The Ghost Horse Read online

  Tebbutt fielded the offer and took it to Snyder.

  “Tell him thanks, but no thanks,” Tim said. “She’s my horse.”

  Finally, according to Tebbutt, came an offer of $250,000 from another owner who said he would allow Snyder to keep the filly, and any purses she earned, through three more starts—even after money had changed hands.

  Again, Tim declined.

  “Everyone thought I was ignorant for not taking the money, but I just would have gone on a spending spree, the way I always do when I get a little cash,” Snyder would later explain (or rationalize). “And the longer I had the horse, the closer we became; the more it felt like my wife was getting involved in her. Lisa, my wife, she had all kinds of physical problems, but she was a good person. And this filly … she struck me a lot like my wife, and the longer I was around her, the more they seemed similar.”

  Perhaps recognizing that he was treading dangerously close to the sort of territory he had been careful to avoid, Tim pulled back just a bit.

  “Look, the horse wasn’t a replacement for my wife, but I needed something to keep me going. I didn’t have no girlfriend, didn’t want one either. I’d rather have the horse, to be honest with you. She’s a moneymaker and we get along. I get up in the morning, I feed her, I take care of her, I talk to her. She’s happy and I’m happy.

  “I think I conquered this horse because I spent so much time with her and I learned how to communicate with her. And sometimes I talk to her just like I talked to my old lady, kind of harsh, know what I mean? Basically that’s how I am. It’s not an act. Some people don’t like it; they’re not used to hearing somebody that rough cut. But I tell it like it is, and Lisa appreciated that. She accepted me for who I am. Me and my wife had our ups and downs like any other married couple, but we settled all our arguments before we went to bed. We didn’t cheat on each other and we didn’t lie to each other. We took care of each other. She’d fight with me, all right—by my side! I remember a guy one time wouldn’t pay us the money he owed after we’d shipped horses for him. We got in a big argument and the son of a bitch took a swing at me. Before I could even react Lisa had picked up a feed bucket and hit him over the head with it. How many wives defend their husbands that way?”

  Well … probably not very many. And if you come across some semblance of that spirit, that spark, you latch onto it. No matter where it happens to be.

  “That horse gave Timmy his life back,” said Tebbutt. “He couldn’t give her up.”

  * * *

  Nearly a month would pass before Lisa’s Bobby Trap ran her next race, as Tim Snyder carefully weighed his options and opportunities. He had initially considered pointing the filly toward the $100,000 Grade 3 Victory Ride Stakes in the final week of the meet, but those plans changed on August 18, when Snyder took her out for a morning gallop on the turf course at the Oklahoma Track, a busy training and stabling facility located just across Union Avenue from the main entrance to Saratoga Race Course.

  Lisa’s Booby Trap was not a grass runner, and Snyder had no intention when he woke that morning of trying to make her one. While some racehorses demonstrate little regard for the type of surface on which they compete (dirt or grass), far more typical is the animal that clearly prefers one surface over another. Oftentimes this proclivity can be seen deep into a horse’s bloodlines: if the mare is a turf horse, for example, then it’s likely her offspring will also be quicker on turf. In Lisa’s case, there was nothing in her lineage to indicate that she would adapt well to a grass course, and Snyder had smartly chosen to train and race her on dirt from the very beginning. With extraordinary results.

  Sometimes, though, a trainer will work a horse on grass simply as a change of pace, or to give her some training time on a surface that is softer and supposedly more forgiving. In reality, though, a turf course, which is often uneven and pitted, can be more challenging to a horse.

  Not to mention confusing. Eons of evolution have left horses with an instinctive desire to run and the capacity to gallop over a wide variety of surfaces, with grass being the most natural. But if a horse has spent nearly its entire life training on dirt, there is no telling how it will respond to a sudden change, and so caution is generally advised. Indeed, when Kent Desormeaux led Lisa onto the turf course, he was under the impression that he was merely to breeze the filly. At the last moment, Snyder instructed the rider to follow his gut.

  “If she likes [the surface] and she wants to run, let her go,” the trainer advised.

  The result was a brief but impressive workout: officially, three furlongs in 35.27 seconds, although she continued to gallop out and unofficially covered a half mile in 47.2 seconds. To Snyder, she looked like a turf horse. He consulted with Desormeaux, who informed him that the filly had felt strong and confident, and not the least bit squeamish. With that, Tim Snyder, the unconventional trainer with the unconventional horse, diverted once again from conventional wisdom. After four consecutive victories on the dirt, by a combined margin of 42¾ lengths, and without a single grass race to her credit, she would run her next race September 2, on the turf. Not only would she be switching surfaces, but she would be running farther. The Victory Ride was a six-furlong race, the same distance at which Lisa had won three of her four starts. Instead, her next start would be at one mile. Ironically, given her trainer’s penchant for rolling the dice, the name of the race was the Riskaverse Stakes.

  “He wins two or three races and then he puts her on the grass!” noted a befuddled John Shaw. “Like she wasn’t doing good enough on the dirt or something. You’ve got to be retarded to do something like that. She had no grass pedigree at all. None!”

  Maybe, though, it was neither foolishness nor stupidity that provoked Snyder’s decision, but rather sensitivity. True, when pressed about his motivation for entering Lisa in the Riskaverse, Tim did allude to the possibility that she could make more money as a grass horse. But he also pointed out that given her troubled upbringing and structural deficiencies, maybe she’d be less prone to injury and thus have a longer and healthier career on turf.

  If it was a somewhat less conservative approach than might have been displayed by most trainers, it wasn’t like he was reinventing the wheel.

  Running in the Riskaverse was just … well … risky.

  “I thought Timmy did all the right things with this horse,” said Tebbutt. “When you make a change, you never know how it will work out, but she worked so well on the turf. And Desormeaux is an excellent rider, a great judge of horseflesh. For him to tell Timmy that he should run her on the turf … that says a lot. Timmy had input from other people. He didn’t just decide on a whim to do this, all on his own.”

  Tebbutt let out a sigh of exasperation.

  “It’s so easy to cut people up after the fact; you see it all the time in horse racing. It’s a tough business. And it wasn’t like Timmy had a string of million-dollar horses to practice on.”

  * * *

  As any horseman—or any gambler, for that matter—can attest, there is no such thing as a sure bet. On September 2, Lisa’s Booby Trap went off as an even-money favorite (down from a morning line of 5-2) in the Riskaverse Stakes. On the eve of the race Snyder had moved his filly to a more secluded spot on the backstretch, in the hope of gaining some much-needed privacy. This left her with a long and public march to the paddock prior to race time, during which Lisa, trailed by a Dateline NBC camera crew, was showered with applause and cheers by a crowd that stood three-deep along the rail. Although attendance on this sweltering (temperatures in the nineties) afternoon was just a shade under ten thousand, modest by Saratoga standards, a significant percentage seemed to have flocked to the walkway to witness the procession of Lisa’s Booby Trap. It was, one couldn’t help but notice, the type of response generated only by the sport’s true stars.

  “Go get ‘em, girl!”

  “Yeah, Lisa!”

  The paddock at Saratoga is a charming if somewhat odd collage of style and personality and confli
cting interests. Jockeys and trainers go about the business of preparing for the next race with precisely the appropriate degree of seriousness, while all around them is the pageantry of a day at the races. Ostensibly, paddock access is restricted to those who have some legitimate reason to be there: horsemen, owners, media. In reality, though, the paddock (at Saratoga, anyway) routinely fills with people who have only the slimmest of connections to the horses involved: nephews and nieces of the jockey or trainer; college frat buddies of the owner’s son; a wide assortment of friends and relatives and “industry insiders,” many wearing searsucker jackets, madras pants, and hats the size of manhole covers (though hopefully not all at the same time).

  And that’s just inside the gate.

  Outside the gate, on a busy day—and there are many of these at Saratoga—a louder and less well-heeled throng encircles the paddock, breaking only when the “riders up” command is given and the jockeys climb aboard their mounts, and the field parades to the track.

  Imagine an NFL locker room thrown open to fans and the media just moments before kickoff, and you have some idea of the level of intrusiveness. But it’s all part of the game in horse racing and everyone accepts it, with varying degrees of annoyance, as the price of doing business.

  As he saddled Lisa’s Booby Trap, Tim Snyder seemed oblivious to his surroundings; he might as well have been at Finger Lakes, so focused was he on the task at hand, so disinterested in the growing cluster of fans pointing and gawking at his horse. Not even the presence of family and friends could distract him. And there were more of them in the paddock on this blistering afternoon than Tim had seen in years. His in-laws had made the trip, of course. But so had his sister and his daughter, Sierra, both of whom had flown in from California.

  “I’d always known that my brother was a good horseman,” said Cheryl Hall. “But to see him there, in Saratoga, and the way he worked … it was just amazing. It was like watching a surgeon. He knew exactly what he was doing, and he handled himself so professionally. I couldn’t have been more proud of him.”

  Tim was all business in the paddock. There was a brief handshake and photo op with John Walsh, known primarily as the television host of America’s Most Wanted, but also an avid horse racing fan and polo player from Central New York who had befriended Snyder; as the race drew near, though, Tim communicated only with Tebbutt and Desormeaux.

  Typically, an owner will leave the paddock and retreat to the privacy of a clubhouse box seat when his horse exits the paddock. A trainer might walk to the edge of the track before handing the reins to an assistant and following the owner upstairs. Tim Snyder walked Lisa out of the paddock, through the crowd, and onto the track himself, releasing the reins only when it was time for Desormeaux to warm her up. He offered a few last-second instructions, gave Lisa a pat on the rump, and then disappeared beneath the grandstand.

  The Riskaverse was split into two divisions, with Lisa’s Booby Trap one of ten three-year-old fillies competing in the ninth race. As she settled into the gate, on the far inside, Desormeaux noticed nothing out of the ordinary. Although it took a while to load the entire field, and she spent considerable time standing in the cage, Lisa seemed relaxed, ready to run. But at 5:32 P.M., when the bell sounded and the door swung open, she hesitated before breaking. It wasn’t a fatal error, as Lisa’s inside position allowed her to move along the hedge and cover lost ground quickly. She settled into fourth place, five lengths behind frontrunner Queen of the Creek and jockey Julien Leparoux.

  At the rail, near the finish line, watching with great concern, was a New York attorney and fellow horse owner named George Santangelo, who had befriended Snyder in the previous month and offered to help him with legal matters. Like most people at Saratoga, Santangelo had fallen for the story of Lisa’s Booby Trap and wanted the horse to run well on this day; unlike most people, though, he knew enough about the game to immediately understand the gravity of the situation. As the field raced along the backstretch, and Lisa failed to find her footing, Santangelo shook his head.

  “Something’s not right,” he said. “She’s not running.”

  As the field approached the final turn, with the crowd imploring the filly to shift gears, track announcer Tom Durkin stated the obvious:

  “A six-length lead with time starting to tick away. Situation critical for Lisa’s Booby Trap.”

  By that point, Desormeaux had dug into the filly and asked her to run; she gave him nothing in return. Perhaps she was agitated by the change in track surface or discouraged by the withering heat; maybe she’d simply run one too many races. For whatever reason, Lisa never fired. By the time they reached the top of the stretch, Desormeaux, unwilling to risk her health and heart in pursuit of an unattainable goal, eased up on the filly. She crossed the finish line in last place, seventeen lengths behind Queen of the Creek, a wire-to-wire winner.

  A smattering of sympathetic applause from a stunned and disappointed crowd greeted Lisa as she walked back toward the finish line after the race. Tim Snyder stepped onto the track and took the horse in hand as Desormeaux dismounted. The two talked briefly, somberly before the rider walked off toward the jockeys’ quarters to change into different silks. The ninth race was officially over, and he had another mount in the tenth. Meanwhile, Tim Snyder walked back up the homestretch, alongside his horse, just as he had done one month earlier, with a gaggle of reporters trailing him. This time, though, they peppered him with questions of a different sort.

  “What happened?”

  “What went wrong?”

  “Is she hurt?”

  He had no explanation, no satisfactory answer; one by one the reporters fell away, eventually leaving Snyder all alone with his filly as they exited the track and walked toward the “spit barn,” where a urine sample of Lisa’s would be collected and tested. Standard postrace protocol; for the trainer, though, a whole lot less pleasant when you’ve just blown up in the biggest race of your life.

  Nearly an hour would pass before Snyder and Lisa emerged from the test barn. They stood together near the edge of the track, cars rushing by on Union Avenue just a short distance away as the crowd filtered out after another day of racing. Subdued and a bit perplexed, Snyder struggled for an explanation.

  “Maybe she didn’t like the grass,” he said. “Maybe the heat.”

  He shrugged.

  “Maybe she just needs a break.”

  Eventually the two of them began walking back toward the stakes barn, where Lisa would spend the next few days before returning either to Finger Lakes or to his mother-in-law’s farm—Snyder hadn’t yet decided. They moved slowly, in perfect sync, the little trainer and the big filly, each of them sweating profusely, looking tired and beaten by the long day’s effort. Snyder was asked if he was disappointed with the filly’s performance. It was meant almost as a rhetorical question, and yet, without breaking stride or giving it a moment’s thought, Tim ran a hand along Lisa’s great, sloping back and smiled.

  “This horse could never disappoint me. She don’t owe me a thing.”

  Epilogue

  CAMILLUS, NY

  FEBRUARY 2011

  Winter grips the Finger Lakes region of Central New York hard and fast, closing its fist well before Thanksgiving and not letting go until deep into April. As Tim Snyder walks into the Calley house after running some morning errands, he takes a few heavy steps to knock the snow from his boots. The clattering provokes yelps of protest from T-Bone, the squatty little Jack Russell who serves as unofficial sentry for the family, and who remains Tim’s sidekick and companion.

  As it has been on and off for nearly twenty years, this rambling, unassuming farmhouse is Tim’s home. Only a mile or so down the road are the usual comforts (or trappings, depending on how you look at it) of suburbia—convenience stores, subdivisions, strip malls of chain restaurants and retail outlets—but here, in a rural neighborhood, there is room to move and to breathe. Room for people of diverse backgrounds, thrown together by circumstance and lo
ve. Room for their complicated and sometimes messy, broken lives to bump up against each other and intersect. Room for their dogs and cats and horses.

  Especially horses.

  “Come on, I’ll show you where she lives,” Tim tells a visitor, and soon they are trudging through knee-deep powder, past a handful of cars and trucks awaiting rebirth in the backyard, past great, twisting heaps of snowcapped deadfall. The Calleys have several acres of land, and some of it is left untended, giving the impression of a place that is at once cozy and overwhelming.

  Far in the back are two connected barns. One is cavernous, with a large walking ring and plenty of room to do some of the hard and rough work of breaking and training horses. The other barn is smaller, with two short rows of stalls. As Tim throws open the door on this stark winter morning, sunlight fills the barn. Three horses stand in their stalls, puffs of steam rising rhythmically from their nostrils.

  Two of the horses are relatively cheap claimers, purchased the previous summer when Snyder had a terrific racehorse and some money in his pocket. The filly whose earnings led to those purchases is in one of the center stalls. As Snyder’s voice fills the barn, she tilts her head to the side in obvious recognition.

  “Here she is,” Tim says, reaching up to pat her on the shoulder. “How ya’ doin’ this morning, girl?”

  Lisa’s Booby Trap is an impressive physical specimen, seeming even larger now in the narrow confines of this modest barn than she did on the backstretch at Saratoga. Always tall, she has grown impressively into her body, and when the trainer says she’s happy and healthy and will be fit as hell in the spring when Finger Lakes Racetrack opens, you can’t help but think maybe he’s right.

  “I’m telling you right now,” Tim predicts, “this filly will be better than ever.”