Free Native Dancer by John Eisenberg Page B

weather warmed, letting the foals stay out at night.
    “Native Dancer was a big, rough foal that wanted to play all the time,” Scott recalled. “I once had a fraternity brother,
     a great big man with great big hands, and he would shake your hand and not realize he was breaking your hand. Native Dancer
     was like that as a baby. He’d entice the other foals away from their mothers, and they’d play, and there’d be some big ruckus
     over something he had started, and someone would get hurt, but never him. He was very healthy; you didn’t have to do anything
     other than make sure he wasn’t too full of himself. He was just the most exuberant foal you could imagine, a joy to be around.
     No one had any idea he was going to be a Native Dancer, of course. You can’t watch horses run in a field and decide. The track
     is an entirely different ball game. People ask me, ‘Did you recognize a champion?’ I said, ‘No, but I recognized a wonderful
     animal.’ ”
    Through the spring, Vanderbilt’s other mares in Kentucky also delivered; there were eleven foals in all by the end of the
     season. They returned to Sagamore Farm after their mothers had been bred back to various stallions. Geisha and her baby were
     loaded onto a van on June 28, 1950—Geisha did load, however reluctantly—and returned to Maryland, where Vanderbilt’s other
     mares had delivered. In all, nine colts and seventeen fillies constituted his foal crop for the year: a rollicking mass of
     infinite possibilities.
    They spent the next eighteen months at Sagamore, by now a 950-acre spread regarded as Maryland’s finest horse farm. Incorporating
     twenty buildings and seventy full-time employees in three divisions—breeding operations, training operations, and maintenance—the
     farm had immaculate barns, fences and paddocks, an outdoor racing strip, and a quarter-mile indoor track for winter gallops;
     a kitchen, chef, dining room, and dormitory housing for the staff; and a large house for Kercheval and his wife.
    From the beginning, even when he was just another yearling in the field, Native Dancer stood apart. “He was a very nice individual
     as a youngster, did things easily, had nice balance and a powerful physique,” Kercheval recalled. “There was never a doubt
     about his athletic qualities, and he was handsome from the word go, a very nice-looking foal without the crooked legs a lot
     of them have.”
    Several other horses in the crop also showed promise through their breaking, development, and early light training. The best
     was Crash Dive, a speedy colt sired by Devil Diver, a popular Kentucky stallion. Find, a son of Discovery, also showed promise,
     as did the colt named Social Outcast. In the fall of 1951, they were put through quarter-mile trials one morning, taking their
     first quantifiable steps as racehorses. The annual event lured Vanderbilt from Long Island, anxious to see the first crop
     of youngsters he had bred with Kercheval. There was a buzz in the air as Vanderbilt, Kercheval, and Winfrey strode to the
     two-story tower by the finish line of Sagamore’s training track. The yearlings galloped around the track and were timed over
     the final two furlongs as their balance and fluidity were studied. A stopwatch served as the final arbiter.
    A lot was at stake. The stable’s annual trek to California was looming, and Winfrey needed to know which of the pending two-year-olds
     to take. He liked to run the early bloomers in the three-furlong dashes for juveniles at Santa Anita and leave his youngsters
     with more far-reaching potential at home; they were better served, he felt, by receiving several more months of schooling
     at Sagamore and then starting their racing careers in the spring in New York, where the racing was better.
    That morning, it wasn’t hard to separate the horses with potential from those destined to accomplish little. Social Outcast
     looked sharp; he would go to California. Find also ran well. But