The Ghost Horse Read online

  Nevertheless, Castillo does not hesitate to acknowledge her disappointment over losing the assignment on Lisa’s Booby Trap.

  “By the time they left Finger Lakes, we knew Lisa was a very good horse,” Castillo said. “I tried everything I could to stay on her for Saratoga, and Timmy kept saying ‘Yes, yes, yes. She’s yours.’ I should have known better. But I did my best anyway, and so did my agent. I told Tim I would go to Saratoga and gallop her, work her, do whatever he needed. I really kissed his butt, and I’d never have imagined doing that before this filly came along. I wanted him to know that I was willing to go to Saratoga, even though I was still riding at Finger Lakes. It’s a wonderful track and I know a lot of people there. I said I’d go on weekends or whenever I had a day off. But I never made it up there, so I don’t know exactly what happened. I just know there are a lot of big riders with big agents at Saratoga, and they get most of the mounts. Then Kent Desormeaux comes along, and well … who’s going to say no to that?”

  As is usually the case in breakups, there are (at least) two sides to the story. Snyder’s recollection of the events leading up to the change in jockeys differs from Castillo’s. It is his contention that Castillo, who had a steady stream of work at Finger Lakes, was unwilling to compromise her business by traveling to Saratoga in July and August.

  “I told Elaine she could ride the horse at Saratoga if she would come down and breeze her first,” Snyder said. “She wanted to pay someone else to breeze the horse for her, and then come in for the race. Well, shit, that ain’t the way it works for me. I just felt like she wanted to take the easy way out, so I told her I’d make my own arrangements.”

  The day after arriving at Saratoga, Snyder ran into Desormeaux during morning workouts. The two talked for a while, with Snyder hinting that the upstart filly might be available, perhaps on opening weekend, when she was slated to run in the Oaks.

  “Breeze her for me, see what you think,” Snyder told Desormeaux. The jockey galloped Lisa, liked what he felt (and what he’d heard, since like any seasoned rider he had done his homework and knew all about the big filly in the stakes barn), and agreed to take the job.

  John Tebbutt watched this scenario unfold from a distance, as he had remained at Finger Lakes, where he had a full stable of horses competing over the summer months. At the time, he did not question Snyder’s decision, either publicly or privately. It bothered him to see one of his favorite riders left behind, but Tebbutt understood the nature of the business, especially at the level now occupied by Lisa’s Booby Trap.

  “Elaine’s feelings were hurt,” Tebbutt said. “I supported Tim in whatever he did because he was calling the shots. It was his horse. And it is difficult in that situation, when you have a big horse and a rider like Kent becomes available. The stakes are high. But Elaine knew that horse awfully well.”

  To the casual observer, the hiring of Kent Desormeaux might have seemed like a no-brainer for Snyder. One of only three jockeys (the others being Steve Cauthen and Chris McCarron) to win the Eclipse Award for outstanding rider as both an apprentice and veteran rider, Desormeaux had ridden three Kentucky Derby winners, and in 1998 had come within a nose of winning the Triple Crown aboard one of them (Real Quiet). The Louisiana native had won more than five thousand races and owned the record for most wins by a jockey in a single year. In terms of career earnings, only four other jockeys ranked ahead of him. He’d guided winners in the Preakness Stakes, Belmont Stakes, and Breeders Cup; he’d also won the Travers Stakes in 2009 aboard Summer Bird, so obviously he was no stranger to Saratoga. Along the way he’d been inducted into the National Museum of Racing and Hall of Fame in 2004.

  In sum, whenever anyone talked about the best jockeys in the history of the sport, Kent Desormeaux was in the conversation.

  But he did not come without baggage.

  By the time he was introduced to Lisa’s Booby Trap, Desormeaux was forty years old, not over-the-hill by jockey standards, but certainly within view of the summit. He had faced mounting criticism in recent years for what appeared to be mystifying tactics in big races—for example, holding back Big Brown and easing him in the stretch of the Belmont Stakes when the colt had a chance to become the first Triple Crown winner in more than three decades. There was also his disturbing personal behavior. Long known for being a feisty, temperamental competitor with a prickly personality, Desormeaux was suspended in early July 2010 after failing a breathalyzer test at Woodbine Racetrack in Canada. Desormeaux had flown in from New York to ride a horse called Hold Me Back in the Dominion Day Handicap, but forefeited the mount to another rider. Hold Me Back won anyway, and Desormeaux tried to downplay the incident, claiming he’d merely had a single drink at a party the previous night, an explanation accepted by virtually no one within the racing community, where substance abuse had long been speculated as a reason for Desormeaux’s erratic behavior. Indeed, not long after that incident, the jockey acknowledged that he was seeking treatment for an alcohol problem.

  And now, just a few weeks later, he was at Saratoga, not so much hustling for work but trying to rebuild his reputation. Riding Lisa’s Booby Trap, a horse sure to attract attention whenever she got to the track, was part of that process. But if others were wary of using Desormeaux, Tim Snyder was not.

  “I don’t give a shit about a guy’s issues,” he said. “My dad was a rider. I know they drink. I know they do coke. I know they do other things. They can do whatever the hell they want to do as long as they do it right for me. Kent knows his business, and he liked this horse. I wasn’t worried.”

  * * *

  By the time Lisa’s Booby Trap made it to the starting gate at Saratoga on Friday, August 6, 2010, in the $75,000 Loudonville Stakes, she was deep into the process of becoming a pop culture phenomenon, her story having transcended the normally insular world of horse racing. As a result, Tim Snyder’s life had taken on a surreal quality. And it was about to get even weirder.

  Granted, the six-furlong Loudonville Stakes was not the equivalent of the Coaching Club American Oaks. It was a small overnight stakes race, with a comparatively moderate purse. Still, it wasn’t exactly like running at Finger Lakes, either. The field of five horses for the Loudonville included one (Nonna Mia) that was trained by Todd Pletcher, and another (Stormandaprayer) that was owned by celebrity chef and ubiquitous Saratoga fan Bobby Flay. Oddsmakers looked at this group and assigned Lisa’s Booby Trap a morning line of 12-1. Betting odds, though, are fluid, reflecting not just the likelihood of a horse winning, but the amount of currency wagered on her. A morning line of 12-1 might indicate that a horse’s background and résumé will not provoke bettors to rush to the window in support of her. In the case of Lisa’s Booby Trap, though, that is exactly what happened.

  At Saratoga, more so than at any other racetrack, the crowd is composed largely of casual fans, tourists who come for the atmosphere and the party and the pageantry, many of whom have neither the expertise nor the inclination to handicap a race. It’s easier (and maybe a whole lot more fun) to choose a horse based on some ridiculous, half-baked connection to its name or number or the color of its silks, or because you like the jockey, or because maybe, perhaps, the horse winked at you in the paddock (although it probably was simply trying to shoo away a fly). There are serious, knowledgeable racing fans at Saratoga, to be sure, folks who devour the Racing Form and memorize speed figures, but there aren’t enough of them to fuel the Saratoga experience. On August 6, in a crowd of 22,383, they were overwhelmed by unscientific, sentimental handicappers who relentlessly drove down the odds on Lisa’s Booby Trap and made her a 3-2 favorite by race time.

  She rewarded them for betting with their hearts as well as their heads.

  “What an amazing day,” recalled John Tebbutt, who helped Snyder saddle the filly in the paddock. “The race, the way the crowd responded … It sent shivers down my spine.”

  He wasn’t alone. When the starting gate opened, the crowd roared, only to fall silent as Lisa practically sto
od in the gate and found herself dead last, trailing by six lengths at the quarter-mile mark, reached in a blistering 21 2⁄5 seconds by pacesetter Stormandaprayer. A six-furlong race is a veritable sprint, with only one turn to negotiate and little room for error. Break poorly or wait too long to make a move and you can quickly run out of real estate.

  After sitting on the early pace, though, Desormeaux urged Lisa through the turn, taking the filly four wide as they reached the half-mile mark in 44.54 seconds. By the top of the stretch she was in fourth place and running furiously as the rest of the field, weakened from the early, lung-searing effort, came back to her.

  “Here comes Lisa’s Booby Trap!” shouted track announcer Tom Durkin as the crowd roared its approval.

  Meanwhile, all alone in a corner of the clubhouse beneath the grandstand, watching the race on a monitor, was Tim Synder, dressed in cowboy boots, faded jeans, and a Western-style shirt, looking less like an owner at Saratoga Race Course than a backstretch groom or maintenance worker. While some 22,000 people stood in the stands or tried to push their way trackside to watch the race in person, the owner and trainer of Lisa’s Booby Trap witnessed the biggest race of his life mostly on a thirty-two-inch television screen.

  “That’s Timmy,” Tebbutt said with a laugh. “He always does that. He likes to be alone when the race goes off.”

  As he heard the crowd cheering, Snyder stepped out from beneath the grandstand and inched his way toward the rail, maybe twenty meters beyond the finish line. He could see Lisa running wide, running hard. Although he had bet two grand on his own horse the last time she ran at Finger Lakes, he’d stayed away from the window today. Didn’t want to jinx her. There was enough pressure as it was.

  “My vantage point was terrible—head on,” Tim said. “But I knew. I just knew. Man, she was flying!”

  The filly swept easily into second place, then took the lead midway through the stretch and galloped to the wire looking strong and poised, six lengths in front of runner-up Nonna Mia and jockey John Velazquez. So sure was Desormeaux of his filly’s kick that he used his whip only once after taking the lead, guiding her across the line under a virtual hand ride in a time of 1:09.64.

  Tim Snyder tried to push his way to the winner’s circle as the crowd stood and cheered. He was lost in a sea of people, none of them even slightly aware that he was the owner of the horse, the trainer of the horse. He was the one who had made this happen, and yet now he couldn’t even get to her.

  “I actually got punched trying to get through the crowd,” Snyder recalled. “I was pushing people out of the way and this drunk guy smacked me, called me a little bastard! Jesus, it was my horse; I just wanted to see her.”

  Moments later Tim reached the winner’s circle; Carol Calley was already there, tears falling from beneath her sunglasses. They hugged, Tim gave her a kiss on the cheek, and the two of them stood beside Lisa’s Booby Trap as the crowd responded with a nearly endless standing ovation. Then Tim took the reins and walked back up the track, a phalanx of reporters carrying notebooks and digital recorders and video cameras trailing in his wake, hanging on his every word.

  “I appreciate y’all taking an interest in my horse,” Snyder told them, “but I gotta get her back to the barn.”

  Shortly thereafter the media turned to Desormeaux for a bit of perspective, and the jockey was only too happy to oblige. Perhaps owing to his Cajun upbringing, Desormeaux was quick to embrace not only the filly he’d just ridden, but the mystical story surrounding her.

  “[Tim’s] late wife told him that she wanted to come back as a racehorse, and here she is, living vicariously through Lisa’s Booby Trap,” Desormeaux told reporters. “As far as we believe, she’s inside—they have the same heart, and she’s carrying this horse. I know how fast she is, and for them to clear her, I knew they had to be smoking. Still and all, though, she came and got them while they were running, so she’s of great talent, there’s no doubt.

  “This is what sport offers,” Desormeaux added. “You can amass hero status through the racing industry; this is a perfect example.”

  That evening, for the first time since he’d been at Saratoga, Tim Snyder left the stakes barn for more than a few minutes. He strolled down Nelson Avenue with a couple friends and turned into Siro’s. There he remained, deep into the early morning hours, enjoying the first sweet taste of celebrity and success. Lisa’s Booby Trap had earned $42,000 for winning the Loudonville Stakes, but her owner, suddenly lifted out of obscurity, did not even have to reach for his wallet.

  “I ended up getting plowed that night,” Tim said. “Had chips lined up all over the bar. No one would let me buy a drink.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  With a Saratoga stakes victory came a deepening of Lisa’s story, and a broadening of its appeal. Calls came from Hollywood and New York, talk of book deals and movies. Dateline NBC shadowed the trainer for the better part of a week to gather footage and interviews for a proposed one-hour special. The national media jumped on a story that tugged at the heartstrings and transcended sports.

  Through it all Tim Snyder remained charmingly unfazed. He spent nearly every waking moment at the side of his filly; even the non-waking moments found him just a short flight of stairs away. There was no way to know how the story would end, how high in class the once unwanted filly would climb before bumping up against the ceiling. It seemed impossible to think of her as Breeders Cup material, but still there were rumblings.

  “All I know is, we haven’t seen the best of her yet,” Desormeaux predicted after Lisa’s victory in the Loudonville. “This is the best story in horse racing, and it’s going to get even better.”

  Everyone loves a fairy tale, and the story of Lisa’s Booby Trap was a good one. That it was somewhat more complicated and less Disneyesque than it appeared on the surface did nothing to diminish interest or squelch fan support. Both horse and trainer were underdogs. Theirs was a tale of life and live, of second chances and hope.

  Who isn’t a sucker for that? If you couldn’t root for Tim Snyder, well, you had no heart.

  “I’m actually glad it turned out the way it did,” said Ocala Stud’s Michael O’Farrell. “We didn’t do particularly well when we had this horse. John Shaw didn’t do particularly well with her. Don Hunt didn’t do particularly well with her. But this Snyder fellow up in New York—who I’ve never met, incidentally—he did well; he got her to run. That’s what the industry is all about. It’s a wonderful story for everyone.”

  Well, maybe not quite.

  When Lisa’s Booby Trap crossed the finish line first in the Loudonville, Elaine Castillo was a couple hundred miles away, in the jockeys’ room at Finger Lakes. She had two mounts that day, in races with combined purses of $21,000. She finished sixth in one race, seventh in the other. Neither of her horses would ever be confused with Lisa’s Booby Trap, nor any other horse you were likely to see at Saratoga. It was a long and hard day for Castillo, further complicated when she heard of the minor miracle that had occurred in Saratoga.

  “I’ll be honest—when I saw her win, it broke my heart completely,” Castillo said. “I had done so much of the work on that horse. It would have been my chance to move up a little bit, too. Instead, it kind of did the opposite for me. I knew better, but it still killed me. It pissed me off, broke my spirit a little. I became kind of resentful and I just quit, eventually. Took like a year off. I won’t blame it all on what happened with Tim and Lisa, but that was a big part of it. All of us in the game work so hard and deal with so much. We all take the disappointment differently. Some can put up with it more. I was in a bad mood and resentful, and that’s not who I wanted to be.”

  By the end of the summer Castillo had withdrawn entirely from the sport. She stopped going to the track, wouldn’t even work horses, let alone race them. She spent a few months in Italy “clearing my head, getting all that craziness out of my mind,” before eventually coming back to the States and trying to rebuild her career. She loved horse rac
ing too much to stay away from it forever. While Castillo said she bears no grudge against Tim Snyder, the pain will never disappear completely.

  “Other trainers do it all the time. It’s part of the game,” Castillo said. “But that doesn’t make it not hurt. The thing is, the big trainers get away with this, and everyone accepts it. I was thinking, Who the hell is Timmy Snyder? And that’s not a good way to be. We get along fine now. I just try to keep a good, professional relationship and move forward. But I know I’ll never ride that filly again.”

  For the shortest time imaginable, Lisa’s Booby Trap was the biggest name in horse racing. She was an equine version of Jeremy Lin, the overlooked and unwanted point guard who in February 2012 came seemingly out of nowhere—“nowhere” in this case being Harvard, and then the far end of the New York Knicks’ bench—to become, for a moment, the most popular player, and the very best story, the NBA had to offer. Like Lin, Lisa was a comet, provoking unreasonable expectations for both longevity and light.

  The offers kept coming and Tim Snyder kept turning them down, which only served to enhance the appeal of the story. Whether Tim was a man of enormous integrity or foolishness, whether his commitment to Lisa was fueled primarily by devotion to his wife or devotion to his own ego and arrogance, was batted about both privately and publicly in racing circles. One of the last offers was also one of the best, according to John Tebbutt. It came from Michael Dubb, a well-known and successful horseman who would saddle more winners than any other owner at Saratoga in 2010. Knowing of Snyder’s reluctance to part ways with Lisa, at any cost, Dubb offered Snyder $150,000 for half ownership, Tebbutt said.

  It seemed the ideal arrangement, permitting a long-broke trainer and owner to put some much-needed coin in his pocket, while also maintaining both a future revenue stream and a personal connection to the filly that had changed his life. He would have money; he would make more money; and he would still be involved with the horse.