The Ghost Horse Read online

  “She was trying to bring the horse into the house,” Carol recalled. “She had no idea what she was doing or where she was. But you know the funny thing? She had complete control over the horse. I guess she just decided it was time to come home, and she wanted to bring the horse with her.”

  Tim shook his head at the memory. “Craziest thing I ever saw. But I got used to it after a while.”

  The illness, Tim believes, brought them closer. They learned to fight through the episodes together, and to laugh at the challenges and misconceptions they sometimes provoked.

  Early one morning Tim and Lisa were on their way to work at Beulah Park, a racetrack located in Grove City, Ohio, not far from Columbus. As Tim recalls the event, they were chatting and driving, enjoying their morning coffee as they approached the front gate, when Lisa suddenly fell silent.

  “Her whole body tightened up,” Tim said. “She clenched her fists and squeezed the coffee cup so hard it splashed all over the car, burned me in the face. I slammed the truck into neutral, tried to take her seat belt off while the engine was still running. But she was thrashing all over the place. I got her in a headlock with one arm, released the seat belt with the other. I was scared to death she was going to choke herself.”

  Over the course of the next few minutes, they rode out the seizure together, Lisa convulsing violently in Tim’s arms. Eventually the shaking quelled and Tim loosened his grip, letting Lisa fall back against his chest. It was just about then that Tim heard a sound off in the distance, a sound he recognized as the feint whining of a siren. At first he paid it no mind, but then the screeching grew louder and as Tim looked up in the rearview mirror, with Lisa tucked into his embrace, he could see the flashing of lights and the unmistakable monotone markings of a police cruiser. He watched in disbelief as the officer approached the car, hand on holster, ready to do business.

  If ever there was a situation that screamed to be misunderstood, Tim quickly realized, this was it.

  “The son of a bitch working the security gate had called the cops,” Tim explained. “He was used to seeing fights. Hell, everyone fights at the racetrack, and he just figured I was some guy beating the shit out of his girl. I guess you can’t blame him. Lisa used to shake like crazy when she had a bad seizure, and I was on top of her. It probably looked pretty bad from a distance.”

  By the time the officer reached the truck, the convulsions had stopped, a crowd had gathered, and Lisa had regained consciousness. Together they explained what had happened. The officer asked if they needed medical assistance. No, Tim said. She just needed to sleep.

  The officer nodded and walked away.

  “It was embarrassing,” Tim remembered. “Everyone felt bad. But that’s just the way it was with Lisa. You never knew when she was going to have a seizure, and you never knew how bad they would be. We learned to deal with it the best we could.”

  If Tim frequently served as caregiver for Lisa, well, she certainly reciprocated. By all accounts she was every bit the workhorse that he was, and usually the more focused partner in their relationship. It was her nature to be calm, patient, organized, almost zenlike in her approach to life and work. And while Lisa’s health problems were more pronounced, Tim had his issues, as well, either as a result of hard living or simply because he spent so much time working with animals; periodically, the odds caught up with him.

  Like the time at Finger Lakes, on a blustery day in the late 1990s, when Tim was riding one of his horses to the track for a workout.

  “A Thursday,” Tim recalled. “I remember that because Thursday was garbage day, and this one guy, another trainer, had dragged his empty feed bags outside the barn, and they weren’t tied down or anything. Then the damn wind came up and got them bags in a swirl, and the horse reared up, knocked me off, fell on top of me, knocked the horse out cold. So I’m lying on the ground, pinned beneath him, and I’m in bad fuckin’ shape. A whole bunch of people came running out, tried to lift the horse off me, but couldn’t even budge him. They kicked him, they threw water on his face. Nothing.”

  For nearly twenty minutes they stood in a loose circle, waiting helplessly, impatiently for the animal to rouse itself and slide away.

  “The last thing I remember was him getting up and continuing to step all over me,” Tim said. “And in the process he punched holes in me everywhere. Just by walking away from me he did the most damage. Last thing I saw was the horse’s tail and his head was turned, and he fell into a ditch across the street.”

  Tim had hit the ground so hard that his helmet had cracked in half. But it was his lower body that took the brunt of the accident.

  “I couldn’t walk,” he said. “So Sammy Blake, a jockey’s agent, he got on one arm, and Lisa got on the other. I told Lisa to give me her flack jacket, since I wasn’t wearing one and I didn’t want to get in trouble when they started investigating. When the ambulance arrived, I told them I was fine, which wasn’t true, of course. But I didn’t have any health insurance—just workman’s comp—so the last thing I needed was an ambulance bill and an emergency room visit.”

  They wound up at a nearby hotel, Tim soaking his battered legs in a bathtub filled with ice, tossing back Percodan with a six-pack of Genesee.

  “Go back to the track, finish putting away the rest of the horses,” Tim instructed his wife. “I’ll be okay.”

  Within a few hours the painkillers and adrenaline had worn off and Lisa had returned to the hotel, finding her husband in a world of hurt. Gone was the facade of toughness, and with it any pretense of having avoided a serious injury or even concern about how they’d pay the crushing medical bills that would follow. Lisa helped Tim to his feet and virtually dragged him out to the parking lot and then drove him to a nearby hospital, where a shot of Demerol dulled the pain and X-rays revealed a pair of broken legs. Tim left the hospital several hours later in a wheelchair pushed by Lisa and casts up to his knees.

  “This horse business—it’s dangerous,” Tim said. And it’s not all glamorous. There’s a lot of horseshit in the horse business. The public has no idea what we go through to get that picture in the winner’s circle. If you’re someone like Todd Pletcher or Bob Baffert, with two hundred head of stock and an army of folks working for you, maybe it’s different. I don’t know. I’m sure they work hard, too. But for most of us it’s a really tough life. The thing that makes it worthwhile is having someone you can share it with. Someone to help you carry the load.”

  Chapter Six

  OCALA, FLORIDA

  SUMMER 2009

  In the beginning, John Shaw had been cautiously optimistic. A veteran horse broker with more than two decades of experience, he knew his business well, knew what to look for in a horse, and what to avoid. In a typical year he would acquire somewhere between fifty and seventy-five racehorses; virtually all of them would be sold to someone else. He was a racetrack middleman, a conduit between breeder and owner. If the formula was simple—buy low, sell high—the reality of his work was something else altogether. It was a complicated and risky venture, one dependent on weighing the strict calculus of bloodlines against the horseman’s hunch—which was less about gambling than it was the hard-earned intuition gleaned through an endless series of predawn workouts and the occasional heart-stopping surprise.

  Like most horse brokers, Shaw knew better than to be ruled by his heart. He was, in many ways, no different than a Wall Street trader, with horseflesh his chosen investment vehicle. Stock was acquired and moved with ruthless precision. At all levels of racing, brokers are a quiet but active part of the thoroughbred industry, finding owners for horses that aspire to greatness and for those that will settle for much less.

  “Every racehorse is a lottery ticket,” Shaw said. “In the end, when I move a horse, I just want to make sure it has a home. I want to know that it’s not going to be put down just because it can’t run.”

  That happens sometimes, unfortunately. A racehorse that can’t race, or can’t race well enough, is an econom
ic sinkhole. It is a common misperception that the sport of thoroughbred horse racing is populated only by men and women with extraordinarily deep pockets, casually and even recklessly tossing money at an expensive hobby. Far more common, especially when you dig below the elite levels of the sport, are owners who consider five figures a prohibitive amount to invest in an animal as fickle as a racehorse. Transactions in which only a few thousand dollars change hands are actually quite common; sometimes, horses are literally given away.

  Such was the case with the big bay filly that had been foaled and raised at Ocala Stud, before finding its way to John Shaw.

  “She was a good-looking horse, big and strong, with a decent pedigree. Not great, but respectable,” Shaw remembered. “But when I tried to work her? Jesus Christmas, she was slow. I practically had to time this horse with a sundial. It was ridiculous.”

  Unsure what to do, and encouraged even on the worst days by the sheer attractiveness of the animal—God, there must be a racehorse in there somewhere!—Shaw hung unto the horse for more than six months. There was no way to break the mystery, to figure out what was in the filly’s head that made her so reluctant to run. To Shaw, she appeared structurally sound. Yes, there was a small, irregular patch of white on her left eye, like snowflakes against a night sky, and that sort of thing when seen in a racehorse can indicate impaired vision (and indeed future owners of the filly would claim that she was nearly blind in that eye). But when Shaw approached the filly from the left side, she would respond appropriately; when he waved a hand across the left side of her head, she would flinch. Good signs, to be sure.

  “She looked fabulous when I got her, and she looked fabulous when she left here,” Shaw said. “She came from Ocala Stud, which is the premiere farm in Florida; and Florida is the largest horse manufacturer on the planet. Ocala Stud is a tremendous farm. This filly had every opportunity. She had all her shots, she was wormed, fed properly, pampered from Day One. Her whole life was perfect.”

  For whatever reason, though, when Shaw would lead her out to the track for a morning workout, he was subjected to the same sort of discouraging performance that had led Michael O’Farrell to unload the horse in the first place. It wasn’t that she was injured; it wasn’t that she was overweight or undernourished; it wasn’t that she lacked the physical tools to run, and to run well. The way Shaw saw it, she was simply lazy. Her effort was almost comically lackluster.

  “This filly would get beat by twenty-five lengths going three-eighths of a mile,” Shaw recalled. “She couldn’t beat any horse on the farm. Why? Who knows? I think with some horses it’s in their breeding. They don’t train at all, or they don’t train well, and they go to the track and they drop out of the gate, and it’s a whole new ball game. Suddenly they run. Or it can work the other way. That’s the funny thing about horses. You can buy a racing prospect and it works fast all the time, and you get all excited. You think, Wow, this horse can really run. No, not necessarily. It can train. Until you put it in a race, you never know. You can pay three hundred thousand dollars for a horse that’s training like a champ, enter it in a race, and it can’t beat anybody. And I’m talking about running for seventy-five hundred bucks against maidens at Penn National.

  “Just because a horse can run, or train, does not mean that it can race. It might have the ability to run just as fast as everyone else—or faster—but it can’t race, or won’t race. There are plenty of horses working at Penn National or Finger Lakes, every day, putting in workouts that are just as fast as the horses at Belmont. But they can’t race; that’s why they’re at Finger Lakes. And every once in a while you see just the opposite—a horse that hates to train, but when you put it in the gate, her genetic wherewithal kicks in, and the pedigree comes out, and she becomes a racehorse. She has the ability and the competitive desire. It’s just that in the morning, for some reason, without the crowd and the environment and the starting gate and all the shit that goes with it, she’s a nag. That’s the only way I can explain what happened with this horse. Because in the morning she was unbelievably slow. Honestly? I didn’t think she had any ability whatsoever.”

  Like Michael O’Farrell, Shaw was so thoroughly unimpressed by the bay filly that he felt conflicted about even trying to sell her. Any exchange of currency, he reasoned, was going to leave the buyer feeling as though he’d been cheated.

  “I figured whoever got her would end up getting mad at me,” Shaw said. “She was that slow.”

  As a compromise, Shaw put in a call to an acquaintance named Don Hunt, who also trained and brokered horses for a living.

  “My deal with Don was, ‘Come and get her, try to do something with her. I gotta tell you, though, she’s so slow you have to mark the ground to make sure she’s moving. But maybe you’ve got some people—you have more clients than I do, that’s for sure—so maybe you know someone who would want her.’ I had no expectations. If Don had told me he found some little girl who wanted to take her and use her as a jumping horse, that would have been fine with me. This horse was so slow that even if someone fell off her they wouldn’t get hurt.”

  In November 2009, Don Hunt drove with a friend to Shaw’s training center in Ocala to take a look at the World’s Slowest Filly. Like Shaw and O’Farrell, they were impressed by the horse’s size and stature, but concerned about her dismal training record, as well as the spot on her eye and what Hunt thought was a structural imbalance in her feet. But there was enough upside in the horse’s pedigree and physical appearance that Hunt was willing to take a chance on her. He’d work with the filly, make any adjustments that were necessary in terms of shodding, and in a couple months try to find a buyer. If all went well, he and Shaw would split the profit.

  If there was any profit, which was far from a guarantee.

  “Her feet were atrocious, and I swear she was blind in that one eye,” Hunt recalled. “But she still looked great. And we worked on her. I had X-rays taken and we shod her three times over the next couple months. But I never thought she’d turn out to be much of a horse. Hell, I never even put a saddle on her.”

  A few weeks after Hunt acquired the horse from Shaw, the two men chatted on the phone.

  “Donny, is she getting any better?” Shaw asked.

  Hunt laughed, as if it were the most ridiculous question.

  “No, she’s not.”

  “Okay,” Shaw said, more than a trace of resignation in his voice. “Do whatever you want with her.”

  Chapter Seven

  Remember the horse we claimed at Brockton? He stood out like something I was supposed to have. He has had a greater purpose than to be just a racehorse; he was like a gift from God, given at a time when I needed something to hope for, to live for. I have made this incredible journey on the wings of friends and family who have prayed and have had their prayers answered. I believe that being sick has been an opportunity for God to reveal Himself, not only to me, but to everyone I know! This has been a time of awakening for all of us … There are still a few bumps in the road, and the doctor keeps coming up with some new ailment whenever I see him—I’m contemplating finding a new doctor who will tell me what I want to hear:

  “Go back to work!”

  —Lisa Calley, March 2003

  They built their business slowly, overcoming meager funds with hard work and an almost playful approach to the racing game. Well, Lisa was playful, anyway. Tim was mostly irascible and narrow-minded—a “my way or the highway” kind of guy—which is why they complemented each other nicely. They never made a lot of money, but in time they nurtured and developed a healthy little enterprise that typically was home to between one and two dozen horses, some of which they raced, some of which they simply bought and sold. In their time together, Tim estimates, he and Lisa churned nearly five hundred horses.

  Their base of operations—their home—was in Central New York, but they traveled frequently and with little baggage. They’d spend part of the summer in Canada, racing at Fort Erie Racetrack in Ontario; in the
winter they’d move to Florida. And there were stops all along the way, at tracks large and small (but mostly small)—anywhere they could pick up a claimer or find a buyer for one of theirs.

  “They had cheap horses, but they had quite a few of them,” said John Tebbutt. “You know—thousand-dollar horses. Maybe two thousand. They’d deal all over the place: Finger Lakes, Beulah, the county fair circuit; anyplace they could find a healthy, inexpensive horse. I hate to use the term ‘bottom feeders,’ but that’s the one that keeps popping into mind. And the truth is, there’s a lot of people in this industry who operate that way. You do the best you can with the resources you have. And they treated their stock well. To Timmy it was a business. Horses were a product, a means to survive. That’s the way he was raised, and that’s the way he supported himself for a number of years; he couldn’t afford to get attached to a horse. But Lisa was different. She absolutely loved her horses.”

  It’s an unusual relationship horsemen have with their stock, one rooted in the practicalities of business and finance, but complicated by emotion. There is, for example, no sadder sight at a racetrack than that of a jockey frantically easing his mount through the stretch, pulling at the reins, working with all his might to stop an animal that has already broken down. While some incidents that result in equine fatality are spectacular—crowded stretch runs in which exhausted, fiercely competitive animals clip heels and tumble to the dirt, dragging helpless riders in their wake—many are deceptively quiet. A seemingly healthy colt, in the throes of mid-race oxygen debt and lactic acid accumulation, begins to weaken beneath the strain.

  Sometimes the jockey can feel this happening; he uses instinct and experience to gauge the amount of fuel left in the tank, and whether the whip is necessary or even practical. It is his job to push the horse, to exact every ounce of speed and ability and competitiveness in an effort to win the race. But he also bears the burden of responsibility, of knowing when to pull back so that the horse suffers no long-term damage. Usually it’s just a matter of understanding that there really is no point in beating a dead (or exhausted) horse. Sometimes, though, more nefarious forces are at work: an undiagnosed stress fracture, perhaps, or a strained tendon; anything that might cause the animal to take a bad step and go down. The thoroughbred racehorse is a miraculous animal, an architectural marvel that almost looks like an evolutionary mistake: so much bone and muscle and mass supported by the spindliest of foundations. That it works as well as it does, as often as it does, is something of a mystery.