Every morning
before daylight, my husband makes espressos for us in our
hideaway at the foot of the Hollywood Hills. And we decide what
kind of music we’ll start the day with and then we sit at our
round Pee-Wee Hermanesque table and wake up together under the
ever intent gaze of two racehorses, Real Quiet and Free House,
battling down the stretch of the 1998 Pimlico Special. Framed
in mahogany roped wood and set in rust-hued linen, a gift from
my brother. A moment...immortalized. We’d played that race
together, the three of us...$100 exacta box, which means either
horse can win, and either horse can run second. And I put
another $50 straight exacta that said Real Quiet had to win,
because I believed. We all three did. And we watched
together from the rail of the club house at
Hollywood
Park
on the jumbotron. That anticipation and excitement...and those
hugs and cheers and dances that came after are what possess
our poets. They are everything you could hope for. They are
what people talk about when they’re old.
***
The racetrack
laid hold of my brother, my husband and me in the winter of
1998. We didn’t know anything except that it was pretty. And
different. Unlike anything we’d seen before.
We didn’t
know the Kentucky Derby was a few months away and that
everything was pointing towards it. That in horseracing, all
the hopes and dreams are always pointing towards it.
We didn’t
know how to pronounce the jockey’s name when a freelance
photographer told us to keep an eye on Kent Desormeaux because
he would be aboard the winner of the Kentucky Derby that year.
The horse was
a cheap $17,000 claimer. So bowlegged and narrow they nicknamed
him “The Fish.” Real Quiet wasn’t the buzz horse. In fact, he
was the arguably the least special horse in the field. And we
were gathered around an outdoor monitor in General Admission at
Santa Anita that first Saturday in May, our first
Saturday in May, when that bay colt came flying down the stretch
with Kent Desormeaux in the irons, pointing to the heavens as he
and Real Quiet crossed the finish line first at odds of 8-1.
We were the
only ones cheering. It wasn’t the first time we’d won at the
track, but it was the first time we’d bet on a horse because of
the horse. Not the way he looked on paper…or the way he looked
in the paddock…but the horse…that we were beginning to love.
That funny looking horse that loved to run fast. There are no
mirrors in a barn and Real Quiet never knew he didn’t look much
like a racehorse. He didn’t know he was a longshot and most
people didn’t believe he was the calibre of horse that could
accomplish what he was training to do. It had taken him seven
races to figure it out…seven losses before he learned how to do
it. Now, at the age of 3, he only knew how to fly.
We were sure
that Real Quiet was going to win the next two legs of the Triple
Crown. And two weeks later, when the Preakness was run, he beat
Victory Gallop, the same horse he’d beat in the Kentucky Derby,
by 2 ¼ lengths to take the second jewel of the Triple Crown.
When the
field was drawn for the
Belmont,
and we saw that the only thing standing between Real Quiet and
the first Triple Crown winner in twenty years was Victory
Gallop, we got ready to celebrate history being made. We wanted
to see only the 12th ever winner of the elusive
Crown…and who better than our bowlegged bay.
We forgot…or
maybe we didn’t realize yet…this was horseracing…and what looks
like it should it happen, rarely does. Real Quiet lost the
Belmont by a nose…the smallest margin ever to separate a horse
from the Crown.
Over the
course of his three year career, he won or place in 17 of his 20
starts, and earned $3.2 million before being sent out to stud in
2000.
Every year,
come
Derby
time, if you listen, you’ll hear the commentators talk about
him. They’ll tell you the same story you just read. Those of
us who love this sport will never forget what almost happened.
History deflected by a nose. Ironic that such a champion as
this is forever linked to a loss. One small fraction of a
second that deceives our memory and fixes him there as the
opposite of what he was.
The truth is,
even if Real Quiet had finished dead last, it wouldn’t have
mattered. Sure it makes a better story…but it had already
happened by then. We had fallen in love. We had followed Real
Quiet through some wardrobe we never even noticed into the
fairytale of horseracing. The adventure had begun. And
everything about it…every little snort, stomp and whinny told us
this was ours. All of this.
The news of
his death came in slow motion. My brother called on his way to
work in Macon, Georgia to tell me. Said “Real Quiet passed,” a
word I’d never heard him use.
I read that
he’d fallen on his shoulder and the fall drove his shoulder
blade into his cervical spine. His stallion manager said when he
took Real Quiet to the paddock that day, he’d “walked toward his
water, stood out in the middle of the paddock, and looked across
the field to some mares on the hill like he always does.”
And as it got
dark here that night, I realized that an era had passed for us
too. The sweet early days of the sport of kings…when nothing
thrilled us more than to see Real Quiet take on Free House, in
all his grey glory. We were discovering. Rising and falling.
Winning and losing. Hoping and praying. Revelling in the
hooves thundering down…the snort, the stomp, the whinny…the days
of Real Quiet.
That framed
cover of the Daily Racing Form is before me now as I
return to that terrain. It now has a Los Angeles Marathon medal
hung over the corner...another finish line crossed...another gift from my brother, who decided
a long time ago never to stop adding brick upon brick to his
unrepeatable life. He’s broadened his horizon. We all have.
But we will always return to the paddock...stand and look out
across the field to the hill...looking for Real Quiet.
R.I.P.
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