A Horse For The Ages

Twenty-four years later it still remains among the most vivid of racetrack memories, an old print that flickers through the mind's eye in a silvery blur of black and white. The gray mud and slashing whips and flying hooves. The jockey struggling to stay on his mount as his saddle slips on the first turn. The straining necks of two of racing's giants, Triple Crown winners Seattle Slew and Affirmed, as they blaze together through the first half mile of the 1978 Jockey Club Gold Cup, with the cries of that split time crackling through cavernous Belmont Park like a blue trolley spark: 45[1/5] seconds! And, in the end, that final, surpassing twist in the drama—the last of those 12 furlongs, the 13 seconds in which Slew defined the thoroughbred as he has rarely been defined.

When it was announced that Seattle Slew, the last living Triple Crown winner, had died in his sleep in Kentucky on May 7 at age 28, the first thought was not of his consummate triumph in the Champagne Stakes at Belmont as a 2-year-old; nor of his bloodless stroll through the Triple Crown, in which his competition was so ordinary that he never really showed what he could do; nor of his smashing triumph in the 1978 Marlboro Cup, in which he beat Affirmed by three lengths in 1:45[4/5] for nine furlongs, only two fifths off Secretariat's world mark; nor of his remarkable career as a stallion, in which he has sired 102 stakes winners, including Kentucky Derby winner Swale and 1992 Horse of the Year A.P. Indy.

What first came to mind was that haunting Gold Cup—a race Slew lost but surely won.

He came to that Gold Cup with a reputation as one of the fastest horses who ever lived, but he left with something more. Seattle Slew did have, in rare abundance, that most cherished of qualities: speed. He had such a blinding, natural turn of foot that other horses simply withered when he lit the gas: A brilliant miler who could carry his speed a distance of ground, he was bold, arrogant and headstrong, as if always itching for a fight. So it had been in the 1977 Kentucky Derby: After hitting the gate and careening into the horse next to him, Slew was trapped behind a phalanx of horses. With no place to go, he simply lowered his head and bulled through the line, shouldering three horses aside as he made off for the leaders.

Few horses of any era have made such a powerful, lasting impression as Slew—and this from the moment he first strode onto the track. Hall of Fame trainer LeRoy Jolley recalls the colt on the day he made his second start—on Oct. 5,1976, in a seven-furlong allowance race at Belmont Park—and of how Slew materialized in the paddock like some kind of black Baryshnikov, exuding radiant energy and bouncing to the track on the tips of his toes. "I don't think I ever saw that horse walk," Jolley says. "He danced everywhere he went."

Slew's four owners—lumberman Mickey Taylor and his wife, Karen, and veterinarian Jim Hill and his wife, Sally—had paid only $17,500 for the colt in 1975. No beauty to behold, Slew was then an awkward-looking yearling with a crooked right front leg, a plain head and a modest pedigree. By the time he got to the races, his body so bulged with muscles that it always looked like his coat was cut a size too small.

Nine months after the race at Belmont, the Taylors and Hills owned the only undefeated horse ever to win the Triple Crown, but they never looked more prescient than during the last furlong of the Gold Cup. A desperate Steve Cauthen somehow managed to stay on Affirmed as his saddle slipped, but his champion was finished after a mile. Slew had opened 2� lengths, yet the duel with Affirmed had nearly finished him, too, and when Exceller swept by him off the final rum, Slew looked beaten. Then, magically, he began to battle back. His neck thrust straight out, his ears pinned back, Slew looked the very picture of unremitting will as he whittled Exceller's lead to a half length, then a neck...a head. Every soul in the grandstand leaned to the right, straining with each snide of that indomitable colt, until there arose that final, whistling exhalation from the crowd as the two horses hit the wire as one.

Exceller won by the snip of his chocolate nose. In defeat, though, Slew had expressed the essence of the blooded horse in his own unforgettable terms. As brilliant as he was on the courses, with 14 victories in 17 races and earnings of $1.2 million, that battling final furlong remains his most enduring legacy as a racehorse—his signature moment, writ with a flourish, in his large corner of racing history.