The Horse That Could Be 'too Damn Fast'

In his office before going home, Jolley has calmed down considerably. He has had word from the clockers that the track seemed to be unusually dull that morning; all the works were on the slow side, even for horses that were being urged to run. Considering the track condition, the work was not really much slower than he had planned, just a tick or two of the stopwatch.

"Of course, that first half bothered me," he says. "You don't want your horse to be fighting like that; the main thing you want is to get him comfortable and running nice and relaxed. When he's going so slow and trying to go faster, you're always worried that the horse will hurt himself. But he didn't hurt himself. And there's plenty of time left to work him fast, and you know he'll work."

Thinking of the future raises another problem. How can you work a horse like Honest Pleasure fast without working him too fast? LeRoy Jolley says, mostly to himself, "He's never really got away from his rider; he's never knocked himself out in a workout. But he's always on the borderline; it's always a worry. And now with these three big races coming up...."

Jolley is thinking about the Triple Crown—the Kentucky Derby, the Preakness and the Belmont. "Those are three days in a horse's life that only come up once," he says. "They're tough days. It's a grueling schedule. All that travel. Three different racetracks, three different surfaces, three different distances. If your horse is going to be at his best, you've got to give him every possible advantage every day of his life. You can't afford to make a mistake."

But fretting over a horse like Honest Pleasure has its compensations. The morning's tension begins to give way. Jolley says, "One good thing, this horse never gives anybody any problems, except that he wants to run so bad. He'll eat anything you put in his feed tub. He'll drink any kind of water. He's never had anything wrong with him, except that he bucked his shins when he broke his maiden last year and once he had a cough and ran a little temperature for a couple of days. As for his workouts, who knows? What a bad horse is struggling to do, a good horse can do easily. Who knows how fast is too fast for him?"

Jolley ponders for a moment and adds, "Naturally he's hard to rate right now. He grew a lot over the winter; he stands over 16 hands now. And he got a lot broader and stronger. Naturally, he came out wanting to sprint. But I think the way we've been trying to rate him in the morning is beginning to take effect. And the whole purpose of our racing schedule is to teach him to take it easy. We're passing up the shorter races. He'll go a mile and an eighth in the Florida Derby and again in the Blue Grass. He'll get a little tired in those races and he'll begin to rate himself."

As it turned out, Honest Pleasure went slower in the Florida Derby than in the Flamingo—six furlongs in 1:10[3/5], the mile and an eighth in 1:47[4/5]. But his pace was still dangerously fast. Only one horse in history, Kauai King in 1966, has ever won the Kentucky Derby after going six furlongs under 1:11. Secretariat, in his record-setting 1973 Derby, loafed the three-quarters in 1:13.

Will Honest Pleasure ever really learn to rate himself? If he does, he may well turn out to be the greatest and most successful racehorse of all time, better than Secretariat, better than Man o' War. If not, he will have failed not for lack of ability but because he was too proud a runner ever to do less than try his very best every stride down the track.