Chapter 1: The Best at What You Do CHAPTER 1 THE BEST AT WHAT YOU DO Bob Baffert was born in 1953 in Nogales, Arizona, a dirt-scratch town within spitting distance of the Mexican border. It was high desert country, four thousand feet above sea level. 1 The family's adobe house sat like a belly button in the middle of acres of cattle fields. There were no neighbors for miles around. Boyhood in an Arizona border town sixty years ago had the sepia-toned feel of a world already disappearing by the time Baffert was born into it. But in the 1950s and '60s, it was all he and his six brothers and sisters knew. They had no television because the cattle kept knocking over the antenna in the field, and eventually the Bafferts said the hell with it. The only real entertainment in town was a drive-in movie theater next to a swamp. Baffert's mother would slather them all with oil to keep the mosquitos away while they watched, then roll her grease-smeared children, already asleep, into bed without baths. Bill Baffert, Bob's father, was known by everyone who mattered as "the Chief." He had retired from the army and wanted to live on a ranch, because he loved horses and needed somewhere to keep them. When he first took his wife to see the house, it was locked and she had to peer in through the windows. Ellie Baffert, a schoolteacher born and raised in Nogales, saw what she thought were gorgeous hardwood floors, but which turned out to be linoleum that had rotted through and had to be ripped up. There was no electricity and for a while, the house was lit only by gas lanterns. The children--Bill Jr. and Bob, Penny and Nori, P.A. and DeeDee, and, finally, the surprise, Gamble--shared rooms even as the Bafferts progressively, and one has to think with a certain sense of desperation, added new rooms to the house. It was a close-knit family. Baffert was a fastidious child, even by his own admission, a hangover from a stretch of time spent with a doting aunt who would wash his hands, dress him in a bow tie, and button his shirt to the top. He would come home from time spent with Aunt Ludie and correct his siblings' grammar and table manners over supper, until the Chief finally snapped at his wife: "What's the matter with your sister? She's going to make a sissy out of the kid." That small addiction to neatness would prove problematic for a boy growing up in a ranching town. There were always animals around, mostly livestock that made up some of the family income. Baffert's father eventually ran cattle, but started out with a chicken business that topped out at about five thousand chickens in individual cages. 2 Chickens are, by anyone's measure, disgusting. There were 4-H lambs as well, which Baffert hated because they, like the chickens, stank. Occasionally the local ranch hands whom the Bafferts hired to collect and crate the eggs wouldn't show up Sunday morning, the sweeter libations of a night out in Nogales having proved too tempting, and the Baffert children had to collect the eggs. Baffert and his siblings walked the stinking, dusty rows of the henhouses, with the chickens raising unholy hell overhead, flapping their wings and stirring up the dust and chicken shit. They would come out of the chicken houses covered in a fine grain of filth. Baffert didn't care for that part of owning chickens, but he proved adept at the business side of the venture, selling and delivering eggs for his father in high school. He was a natural-born salesman, making his own deals and adjusting prices to move aging stock over his father's head--experience he would later credit with training him for a lifetime of making good business deals. When he was about ten, Baffert was invited by a friend whose family owned a large ranch in Mexico to fly down on a private plane and spend three days on horseback pushing three thousand head of cattle on a hundred-mile drive across the border. It was a boy's dream, in an era when John Wayne was king: They slept on the ground under the stars and lived on canned tuna and tortillas. Baffert rode point--the lead position at the front of the herd--and learned horsemanship from the Mexican cowboys. They were excellent, and taught Baffert how to go after cattle, how to really ride . But there was a problem. Baffert did not want to perform one of humankind's most important and private functions in the middle of the wilderness: he did not want to poop. In desperation, he asked the Mexican cowboys what they used to wipe. The cowboys soberly informed him that they used rocks. Ten-year-old Baffert, a forlorn Little Lord Fauntleroy left with no other options, held it in for three days. Nogales was about as far from the center of the horse universe as it was possible to get in those days. In Kentucky and New York, the 1960s and '70s were a halcyon age in Thoroughbred racing, an era of giants of the turf still remembered today. The year Baffert was eleven, one of the most important Thoroughbreds in the history of the breed won the Kentucky Derby--although no one knew it at the time. A small and fiery-tempered colt with a powerful engine, Northern Dancer had been underestimated from the start because of his size. He was foaled late in the season for a Thoroughbred and consequently stood a mere 14 hands as a yearling, when his owners held an annual auction to sell their stock. Horses are traditionally measured in "hands," or the breadth of a human hand, with a "hand" standardized to four inches in the modern era. Anything less than 14 and a half hands, measured from the shoulder, is considered a pony. Tiny little Northern Dancer failed to meet even the low reserve of $25,000 and, unwanted, remained to race for his breeders. In a sign of how little they thought of his long-term value, his trainer initially wanted to geld (castrate) the horse. But the scrappy bay colt quickly showed himself. He blew away the field by eight lengths in his debut, then went on to trounce the best two-year-olds in Canada, often while carrying ten pounds more weight than his lesser rivals. 3 His first jockey, Ron Turcotte--who would later pilot Secretariat--had to be taken off the horse because Northern Dancer routinely ran away with him during races. "God knows how good he really was," Turcotte would later say, "for he was never a completely sound horse most of the time I rode him, and I still could not slow him down." 4 He won the Kentucky Derby in a blazing two minutes flat, a track record that stood for almost ten years until it was broken by Secretariat himself. As a breeding stallion, Northern Dancer proved even more undeniable: decades later, he is the dominant sire in the Thoroughbred breed. In the 1980s, his offspring routinely sold for more than $1 million at auction. 5 A privately negotiated breeding to the horse in the final years of his life--with no guarantee of a live foal--cost $1 million. 6 His sons and daughters appear wheeled out in the pedigrees of thousands of racehorses in America and Europe today. I The 1960s and '70s were a time of historic farms, owned by old East Coast money, farms steeped in gentility that bred regal, long-legged Thoroughbreds whose value was steadily increasing as the boom years of the 1980s ticked closer. Families like the Vanderbilts and their friends the Phippses bred blooded horses--Thoroughbreds--for the sport of it. The Thoroughbred was noble, refined, a work of art, his classic beauty immortalized in London's National Gallery in the form of the temperamental and heroic Whistlejacket, towering life-sized in George Stubbs's iconic 1762 oil rendering. This was the sport of kings. It belonged to artists like Federico Tesio, an Italian breeder who wrote an influential book called Breeding the Racehorse in the 1950s, and the particular class of person who had the time and leisure to read Tesio. In Nogales, the Chief had gotten his son Bobby hooked on a very different kind of horse. Ironically for a breed now associated so thoroughly with the American West, the quarter horse has its origins in the East Coast dating back to the colonial era. As early as 1611, settlers had begun crossing their English stock with a faster, squattier Chickasaw pony believed to be the descendants of Spanish barbs brought to Florida by early Spanish colonists. They would come to be known as the "Celebrated American Quarter Running Horse," so named for their brilliant speed over a quarter of a mile. Later, an infusion of mustang blood would solidify the American quarter horse as the horse of the West. They carried cowboys and settlers alike across the harsh and unforgiving plains, and in Texas became the mount of choice for cutting and driving cattle. Their sturdy build and muscular haunches gave them not only searing speed over short distances but also the ability to cut and wheel, to change direction on a dime in pursuit of the Texas longhorn--with power and stamina left over to race up and down Main Street for a jug of corn whiskey on the weekends. This was the horse on which the West--at least for white Americans--was won. 7 The Chief acquired a couple of quarter horses to race when Baffert was about ten or eleven. Bob won a couple of races with Baffert's Heller, a horse possessed of a terrible beauty for an eleven-year-old boy. Baffert was in awe of the horse, but he was afraid of him and the horse knew it. Baffert's Heller was cinchy, meaning that he would buck and sometimes throw himself on the ground when the girth was tightened around his belly. The boy spent months riding home on the school bus contemplating how to master the animal. By the time he had figured out the horse's proclivities and come to ride him without fear, he was sunk. Baffert was horse crazy. He would groom and exercise his father's horses and tag along to the races. By the time he was fourteen, the Chief had cut a quarter-mile strip in one of their hayfields and begun training their small string himself. There was a creek there, and the ground was loamy and soft. Baffert would exercise the horses for his father, riding them back and forth up the short strip. They weren't very good horses, but it was a good education. When he was a freshman in high school, Baffert was riding in unsanctioned match races for $50 or $100 pots and dreaming of being a jockey. He bought a pair of bell-bottomed pants with his winnings. 8 The horses were a hobby for the Chief. For Bob they became not only a passion but the vehicle for a magical connection with his father. Baffert worshipped his father. In later years he would become his simulacrum. 9 Bill Sr. was fun . He was the kind of father who taught his son how to toss empty beer cans out of the window of a moving car without attracting police attention ("Hold the can down and keep your arm to the side of the car when you release it"). 10 He let the boy sit around and listen to the old-timers' horse stories, tales of races won and lost, wisdom passed down of homemade liniments and tinctures to rub a horse's sore and ailing legs. Nobody had any real money in horses in those days. The purse money for the top races was good--better, in fact, than for the big Thoroughbred races--and Baffert came of age with some of the greats in quarter horse racing. But most trainers were running just a couple of cheap horses for cheap purses, hauling them from race to race in a two-horse stock trailer attached to a pickup truck. Even the sanctioned racetracks were dusty, run-down affairs, nothing like the generous, tree-lined Thoroughbred ovals of New York's Saratoga or Kentucky's Keeneland. The famous El Paso tack-maker Johnny Bean once laughed off a persistent rumor that the now-famous Thoroughbred trainer D. Wayne Lukas, then training quarter horses, had stiffed him with a $20,000 bill: "Oh, that's ridiculous. Nobody had $20,000 in those days." 11 The bush circuit for quarter horse racing was even poorer. It was part family picnic, part county fair, part illegal gambling ring, and it could be a rough-and-ready world with few rules: During one match race when Baffert was a sophomore in high school, the other horse in the race bolted from under his jockey, careening out of control off the dirt strip and into the crowd, running between the cars parked along the perimeter. Baffert kept riding, hollering all the way because the crowd had abandoned their barbecues and poured out onto the makeshift track to mill around on the finish line. They parted for him as he came blasting across the line first--but the instant he stood up in the stirrups to celebrate, the leather strap holding the footrest snapped. Someone had cut it in half, but it hadn't broken during the race as it was meant to. Sonofabitch, what the hell did I get myself into? Baffert thought. It was hard to say he hadn't been warned: The Chief had put $200 on his son to win, only to be told by a friend that it was a bad bet. The other horse had been "set up for a big race." Whatever that meant exactly, the horse was supposed to win. Baffert rode back into the middle of an argument. A man who stood out in his memory mainly for his size--and the fact that he had clearly laid a lot of money on Baffert's opponent--wanted to call the race a no-contest because his horse had bolted off the track. The evidence that there had been a fix in on the race was mounting. The argument escalated, and pretty soon the big guy was whaling hell on two smaller fellas. Other men stepped in to break up the fight. One of the smaller men ran off--and returned with a rifle. He fired a shot into the air as he approached. Baffert's uncle, who was with Bill and Bob, yelled: "Hit the ground!" Pandemonium broke out. Everyone panicked, leaping into their cars and hauling ass to leave. Drivers wrenched the wheel to whip their cars around, grinding gears and stirring up dust so thick it was hard to see. Baffert looked over and saw one driver barreling down the track itself. He saw what was going to happen seconds before it did: "Dad, he's going to hit the starting gate!" The car plowed dead into the immobile metal starting gate with a sickening crash. The driver, who hadn't been wearing a seat belt, was bloody and dazed. It was the man with whom the Chief had bet the $200. Somehow he was roused and in a condition that the Chief could address the outstanding wager between them. The man, convinced he couldn't lose, didn't have the cash. So the Chief took instead a pocket knife and a hundred-year-old reata, the kind of long, braided rawhide rope favored by Mexican cowboys. As Bob and his father finally drove away, the Chief had a single instruction: "Don't tell your mother." Ellie Baffert was no fool. She believed race riding was too dangerous for Bobby, and for a long time, the Chief and Bob conspired to keep what he was doing from her. They had a deal: Bill Sr. wouldn't squeal that Bob was riding races, and Bob wouldn't tell on his father for his beer drinking. 12 Few endeavors are more dangerous than race riding. Piloting a half-ton animal with a mind of its own and a highly sensitive flight instinct at speeds of near to forty miles per hour, with nothing but the tips of the toes and a whisper of ankle and hands on the reins for balance, is a physical feat the best parallel for which is likely free climbing. Often referred to as the best athletes pound for pound, jockeys suffer a shocking number of injuries from on-track crashes. A fund started only in 2006 to help care for permanently disabled jockeys now supports sixty former riders who have suffered paralysis, brain injuries, or both. 13 Accidents happen both in the blink of an eye and in newly inventive ways every day. It takes only a split second for horses in a race to "clip heels": a following horse's front hooves grab a lead horse's back hooves in a rippling disaster that is likely to snap both animals off their feet, catapulting their riders over their heads. Perhaps the most dangerous moment in any race is the time that the animals spend confined in the metal ribs of the starting gate. A panicked horse might rear and flip, his rider still perched on his back. Today an ambulance is required to shadow the horses and riders as they compete in races, driving around the track just behind the racing field. The races Baffert was riding in were particularly dangerous. His earliest experiences race riding were en faja , a traditional Mexican style of match race in which the jockey is literally tied onto the horse bareback by a long strap that hooks over the rider's lap and under the animal's belly. A pair of golf balls in the front pockets of his pants kept the faja from slipping down. 14 It was terrifying. If a horse flipped, there was no way for the rider to bail out. He would be crushed under the mass of a thousand-pound horse. The last time Baffert rode that kind of race, his horse "bolted," in the parlance of the track--running blindly and uncontrollable by the rider--and dove straight for the barbed-wire rail. Somewhere in the back of his mind he remembered the counterintuitive wisdom given to all trackwork riders. If they're bolting, give them their head: release your grip on the reins and stop trying to steer the animal. It's the racetracker equivalent of "Jesus, take the wheel." For some horses, giving up the fight will short-circuit their flight instinct. In the worst-case scenario, it will at least allow the horse to see where he's going, and maybe he won't run right through the rail. Baffert threw the horse his head and closed his eyes. The horse at the last moment saw the rail and ducked to the outside. Baffert stayed on and somehow managed to pull up the horse. Baffert wasn't any fool either. "I'm never gonna ride with that thing on again," he told his father. After that, he would ride in a saddle. But even a saddle offered few guarantees of safety. In one race in Yuma, Arizona, Baffert picked up a mount on a horse that turned out to be dead lame. Baffert rode the horse on the outside of the field for the entire race just in case the animal broke down, so he would not go sprawling in the middle of a pack of other horses running at top speed. On that same trip, the cinch of his saddle broke while he was exercising a filly for some friends. The saddle slipped and sent Baffert shooting off the horse like someone had opened the passenger-side door of a racecar going around a turn. He hit the ground with his elbow and jammed it into his kidney. He urinated blood that night. It wasn't until a week later, when his older brother, Bill, caught him still pissing red, that Baffert was sent to the medical center in Tucson. He spent five days in a hospital bed with a bruised kidney. Baffert didn't even bother going to the hospital when he fell from a horse he was breezing and the animal stepped on his chest. The impact of the fall knocked the heels off his boots. 15 He couldn't breathe, and after about a week of that discomfort, he asked a vet he knew to x-ray him. "Oh, yeah," the vet said. "You've cracked your sternum." 16 It wasn't just the horses that were dangerous. He rode at the kind of track where the other riders would steal twenty bucks out of your pocket while you were out riding a race. "They were just a degenerate bunch of jocks who couldn't make it anywhere else," Baffert said. There were some vestiges of the fussy boy who had refused to wipe his backside with rocks. Baffert was allergic to alfalfa, an occasionally convenient excuse to get out of barn work (and later, so legend has it, the reason for the trademark blue sunglasses). 17 Because he was riding races in the afternoon, it sometimes worked out that Baffert loafed around the night before a race while Bill did the chores. 18 But race riding was a real horseman's education, the rare kind that gives a person an intimate facility with the horse's body and his mind. Ellie eventually found out that her son was riding in races. A friend noticed Bob's name on the entries at the local track in Sonoita and called her to wish her son luck. Bob tried to stammer his way out of it, to no avail. Ellie burst into tears, calling her son and her husband both liars and sneaks and begging Bob not to ride. After he wound up in the hospital, she kept saying, over and over, "You don't know what you've put me through." It was no use: Baffert was desperate to ride. With the danger of race riding also came the thrill. And by that point, Baffert was a fool for horses. Baffert stepped out of the hot box at Tucson's Rillito Race Track. He had been sitting under the burning red bulbs trying to get down to the 122 pounds he needed to weigh to ride races. The hot box is a feature at racetracks to help the riders drop weight. The professional jocks would slather baby oil on themselves and let the sweat run off them, but Baffert didn't sweat much. When he stepped out from under the bare bulbs, he fainted. College-aged at the time, Baffert was really too big to be a jockey. He had been a scrawny kid, which kept him just under 122 pounds for a while. 19 But as he started to fill out, the problem of keeping his weight down became more acute. Although he was too squeamish to turn to bulimia--common enough in racing that jocks' rooms often have a dedicated toilet for "flipping"--he effectively starved himself down to a twenty-seven-inch waistline by eating nothing but protein. He was skin and bones, which made him weak. 20 He also wasn't making any money. The math was grim for a race rider in Arizona even if you were winning races: the purses at Rillito topped out at about $600 for a given race. Only about half of that went to the winning horse, and the jockey's cut of that was just 10 percent--$30. 21 And Baffert wasn't winning many races. Still, he stuck with it for as long as he could. He deferred starting college at the University of Arizona for a year, in part because he knew his days riding races were waning. In the early 1970s, the Chief dropped him off at Los Alamitos Race Course, in Southern California, to spend the summer living on a cot in the tack room and breaking horses for a trainer there. Before long he had blisters on his ass from getting on horses from six in the morning to three in the afternoon. The blisters were worth it to Baffert because the horses belonged to Dr. Ed Allred, one of the legendary owners in quarter horse racing who later bought Los Alamitos. Baffert got to ride a few horses in the afternoons, in actual races. But the competition at Los Alamitos was stiff, and he eventually returned to Rillito. In the end, it wasn't Ellie who convinced Baffert to hang up his tack. It was one of the top quarter horse jockeys in the country, Bobby Adair. Known simply as "the Master," Adair was the sport's superstar. He had ridden some of quarter horse racing's most famous horses to victory and shattered records for race wins. He famously remarked that he "thought he could ride anything that had hair on it," and Baffert idolized him. 22 Around the same time that Baffert passed out trying to cut weight, Adair was in town to ride a big race at Rillito. He asked Baffert if he was planning to return to Los Alamitos the next summer to ride. "No," Baffert said, honestly. "I'm not good enough." The competition at Los Alamitos was too tough, the races full of better horses with more experienced jockeys competing for bigger purses than Rillito and the local county fair tracks like Sonoita where Baffert was riding. Adair gave Baffert some advice that he would carry with him for the rest of his life: quit. "If you don't think you can be the best at what you do, you need to quit," Adair said. "Because if not, you're gonna kill yourself." The Arizona fair circuit was too dangerous, full of rough riders and rough horses. Driving home from Rillito that night, Baffert knew that Adair was right. He was a good horseman, but he wasn't a great race rider. He couldn't "switch sticks" while riding--transfer the whip from one hand to the other seamlessly. His friend John Bassett, a hard-partying quarter horse trainer Baffert had met in California, once told him, "You can't ride a hog in a phone booth." 23 Privately, Adair was thinking the same thing, although he wouldn't tell Baffert that until years later. 24 Reeling after the incident outside of the hot box, Adair's words ringing in his ears, Baffert decided he had had enough. He gave his tack to another jockey. It was an early call of the true competitor in Baffert--or perhaps just a demonstration of the kind of boyish sense of entitlement to greatness held by restless young men who have yet to discover their ambition: a bone-deep belief that a thing isn't worth the effort if you can't be the best at it. In any case, Baffert would come to believe in Adair's advice with an almost religious fervor. He would set himself deadlines based on it, shape career decisions around it, and, in later years, reflect on it as a credo that has set him apart. The decision didn't look nearly that fateful in the moment. In the short term, it mostly allowed nineteen-year-old Baffert to order a hamburger with impunity for the first time in a few years. He went to college, joined a fraternity, and, even as he continued to take jobs here and there fooling with horses, told people that he didn't want anything to do with the racing business. But Baffert was about to discover what he was the best at. I . In 2019, roughly half of the new stallions entering the market in central Kentucky were descended from Northern Dancer. https://www.bloodhorse.com/horse-racing/articles/231145/new-sires-of-2019-northern-dancer-fires-back . Excerpted from Death of a Racehorse: An American Story by Katie Bo Lillis All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
