Free Native Dancer by John Eisenberg

the three mares. Geisha, then a compact six-year-old roan, detested
     being loaded into a van. “The steps of vans were quite high off the ground in those days, and a horse could develop a real
     horror of having to get in,” Scott recalled. “Geisha was practically impossible to load. But we didn’t have to load her to
     get her bred to Polynesian. All we had to do was walk her across a road with very little traffic. It was just simpler and
     it made sense, especially since the pedigrees were an interesting mesh, anyway.”
    Years later, Kercheval smiled when it was suggested that Geisha’s reluctance to load was a factor in the fateful decision
     to breed her to Polynesian. “I would never put off something I wanted to do on account of something like that,” Kercheval
     said. “By my way of thinking, I could load any horse. You could always find a way.”
    The “mesh” of pedigrees was more important, Kercheval said. “Despite Geisha’s poor record and productivity to that point,
     her family was the kind that could produce something good,” he said. Her grandfather John P. Grier was one of Man O’ War’s
     toughest rivals. Her grandmother La Chica was a blind mare who had produced a champion two-year-old. She had a full sister
     who was a stakes winner on the steeplechase circuit. And of course, her sire was Discovery. “The key was Discovery,” Kercheval
     said. “I had always felt Discovery was probably the greatest horse I ever saw. His history of weight and distances matched
     with Polynesian’s speed was a good match.”
    The philosophy of the breeding industry was “breed the best to the best and hope for the best”: deal in the highest available
     stock to improve your chances of breeding a winner, but never forget that it was an imperfect science. Vanderbilt’s philosophy
     was only slightly different: “breed the best to a Discovery mare and hope for the best,” he often said. In that spirit, Geisha
     was led across Russell Cave Pike on May 8, 1949, bred to Polynesian in the hallway of the barn at Gallaher Farm, and led back:
     a morning walk, briefly interrupted.
    Vanderbilt was later hailed for having the insight to breed Polynesian to Geisha. Typically, he was careful not to boast,
     pointing out that if he accepted the credit for breeding a horse so gifted, he should also accept the blame for having bred
     so many horses that, he said, “couldn’t get out of their own way.” (Along the same lines, when asked if there had been reason
     to believe Geisha might be better as a broodmare than she was on the track, he replied, “It’s hard to say; I trained her myself.”)
    In reality, Vanderbilt and Kercheval together made the decision to breed Polynesian to Geisha. “I would say both were driving
     the car,” Dan W. Scott said. Kercheval’s wife, Blanche, recalled years later, “Alfred told Ralph several times ‘I’m getting
     all the credit for this horse, but I wouldn’t have him if it hadn’t been for you.’ ”
    Vanderbilt’s stable embarked on a resounding comeback in 1949, coinciding with the hiring of Bill Winfrey as a trainer. Vanderbilt
     had used Lee McCoy since the early 1940s and occasionally trained some of the horses himself, but just as he had felt the
     need to overhaul his breeding operation, he also felt it was time to put a better trainer in charge. Winfrey’s touch was so
     galvanizing that Vanderbilt soon began referring to the years before 1949 as B. W: before Winfrey.
    The stable’s comeback had started, ironically, with breeding decisions Vanderbilt made at his lowest ebb of frustration, shortly
     before he hired Kercheval. Bed o’ Roses, a filly foaled in 1947 out of a Discovery mare, swept the East’s four richest races
     for two-year fillies in 1949, earning $199,200, the third-highest total ever for a two-year-old, male or female. She was so
     feminine and attractive that Eric Guerin, her regular jockey, said of her years later, “If she could