He answered each one pleasantly and thoroughly. If I asked a follow-up, he went into more detail. He never complained or evaded.
I enjoyed talking to Gerald, and I liked him. But the most important thing was I could see that he knew just about everything there was to know about his father, Ronnie, and Spectacular Bid. He was a witness to it all and a confidante to everyone. But I still had not asked him the big questions. In fact, my heart pounded in my chest as I worked up to them.
“Some people in Ronnie’s family are still bitter,” I began.
“I understand that,” he replied, biting off my preamble in his haste.
“They said there was a lot of cocaine in the house,” I said.
“There was,” he quickly replied.
“They also said that your father was a coke user.”
This time he looked at me long and hard with his sad, weary, and watery eyes. And then the real conversation began.
Gerald, that day and over a series of many interviews, was candid, lucid, and even eager for the truth to be told. He didn’t look good in his own stories, and neither did his father, but he believed in the redemption of confession, and he told me about everything that he personally had witnessed, which was just about everything.
The next important person I met was Cathy Rosenberger. Cathy had seen me interviewed on television, talking about Spectacular Bid, and then sent me an email. We spoke by phone later, and Cathy told me all about her role in Buddy Delp’s organization and in Ronnie’s development as a rider. Cathy filled many roles for me, including technical adviser, proofreader, and editor. Her personal story is one of the few in the book that ends happily. After racing, she moved on to a career in residential real estate, where her natural talents for being friendly, ruthlessly organized, and level-headed led to a highly successful life. She lived in Columbia, Maryland, in a suburban home, not far from Laurel Race Track. She was living an affectionate and fulfilling life with her longtime companion, Ed, taking care of Ed’s business. A highly intelligent and engaging woman, Cathy also was working on researching and writing books of her own. Over the years she had lost much of her eyesight but still had keen insights on just about everything related to racing.
The most fascinating interviews I did for this book were with the trio of Hispanic riders: Angel Cordero Jr., Jacinto Vasquez, and Ruben Hernandez.
When I first called Angel Cordero, I told him I wanted to talk to him about Spectacular Bid, and he briefly put me off. “Call me back in forty-five minutes,” Angel said. But when I called back, he let it ring a while before he answered. When he finally picked up, he wasn’t so sure he wanted to talk.
“Look,” he said. “I never rode Spectacular Bid, and I never had anything to do with that horse. I think you got the wrong guy.”
“This is Angel Cordero Jr.?”
“Yes,” he said. “But I’m not too crazy about doing an interview on a horse that I never rode or anything. There’s not much I could tell you about it.”
“Mr. Cordero,” I said, “you are one of the most interesting horsemen, one of the most interesting men, of the twentieth century. I would like to include you in my story.”
“I never even rode a horse that could compare with him,” Angel said.
We went back and forth that way for a little while before Cordero admitted he was worried about his “bad side” showing up in the story. “Everyone has a bad side, Mr. Cordero,” I said. “Me included. It’s what makes us interesting as human beings.”
After that, we agreed to talk, and we had a rather lengthy interview. I found Cordero to be smart, charming, articulate, and very intimidating. He was guarded but honest. In retrospect, he was wise to be concerned about how he would appear in the story because forty years later he knew and remembered what had happened and how he had behaved. And it wasn’t good.
In many, if not most, situations Cordero’s crazy-aggressive tactics, his dangerous movements, could be written off as almost positive, the traits of a man dedicated and obsessed with victory and willing to pay any price to achieve it. In Ronnie Franklin’s story, however, his work habits, even his brilliance, took on a more sinister quality as they stood in relief to the immolation of a promising young rider who was not yet twenty years old.
When I first spoke to Jacinto Vasquez on the phone, he also claimed to not want to speak to me but for vastly different reasons.
“You are a writer?” he asked.
“Yes,” I said.
“So,” he shot back, “are you a Communist or a socialist?”
I imagined he was sitting back in his easy chair in his Florida retirement, watching quite a bit of Fox News. He railed for a few minutes about “AOC,” the congresswoman from New York, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortes, and also against Jewish voters.
“What’s the matter with the Jews?” he asked me.
“I don’t know,” I said.
And then he answered his own rhetorical question: “They voted for that fucking Obama, and he screwed them,” he said, cracking up laughing at his own answer.
Like Cordero, Vasquez was a fascinating and competitive man, a legendary rider also willing to do questionable things to win. But there was no shame or regret in his voice, only humor and an inherent decency. Rare among the characters in this story, he was forgiving and one of the few figures from either the racing or journalism worlds who understood that Franklin was still essentially a child in 1979 and in need of dispensation.
Vasquez was the bluntest, and profanest, person I spoke to, though he dropped his expletives with perfect comedic timing. I asked him about the infamous Preakness race in 1980 in which he rode the Kentucky Derby–winning filly Genuine Risk against Cordero and his horse, Codex. Cordero won by four and three-quarter lengths but only after riding Vasquez out to the parking lot.
After the race, Jacinto claimed foul and said that Cordero had interfered with his horse by whipping her in the face with his crop. The stewards upheld Cordero’s victory, but the case went to court anyway. Cordero’s brilliant Baltimore lawyer, Arnold Weiner, widely hailed as one of the very best barristers in the country, successfully argued from photographic evidence that Angel was too far away from Genuine Risk to have impeded her in any way. Weiner won the case, and Codex’s victory was assured.
I had to ask Jacinto anyway: “Did Cordero whip your horse?”
“Did he whip her? You’re goddamned right he whipped her; he whipped the living fuck out of her,” Vasquez said.
“Do you still hold a grudge against Angel?”
“Nah,” Jacinto said. “A few years earlier, I barbecued him. I ran him into the hedges in Atlantic City. I knew he’d get me back sooner or later; it just happened to be at the Preakness.”
Ruben Hernandez, the jockey who defeated Spectacular Bid in 1979 to win the Belmont Stakes, was temperamentally as different as he could be from Cordero and Vasquez. Hernandez was a calm man, with a good sense of humor, and analytical.
It is interesting that one of the first things he told me was, “I am happy with my career.” My sense was that he assumed that I or others might have regarded him as a mediocrity. But how could a rider who beat the fastest horse in the world and pulled off the biggest upset in history on one of the most highly anticipated racing days ever be average or undistinguished? The thing about Hernandez that stuck out for me was his love for his wife and the role she played in inspiring him.
I spoke to one other jockey of consequence to this story, and that was Stevie Cauthen. I dialed him up soon after Franklin died. He was clearly sad and moved by the circumstances of Franklin’s early death and troubled life.
Cauthen interested me because he provided almost a mirror on Franklin. They were in an exclusive club of teenagers who rode in and won Triple Crown races. They were almost the same age; had grown up in the same era; and had experienced the same unique pleasures, pressures, and opportunities. Very few other people in the world experienced life like either one of them.
But Cauthen’s experience was a far happier one from start to finish. He won the Triple Crown and then became the only jockey to ever be named “Sportsman of the Year.” He beat out Muhammad Ali and Reggie Jackson for the distinction. What’s more, he enjoyed unprecedented financial opportunities outside of the track. He married happily and has so far lived a healthy life.
Cauthen, who never had a whiff of scandal about him, knew all about the temptations and pressures. “When you have a lot of success, people expect you to do man-size things,” he said. “If you have been successful in the past, they expect you to continue to be successful.”
The difference between Franklin and himself, Cauthen said, was his parents’ experience in the racing industry. Ronnie’s mother and father didn’t really know anything about the business of horse racing. So they had to put their trust in Buddy Delp.
“Many young jockeys find bumps in the road,” Cauthen said. “When you’re young, you’re so dumb that sometimes you don’t even know when you’re in a bad situation; you think everything is great.”
And that was exactly how Ronnie felt with Buddy Delp.
I also looked in on the Meyerhoff family, starting with Tom. He was kind enough to invite me to his modest but nice Manhattan apartment, where he still had Spectacular Bid’s mementos, including the Preakness trophy, and a striking painting of the great horse.
Tom was still much like he had been in the late 1970s, a nice-looking man and in good shape, but no longer young. He was more than sixty years old and a new grandfather when we met, a good bit older than his dad had been the year the Bid ran for the Triple Crown.
Obviously an articulate and intelligent man, Tom was as insightful and candid as he could be, although I asked him to recount some stories that must have been painful for him, including the dissolution of his parents’ marriage, the things that went wrong with Spectacular Bid, and his father’s alcohol and drug use.
Tom said that the Meyerhoffs’ view of Buddy Delp was simple and succinct. “Buddy was family,” he said. Their affection for Buddy was based on his professional skills. “Buddy had a great eye,” Tom said. Their belief in his character came from their observation that Delp “always put the horses first.” But Tom also said that the Meyerhoffs knew nothing of the inner workings of Buddy’s relationship with their jockey. And as things went south with Ronnie, they had no sense of how much Buddy might have had to do with the kid’s issues. They simply didn’t ask.
A few years after the Bid’s magical run, Harry Meyerhoff purchased a historic building and property in one of the United States’ most picturesque small towns, St. Michaels, Maryland. He used his skills as a developer to reimagine the ancient site as a hotel, bar, and restaurant that he called the Inn at Perry Cabin.
Although Harry was an adept and polished man, aspects of his private life sometimes came spilling out in embarrassing ways for others to see. One of his employees at the inn, a young college-age man, accused Harry of using the bar to traffic drugs. In a letter to Harry the young man asked for “tuition money” from Harry to keep his mouth shut about the alleged trafficking. Instead of paying the ransom, Harry immediately alerted the police, who arrested the young man. They found no merit to his claims, but the incident spoke to the larger truth of Harry’s addiction issues. When it was all over, Harry continued his life as a functioning alcoholic and a regular marijuana smoker.
Harry and Teresa’s storybook love affair eventually fell apart too. Although they had been visibly and deeply in love for much of their marriage, they began to fight and did so loudly, regardless of who was around to hear it. Eventually Teresa met another man on the Eastern Shore, and she left Harry to be with him.
When Teresa and Harry divorced, the loss was devastating to Harry, who enjoyed her affection so much that he had once risked everything for it. Because he had loved her, she walked away with a generous settlement. They were two halves of a glamorous and highly successful partnership, something that would always connect them in the eyes of the public, but they both moved on, and eventually they married other people.
Teresa settled down to a happy life in New England with her new husband. After a long and successful third marriage Harry died of complications due to a stroke in 2016. He was still living at Hawksworth Farm at the time of his death.
When I spoke to Teresa, it was at the height of the pandemic, and I did so by Zoom platform. She was in the neighborhood of seventy but still an attractive woman and a highly cheerful person. She was generally mistrustful of reporters but agreed to speak to me and did so in the spirit of the request. She was quite candid and even revealed to me her own brief flirtation with cocaine. She also corroborated what Tom had said about the Meyerhoffs knowing literally nothing about the inefficacies in Buddy’s relationship with Ronnie. She asked me to tell her what I knew, and when I ticked off the drug stories and financial issues, she broke down and sobbed and ended the interview. “You have to believe me,” Teresa said. “Had I known about these things then, I would have done everything in my power to stop it.”
I did believe her. But in all candor, I felt that she and her husband and stepson all might’ve taken a more active interest in a teenager who was clearly and visibly imploding under their watch.
A few years after he rode Spectacular Bid, the horse’s “other jockey,” Willie Shoemaker, retired from racing with virtually every record in the books. It was a fitting end to his prodigious and historic career. When he was done riding, he enjoyed a successful second career as a trainer.
Shoe’s life was changed forever, however, by something as simple as a long day of golfing capped by a few beers. Somewhere along the way home, he reached for his phone, lost control of his vehicle, and rolled it over an embankment. It was a single-car accident, but he was paralyzed from the neck down, and he never walked again.
Shoemaker’s wife left him soon after that tragedy, but as always, he emerged triumphant. He guided his horses and riders to ninety victories and almost $4 million in earnings, all from his wheelchair. He died in 2003.
Angel Cordero Jr. continued on his torrid pace as one of the most skilled, respected, fearless, and—especially—feared riders in racing history. He never admitted any untoward behavior in regard to Ronnie Franklin or Spectacular Bid in 1979.
Cordero said he didn’t collude with Georgie Velasquez in the Florida Derby. He didn’t ride Ronnie out to the parking lot in the Preakness. And he didn’t intentionally ram Franklin in the days leading up to the Belmont Stakes. But he recalled with particular vehemence Franklin’s statements to the press, the physical altercations they had, and also the writers’ portrayals of him.
As far as Angel was concerned, whatever happened, happened. And the things people said about him were irrelevant. “They wrote so much shit about me,” Cordero said, “but I never worry about me. I know what I can do. I know what I was. And I know who I am. I didn’t become a jockey to sleep with anybody. I became a jockey to make a living.”
And a hard living it was.
In 1986 Cordero was riding High Falutin when the horse went down. Cordero sustained catastrophic injuries, tearing his liver into seven pieces; puncturing his lung; and fracturing his ankle, tibia, and elbow.
In 1990, he went down again. This time, riding Gray Tailwind in a simple claiming race, he was part of a five-horse accident. Again, he tore his liver into seven pieces, ruptured his spleen, broke four ribs, punctured his lung, and fractured his arm and elbow.
It was all the byproduct of a style that was either daring or ruthless, depending on how one viewed him. No one, it seemed, who witnessed his brilliant and controversial career was indifferent to him. The thin line between love and hate, for Cordero, was respect.
Without regard for affection, everyone had to agree that Angel Cordero Jr. was one tough hombre and a great rider.
Buddy Delp remarried and started a new family with his wife, Regina. They had a daughter, Pajeen, and a son, Cleve, both of whom loved horses and worked at the track. After Spectacular Bid, Buddy sold his house in Laurel and expanded his operations in New Orleans, California, and Chicago. He remained a successful trainer.
Buddy was inducted into the horse racing Hall of Fame at Saratoga, New York, in 2002. His record was unassailable. His 3,674 wins were good enough to put him in the top ten all time, and he had won $41 million in purses.
About ten years after Buddy’s magical ride with the Bid ended at the Belmont Stakes, he was once again asked by a reporter about that fateful day. In 1979 he had put responsibility on his own shoulders and also invoked the catastrophic safety pin. In 1989 it was a whole different story. “There’s no doubt in my mind that Shoemaker would have won on Spectacular Bid that day, with or without the pin,” Buddy said. “It was a mile-and-a-half race, and after about half a mile, Ronnie was running past an 80–1 shot, taking the lead with a mile to run. Had he just laid back there and relaxed the colt, I still believe he would’ve won the race.”
Buddy summed up a lot of conventional thinking in that statement, but he never mentioned his desire, as stated to Jacinto Vasquez, to beat Secretariat’s record time that day or his unwise Belmont instructions to Ronnie. He was the one who demanded that the young jockey “take ’em away”—that is, take an early lead—but ten years later, with Ronnie’s reputation in tatters, that detail slipped Buddy’s memory.
Delp’s “expert opinion” was nothing more than a few lies and a massive betrayal of his protégé.
As the years went by, Buddy would do much more harm to Ronnie Franklin’s reputation, often speaking “frankly” to journalists about Ronnie and his problems. “[Franklin] could’ve been as good as anyone in the sport,” Buddy told the great broadcaster Jim McKay, who included Buddy and Ronnie in his memoirs. Buddy misled McKay, leading him to believe that Franklin’s demise was in trying “cocaine . . . at the suggestion of friends.”
In a sense, that was a true statement. But Buddy himself was the “friend” who suggested those first lines of coke to Ronnie. He was the one who led Ronnie and Gerald into addiction with his full knowledge, blessing, and participation.
Buddy died of cancer in 2006. In his lifetime he was never publicly connected to Ronnie’s or Gerald’s substance abuse issues.
Gerald’s life was complicated by addiction issues, in one way or another, for many more decades. He suffered two divorces, the loss of his wealth, and crippling health issues. By 2019 he was living in suburban Philadelphia, near the Parx Race Track, in a small white rented home with a front door that was practically on the highway.
For many months Gerald walked around in a near-death state, connected by tubes to a large oxygen tank. He passed his days waiting for the phone to ring, hoping to hear someone tell him that they had new lungs for him. That call finally came, and he underwent a successful transplant operation in 2019, though he almost died due to complications from his life-saving surgery. After that he suffered cardiac issues and eventually required yet another set of lungs.
As this book was being written, Buddy’s brother and one-time assistant trainer, Dick Delp, died. A mere few days after that, Buddy’s daughter, Pajeen, died from a cardiac issue. A few months earlier she had refused to go to the hospital after a cardiac event because she lacked health insurance. On the day she died, Pajeen was still a few years shy of her fortieth birthday.
Nor was Spectacular Bid immune from problems in the ensuing years. Although he lured a king’s ransom in breeding fees, he wasn’t much of a sire. He sired forty-seven stakes winners but not a single champion.
After years of trying but producing little, the Bid left Kentucky’s prestigious Claiborne Farm, where he lived in a barn near Secretariat’s, and moved to a secluded pastoral locale in upstate New York. He continued to breed up there but was no longer under the same expectations.
The great horse had a heart attack and died on June 9, 2003, exactly twenty-four years to the day since his mysterious defeat in the Belmont Stakes. His caretakers asked the Meyerhoffs if they wanted his remains shipped back to them at Hawksworth Farm. They declined. The Bid might have been the greatest horse of the twentieth century, and he was certainly the most sensational horse to ever come out of Maryland after centuries of racing there.
But Spectacular Bid was laid to rest in New York state, forever an exile who couldn’t quite make it back home.