Horse Of A Different Color

From the outset the similarities between racehorse breeding and being a media corporation executive were striking. For one thing, the beast you're feeding has an insatiable appetite, resulting in excessive amounts of excrement that must be dealt with each day. For another, a lot of time is spent making plans that never get beyond the conception stage. Some projects that do get launched die (literally, in the case of horses) before they can ever succeed. And those that make it to fruition and become a smashing success are inevitably taken over by someone else who gets the credit. When things don't turn out as planned, well then, of course those still belong to you and they were never a good idea in the first place.

One aspect of big corporate life missing in my new business endeavor, however, was second-guessing by big bosses. Having people in suits breathing down your neck when things are going great, yet nowhere to be found when straits are dire, eventually becomes essential to good executive decision-making. Fortunately, this vacuum was ably filled by my wife of twenty years, M. A., shorthand for Mary Anne, perfectionist and born CEO.

Working against the backdrop of a Gregorian chant of skepticism over a new enterprise from such a knowledgeable and conscientious overseer was not only comfortingly familiar, it also underscored the importance of two essential management techniques that in retrospect would have proved invaluable in journalism: (1) the use of drugs, and (2) the availability of a "twitch," which is a loop of rope attached to an ax handle-like stick that when applied around a nerve in a horse's nose tends to have a calming and immobilizing effect.

Horses don't need drugs, unless they're sick. But the people around them do, because horses simply won't do many of the things people ask them to do without being on drugs—specifically tranquilizers. Expecting a three-day-old, 120-pound foal to hold still while stitches are taken in his eyelid is unreasonable. Without sedation and immobilization, the needle would end up in the eyeball of the surgeon, or more likely, the person being asked to hold the foal's head. A combination of skill, twitch and drugs is what makes it possible to clip the hairs from deep inside the ears of a 1,200-pound stallion (racehorses can't go around with fuzzy ears), or to get him safely aboard a jet transport in time to make a race on the West Coast. Had I only known back in my editor days the power of a tiny syringe of Acepromazine, think what miracles I could have wrought on meddling corporate types, publishers, accountants and other irritants who belittled and foiled my precious work. M. A. does not come near me when I am carrying a syringe and a twitch.

However grim the future of print in the world of electronic information delivery, the year I left newspapers everything was hunkydory. The Tribune made about 25 percent operating profit on a billion dollars, my pay was about half a million bucks and the newspaper won two Pulitzer Prizes. Some said I had fallen from the pinnacle of my life's vocation. I thought so, too. Indeed I had lost one of the great jobs in journalism, a post of such prestige and power that I could have never reasonably hoped to attain it in the first place.

My resignation statement, fabricated to spare everyone the humiliation of a firing, said I was leaving to pursue other longtime interests, specifically the commercial breeding of horses in Kentucky. This announcement produced widespread sniggering, especially among my newspaper colleagues who knew the meaning of "canned"—and among horse breeders who knew the definition of "commerce."

A million dollars—the approximate size of my golden parachute—can disappear in the thoroughbred horse industry with the stroke of a gavel or a clap of thunder. Dozens of times each year in Kentucky, Florida and Saratoga auctions, horses worth five and six times that amount sell in the span of thirty seconds. Countless others that might attain such a handsome worth die in their mother's wombs, are struck down by disease or lightning bolts in the pastures, impale themselves on oak board fences or simply break their legs running across a field or down a track and have to be euthanized.

Ten years ago gamblers' odds were more a mystery to me than they are now. But it is safe to say that my chances of becoming a successful racehorse breeder were no better than even with those of me ending up homeless living under the "el" in a cardboard box. That I might eventually breed and raise the winner of the most famous and important horse race in the world—thus climbing to a second pinnacle of sorts—was beyond even an imagination as fertile as my own.

Realistically the most skilled, formidable and experienced horsemen can only dream of breeding a Kentucky Derby winner. More than 30,000 thoroughbred foals are born each year. Only fifteen to twenty make it to the Derby gate and only one can win. In history there have been just 127 winners, while generation after generation of breeders—some fabulously successful otherwise—have devoted their lives to this challenge in vain.

A few days after the steel gray colt, Monarchos, won the 2001 Kentucky Derby, a letter came from my friend Michael Dickinson, the great British-born horse trainer, whose skill at winning big races and developing revolutionary training methods often results in the use of the adjective "genius" in connection with his name. Obviously taken with the word, he used it flatteringly to describe my accomplishment of breeding a Kentucky Derby winner from only my third thoroughbred foal crop.

However, people more familiar with the miraculous nature of my life's journey have other explanations for such a surprising success. I made the mistake of relating Dickinson's compliment to a crusty old pal of thirty years who has been along on a few of my previous stumbles into good fortune. "Breeding genius, hell!" he exclaimed. "All this means is that sunshine will even hit a horse's ass if he stands out in it long enough."

Whatever the source of the streak, six weeks after the Derby Churchill Downs invited the winner's "connections"—owners, breeder and trainers—and their friends back for yet another celebration and the re-awarding of the engraved trophies. For everyone involved, including the track's corporate owners, the Derby is an event to be milked for all it is worth. There can never be too many toasts or reruns.

A dinner hosted by Monarchos's owners, Debby and John Oxley, that weekend in the magnificent Kentucky Derby Museum trackside turned out to be a joy second only to the actual running of the race. It began with the 100 or so guests standing by their tables as the music and color of 127 years of racing tradition whirled around us in a spectacular 360-degree video presentation. It was the equivalent of having a catbird seat in the infield with the ability to see, up close, everything that goes on before, during and after a Kentucky Derby. Waves of emotion began to build, rising off the great performances of previous Derby heroes—Northern Dancer, Secretariat, Affirmed—finally bursting into an explosion of color and sound from the 2001 Derby that focused on a monster-sized, dirt-stained Monarchos in full flight to glory, nostrils flaring, hooves pounding, eyes glistening, bearing down on you from every direction—as if you were waiting for him at the finish line. Just the recollection returns the shiver to my spine. Relating the thrill of seeing an animal you pulled from his mother's womb rising to such a level of magnificence tests the most fertile imagination and defies adequate description. Even people who'd never seen the horse anywhere but on television were moved to tears. The theater erupted in deafening applause. After everyone else had stopped, I was still standing there, clapping like an exuberant seal, as oblivious to surroundings as I had been on May 5, when I was unable to believe what I was seeing in my binoculars.

Of all the thrills available in life, there is none greater for a horseman than winning the Kentucky Derby. Inside the thoroughbred industry worldwide, particularly for a Kentuckian, the consequences of winning this race are stunning. The level of acclaim among your peers, for example, approaches that associated with winning the Nobel Prize. And the stature and respect it earns among horse enthusiasts is unfathomable, embarrassing and in my case at least—in light of the degree of chance involved—completely undeserved. Many Nobel Prize winners have reported the same feelings of humility, even though the skill, knowledge and effort demanded by their professional achievement cannot be measured against the dice roll involved in breeding and raising an animal. But unlike the Nobel Prize competition, the Kentucky Derby is the most famous and most widely observed contest of excellence in the world. Like the football Super Bowl, the baseball World Series and World Cup soccer, it attracts public attention far beyond that expected from the normal denizens of a particular sport. And because it requires only two minutes of attention each year and occurs within the context of a social event now over a century old, the Derby has attained an extraordinary level of popular significance. Now available worldwide through the miracle of live television, it is the one event with which almost everyone can associate. Simply knowing someone who knows someone who has won the Kentucky Derby endows a degree of coveted exclusivity. On the morning of the 2001 race, my son-in-law, a telecommunications executive in Greenville, South Carolina, casually mentioned to his barber, a transplanted Kentuckian, that his father-in-law had bred a horse slated to start in the Derby. On his next visit to the shop after Monarchos's victory, the barber greeted him with waving scissors, a shouted "Oooweee!" and a celebrity's introduction to fellow patrons as "Mister Monarchos." Simply cutting the hair of a relative of the winning breeder had given the Kentucky native son a rewarding sense of special relationship with the race, literally an "exciting moment."

And for those with a more direct connection, winning the Derby can actually change your life, even against your will and in ways never contemplated. In my case, it expunged from my consciousness a long-felt sense of rootlessness—the unavoidable result of spending most of my adult life as a journalistic and political vagabond. For me being happy where you are meant being rooted in a sense of being rather than place. Solace came from knowing who I was, not where I was. Loving my birthplace of Nashville and all the places I'd called home since—Washington, Orlando, Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Lexington—had made me comfortable virtually anywhere but truly at home nowhere. In the months preceding the Kentucky Derby, M. A. and I had considered selling Two Bucks, our gorgeous old farm west of Lexington where Monarchos was born, and possibly relocating a downsized horse operation elsewhere, perhaps even in Florida or New Mexico—not because Kentucky in any way had failed us but because we are both by nature restless and adventurous spirits.

When compelled by circumstance or wanderlust to move in the past, I had inevitably left behind, attached to cherished people and places, great chunks of my heart and soul—to such an extent that I felt the supply in danger of depletion. Still, leaving Kentucky and starting over yet again had become a viable option. It no longer is. Within forty-eight hours after winning the Kentucky Derby, I had been planted into the fertile loam clay of Woodford County as solidly as if I had died and been inserted beneath the limestone.

On the afternoon of June 16, when the Oxleys, trainer John Ward, Mary Anne and I were again celebrated in the winner's circle at Churchill Downs, we were presented with the "official" trophies. As an award, the breeder's trophy is neither artistically stunning nor extravagantly crafted—a rather small, simply engraved sterling silver statuette of horse and rider.

But the day my name was inscribed on it I claimed a tiny, coveted, precious spot in history for an achievement that, dubious or not, will likely define my life as much as anything else I have ever, or will ever, do—however unfair that might be to the rest of my existence. Where "winning the Derby" ranks in true importance varies with the life of the individual involved. But the handful of owners, jockeys, trainers and breeders fortunate enough to have had the experience must all realize one simple truth—that you owe it all to the horse that brought you there. To the Oxleys, he was the fleet, gunmetal-colored stallion with a bearing as regal as his name. To the trainers and grooms, he was the enigmatic and unpredictable "Sparky" who kept them both entertained and on their toes. And to those of us on the farm who raised him, he was a little, black, bright-eyed bugger with ears that talked and a personality that began telling you the minute he was born about how great he planned to be.

Monarchos fulfilled his promise. He proved to be a helluva ride for everybody, but particularly for the one rider aboard who had spent his entire life watching big stories happen to other people—me. As proof of my newly acclaimed "breeding genius," he became for me one of those signposts in life that delineate where you've been from where you're going, a turning point that altered everything from the nature of my deepest sleep to the shape of the most cursory conversation when awake.

All those years as a journalist had enabled me to recognize an extraordinary tale when I saw one. But I had been thoroughly conditioned to observe significant happenings from the emotional safety net of complete detachment. The impossibility of being at the center of something big and at the same time completely detached from it did not stop me from trying, of course, which made the story even better. When people try to do the impossible, it always does.

In the old days, to unravel such a twisted yarn I would have assigned my best young, energetic, curious and unbiased reporter. But in this case I knew the main character to be so contrary, elusive, conflicted and skilled in the black arts of journalism that few reporters would be a match for him. And I knew his story to be so complex and talismanic that a veteran investigative reporter with grit and expertise would be in order, one who could track mushy ground, one with an eye for the absurd and an ear for code and doublespeak. This particular protagonist demanded a writer with a poison pen and a complete disregard for balance and objectivity. And for the tale to be as unbelievable, entertaining, ridiculous and as much fun in the reading as it was in the happening, a humbling confession would have to be wrung out of the one surly wretch who knew it all—me—which would require someone equally merciless. So having always been a sucker for the challenge of a good story, I willingly became my own target—and with only one glorious benefit assured.

For all of my adult life, when asked by the stranger in the airplane seat next to me what I did for a living, my answer was invariably "newspaperman" or "writer." This was always followed by further inquiry about which big events had been witnessed, which books authored. Thankfully, most of these conversations soon died, owing to the interrogator's lack of familiarity with the answers.

But from this day onward, when asked that question, my reply will be "racehorse breeder," to which the follow-up inquiry will invariably be the same: "Did you ever have a famous horse, like in the Kentucky Derby or something?"

Natural modesty and a soon-to-be obvious aversion to the firstperson pronoun will prevent me from owning up to the truth. But at the risk—and delightful prospect—of the conversation going on forever, I will employ a tactic that was taught to me by politicians. I will evade the question thusly: "As a matter of fact, a guy I know particularly well bred a Kentucky Derby winner named Monarchos and it changed his whole life. And he wrote a book about it."