ON FEBRUARY 21, 1975, Won’t Tell You delivered a bright chestnut colt whose elegant face was emblazoned with an irregularly shaped star that flowed into a narrowing strip. His broad forehead tapered down to a fine muzzle, giving him an intelligent look. The colt was leggy, refined, and well-balanced. Though his dam’s pedigree predicted a sturdy and resilient foal, it was otherwise unremarkable and certainly not in the same league as some of the other broodmares foaling out that spring at Harbor View Farm. So there would be no phone call to announce the little chestnut’s birth, like there would be when Straight Deal, the mare that Lou and Patrice Wolfson owned in partnership with her mother, foaled. For the next several months, the colt and his dam would be turned out with the other babies and broodmares where he would learn to play and socialize. Once he was weaned, he would spend his days in a pasture with the twenty-odd other colts born that spring.
When the Wolfsons stopped by in the fall to check out the young horses, Lou and Patrice walked over to the colt’s field. They paused, elbows resting on the fence, to watch the youngsters play. For some reason, the bright chestnut colt caught Patrice’s eye. She wasn’t sure why she was drawn to him. Though relatively tall, he was among the scrawniest of the bunch. As she stared out across the field, the colt spotted her and stopped his play. Breaking away from his pasture mates, he trotted over, and when he reached the fence where Patrice was standing, the little guy pushed his nose forward, nuzzled her, and then stuck his head in her arms. Patrice was startled, but instantly charmed. She scrutinized the lanky baby and wondered what it was about him that had called out to her. He lifted his head up and stared directly into her eyes, and she knew. “My heavens,” she thought, “he looks like Stymie.” She looked into the colt’s eyes and said, “You know, you look just like Stymie.” Then she gripped his halter and turned his head so she could read the nameplate, which was emblazoned WON’T TELL YOU since the babies who hadn’t been named yet wore their dam’s name on their halters. “So that’s who you are,” she said to the colt. After a few minutes, he turned away and trotted back to his companions and the moment was over. Lou, who had been watching silently the whole time, smiled to see once again that mysterious connection his wife seemed to make with certain animals.
Although there still wasn’t anything to make the Wolfsons think this colt could be a future star on the track, he had made an impression on Patrice and she would remember to check in on him each time she and Lou visited the farm.
A MONTH AFTER Won’t Tell You foaled her colt, Sweet Tooth was getting ready to drop hers.
As a heavy rain pelted down and lightning crackled through the dark Kentucky sky, Sweet Tooth was brought into her stall in Calumet Farm’s foaling barn. It was clear that she was close and that the baby would come that night or soon after. By 9:30, the thunderstorms had passed and the temperature had settled into the seasonable sixties. All was quiet in the barn, except for the steady crunching sounds as the mares chewed their hay and the occasional snort as they cleared the dust from their nostrils. By 10:30, Sweet Tooth had begun to move around, looking vaguely uncomfortable. Now, there was no doubt that tonight would be the night. As time passed, the mare looked more and more uncomfortable. Then with a gushing sound, her water broke. Within minutes she dropped down, and two small front feet appeared, followed by a tiny head. By 11:20, a big chestnut colt lay at her side. His dark brown coat was marked only with a small splash of white between his eyes and discreet low white socks on his left front and right hind legs.
The next morning Melvin Cinnamon, the farm manager, recorded the birth and its particulars in the foal register. “Wonderful, fine-looking big colt,” he wrote, noting that the birth had taken place at 11:20 P.M. on March 23, 1975. Right from the start, Cinnamon and everyone else on the farm were convinced that this brash and bouncy specimen was going to be a star. Even the colt seemed to know it. He had a self-possessed and regal air from the moment he gathered his long, spiderlike legs beneath him and wobbled up to survey his world.
At Calumet, though, there would be no special treatment even for a star like Sweet Tooth’s new foal. When he was weaned, he was turned out to run and play with all the other colts born that year. This was the only way, the Markeys felt, for babies to learn how to handle themselves and to become the warriors that would later battle it out on the track. As Lucille and the Admiral watched the young horses racing through Calumet’s huge fields, they knew they had some special babies. By the time Sweet Tooth dropped this 1975 Raise a Native colt, the Markeys already were seeing great promise in her 1974 filly by the French stallion Herbager. There was no question that both the filly and the colt had unlimited potential—but the Markeys were worried that their current trainer, Reggie Cornell, might ruin them before they ever had a chance to make their mark.
Cornell was the fourth trainer that had tried unsuccessfully to fill the boots of the Jones Boys. For Lucille, it brought back unpleasant memories of the time before Plain Ben Jones took the reins at Calumet when Warren had been so frustrated he practically sold off all the horses. Now, just as then, colts and fillies would start their training at Calumet full of promise and potential, but when they reached the track, the injuries would start to pile up. Pretty soon they’d be back at the farm recuperating without ever having started, let alone won, a race.
The Markeys started casting about, looking for someone with the talent to bring along their precious young prospects. They asked their farm manager if he had any suggestions. As it turned out, Cinnamon did have someone in mind: a young trainer named John Veitch.
Although Veitch was just thirty at the time, and younger than any trainer Calumet had ever hired, he came from venerable racing lines, just as Sweet Tooth’s colt did. He was the son of Hall of Fame trainer Sylvester Veitch, who in turn was the son of leading steeplechase rider Silas Veitch. Syl Veitch, following in his own father’s footsteps, had gotten his start riding and then training steeplechasers before finally switching to flat racing in his late twenties. During his nearly two decades training at Cornelius Vanderbilt Whitney’s stable, Veitch saddled four champions, including Phalanx, the 1947 Belmont Stakes winner, and Counterpoint, who was voted 1951 Horse of the Year after handily capturing the Belmont. When Whitney divorced and bolted for California in 1958, Veitch decided he would rather find a new employer than move to a state he detested. Snapped up by George D. Widener, Veitch continued to turn out winners, including another champion. Following Widener’s death in 1971, Veitch opened his own public stable, which he had been running ever since. “What else would I do? Go crazy? Jump off a bridge?” he shrugged, explaining his decision to start his own stable in his sixties. Racing, simply put, was in his blood, and his bloodlines.
Though John Veitch had been out on his own for just two years, he already had considerable experience working as an assistant trainer at the racing stables of both Widener and Paul Mellon, apprenticing first with his father and then with Elliott Burch, the head trainer at Mellon’s Rokeby Stables. What really made Veitch appealing to the Markeys was his experience working for a single big client; in other words, he knew how to be a private trainer. By the seventies, public trainers—those who divvied their time between a bevy of clients—had become the fashion, with few still opting to devote all their attention to just one farm.
Born in Lexington, Kentucky, Veitch had been around horses and horse racing all his life. Even as a young child, he had accompanied his father to the track, hanging out with the grooms and exercise boys while Syl Veitch worked. An inquisitive and intelligent boy, he soaked up whatever he saw, learning every detail of horse care from proper mucking of stalls to the construction of a spider bandage that would fit perfectly over an injured knee. Sometimes he was asked to help out, and that set the lessons more permanently. The time with his father’s workers was entertaining and interesting but, being the only child at the track, the boy longed for some buddies. He had always been drawn to animals of all kinds, and eventually he came to look at the horses as his friends. He’d spend hours on end communing with the horses that liked to be treated as pets, steering clear of the ones he’d been told could be dangerous. He learned which ones would let him come into the stall when they were lying down, which ones would allow him to lie down next to them and rest his head on their necks. The more time he spent with them, the more he came to understand their body language and the subtle changes in facial expressions. While back at the Whitney farm on Long Island, he’d learned to ride, taking lessons with C. V. Whitney’s son Searle. The two would gallop their Connemara ponies from estate to estate. All in all, it was an idyllic existence.
By the time the boy turned nine, his parents started to worry about his schoolwork. The family was traveling from track to track, which meant the boy could never adjust to any one school, and it wasn’t helping his grades. Their solution, to his dismay, was to pack him off to military school. A shy boy, he felt out of place and longed for those magical hours spent with the grooms and exercise boys. Most of all, he missed the time spent communing with his horse friends. Though he did discover eventually that there were other boys at the school from racing families, he never quite settled in. Eventually his parents found a place in Garden City, Long Island, and from then on, that became the boy’s home and where he attended high school. No more traveling with Dad, but no military school either. When he was old enough, he started helping his father at the track during the summers and on school vacations. One of his big thrills was riding with the horses being shipped from Belmont Park to Hialeah in a boxcar. The cars were specially designed to move horses, divided into three sections, each with stalls for eight horses. Each section had two sets of four stalls facing one another, with an aisleway in between where the hay was stacked and barrels of drinking water were stored. Two to three men would ride in each section to care for the eight horses. For a teenage boy, it was a great adventure.
Increasingly immersed in the racing life, the boy wanted to start his career as a trainer right after finishing high school, but his dad wouldn’t hear of it. He told the boy that college was important, even for a racehorse trainer. It will help you deal with the owners, Syl Veitch had said. So the boy went off to Bradley University in Peoria, Illinois, once again separated from the horses and the racing life. In college he was drawn to history and literature, some poets calling out to him loud enough that he memorized whole stanzas of his favorite poems and pages from his favorite novels. Still, he remained impatient to get back to his one true love.
Once he graduated from college, Veitch started working as an assistant trainer to his father at the Widener farm. When he felt he’d learned all he could there, he struck out on his own apprenticing as an assistant trainer to Burch at Rokeby. From his father and Burch, he learned there were many ways to bring a horse along—and to listen to what each individual horse was trying to tell him. Some were quick learners; some were slow. Some were precocious; some were late developers. He learned to fit the training to the horse, instead of the horse to the training—and that you could ruin a good horse by taking the wrong approach. After several years, he wanted to start his own stable, but his father advised him to wait a little longer. They’ll expect more of you because you are my son, Syl Veitch had said. So the boy, now a man, continued to work, and to learn, as an assistant.
By 1974, he felt he was ready to go out on his own. He left Rokeby and started up a small racing stable based at Belmont Park. Even then, though, Veitch had big dreams. One evening that summer, as the trim, balding young trainer whiled away the hours in a nearby bar with turf writer Bill Nack, the two began to talk about their lives and their ambitions.
“John,” Nack said, “if you could choose one job at the racetrack, what would it be?”
The twenty-eight-year-old Veitch smiled and thought it over for a bit. “I’d like to see what I could do with a big stable of well-bred horses,” he said finally. “I think I’d like the chance to train horses for Calumet Farm.”
It seemed like a pipe dream. At the time, Veitch was just beginning his career and wasn’t getting very far very fast. By the fall of 1975, he was still struggling to make ends meet. He’d had only two or three owners at a time, each of whom had three to five horses in training. He’d been doing moderately well, but had no real stars in the barn. To save on living expenses, he’d moved into a tiny unheated room in an old boiler building at the track. The cinder-block walls and concrete floor were painted a drab gray and the only fixtures were a toilet and a sink. Veitch shivered through that autumn sleeping on a foldout bed, consoling himself with the thought that he was at least close to his horses. He could easily do his 8 P.M. check to make sure everything was OK—and didn’t have to pay someone to do the 4 A.M. feeding.
One exceptionally cold December evening when Veitch was curled up with a new history book trying to ignore the frigid temperatures in his little room, the phone rang. He put down the book and trudged over to grab the receiver.
“John Veitch,” he announced.
“Hi, it’s Melvin Cinnamon,” the voice on the phone answered. “How are you?”
Veitch and Cinnamon had known each other for years, but it had been a long time since they’d talked. They chatted for a while about Veitch’s dad and their families. Then Cinnamon said, “Mrs. Markey isn’t happy with Reggie Cornell and she’s looking to make a change. She’s looking for a new head trainer and would like to know if you’d be interested in interviewing for the position.”
Veitch was stunned, and paused for a moment to process this sudden and unexpected possibility of good fortune. Though Calumet was nowhere near as powerful as it had been in the 1940s, ’50s, and ’60s, it was still Calumet Farm.
“I’d be more than interested,” Veitch said finally.
“Good. I’ll be in touch.”
After the two men hung up, Veitch sat for a bit wondering how serious the offer actually was—and when he might hear back.
The months passed. December turned into January, then February, then March. By that time, Veitch was sure that the Markeys had decided to keep Cornell—or had found someone with more experience to hire. Then in April, Cinnamon called again, this time asking if Veitch could make time to fly down to Florida and have dinner with him on the night of the thirteenth. The next day, the two of them would have lunch with Mrs. Markey and the Admiral. Veitch was excited, though nervous, figuring he might have finally landed an interview.
During the dinner with Cinnamon, there was no discussion of the possible job at Calumet. Veitch figured that would come the next day when he visited with the Markeys. The following afternoon over lunch, the four discussed horses and racing. When dessert arrived, the Admiral turned to Cinnamon and said, “I’m sure you’ve discussed with Mr. Veitch what his salary will be and told him how happy we are to have him on board.” Veitch was confused, but waited till after the lunch was over to pull Cinnamon aside to ask what was going on.
“Melvin, what’s this about?” he queried. “I thought this was going to be kind of an interview where they were going to sound me out.”
“They had already made the decision that you would be their next trainer,” Cinnamon responded. “It was just a matter of timing. Tomorrow we’re going out to Hialeah and we’re going to inform Mr. Cornell that he’s no longer Calumet’s trainer.”
Just like that, John Veitch went from barely scraping by as a public trainer with a handful of horses to earning more than $30,000 a year and running the most famous racing stable in the country.
At Hialeah the next day, Veitch felt sorry for Cornell, but ecstatic about his own change in fortune—until he had a good look at the horses. Though the colts and fillies were well-bred, they were for the most part overworked and fat. Many had the kind of soft-tissue injuries that you’d expect to see in older, heavily raced horses. They didn’t look at all like the shiny new cars Veitch had expected to find. Instead, they were like rental cars that had been driven hard. The biggest disappointment was Turn To Turia, a half brother to Forward Pass. Cornell had assured the Markeys that the colt would be ready for the 1976 Kentucky Derby. But as Veitch surveyed the horse’s legs, he realized that Turn To Turia wouldn’t be going to the Derby—or any other races that year. The best thing for the colt, Veitch concluded, was to go back to Calumet to rest and recuperate. Veitch steeled himself for the phone call to Lucille, not sure how she’d take all the bad news. But to his surprise and relief, she took it in stride and told him not to worry. Then she suggested that he fly up to Calumet to discuss strategies and to have a look at the young stock.
At the airport in Lexington, Veitch was collected by the Markeys’ driver in their trademark silver Rolls-Royce. As the car wended its way up Calumet’s long driveway, Veitch was struck by the pastoral beauty of the farm. The dogwoods lining the road were all in bloom and the lush verdant pastures dotted with budding racehorses. When they got to the house, the Markeys’ butler, Charles, grabbed the trainer’s luggage to take to the upstairs guest room. Later, when Veitch came down to meet the Markeys for a drink before dinner, Charles took him aside and said quietly, “Your man forgot to pack your pajamas, robe, and slippers.” Charles said he’d sent off to the store in town for replacements. At first Veitch wasn’t sure how to respond, but then, smiling to himself, told the butler, “I appreciate your kindness and I’ll have a word with my man when I get home.” He knew he’d entered a different world.
That night over dinner, Veitch and the Markeys talked about racehorses and about Calumet’s history. The next morning, with a handful of papers detailing the pedigrees of all the farm’s horses, Veitch took a tour with Cinnamon and Calumet’s resident farm trainer, Ewell Rice. Before they walked out the door, Lucille had told Veitch that she wanted his impressions of all the young prospects.
When they got to the field with the yearling colts, Veitch surveyed the little herd, observing the interactions between the youngsters. It was clear that the muscly dark chestnut with the tiny star was the leader of the group—and also the fastest by far. When the colt took off, all the others bolted after him. “He’s sure got charisma,” Veitch thought, and then asked who the handsome chestnut was. “That’s the Sweet Tooth colt,” Cinnamon told him. Though Veitch knew it was too soon to be thinking about it, dreams of the Derby started to flutter through his head.
The trip to Calumet had given Veitch renewed hope for the future. But now he had to go back to Hialeah and deal with the disarray that had been left by his predecessor. Veitch sent some of the horses home to rehab injuries and did his best to get the remaining colts and fillies in shape to run. By the end of 1976, Calumet had only $87,725 in winnings to show for the year. Even more galling, its horses won just four races—by far the stable’s worst showing since its debut year of 1932. Veitch was disheartened and discouraged, sure that he’d blown his big chance.
When December rolled around and it was time to head back down to Hialeah, he was once again invited to have lunch with the Markeys in their Miami home. The thought of having to discuss a season he saw as marking his complete failure as a trainer made him depressed. During lunch, he turned to Lucille and told her that he was ashamed of his performance and that he would completely understand if they wanted him to resign.
“I feel I let you down,” he said with a sigh.
Lucille looked him in the eye and replied, “No, John. I let you down. I haven’t given you good enough horses. But I want you to know we have some wonderful yearlings coming along and I really hope that things will be better next year.”
THE YEARLINGS AT Calumet were given their names in the fall. Brass nameplates were ordered up for their leather halters and for their stall doors. When it came to Sweet Tooth’s colt, the Markeys wanted something that would allude to his regal heritage, but they were also feeling somewhat whimsical. After kicking around some names, the Admiral finally suggested they call the colt Alydar, a private joke between the couple that played on Lucille’s greeting to one of their most aristocratic friends, Prince Aly Khan, whom she often addressed as “Aly, darling.”
At Calumet, as at many Thoroughbred farms, fall was also the time when the yearlings started their race training. Much of the early work was done in the stalls, where the babies were introduced first to wearing a bridle and carrying a bit in their mouths. Once they were comfortable with that, a saddle was placed on their backs and the girth tightened. If they were calm about the process, the next step was to let them feel weight on their backs. A groom would give the rider a leg up, and if the horse remained quiet and relaxed, the rider would simply lie belly down across the saddle for a few minutes and then drop back off. After repeating the procedure several times, the groom would lead the yearling around the stall with the rider lying across the saddle. The next day, after being hoisted up, the rider would swing his leg over the saddle and sit for a minute or two. Not all the babies were happy with this new phase of their new lives. Some would hump their backs up as if to buck. Some would wriggle as if this might unload the weight from their backs. But Alydar was the perfect student. It was as if he knew he was growing up and was about to embark on something important.
Once the yearlings were comfortable with being mounted, they were led out of the barn with a rider on board. When they got to Calumet’s training track, the grooms let go of their bridles and the riders began to work on steering, pulling on the left rein to get a left turn and the right rein to go right. The next step was to start walking, and then jogging, around the track. When the babies were used to all the new sights and sounds and could relax while jogging around the track, the riders would ask them for a slow and leisurely gallop. In just a few months, their lives would change dramatically. They would leave the familiar barns and track of Calumet to start their new careers as racehorses.
AS VEITCH WATCHED the Calumet yearlings unload at Hialeah in early December of 1976, he felt a mixture of excitement and joyful anticipation, the kind of emotions a child might experience as he walks in on a pile of presents stacked under the Christmas tree. These babies were the future, embodying all of his hopes for the coming year as well as the Markeys’ dreams of a renewed Calumet.
Among them was Alydar, the horse that Veitch and everyone at the farm felt might be the key to that new beginning. Veitch took particular note of the big, powerful-looking colt walking down the ramp and was satisfied to see that he seemed to have traveled well. Alydar stood out among the others, attractively put together with the look of an elite athlete. He carried himself as if he knew his heritage, as if he knew just how special he was.
The colt stepped off the ramp quietly, looking around at his new surroundings but too tired to have much of a reaction. The fifteen-hour trip had taken a lot out of all the yearlings. Though they had been trained to ride in the van back at the farm, they had never been on a long trip like the one from Lexington to Miami. The young horses were led off the van by the grooms who would be taking care of them now and walked to the stalls that would be their homes for the rest of winter as real training commenced and their talents were being assessed. For now, though, the yearlings would be allowed to recuperate from their long ride.
During the next three days, they were all body-clipped, their grooms shearing off the shaggy coats that had kept the yearlings warm during the chilly winter nights in Kentucky. They wouldn’t need all that hair in Miami, where the days averaged eighty-five and the nights seventy. They were bathed and walked around the backstretch and given time to assess their surroundings. It was a big change for the young horses. They’d spent their entire lives up to that point on the same farm with the same horses. Now there was a new routine and the hustle and bustle of a very busy racetrack. Once the yearlings had acclimated, Veitch started their training. He was a patient man and was careful not to overface the young horses, knowing how easy it would be to push too hard and injure them mentally or physically.
Four days after they arrived at Hialeah, the colts and fillies were tacked up and walked from the stable area down the half-mile sand path that ran between the stands and a line of tall Australian pines to the track. Veitch rode with them on his pony, watching carefully to see which ones got along with the rider he’d assigned them and which might need to be switched. For Alydar, Veitch had chosen his best exercise rider, Charlie Rose, and best groom, Clyde Sparks, knowing full well that the Raise a Natives could be strong and strong-minded—and that it was a lot easier to prevent a bad habit from starting than it would be to correct one once it was ingrained.
When they got to the track, they moved along to the stretch area where there was a long chute that was used for the shorter races in the afternoon. It was usually much less crowded there and the babies could be jogged two or three abreast as they got used to the strange new sights and sounds. At the quiet pastoral Calumet, they had been accustomed to being out with only six to eight others, with nary a sound besides the birds and the muffled hoofbeats of their comrades. At Hialeah, they would be sharing the track with two to three hundred horse-and-rider combos jogging and galloping by them—and sometimes at them.
By the beginning of the new year, when they had all turned two years old (Jockey Club rules stipulate that all Thoroughbreds celebrate their birthdays on January 1 no matter when they were actually born), it was time to start galloping on the track. The gallops were leisurely at first, with the babies taking four minutes to go a mile (later on they’d be asked to cover the same distance in two minutes). Veitch would often put eight of his charges on the track at the same time, a pair followed by another pair, followed by a group that was three abreast. He would switch up the order periodically so they’d all get used to the feeling of having horses in front kicking sand up in their faces, to being the horse on the rail, or to being the one on the outside. The idea was to have them exposed to every experience they might encounter in a race before they actually ran one.
After a month or two of those leisurely gallops, some of the babies, Alydar among them, seemed to be coming along much faster than the others. These were the ones that Veitch started breezing, or, in other words, galloping a short distance at a faster pace. At this point, he was looking for speeds of about fifteen seconds per eighth of a mile, or furlong. Later on, he’d want to see them covering a furlong in twelve seconds. The babies still weren’t being pushed to their fastest pace, but they were starting to be tested. Alydar, always the perfect student, seemed up to whatever task Veitch threw his way. That made him the kind of horse you had to be careful with because he would give you everything you asked for, even if it came at a cost to him. Each time he watched Alydar breeze, Veitch felt the temptation to let him run full tilt to see what the colt was made of. But that could easily have resulted in an injury, so as much as Veitch wanted to rip the wrapping paper off that very special Christmas present, he forced himself to be patient and to wait.
All the while, the trainer kept track of the minutest details of the two-year-olds’ lives—how much they ate, how much they drank, what their manure looked like, how often they passed urine, how well they cooled out after a breeze, whether they were fresh the day after a breeze. If anything changed—if a horse ate or drank more or less than usual, for example—Veitch knew it could be a sign that a problem was developing.
Though there were others with promise in the group that came from Calumet that year, none took to the training regimen like Alydar. The colt seemed to thrive on the work, and the harder it got, the more he liked it. Once Alydar and the others were galloping easily on the track, Veitch began to teach them about the starting gate. First, he would have the riders walk the two-year-olds around the gate. Then, after they were calm in its presence, he would open both the front and back doors and have his exercise boys ride the young horses through the gate forward, then backward. When the babies were comfortable with that, they would be ridden into the gate and the back door would be shut. Next their riders would jog them out, and then they would start galloping them out. Once the colts and fillies had adjusted to that, assistant starters would begin climbing up over them—as they might in a real race. Eventually, both doors would be closed and the two-year-olds would be asked to gallop out as soon as the front door was sprung open. The very last step was to add the bell. If it was all done systematically and calmly, the young horses would not be afraid to get into the gate in a race and would break cleanly at the bell.
By early March, it was clear which two-year-olds would be ready to actually start racing that spring. At the head of the pack was Alydar. He had balked at nothing and seemed to enjoy learning new things. Veitch felt a surge of satisfaction watching the colt glide around the track, his huge strides effortless and smooth.
WHILE ALYDAR HAD immediately been recognized as a star, Won’t Tell You’s colt hadn’t made much of an impression on anyone working at Harbor View Farm. The only feature that made the lanky chestnut stand out from the others was his exceedingly mellow nature and his habit of taking long, luxurious naps. The colt loved to sprawl out in his stall and would often drop off into such a deep slumber that scarcely anything would wake him. At feeding time, all the other horses would be pawing and banging on their feed tubs as the grooms brought out the grain. Not Affirmed. If Affirmed was in the middle of a good snooze, the groom would have to step over him to put the grain in the colt’s tub. When Affirmed was done with his nap, he’d slowly stretch his legs, then heave himself up and give a good shake. He’d mosey over to the tub and start munching on his grain. When he was done, he’d lie back down and take another nap.
Though Affirmed may have wriggled his way into Patrice’s heart, that didn’t mean he was going to be a good racehorse—just that he was her pet. Other than the hugs she gave him when she stopped by for a visit, he received no special treatment. Like all the other yearlings at Harbor View, he was started in the fall of 1976.
The farm trainer, Melvin James, started Affirmed out the same way he did with all the other Harbor View babies: first lessons all in the colt’s own stall. James tacked him up, and Affirmed barely flicked an ear. James wasn’t surprised. Of all the babies born at Harbor View in the spring of 1975, Affirmed was the quietest—and the laziest. The colt actually looked bored with the whole training process. He didn’t flinch when the exercise boy bellied up on his back, or when the rider sat upright. He turned easily to the left and right when his rider pulled on the reins. He was just as nonchalant when he was taken out to the small paddock for his first rides outside. In fact, the colt acted like he’d been at this all his life.
When James started running him on the track with pairs of other yearlings, Affirmed always came out in front, but only by a few inches. As the weeks passed, James kept improving the quality of horses he trained the colt with, but the result was always the same: Affirmed out in front, by just a head or a nose.
While some of the others got a bit hot as training progressed, nothing seemed to affect Affirmed’s laid-back disposition—or his love of sleep. One day a visitor to the farm came running up to James, worried that there was something wrong with the tall chestnut colt because he’d been lying down for a long time and wouldn’t get up. James just smiled and said, “Oh, there’s nothing wrong. That’s just Affirmed being Affirmed.”
Late in 1976, Harbor View’s race trainer, Laz Barrera, called from his California headquarters to ask James which yearlings appeared to have the most promise. Then he asked James to pick the five he liked best and to ship them down to Hialeah. That winter, Affirmed was shipped off to Hialeah, where Barrera’s brother Willie would start the colt’s race training. It didn’t take long for Willie to see that this colt had a lot more talent than anyone would have guessed. Though Patrice had bonded with Affirmed, no one really thought he’d be a star. In fact, the Wolfsons had been so unimpressed with Won’t Tell You’s babies, including Affirmed, that they’d sold the mare at the previous fall’s Keeneland Sale for a mere $5,500.
Shortly after Affirmed started training on the track, Willie called Lou to tell him about the colt. “This is the best horse you’ve ever had,” Willie said.
Lou wasn’t convinced. “That mare never threw anything that was any good,” he responded. “And remember, I owned Roman Brother.”
“This one is better,” Willie said simply.
In the end, the Wolfsons decided to give Affirmed a chance and told Willie to ship the lanky chestnut colt up to Laz Barrera’s East Coast stable at Belmont Park so the trainer could give the colt a closer look.