Native Dancer Read Free Page B

patterns of light rings just visible in his coat. His sire, Polynesian, was a bay,
     but the genes of his dam, Geisha, had dominated his coloring. Geisha was a grey great-great-granddaughter of Roi Herode and
     a daughter and granddaughter of greys. Now her son was a grey, becoming more famous every day.
    Those who still doubted him because of his color had no argument left after his move to the front in the Futurity. Many in
     the crowd had thought he was beaten, but he had broken free from the pack with a breathtaking burst, and now, with seventy-five
     yards to go, embarked on the triumphant sprint many had envisioned. He drove forward in a grinding gear, for once not easing
     up with the lead as his slanting shadow bobbed farther ahead of the others. His rivals were left behind, their inferiority
     underlined. The Dancer was two and a quarter lengths ahead of Tahitian King at the finish line, and nine lengths ahead of
     every other horse except the distant third-place finisher, Dark Star.
    There was a cheer, and then another, even louder, when the winning time was posted. The Dancer had run the race in 1:14⅖,
     as fast as any horse anywhere had ever covered six and a half furlongs on a straightaway course. He had tied a world record!
     A two-year-old named Porter’s Mite had set the record on the Widener course fifteen years earlier, carrying three fewer pounds
     than the Dancer. “I’m sure he would have broken the record if we hadn’t been fighting a headwind the whole way,” Guerin told
     reporters. The jockey had won a Kentucky Derby and stood in hundreds of winner’s circles, but clearly he was moved by what
     he had just experienced. “I don’t believe,” he said, “that I have ever ridden a better horse.”
    More cheers rained down as Lester Murray, the Dancer’s elderly black groom, attached the shank and held him in the winner’s
     enclosure at the foot of the grandstand. Vanderbilt and Winfrey posed for win pictures as reporters surrounded Arcaro, who
     could only shake his head. “I wish the race had been six furlongs instead of six and a half,” the Master muttered. “I thought
     I had it won until that grey horse just smothered us.”
    It was a busy sports Saturday in New York and across the country, with Notre Dame playing Pennsylvania in college football
     before a national TV audience and 75,000 fans in Philadelphia, the pro football season kicking off, and tickets selling for
     the World Series between the Yankees and Brooklyn Dodgers beginning the next week. Baseball was dominating the talk on the
     streets of New York. There wasn’t much room in the papers for big news from Belmont But Native Dancer had given the sports
     editors no choice. As Joe H. Palmer, the esteemed racing writer for the
New York Herald Tribune
, wrote in his column the next day, the grey colt had “just plain murdered the field in the Futurity,” raising glorious echoes
     of past champions such as Count Fleet, Citation, and Man O’ War. America’s next great horse had arrived, and he was a grey,
     of all things, a pale specter sprinting through the stretch. People were calling him the Grey Ghost, his coloring and shadowy
     dominance stirring imaginations. If his victory in the Futurity didn’t warrant a bold headline at the top of the sports page,
     what did?

TWO

    T wenty minutes after the Futurity, with the crowd still buzzing about the Dancer’s charge, the colt headed back to Barn 20
     on the backstretch at Belmont, where Vanderbilt’s horses in training were permanently stabled. Harold Walker, the stable’s
     mammoth night watchman, held the lead shank as the Dancer pranced through the track’s treelined barn community. Lester Murray
     brought up the rear. Clothed in the white coat and broad-brimmed hat he always wore to the races, the groom gripped the Dancer’s
     tail tightly with both hands and chattered nonstop. “You done good, you bum, you done real good,” Murray huffed at the horse
     as