The Ghost Horse Page 16

  It was from George Burrows, the trainer at Ocala Stud who had served as a conduit between Shaw and Michael O’Farrell in the exchange of a tall, unnamed, slow-footed horse nearly one year earlier.

  “Hey, you hear about that filly we sent to you? She won by seventeen and a half lengths yesterday at Finger Lakes!”

  It was a short message, and it failed to communicate perhaps the most important piece of information: the horse’s name. So Shaw quickly returned the call.

  “What filly are you talking about?” he asked.

  “The Drewman filly,” Burrows replied, offering up not the name of the horse, but rather its sire.

  The line went quiet for a moment as Shaw racked his brain for some hint of recognition. He’d moved a lot of horses over the years, and more than a few had come to him from Ocala Stud. Finally, it dawned on him.

  “Not the Drewman filly I had?” he said, his voice echoing nothing so much as bewilderment.

  “Yup, that’s the one,” Burrows said. “Can you believe it?”

  Frankly, no, Shaw could not believe it. Free horses became barn ponies; they did not win races by seventeen and a half lengths, not even at Finger Lakes. And even by the ridiculously low standards of horses deemed unworthy of sale, this filly had been disappointing. Attractive, yes, but just about the slowest filly God had ever put on Earth; slowest one Shaw had ever seen, anyway. That this filly had somehow evolved into a running machine stretched the limits of incredulity.

  “Can’t be the same horse,” he said. “Somebody better go up there and check, because it has to be a ringer.”

  Burrows assured him that it was, in fact, the very same filly—the one Shaw had acquired without a request for compensation, and that he had passed on to fellow broker Don Hunt, who in turn had sold the horse to a guy in Upstate New York for $4,500, only a portion of which had made its way to Shaw. Not only had she won, but she had done so in her very first race, and in a time that would make her breeders proud to acknowledge her pedigree: 1:10 and change for six furlongs.

  Shaw stared off into space and said nothing.

  The Drewman filly … Well, I’ll be damned.

  Equally amused, but hardly disappointed, was Michael O’Farrell, the manager of Ocala Stud.

  “When she won her first start, we were all surprised,” he said. “It wasn’t just that she won the race, but that she ran such a fast time and won so convincingly. And, of course, we called and kidded with John Shaw. He didn’t mind, I don’t think. We’ve all been in the business a long time. There’s nothing you can be upset about. It’s just one of those things that no one could have predicted. It’s a shocker, but it’s good, too. A story like this is good for the sport. It attracts fans. And it’s certainly not bad for us. Anytime a horse from our farm runs well, it’s good for business. So there were no regrets about letting her go. We were pleased. I mean, it wasn’t like she was going to make or break our year, but you’re always happy to see the horses you raised or sold go out and do well; at the end of the day it shows up as another horse from Ocala Stud that’s been successful. That’s a good thing.”

  Horse racing is an insular world, its denizens competing in an increasingly overlooked sport; so, impressive as it was, the inaugural performance of Lisa’s Booby Trap remained something of an arcane achievement—at least for a little while. Yes, traffic increased somewhat around John Tebbutt’s barn, as did the price offered for Lisa’s Bobby Trap, from twenty-five thousand to forty thousand. Tim Snyder didn’t so much as blink. By this point he had grown extraordinarily close to the horse, spending virtually every waking hour at her stall and sleeping just a short distance away, in a tack room at Finger Lakes. She represented to him so many things that he had lost or forgotten, or never possessed in the first place: opportunity, hope, pride, and, yes, love. She was the culmination of a life’s work, a totem of his late wife and a potential winning lottery ticket, all rolled into one. She gave him purpose; she got him out of bed in the morning.

  Would he trade all of that for forty grand? Not a chance.

  But the numbers were about to mushroom, and with the expansion came temptation—and pressure—that Snyder had never anticipated.

  On June 12 Lisa’s Booby Trap returned to Finger Lakes for the second start of her career, in a $19,000 allowance race for fillies and mares. There would be no surprises this time, no sneaking up on the competition or the betting populace. Lisa was assigned 119 pounds, second highest weight in the field; nevertheless, she was a heavy morning-line favorite, and by race time she was an almost comically prohibitive 1-9 choice in a six-horse field.

  As in her debut, Lisa would be competing over six furlongs on a dry, fast, dirt track. In the saddle, for the second consecutive time, was Elaine Castillo. Watching from the sidelines was Janice Blake-Baeza, who would never again ride Lisa’s Booby Trap.

  “It was Elaine’s horse pretty much after that first race,” Blake-Baeza said, the disappointment palpable in her voice. “She was in with John Tebbutt, and John was a friend of her agent, and obviously the agent wasn’t going to let that one get away, not after the way she ran. So they all had a history together. Tim owed John Tebbutt, big-time, and John wanted his rider on that horse in the first place. He always wanted Elaine, so who knows what went on behind the scene. But once she got on the horse, they weren’t about to make a change. I tried talking to Tim. ‘I’ve put in all this work; I think you should give me the ride back second race.’ But he said, ‘Nope, can’t do that. I’m sorry.’ I think that was John’s decision more than Tim’s, but what are you going to do? Elaine’s a good rider and she was in the right place at the right time.”

  A footnote worth mentioning is that while Blake-Baeza was not happy with losing the mount, she appreciated the fact that a couple months later, as the career earnings of Lisa continued to swell, Tim Snyder recognized the rider’s contribution.

  “He did stake me,” Blake-Baeza said. “He gave me some money, which was nice of him.”

  Drawing an inside position, Lisa broke well for the second straight time and went directly to the lead. She ran comfortably through the half-mile mark, setting a brisk but manageable pace and keeping the completion on her shoulder, a length or two behind, until she round the final turn and began her stretch run. The moment Castillo showed her whip and exhorted the big filly to move, she did so with ease, efficiently opening up a lead of five lengths by the eighth pole. As Castillo dug into the horse for the stretch run, Lisa took on the appearance of a horse that had stumbled into the wrong race; indeed, she looked again like the ringer that John Shaw had mentioned.

  The winning margin was ten and a half lengths, the winning time 1:10.38, almost identical to her first race. A bet on Lisa’s Booby Trap returned a modest $2.20 for a two-dollar investment. For her handlers, though, she earned more than eleven thousand dollars, bringing her career winnings to more than twenty thousand. Not exactly the stuff of legend, but not bad for a $4,500 Finger Lakes filly.

  “You know, there were times with Lisa where she’d be a little sore during workouts,” Castillo recalled. “Her ankle would get swollen, and sometimes you’d see her walking by, kind of favoring it. But then she’d get out and race, and … oh, my goodness, what a heart! As long as she was even a little bit okay, that girl could run. Every single time I rode her in a race she was awesome. And I didn’t even have to ask her for much. At some point before the second race, Tim had said to me, ‘Let’s see what she’s got. Even if you’re at the front, open her up a little bit.’ So I did, and you could tell right away she was that good, which was pretty neat.”

  Neat …

  Such a quaint and unassuming description, and one that accurately reflects the difference and distance between those who are in horse racing primarily because they love horses and crave competition—jockeys, for example—and those who view it primarily as a business venture. Horses, after all, are commodities, and like any commodity they can at times provoke irrational exuberance on the part of investor
s. In greener times, when tax codes were friendlier and the sport of thoroughbred racing more popular and self-sustaining, yearling sales would routinely produce stupefying transactions. At the highest levels, horse sales (auctions, by any other name) have always been driven more by vanity and greed than common sense or wisdom. The yearling sale is all about potential—the possibility that a gangly colt might someday win the Kentucky Derby and bring his new owners fame and fortune. (Okay, the fortune part they likely already have, but a winning horse is at least worth bragging rights at the polo club or the marina.) Millions of dollars are tossed at horses that have never run a competitive step, and might never see the inside of a starting gate.

  But that’s the precisely the point. In many cases a horse with stout lineage is never worth more on the open market than he is at a yearling sale, when the entire breadth and depth of his résumé consists of a single line: the one denoting his parents. If he turns out to be a runner in his own right, his value goes up; if not, his value plummets, dragging the value of future generations in its wake. This is why it’s not uncommon for a horse to be retired shortly after it wins its biggest race, even though it is in perfectly good health. Once a horse wins a Triple Crown race, or a Breeders Cup event, its value as a stud or broodmare skyrockets, and any subsequent trip to the racetrack represents an epic roll of the dice; one or two bad races and the horse is dubbed a fraud, or a freak, or simply lucky, and its stock can fall through the floor.

  For a while there, buying a yearling was like buying a tech stock at the height of the Nasdaq boom. It didn’t matter that the investment had no proven track record, or any guarantee of returning a dividend, it was simply the possibility of greatness—of getting in on the ground floor—that made otherwise reasonable folks swoon.

  Lisa’s Booby Trap fell into a different category—she possessed neither the stellar racing record of a champion nor the shimmering promise of a yearling born of impeccable breeding. But as a lightly-raced three-year-old with a pair of impressive victories to her credit, she had about her not only the tease of talent, but also the faint whiff of mystery.

  Twice she had been to the starting gate, and twice she had won. Twice she had run in a manner befitting a horse that had no business at Finger Lakes. If racing fans had begun to fall in love with the story of the one-eyed wonder horse and the Runyonesque character who found her and nurtured her and somehow brought out the best in her … well, others had a more avaristic interest in the filly. And as anyone who has been around the game long enough can tell you, greed wears blinders.

  “There’s no logic to it,” John Tebbutt said with a laugh. “People in this sport spend an awful lot of money on bad horses. And Lisa was a very good horse.”

  More than that, it seemed—at least to some eyes—for the offers that rained down on Tim Snyder in the aftermath of Lisa’s second race were almost enough to shake the owner’s loyalty. Fifteen thousand had become forty, forty quickly became fifty, and then one hundred. Now, suddenly, here was Tebbutt, acting as agent, friend, and broker—but mainly just shielding Tim from the pressure and distractions that come with owning a popular racehorse—fielding calls from people with even deeper pockets.

  “You take care of it,” said Tim, a walking, talking anachronism who had only recently acquired his first cell phone; who had no laptop or Internet connection, and not the slightest idea how to send or a receive a text message. Not so much a technophobe as simply a single-minded man who saw no reason for such devices in his life—and until recently he hadn’t the means to acquire them anyway—Snyder leaned on his old buddy and sometime employer for support and guidance. Tebbutt, who was temperamentally better suited for the role anyway, willingly shouldered the responsibility.

  “Timmy just couldn’t deal with it,” Tebbutt recalled. “It was too much for him. Just talking about it got him all flustered and nervous. His solution was to not talk with anyone.”

  Given that some of the offers came from halfway across the country, while others came from halfway across the track, this made Tebbutt’s job challenging, to say the least. The most alluring of the homegrown bids came from Chris Englehart, a longtime trainer and owner whose upstate roots ran deep (he’d grown up in nearby Canandaigua). As a fellow resident of the Finger Lakes backstretch, Englehart had watched Lisa’s Booby Trap almost from the day she arrived, and he’d grown sufficiently impressed to offer Snyder (through Tebbutt) as much as $150,000 for the filly.

  “Not for sale,” Tim declared.

  Tebbutt’s phone began ringing incessantly, as great chunks of time were devoted to parsing out the legitimacy of the suitors who had somehow gotten his number. Most were easily dissuaded, leading Tebbutt to wonder about their seriousness. It took no great effort, after all, to make a phone call and throw out a few numbers. Tebbutt had been around long enough, and bought and sold enough horses, to distinguish between buyer and bullshitter.

  One person whose persistence seemed to place him in the former camp was a bloodstock agent from Kentucky. Tebbutt never met the agent in person but he called repeatedly, claiming to represent a serious buyer from the Midwest. The first offer, Tebbutt said, was $100,000. The second offer, tendered shortly after Lisa’s second victory, was $250,000. Each time, Tebbutt took the offer to Tim and each time he declined, but not before consulting with those closest to him. He wondered sometimes whether he was crazy, passing up a quarter million dollars for a horse that had cost only a fraction of that amount.

  He called his sister, Cheryl Hall.

  “Don’t do it,” she said. “There’s something going on here.”

  “I just want to do what Lisa would want me to do,” Tim said.

  This was risky territory, but Cheryl, who knew them both and had come to understand what the filly meant to Tim, took the plunge.

  “I think Lisa would want you to keep the horse.”

  Tim laughed. “I knew you were going to say that!”

  In retrospect, it’s easy to suggest that Snyder should have unloaded the filly when he had a chance. Interestingly, though, neither Tim nor anyone else close to him expresses any regret about the fact that he may have held onto this particular stock long after it reached a peak.

  “The money really didn’t matter,” said Tebbutt. “Timmy would have found a way to blow all the money anyway. It was the horse that mattered.”

  Added Tim’s sister: “To some extent, we all have a hardened faith in the Lord. My personal belief is that He does things for you. He doesn’t put your wife inside a horse; I don’t believe that. But I do believe He might send you a horse when you need it most.”

  Those less susceptible to romanticism dismissed Tim’s loyalty to the filly as the product of either arrogance or stubbornness, if not stupidity.

  “I’ve been training horses for nearly forty years,” said Don Hunt. “I don’t get surprised by much anymore. But what this horse did surprised me. I was happy for Tim. But you have to understand—to people like Tim, it is not about the money. It’s about the love of the horse, and being recognized for having a good horse.”

  It was pointed out to Hunt that many owners and trainers avoid getting overly connected to their stock for precisely this reason: emotion complicates things; hubris gets in the way of business.

  “That’s exactly right,” Hunt said. “Those guys don’t drive three-hundred-dollar station wagons, either.”

  Occasional sore ankle notwithstanding, Lisa had come out of each of her first two races in good shape, prompting Snyder to reason, logically enough, that the filly seemed to benefit from steady work. So he entered her in a $17,000 allowance race on June 29; the level of competition would be similar to what she had faced previously; this time, though, she would be stretching out to a distance of one mile and 70 yards, a natural progression for a horse relatively new to competition. This would help Snyder determine whether Lisa was a natural sprinter, or more of a middle-distance runner.

  Or, perhaps, a bit of both.

  Snyder tried to focu
s on his work, but background noise persisted in the form of an escalation in the bidding war for Lisa’s Booby Trap. On the afternoon of June 29, as Tim prepped Lisa in her stall, John Tebbutt’s cell phone rang again. Busily helping Tim with prerace matters, Tebbutt let the call kick over to voice mail. A short time later Tebbutt checked his messages. It was the same bloodstock agent, calling to let Tebbutt know that his client would not be easily discouraged, and in fact was prepared to sweeten the deal considerably. At the time, he said, they were at Keeneland Racetrack, preparing to watch the simulcast from Finger Lakes.

  “When you see Tim,” the bloodstock agent said, “let him know that I’ve got my people here watching the race, and depending on how she runs, they’re talking about up to five hundred thousand dollars—if she runs the way we think she’ll run.”

  Tebbutt saved the message—a portion of which was later replayed during a lengthy feature segment on Tim and Lisa, produced by the Television Games Network (TVG), a broadcast company devoted to coverage of the racing industry—and holstered his phone.

  The race itself was a virtual replay of Lisa’s first two starts, albeit at a slower pace. Given the longer distance, Elaine Castillo had been advised to take the horse out carefully, making sure that she broke free but did not bolt so quickly to the front that she would burn herself out. A lot of horses can run six furlongs without any problem, and Lisa had shown herself to be among that group; whether she could run a mile of more was yet to be determined. It was up to Castillo to give the filly every chance to prove herself.

  Sent off at 2-5 odds in a cozy, five-horse field, Lisa found herself once again running under nearly perfect conditions: overcast skies and a dry, fast track. She broke cleanly and went to the front, setting a conservative pace, with Castillo smartly holding her in hand and hitting the first quarter mile in nearly twenty-five seconds—a virtual jog for a filly who had demonstrated so much speed in her first two races. It was a sound strategy, executed perfectly by the rider, who guided Lisa through the half in forty-nine seconds, a length in front of the field. Then, deep into the backstretch, Castillo chirped at her mount and asked for a slight shifting of gears; Lisa responded effortlessly. As they rounded the final turn, Lisa’s lead had widened to three lengths, and she cruised down the homestretch comfortably, pulling away to an 8½-length victory over runner-up Love Our Grandkids. As in their previous two outings, Castillo had encouraged Lisa with her whip only a couple times after the quarter pole.