a straight, stainless-steel bar bit in his mouth, clipped a lead shank to it, and walked the horse the short distance from the stall to the front of the breeding shed.
Robinson met Fields outside the shed, took the shank, and walked Bold Ruler through the door, turning him around in the nearest corner so that he faced Somethingroyal, who was standing in the center of the room with her back to him. One man held Somethingroyal. Her hind legs stood in an indentation on the gravel floor where the hind legs of hundreds of other mares had stood while breeding and bearing the weight of the stallion. Other men—including Dr. Walter Kaufman, holding a pint cup—waited nearby.
Bold Ruler’s penis dropped from its flap as he walked into the breeding shed. He was a fifteen-year-old horse who knew what he was about. The mood was sober and businesslike.
Fields immediately dipped a sponge into a bucket of warm, clear water and washed Bold Ruler’s penis, which was beginning to stiffen. Some stallions excite themselves into readiness by sniffing at a mare, but Bold Ruler was not one of them. All he needed to do was look. Robinson restrained the horse, who soon began prancing, and waited until he saw the horse was ready, watching for the penis to harden fully. Irving Embry, at the front of Somethingroyal, lifted up her left front foot, a precaution designed to prevent her from kicking Bold Ruler while he mounted her. Another man moved in and lifted the mare’s tail. Privacy was neither demanded nor afforded.
Robinson brought the horse forward and raised the shank. Bold Ruler mounted Somethingroyal in an instant. Holding the shank with his left hand, standing on the left side of the horse and mare, Robinson gave Bold Ruler one final assist: with his right hand, he guided the penis in. Bold Ruler was inside Somethingroyal no more than two and a half minutes, and Robinson watched for the single most compelling sign that the horse had covered the mare, watched for the flagging of the horse’s tail, the dipping of it during orgasm. Some stud horses dismount during copulation, either to rest or prolong the pleasure of it, but Bold Ruler rarely did. “He was one of the most wonderfullest coverin’ horses you have ever seen,” Robinson said. “The first time up, every time.”
Bold Ruler flagged. And as he dismounted Somethingroyal, Dr. Kaufman came to the horse’s side with the pint cup to catch a dripping for examination. Then Fields, with a sponge dipped into a soap and disinfectant solution, washed the horse again. Bold Ruler was then led from the barn, no more than five minutes after he walked into it, and was turned out to romp on the greenery of his nearby private pasture.
Kaufman later checked the dripping, in a routine examination, to make sure the horse had ejaculated. He had.
Two days later, on April 22, Somethingroyal was returned to the breeding shed for a second and final mating with Bold Ruler. The same procedure was repeated. There was no way of telling, Robinson said, when Somethingroyal actually got pregnant that spring. But she did.
That year, The Meadow sent Cicada to Bold Ruler as the second mare in the arrangement with Phipps, but she proved barren.
In the summer of 1969, Penny Tweedy was in Saratoga to meet Phipps and Phipps’s trainer, Eddie Neloy, in the offices of the chairman of the board of trustees of the New York Racing Association, James Cox Brady. It was time to flip the coin.
Each knew the consequences of winning the toss.
Under the rules of the flip arrangement, the winner of the flip would automatically get first choice of the first pair of foals—the two born in 1969—either the Somethingroyal filly or the Hasty Matelda colt. The loser, while getting the second choice of the first pair, automatically would get the first choice of the second pair of foals. And the winner would get the second choice of the second pair.
But there would be no second foal in the second pair. Somethingroyal was pregnant, but Cicada was barren.
So neither party wanted to win. The winner would get only one of the three foals, the first choice of the first pair. The loser of the flip would get the second choice of the first pair but also the only foal to be born in 1970—the foal that Somethingroyal was carrying on that day in August.
The coin sailed in the air. Ogden Phipps returned to his box seat and dourly told his son, Ogden Mills Phipps, “We won the toss.” And that was it. The Phippses took the filly foal from Somethingroyal. They called her The Bride; she couldn’t run a lick, finishing out of the money in four starts as a two-year-old before she was retired to the Phippses’ stud at Claiborne. The Meadow Stable got the Hasty Matelda colt, who was named Rising River because he was foaled when the river below The Meadow was flooding. He always had more problems than future.
The Bride was weaned at Claiborne in the fall of 1969 and taken from her mother at Claiborne. On November 14, Somethingroyal was loaded on a van and returned across the Alleghenies to Doswell. She was almost seven months pregnant. She spent the winter that year at The Meadow, with the other broodmares, her belly growing larger and rounder until came that chilly night of March 29, 1970, when Southworth rang Gentry from the foaling barn in the field.
The newborn Somethingroyal foal gained his legs just forty-five minutes after birth and began suckling when he was an hour and fifteen minutes old. He was well made, well bred, healthy, and hungry, and that made him as much a potential Kentucky Derby winner as any of the other 24,953 thoroughbreds born in America in 1970.
The mare and the foal were turned loose together the following day in a confined one-acre paddock behind the foaling barn. So that the newborn foal does not injure himself trying to stay at her side, a mare is not given much room to run and roam about. After the foal had gained the strength to stay with her—four days later—the pair was turned out with other mares and their foals in a three-acre pasture near the broodmare barn. The routine of farm life began.
For six weeks the mare and foal were pastured in the daytime, and returned at night to their single Stall 3 in the broodmare barn. The routine changed in mid-May, when groom Lewis Tillman began taking them outdoors in the early afternoon, leaving them out all night, and then returning them in the morning to Stall 3. The foal subsisted on Somethingroyal’s milk for the first thirty-five days of his life. Then Tillman began to supplement the youngster’s regimen with grain, preparing him for the day of weaning in October. Tillman would tie up the mare in the stall and give the colt small portions of crushed oats and sweet feed. He grew quickly as the summer passed. Christopher Chenery’s personal secretary of thirty-three years, Elizabeth Ham, visited the farm and looked at the foals. Miss Ham noted in her log, dated July 28, 1970:
Ch. C Bold Ruler-Somethingroyal.
Three white stockings—Well-made colt—Might be a little light under the knees—Stands well on pasterns—Good straight hind leg—Good shoulders and hindquarters—You would have to like him.
Summer cooled into October. The daily rations of the Bold Ruler colt were boosted periodically, up to five and finally to six quarts of grain a day by the time he was separated from Somethingroyal on October 6, 1970. Like other newly weaned colts, the youngster howled and stomped around the stall and field, but that passed in a couple of days. Somethingroyal was far into pregnancy once again by then, this time carrying a foal by the Meadow stallion First Landing. The aging Imperatrice, the colt’s maternal grand-dam, had been bred for the last time in 1964, and since then had been pressed into service as baby-sitter for nervous, young, and uncertain mares, especially for broodmares visiting the farm. They would gather around her in a field, as if around a grandmother, within the apron and circumference of her calm. Chenery had bought her twenty-three years before, when she was nine in 1947, so while her grandson was romping around toward his yearling year, which would begin January 1, 1971, Imperatrice was already pushing thirty-three. She was aging visibly, three dozen ribs and elbows dressed up inside an old fur coat, but her eyes were clear. Everyone hoped she would live to reach the milestone age of thirty-five.
Her chestnut grandson had begun to fill out into a striking if still pony-sized colt by the day of his weaning, and on October 11, Miss Ham was moved to note: “Three white feet—A lovely colt.” Lovely was twice underlined.