1. Life Begins at Seventy-seven
2. A Mistake … and a Big Day
3. The Man
4. The Business
5. The Green Years
6. Rough Tracks
7. Sweating It Out
8. The Backstretch
9. Heading for the Top
10. The Big Years
11. For the Record
12. It Don’t Hurt None
A Biography of Jimmy Breslin
PHOTO
1 Mr. Fitz as a jockey
2 Mr. Fitz riding in the Oldtimers’ Race at Pimlico in the 1920s
3 Mr. Fitz, Rox Angarola, and Walter Miller
4 Mr. Fitz and James Fitzsimmons, Jr.
5 Max Hirsch and Mr. Fitz
6 Gallant Fox winning the Preakness in 1930
7 Omaha, “Smokey” Saunders up
8 Mr. Fitz, William Woodward, Sr., and William Woodward, Jr.
9 Nashua and Swaps in their historic match race
10 Mr. Fitz and Nashua
11 Dark Secret at the finish of the Jockey Club Gold Cup Race at Belmont
12 Mr. Fitz and Eddie Arcaro
13 Diavolo winning the Tremont Stakes at Aqueduct
14 Mr. Fitz and Johnny Longden
15 Photograph of a painting of Sunny Jim by Robert Roché
16 Mr. Fitz watching the post parade at Aqueduct
17 Mr. Fitz at Hialeah
18 Mr. Fitz in the doorway of his Barn 17 at Belmont Race Track
Chart of a race won by Mr. Fitz
AT ABOUT SEVEN O’CLOCK, when the dusk had changed the color of the hills and lake to gray flannel, the mosquitoes at Fitzsimmonsville, New York, which is a summer colony outside of Saratoga Springs, began to come out and eat Irish for dinner. Somebody turned on an automatic spraying system which pumps an insecticide smoke out of pipes on each of the six houses. When it began, everybody started to tell the great-grandfather, Mr. James E. Fitzsimmons, age eighty-seven, that he’d better walk down the hill to the lake so that the fumes wouldn’t get a chance to clog his windpipe, which even he concedes is just a little bit odd.
It was nothing more than an extra precaution. The smoke had no smell to it at all; two martinis on somebody’s breath would have been far more powerful. But the old man still made his way down the hill, a handkerchief in his hand to cover the outside chance this smoke business one of the family’s engineers had devised would start him coughing.
One of the children playing on the hill saw him walking away. She promptly put a hand over her mouth, made herself cough and then flew down the hill. The one playing with her did the same and so did the others and now the hill was a tangle of barefeet in T-shirts and all of them had a hand over the mouth and kept forcing coughs.
“They see me,” the old man said, “and they all start coughing. They didn’t even know the spray was on. They just like to do it because I do it.”
There were probably twenty-five kids running from the smoke. It was impossible to get an actual count because they moved around so fast.
“Do you know them all by name?” the old man was asked.
“Oh, this isn’t even all of them,” he said. “There’s more around someplace. I guess I could try to pick them out here for you, but I stopped doin’ that a long time ago. I always get them mixed up and then the mothers start squawking because I don’t know their children. So I just say hello and pat them on the head.”
The old man got down to the edge of the lake and stood there as the children ran around him. A group of older ones came down and got into the two motorboats which were tied to the dock. Up in one of the houses on the hill, the teen-age girls were in the kitchen, running up a phone bill with long-distance calls to a disk jockey in Albany who announces your name when he plays a request. There were also something like twenty-two adults getting dressed for a formal dinner. And three or four others, including the old man, were going to stay behind and baby-sit.
Earlier in the day, most of them had gone to the railroad station to say hello to granddaughter Eadith, who is a Sister of St. Joseph and was passing through on the afternoon train to Plattsburgh.
So many of the family had clustered on the platform in front of the one car that the old New York Central conductor said to a trainman with him, “I guess it’s some sort of a celebrity they’re here for. I’ll take a walk down and make sure everything’s all right. Maybe we can give ’em an extra minute for autographs and make it up somewhere along the line.”
“It’s no celebrity,” a fellow working at the station told him. “It’s a nun. Her family came to see her.”
The conductor walked down to the car and held the train until everybody had a chance to say goodbye to Sister Anella, as she now is called.
“That’s some family you’ve got,” he said to one of the girls on the platform.
“Oh, we have a lot more than this,” she told him.
Which they certainly do. There are, simply, an awful lot of Fitzsimmonses. And next year, Irish Roman Catholic couples being as they are, there will be even more of them.
And now, the old man who started the whole thing off, was standing by the lake and talking about how he was going to baby-sit later on.
“I’m the back-up man,” he said. “Something happens to Eddie up there, I take over. Oh, I’ll know what to do. I remember there was a fella back in Brooklyn, Brennan his name was, he was a corker at it. He used to get the kids, he had six of ’em, and he’d sit them in a circle around a big potbellied stove in the living room. Then he’d open up a bottle of beer and pass it around to them. He’d come back a half hour later and all he’d have to do is reach down, pick them up and carry them in to bed. They’d all be out like lights on the floor.”
He stood there and watched the water and talked about baby-sitting until the insect smoke was turned off and he could go back up to one of the houses and sit down.
This is as good a place as any to begin picking up the story of James E. Fitzsimmons. He is a trainer of race horses who is called Sunny Jim Fitzsimmons in the newspapers, but Mr. Fitz by those who know him, and he is one of the biggest successes the sports world has ever had. He has been in horse racing since he was eleven and he has been a part of some days in sports history that most people, even if they have never seen a horse race, know something about. But the story of Mr. Fitz really isn’t about horse racing. If it were, we would get down to bedrock right about here and go into such matters as three-horse parlays and a bibliography of reasonable excuses for any milkman with a bill. The horse racing is just a backdrop here because this is about a unique human being who even now, at eighty-seven, is up at five in the morning, six days a week, to start another day in the game of life that he has beaten in a way that few ever have.
There are a lot of things about Mr. Fitz. He is old and bent over, but he is active and smart and talented and his thinking consists of today and tomorrow and next week and never yesterday. He is a great success at his business, but he is an even bigger winner as a human being, which is something you do not find often. Too many times, when you start telling about somebody who is revered and has made it big, his wife or his children come around and they tell you enough to make you drop the whole project.
Mr. Fitz has been around for a long time: Sheepshead Bay in the 1880s, Churchill Downs in the 1930s, or Belmont Park and Aqueduct in 1961. But if you were to stand at a bar and spend an afternoon talking to people about him, you would have to start by saying that for the Sunny Jim Fitzsimmons who is around today, a new life began at seventy-seven.
It started about 1946 when Mrs. James E. Fitzsimmons, sitting at home in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn, decided to get a little puckish about life. She made up her mind that she was old and she would like a little service. For sixty-one years of her married life she had done everything from selling the living-room furniture to having children practically unaided. Now that her husband had become a famous sports figure—or at least the newspapers said he was famous—and the children were married, she thought it was about time somebody made a fuss over her.
First there were the newspapers. Jennie Fitzsimmons had been a front-page to back-page reader of newspapers all her life, but now she would sit in the living room and hold the paper close to her face and then throw it down and tell everybody, I’m getting too old to read. I can’t see the print any more. I’m just too old.”
Then there was her Holy Communion on the first Friday of the month. Mrs. Fitzsimmons always went to Mass on these Fridays and received Communion, in addition to Sundays and Holy Days. During all her years in Sheepshead Bay, she would make it to St. Mark’s, five blocks away, through any sort of weather. There were certain things in life you could count on and one of them was Mrs. Fitzsimmons making it to St. Mark’s. But now it was different. She informed Father Edward Lahey that she was just too old and too tired to make it down to St. Mark’s on first Fridays and would he please come to her house and give Communion, as parish priests do for all who are physically unable to come out. Of course, Father Lahey said he’d be around.
There were other things like this. And when they were put together they would have worried those around her, except for certain things that happened. One Friday, for example, her family noticed that Mrs. Fitz, who had been sitting in the living room downstairs, jumped up and ran to her bedroom as Father Lahey came up the front walk to give Communion to his shut-in. After this, the family clocked her in track record time for the distance on several of these sprints.
Grandson Jimmy also became a bit skeptical during on of his weekly drives with her. Every Thursday afternoon, from the time Jimmy was old enough to drive, he and his grandmother got in the car and went someplace—upstate New York, out on Long Island; anyplace they felt like. They’d eat dinner, then come home. On one of these drives, following a round of complaints about her eyes and general failing health, Mrs. Fitzsimmons was sitting next to Jimmy as they were driving through upstate on the way back to Brooklyn.
A good distance away, far enough to make an eye doctor squint, a stately house sat on the top of one of those rolling hills which edge out from either bank of the Hudson River.
“That’s a pretty house,” Jimmy said. “Must be a beautiful view from inside it.”
“Oh yes, it is,” his grandmother agreed. “And they have a lovely window arrangement. See it? Four right in a row across the top and then two together on each side of the door. They must have a lovely view from the living room and top bedroom.”
Her grandson could not make out the windows if his life hinged on it. Neither could nine out of ten people. So her old age and infirmities turned into one of those little games people always like to play with one another and nobody had much to worry about.
By the spring of 1951, Sunny Jim Fitzsimmons was approaching his seventy-seventh birthday and people were calling him ancient. He had lived a full life, and now it was becoming serene. He was at the barn each morning with the hay and ammonia smell opening his eyes and flaring his nostrils as it always had, and then he would train his horses, have something to eat, take a nap and wake up for the afternoon’s racing. There was almost no change. You could spend a day with him, then come back six months later and it still would be the same. He would be walking around the stable area, bent almost in half over an aluminum crutch under his right arm. Arthritis has his back bowed and hardened so that he looks like a man carrying a beer keg on his back. He would keep looking up to see ahead of him and he would snap orders to stablehands taking care of the 45 valuable thoroughbreds under his command. Then in the afternoon he would sit at his favorite spot along the rail and watch his horses run and win or lose he would not get excited. He was in the big money; as big as there is in sports. It was a life he had earned by spending years scratching for meal money.
It was a good life for Mr. Fitz. Every day of it. And on June 21, 1951, it all started to fall apart. The day didn’t seem to be a bad one. It was a soft spring morning at Aqueduct, the horses were on the track and Mr. Fitz was along the rail watching them. The phone rang in the cottage and a boy yelled out that it was for Mr. Fitz. He walked to the cottage, grumbling about being bothered when he was in the middle of his work. He picked up the phone.
“Yes,” he said.
A man’s voice on the other end said he was a policeman and that he had just been called in because of a death in the house and he wasn’t sure of who was who in the family but he did know that Sunny Jim Fitzsimmons, the horse trainer—well, his wife had just died and he had been told to call somebody at the stable here and tell them.
It was as simple as that. When Mr. Fitz got home there was a police car and an ambulance in front of the house and inside there was a doctor who was saying, in the gentle tones they always use at such times, that it had been very quick; a heart attack; no pain; just one of those things that happens very quickly … at her age, you know. Jennie Fitzsimmons, Mr. Fitz’s brick, was dead in her room upstairs. There was nothing to do but call the undertaker.
William Woodward, the New York banker whose horses Mr. Fitz had trained for over a quarter century, died during this period, too. Woodward had become a friend of Mr. Fitz’s; the anything-goes kind of friend that you can only have after years of close association. Then George (Fish) Tappen, who had grown up with Mr. Fitz, died. Fish had been a part of Mr. Fitz’s racing life for all but one or two years of his career. And the Bradys, who for twenty years kept house for Mr. Fitz, also died. Oh, maybe there was six months before Woodward went and another six months or so might have passed before Tappen and the Bradys went. But to Mr. Fitz it seemed like everything had turned into a dark blue suit and the smell of flowers they put around a casket, and the life he had worked for so hard was disappearing around him.
People who live to be very old always say it is the easiest thing in the world to let go when your friends are going. And once you let go and lose interest in what is going on, it doesn’t take long for the end to come.
This seemed to some to be what was happening with Mr. Fitz. Or maybe they just thought it was happening because they were looking for it. Anyhow, he seemed to be thinking more about the past than the present or future, and this wasn’t like his usual self.
Then some claimed it started to show in the horses. They pointed to the winnings being off. But who could be sure of the reason? There are an awful lot of ifs and buts and maybes in this game.
One thing you can say for sure. Circumstances had changed, too. When William Woodward, Sr., died in 1952 his son Bill took over the stable. Through most of his life, the young Woodward had been around the horses only sparingly. Now he became interested in them and after spending a few days at the stable, then watching horses run in races, he was getting the feeling a man always gets when he is around good horses. Mr. Fitz thought he was a fine boy. But Mr. Fitz was seventy-seven and he had had twenty-seven years of working with a man he had come to think of as a friend and now he had to start all over again with somebody else. It was not easy.
Then something really did happen, and it made all the difference. On his last trip to Belair Stud with Woodward, Sr., Mr. Fitz had looked over the crop of weanlings, leggy little things with almost no bodies to them at all, and Woodward pointed to one of them and said that if everything went well this was a horse he wanted to send to the races in England.
“He is by Nasrullah out of Segula,” Woodward said. “I like the breeding.”
“He looks fine,” Mr. Fitz said.
The next year Woodward was dead, his son was in charge and all of the racing was to be in America. One bright afternoon in the early fall, the young Woodward and Mr. Fitz were in a car which turned into the gravel driveway, bordered by fieldstone fence, of Belair Stud Farm. They were going to look at the yearlings which were about to be broken for racing and the weanlings which still had a year to go before this could be done.
At one enclosure, Woodward and Mr. Fitz got out and walked to the fence rail to look at a group of horses—mares, each with a weanling. When you are at a horse farm and you stand at a rail like this, you rap on the wood to make a noise and then one by one the mares and their yearlings lope toward you. If the weanling gets too close to these strangers at the fence, the mare sticks her head between the weanling and the fence and pushes her offspring away from the strangers he is too small to deal with. Now and then one of the weanlings will dart away from a mare, move as fast as he can in one jumble of long legs, then stop, flick the hind legs up in a little kick, wheel again, get the jumble of legs going, then dart back and put his head under the mare’s stomach for a coffee break. You can watch them running around like this for hours.
If Sunny Jim needed a lift at this time in his life, it might well come from these fenced-in fields of soft dirt and deep grass with young horses running in them. Through all of his years, he had taken care of horses, good ones and bad ones, sound ones and ones with injuries nobody else wanted to bother with, and they had shaped his life. Maybe what he needed now, without even knowing it, was to have a big one going for him. The kind of horse that can put that little extra bit of excitement inside you. What was needed, simply was a horse that could make it a fair test between Sunny Jim Fitzsimmons and the calendar. The horse was in the next field.
He was a big, sturdy-legged, inquisitive yearling who came to the fence as Mr. Fitz and Woodward walked up, then wheeled and pounded back toward the center of the field, his feet sending clods of dirt into the air. He would not be two years old until the end of the year, but he had a chest on him and his legs looked like they could kick their way through a brick wall. You look at a horse such as this and it does something to you, even if you are not used to seeing horses. And Mr. Fitz looked at him and asked Woodward which one was that colt out there.
“You saw him with my father,” Woodward said. “He’s by Nasrullah out of Segula. That’s the one my father wanted to send to England.”
“Oh, yes,” Mr. Fitz said. “Good-lookin’ kind of a colt. Good runnin’ action. Look at that. Uses two leads at this stage. Big, too. Gonna be extra big. Oh, you can see he could be a real useful horse. Course you don’t know what’s inside him. Heart, lungs. You don’t know that. But he looks real nice right now, don’t he?”
“We have him nominated for everything,” Woodward said.
“That’s good. You never can tell.”
Then they left and Mr. Fitz went back to New York to take care of his horses, but on the way back he was thinking a little bit about the horse. There was this one double-sized stall he had at Aqueduct. It used to be two stalls, but he had broken it into one for Johnstown. Remember that? Sure. Johnstown couldn’t fit in an ordinary stall. Still got that extra big stall. Yes, it would be a good place to put this colt when he came to the track. He’d need it. You could see he was going to grow into a real big-sized horse. He had wide hips. Good, wide head, too. Plenty of spirit to him. Looked like he wanted to take your shoulder off. He walked with a little swagger, too. Didn’t mope around, sloppy-like. Well, I’ve been wrong before lookin’ at horses like this. So has everybody else. There’s only one way to tell, though. Get him to racin’ and see what happens. You won’t know for a long time. This one seems to have something you could go to work on, though.
So he began to think ahead again, to the day when he would get this colt on the race track and see what could be done with him. This was 1953 and he was seventy-nine, but now he definitely had something to keep him going.
Woodward named the horse Nashua. You could stick your fist down the horse’s throat, down to where the jaw comes out of the neck, and there would be plenty of room for it because this was a horse with a big windpipe and he could take in enough air to run for a month. He was sent out to a Westbury, Long Island, horse farm owned by John (Shipwreck) Kelly. Bill McCleary, one of Mr. Fitz’s exercise boys, went out there to break the horse for racing. This was only the fall and it would be months before Nashua got to the races and the first year wouldn’t be that important because a lot of times a horse doesn’t come around until he is three years old. This is what makes being with horses beautiful. You are always waiting for something in the future and now, as Nashua learned how to get into a starting gate and how to run around turns, Mr. Fitz was waiting and looking ahead.
The stable shipped to Florida and in February, at Hialeah, he had Nashua on the track working. People saw the horse and they asked Mr. Fitz about him. The answer was what it should be.
“Like him?” Mr. Fitz said. “I don’t know whether I like him or not. He’s only a baby and we got a long way to go. He looks like he might be a good one, but how do I know? I can’t tell if there’s anything wrong with him. He can’t tell me, either. He can’t talk, you know. And I can’t see inside him to find out what kind of a motor he’s got. I hope he’s good. But I don’t know what he’s going to be.” He then kept on with an old-time Fitzsimmons monologue on horses and life and how little anybody knows about what’s going to happen. After he was through, he gave a groom hell for throwing out too much straw while mucking out a stall and he was making demands on everybody else around him and that crutch was banging onto the ground hard when he walked. He was not interested in what happened yesterday.
Later in the year, in October, after Nashua had won several races and had lost a couple because he was green and ran that way, Mr. Fitz was standing in the infield at Belmont Park with his son John and grandson Jimmy and far up to the right Eddie Arcaro was sitting quietly on Nashua after they finished a warm-up and the horse was walking toward the starting gate. The race was the Futurity. It was to be run on a strip known as the Widener Chute. This was a running strip which bisected the main track. The horses would come straight down it to the finish line, with no turns. Because of the chute’s angle to the stands, it was nearly impossible for anybody in the crowd to make out who was ahead in a race. Mr. Fitz had always watched Futurities down the chute and it didn’t bother him. He knew what to look for.
When the race went off, he saw what he wanted. There were good horses in this race … a horse called Summer Tan, another called Royal Coinage, a good sprinter named King Hairon, and he could be tough because the race was only for six furlongs. They all came down fast. Mr. Fitz stood quietly, with the crutch under his right arm. He watched the field as it moved along. Halfway down the chute, somewhere around the pole that said there were three furlongs left, Nashua let it go. His stride became longer. His head stuck out. He was working now. Running like a big one. The horses around started to slip back. Then a little growl came from the bottom of Mr. Fitz’s throat. Then he growled again.
“Look at how he lowers his belly and goes to work,” Mr. Fitz said. There was a spark in his voice. The years had no meaning to them now. This was Sunny Jim Fitzsimmons, age anything, and he had a big horse.
Nashua slammed down the chute and won by a long neck. Arcaro, a big grin on his face, brought the horse back to the winner’s circle. Woodward was there and so were the photographers and there were big trophies for everybody, and Arcaro was saying that this big dude is a real runner.
Mr. Fitz was walking out of the infield. A brown-uniformed Pinkerton swung open a part of the rail so he could walk through and as Mr. Fitz came up the Pinkerton said, “Congratulations, Mr. Fitz. Looks like a real good one, doesn’t he?”
“Thank you. Oh, he looked all right today. But we got a long way to go, you know. I want to get back to the barn and see what he looks like right now.”
Mr. Fitz walked through the gap onto the track and headed for the car in the parking lot so John could drive him back to the barn and he could have the groom walk Nashua around in front of him so he could look close and make sure the horse came out of it all right. Then he would sit down and watch them rub the sweat off the horse and cool him out with water and he’d have plenty of orders to give. No, he was certainly not going into the winner’s circle. The barn was his winner’s circle.
And as Mr. Fitz made his way across the track, Slim Sully leaned against the iron rail around the crowded winner’s circle and looked at Nashua. Then Sully pointed over to Mr. Fitz and he smiled.
“Look at him,” Sully was saying. In what other business could an eighty-year-old man win something called the Futurity?”
Everybody used the line the next day in the papers. It was more than just a line. Mr. Fitz, they knew then, had a future going for him after that race and because of this, when you talk to a friend of Mr. Fitz’s today about Nashua, the friend will smile a little and talk a lot about the horse and remember a lot of things about him. All of them will. Nobody ever will forget the part Nashua played in Mr. Fitz’s life.
WITH NASHUA, MR. FITZ, at eighty, started what amounted to another career. It was to lead to what is, as far as winning a horse race goes, the most important single victory of life. It came in 1955, when Nashua was a three-year-old. And it started with Mr. Fitz making a mistake.
Nashua had rolled up the field in important races in Florida early that year, winning the Flamingo at Hialeah and the Florida Derby at Gulfstream. In April, at Jamaica race track, he hooked up with Summer Tan in the Wood Memorial, run two weeks before the Derby. Nashua nearly filled hospitals that day. With Eddie Arcaro suspended for a riding infraction, Ted Atkinson was on Nashua. Atkinson was on a lot of horses and in a lot of tough races in his years. But the ride he had on Nashua in the Wood Memorial was something he can recall today, step for step. It made that kind of an impression on him. When he retired and wrote a book, Ted spent a whole chapter telling of the race.
Nashua started off by nearly throwing Atkinson while they were going to the gate. At the start he boiled out first, then sloughed off, and Summer Tan, with Eric Guerin up, took the lead. A good lead, too. He had a couple of lengths on Nashua. He wouldn’t give it up, either. The rest of the horses in the race meant nothing as Nashua chased Summer Tan around the turn, all down the backstretch, around the turn again and into the stretch. With an eighth of a mile left, it was Summer Tan’s race. With a sixteenth of a mile left, it was Summer Tan. Nashua started to pick it up a little, but it was too late. John Fitzsimmons was standing in the infield, behind the mutuel board, watching them come down. When they ran in front of the mutuel board and he couldn’t see them any more, he put his head down. That’s that, he said. There were only 70 yards left in the race when the horses went out of his view. There was no way for Summer Tan to lose. Even today, when you sit and watch a movie of the race, you would reach into your pocket and take out money and bet it that Nashua isn’t going to catch Summer Tan when they are 70 yards from the wire.
But he caught him. With about seven whopping lunges, Nashua cut down the distance between Summer Tan and himself. Each one of them edged that nose closer to Summer Tan. Then with one swoosh, Nashua went under the wire a nose in front. In the stands, people dropped cigarettes. Eddie Arcaro, watching the race up on the roof, yelped.
“He win it, didn’t he?” he shouted to people with him. “He win it, didn’t he?”
It was the same in the jockeys’ room. The little guys who ride horses and accept thrills as being commonplace were hopping around and shouting to one another. There had not been this kind of excitement over a horse race for fifteen years.
“He drew it kind of close, didn’t he?” Mr. Fitz kidded people. Then he had John drive him home. It was a great win. Now he proceeded to make a mistake that he always talks about. He wants to make sure he punishes himself for it.
Mr. Fitz made arrangements for Nashua, the sure champion, to be shipped to Churchill Downs for the 1955 running of the Kentucky Derby with groom Al Robertson, exercise boy Bill McCleary, stable foreman Bart Sweeney, and John Fitzsimmons. Jockey Eddie Arcaro would be down the day before the Derby. Trainer James E. Fitzsimmons would stay at home and handle the whole thing over the telephone. The trip to Louisville didn’t interest him at all. As he puts it, after all, what good can I do down there? The horse just needs a little breezing and then it’s up to him and Arcaro. I can see the race on television better than I can at the track down there. It’ll save me a long trip.
“I don’t ship too good any more,” he told everybody.
Mr. Fitz didn’t know much about the other horses in the race, but he didn’t see how that mattered. Summer Tan was the tough one. He had to be watched. There was this horse named Swaps from the coast, but fellows who were around horses told Mr. Fitz that Swaps was a good mile or a mile-and-an-eighth horse, not the kind of a horse who would be strong enough for the mile-and-a-quarter Derby. Distance, of course, was Nashua’s game. He figured to be strongest of all at the end.
The night before the race, Mr. Fitz was on the phone with Arcaro. “Cater to Summer Tan,” he said.
The next afternoon, in an office at Belmont Park, Mr. Fitz sat and watched the Kentucky Derby on television. Eddie Arcaro followed his orders perfectly. He stayed off the pace, which was set by Swaps, and kept looking for Summer Tan. He looked for Summer Tan on the backstretch. He looked for Summer Tan into the final turn. Willie Shoemaker, his rear end up in the air as he coasted along, had Swaps moving freely. He was saving plenty of the horse. At the top of the stretch, Arcaro looked for Summer Tan again. He still couldn’t find him. So he started after Swaps. He got to Swaps all right. He lapped onto him at the eight pole. Shoemaker, with plenty of horse under him, now set Swaps down. The California horse had a big kick in him. He simply ran away to win by a length and a quarter.
Down in Louisville, Mr. Fitz’s grandchildren, Kathleen and Jimmy, had tears in their eyes. But in Belmont Park, Mr. Fitz said simply, “I’m sorry for the horse that he lost. Don’t be too hard on him. You know, I figure I chucked it for him.”
Without making any long speeches he made sure everybody knew he had made a mistake. As bad as a man can make. Then he went home and watched television. But this was one loss, as they say, that he was not going to take easily.
After the race, Swaps was shipped back to California. Nashua went on to win the Preakness and the Belmont, but it didn’t seem to matter. All you read about was Swaps. This was the California wonder horse. He was owned by Rex Ellsworth, a cow rancher, and trained by Mesach Tenney. Ellsworth and Tenney wore Levis, said horses were stupid animals and all this extra treatment people give race horses is a waste because they don’t need it. This was completely opposite from anything Mr. Fitz ever had done. When Swaps came back from a workout, Tenney and Ellsworth were saying, they used a water hose on him, then let him dry in the sun and put him in the stall. Rubbing? That’s for humans. This is a dumb animal. All horses are.
“He has his hay and grain and a good bed to sleep on,” Tenney said. “The same as with humans, anything else you give him may be detrimental.”
Mr. Fitz said nothing. Swaps was the wonder horse, he was being trained in a new modern way, and he had beaten Nashua. What could you say?
In July, Nashua was shipped to the Arlington Classic in Chicago, which he won. Swaps was scheduled to come to Washington Park on August 20 for the American Derby. Since both owners, Woodward and Ellsworth, were not against shipping to Chicago for normal races, it gave a couple of people ideas.
One was actor Don Ameche. He had been at race tracks betting horses through most of his adult life. He knew Ellsworth from the Coast. He also knew publicity-conscious Ben Lindheimer, owner of Chicago’s Washington Park. It was a simple idea: put Swaps and Nashua in a match race. Lindheimer went for it. Ameche contacted Woodward and Ellsworth. Everybody agreed. The date was set for Wednesday, August 31. It would be $100,000, winner take all, at a mile and a quarter.
They unloaded Nashua from a train at Saratoga on July 18, a Monday, and Mr. Fitz was there waiting for him. He now had a little over five weeks to get Nashua ready for the race of his life. He talked quietly and never made much of what was going on.
Nashua was muscled up, as Mr. Fitz says, when he started working for the match race. So he simply had the horse lumbering along on the deep training track, called the Oklahoma at Saratoga, putting in a two-mile gallop, then another, then a mile gallop, with no particular time called for. Then in August he sent Nashua three-quarters of a mile in 1:17 2/5 and then another three-quarters in 1:15. These are racing times and most people don’t know what they mean, but as Mr. Fitz sat in his stable office and looked at the typewritten workbook for Nashua and checked the times each day and then planned for the next, the figures were his life. They meant everything to him. He was pointing the horse for one thing: he wanted Nashua to be screw-tight on August 31 and he wanted to have the horse throw the fastest first three-quarters of a mile possible. It was a match race at a mile and a quarter, but every match race he had ever seen in all his years on the race track was strictly a test of speed from the start. “Make the other horse crack,” he kept saying.
Arcaro agreed, even to the extent that his fellow jockey, Con McCreery, voiced wonder at the fact that Eddie was practicing starts as a green kid would in the week before the match race.
The arrangements called for Nashua to be shipped to Washington Park on Friday, August 26. On the Saturday before that, August 19, Mr. Fitz was sitting in a folding chair under a big tree in the paddock at Saratoga and only a couple of people were around him. The crowd walking around the treeshaded paddock was clustered about the horses who were being saddled for the next race, looking for betting information. When the horses went out for the race, the fourth of the afternoon, everybody followed them and the place was empty except for Mr. Fitz and a couple of sports writers who were talking to him. This was good, because then you could see, with no crowding, something you would remember all your life.
From the stable area, coming in the same way they bring a heavyweight champion into the ring, four grooms walked Nashua toward Mr. Fitz. Al Robertson led him. Then there was a groom named Chico and another one named Andy and exercise boy Bill McCleary. They all had towels and were waving them around Nashua to keep the flies away.
“The last time I saw anybody come in like this it was Dempsey getting into the ring at Chicago,” somebody said to Mr. Fitz.
“Well, he’s a nice horse and there’s a lot of flies around here and I kind of like to treat a horse right,” Mr. Fitz said. But he had a little smile. This is the big leagues, son, the smile said.
Eddie Arcaro, in a white T-shirt and riding pants, walked up to Mr. Fitz, leaned over and talked to the old man. Then he threw his cigarette away, put the toe of his boot into Robertson’s cupped hand and hopped up onto Nashua’s back with that little feather motion jockeys have.
Arcaro started walking Nashua toward the track. When the fourth race was over, Eddie and Nashua came on and Freddy Capposella, the public address announcer, said that Nashua was now on the track for his last public workout before going to Chicago to face Swaps in the match race of the century. Arcaro and Nashua lumbered along in front of the stands, moved around the turn, and on the backstretch Eddie’s rear end came down and his arms started to pump and Nashua took off. There is a teletimer on the mutuel board which gives the time for the race as it progresses and it started to click off as Nashua moved. Clockers were catching it, too. Only they were breaking it down into fractions for each eighth of a mile, and as Nashua moved, they caught him and after a couple of furlongs they started talking.
“Eleven and a fifth,” Frenchy Schwartz said. “Eleven and three fifths. Eleven and four fifths. Oh, what is he doing with this horse? This is time for a sprint champ. He’s supposed to be getting ready for a mile and a quarter. There you go again. Twelve and two … Thirteen … Twelve and four. This is crazy.”
Out on the track, Arcaro was a white piece of Nashua’s motion and as they moved the big crowd began to start a loud Oooooh! Then it became louder and now it was a roar as Nashua busted down the backstretch and into the turn. Arcaro kept him going and the people kept yelling until Arcaro eased up and Nashua slowed down for the rest of the work. You didn’t have to know a thing about racing. It could have been your first time at the races. It didn’t matter. You knew this horse was running like hell.
After the workout, Arcaro brought Nashua back to Mr. Fitz and he was not just a guy coming from a workout.
“How’d it go, Eddie?” Mr. Fitz called up to him.
Arcaro jumped down and almost shouted. “Wonderful,” he said. “Just wonderful, Mr. Fitz.”
He was a little excited now and he turned to the other people and said, “Maybe that other horse is a super horse, like they say. If he is, then forget it. But if he’s just another real good race horse, then he’s going to have some time with this dude.”
The grooms had a white blanket over Nashua and one of them was giving him some water to drink and the others kept shooing away flies. At the stable they would rub him down with liniment, cool him out, and treat him as if he were royalty. That was Mr. Fitz’s way to train a race horse.
Clockers and racing writers didn’t know about that. They thought Mr. Fitz had lost the touch.
“I don’t know what it is,” Bill Corum wrote, “but he is ruining this horse’s chance. He is training him for a six-furlong sprint and out in Chicago that machine from the Golden Slopes of the West is oiled up for the same mile and a quarter distance that found Nashua wanting in the Kentucky Derby.”
Mr. Fitz shrugged. On August 24, Nashua was put into a private car attached to the New York Central’s Pacemaker, with Mr. Fitz following a couple of days later.
There had not been a horse race in years to produce such interest. The track was filled with television people and newspapermen from all over the country in the days before the race. They talked about what the horses ate, what their habits were, what they did each day. But mostly they wrote about the new and the old of racing—the Ellsworth-Tenney way to take care of a horse and get him ready, and the old way of Mr. Fitz. They made a lot out of it and nearly everybody was picking Swaps to run off and hide. That was all right with Mr. Fitz. Two days before the race, when he looked at Nashua, he didn’t think there was anything alive which could beat him.
Al Robertson walked Nashua around the infield turf course and in front of the crowded stands that day for a rehearsal of their saddling procedure. The horses were to be saddled in the infield, in front of the stands, and Mr. Fitz wanted the horse to get used to the new surroundings. In the middle of the walk, Nashua stopped. He looked around. Then he went right up into the air on his hind legs, his mane tossing, his head high, tugging at Robertson’s grip on the reins. Robertson held him tight, then got him to come down. A few yards later, Nashua did it again. He came down, walked a while, then went up again. He did this four times and he had the groom scared stiff.
“If he does it again, he’ll go right over backwards,” Robertson said.
“That’s his idea of playin’,” Mr. Fitz said. “He rares up when he wants to play. I don’t like that. He could get hurt. Keep a good holt on him.”
When they got Nashua back to the barn safely, both Robertson and Mr. Fitz could relax. And smile a little. They knew what the rearing up meant. This was a horse who was so fit he was bursting with energy he had to get rid of.
The race was for Wednesday afternoon. It rained on Monday night and kept right on raining through Tuesday. On Wednesday, papers all over the country had stories about the race and it was all you heard of around Chicago. The tension was all over the track as the match race of the century was about to be held on a muddy track that was drying in spots.
At noontime, Frank Graham said to Red Smith, a columnist friend of his, “Let’s walk over and wish Mr. Fitz luck.”
“Oh, no,” Smith said. “Don’t go near him now. We better leave him alone. The last thing they’ll want around is people.”
“Just for a minute,” Graham said.
He and Smith walked quietly and solemnly to Barn A, went down the shedrow and stepped into the tack room at the end of the barn to see Mr. Fitz. They went as solemnly as if they were in a church. And Mr. Fitz, the nervous man who needed quiet, was sitting with John and they both were eating sandwiches and having a glass of milk. Mr. Fitz looked up at the visitors and said, “Why didn’t you tell us you were coming around? We’d of gotten a sandwich for you. Well, it’s too late for you now. I’m going to eat this and then I’m going to roll right over on that cot and take a nap for myself and you can take this damn match race of yours and do anything you want with it. I’m going to take a nap.”
P.M.,