Thoroughbred racing takes a tremendous physical toll. And like anyone who has followed the game for more than a little while, this reporter has witnessed that toll at close range.
Two weeks after Sunday Silence defeated Easy Goer in the 1989 Breeders’ Cup Classic (G1), I was standing with Charlie Whittingham as we peered through a small window looking into the operating room of the Dolly Green Equine Hospital at Hollywood Park while Dr. Greg Ferraro tipped the black colt on his back, extended his right foreleg, and surgically removed two bone chips from his knee. Six months later, reigning as ‘89 Horse of the Year, Sunday Silence returned to the winner’s circle.
Some time in May of 1995, again at the Dolly Green clinic, that was Dr. Rick Arthur, former California Equine Medical Director and practicing vet at the time, kneeling with his scalpel beside the leg of Hollywood Futurity (G1) winner Afternoon Deelites and applying a line of small punctures to an injured tendon in order to facilitate healing. I was close enough to see the dots of blood. Later that year, Afternoon Deelites was back in action to win the Malibu Stakes (G1).
On the morning after the 2001 Breeders’ Cup at Belmont Park, I warily approached the Scotty Schulhofer barn, where their star filly Exogenous stood bleary-eyed and dazed in her stall after flipping at the mouth of the grandstand tunnel while going postward for the Breeders' Cup Distaff (G1) the day before. Her skull had been fractured. She didn’t make it.
At Bobby Frankel’s Santa Anita Park barn, I sat in the straw next to a groggy Exbourne, the West’s best grass horse. His leg was thickly bandaged, with its fractured sesamoids and ruptured ligaments, as he fought to survive an injury sustained during training. He did, and went on to a brief, miraculous career at stud.
Such moments are recalled just as quickly as the great performances enjoyed over time. To be a professional athlete, man or beast, means sacrifice without end, tangled in a constant negotiation between risk and reward.
I arrived at the Wayne Lukas barn that fateful morning in November of 1982 to find what had been the brilliant Landaluce lying in her double-wide stall covered in a tarp, the victim of a deadly virus.
There was still some hope for Ketoh, winner of the 1985 Cowdin Stakes when it was a grade 1 event and a half brother to champion filly Althea, on the day I visited the Southern California clinic where he was recovering from surgery, but suffering from what turned out to be a fatal bout of post-surgery colic. Bosque Redondo was a gorgeous, gregarious chestnut who sustained fractures while finishing a brave fifth in the 2002 Pacific Classic Stakes (G1). I was welcomed by the compassionate staff at the clinic near Los Alamitos, but not even their considerable expertise could save him from foundering in both front feet. Then there was the maiden filly Lovely Finish, a refugee of the San Luis Rey Training Center fire on Dec. 7, 2017, patiently tolerating the ministrations of weary angels treating her face and chest, a mass of blistered flesh, late that night in a stall at Del Mar. To forget such a sight is to abandon humanity. She would survive.
When they don’t, their sacrifice must be acknowledged, which is why I was compelled to visit the “slumber room” at Santa Anita where the bodies of Sweet Diane and High Haven rested after their terrible first turn in the 1984 Santa Ana Handicap (G1T), and why the speedy grass horse All the Boys deserved a lonely vigil in the holding pen at Hollywood Park after his fatal injury on the day in 2005 he was claimed to be a pacemaker for Better Talk Now.
There also have been way too many visits to hospital beds containing the battered versions of jockeys who went down at unsustainable speeds: Alex Solis, Eddie Delahoussaye, Tyler Baze, Joe Steiner, Tony Lovato, Corey Nakatani. Julie Krone twice. Laffit Pincay more than twice. What can you say in those stark, sterile rooms? You’re glad they’re alive. They’re just happy to wiggle their toes.
There was Victor Espinoza, in a bright corner hospital suite filled with flowers, sitting upright with an external traction device immobilizing the cervical vertebrae fractures that threatened a lot more than his career. I found John Velazquez in a Pasadena hospital with his wife, Leona, keeping watch again after her husband lost his spleen on the day he went down during a Breeders’ Cup race at Santa Anita. Chris McCarron, hospitalized with two broken legs and a broken arm, was cheered by a visit from his pal, the comedian Tim Conway, who made us all laugh. Gary Stevens, all of 22 at the time, was stretched out at Arcadia Methodist, battered and broken after a training accident left him with a concussion and in need of shoulder and knee surgery. I don’t think I was ever very comforting, but someone had to be there.
Such moments are all in the past now, dark spots on an otherwise satisfying collection of racing memories. And yet, they remain vivid, firsthand reminders of the line from the driver played by Steve McQueen in “Le Mans” when confronted with the dangers of his racing profession:
“This isn’t just a thousand-to-one shot,” he said. “This is a professional blood sport, and it can happen to you. And then it can happen to you again.”
The horses don’t have a say, which is why their care and protection should be the prime directive for anyone playing the game, while the jockeys have sway over their fate, right up to the moment they throw a leg over the saddle and toss their destinies to the wind.
For those of us on the ground, sometimes allowed a peek backstage, it is a vicariously thrilling, agonizingly beautiful enterprise, without threat to our own life or limb. We chase those ambulances out of obligation if nothing else.
That is why my little visit to a chop shop this coming week is nothing. I’ll be trading in a worn-out hip joint for a new model guaranteed to last until the end of the race. A little effort, some meaningless pain, and I will be on the trail again in no time, dancing a jig and following my warriors as they put it all on the line for our entertainment. I’m told I’ll be on the table for about two hours. That’s about how long it took to fix Sunday Silence.
“He’s probably dreaming about that big red son-of-a-gun right now,” Whittingham said, as he watched a sedated Sunday Silence being wheeled into the operating room on that November morning, 33 years ago. “Dreaming about swishing his tail in Easy Goer’s kisser one more time.”
I wonder if I’ll dream.
