07/24/2023
BOLD RULER
Bold Ruler was the Heart of Hearts and the bond he held for his father, Nasrallah touches ones Soul.
This is an interesting story in which two worlds touch. Mrs. Phipps, the owner of Bold Ruler, (Secretariat’s sire), had owned and sold Seabiscuit at one point back in the early 1930’s to Charles Howard.
I love the fact that horses were Mrs. Phipps passion and her means of staying grounded. Seabiscuit was born in Lexington where Secretariat ended his days. I always wondered why Seabiscuit had a strong pull on my spirit, come to find out, he was put to rest in Willits, just a short drive from where I was born in Northern California.
I love the way this clip ends. I hope you enjoy it as much as I do.
♥️🐎👑🐎👑🐎👑🐎♥️
Jockey Eddie Arcaro was riding Bold Ruler toward the winner’s circle late that afternoon of 1956, moments after the c**t had raced to a two-length victory in the Futurity at Belmont Park, when Mrs. Henry Carnegie Phipps stepped forward to meet them. Bold Ruler had just beaten the fastest two-year-old c**ts in America, running in near-record time, and he was dancing home, his nostrils flaring hotly, his neck bowed and lathered with sweat, moving powerfully toward his seventy-three-year-old owner. Turfwriter Charles Hatton watched her meet him.
“Mrs. Phipps was out at the gap to get him and lead him down that silly victory lane they had there. And she must have weighed all of ninety pounds, and here is this big young stud horse—and she walked right up to him and held out her hand, and he just settled right down and dropped his head so she could get ahold of the chin strap, and Bold Ruler just walked like an old cow along that lane and she wasn’t putting any pressure on him to quiet him down or make him be still. It was one of the most amazing sights I’ve ever seen. It was incredible to me because anyone else reaching for that horse
—and he was hot!—you’d have had to sn**ch him or he’d throw you off your feet or step all over you. But not with her. For her he was just a real chivalrous prince of a c**t. He came back to her and stopped all the monkeyshines, ducked down his head and held out his chin, and here was this little old lady with a big young stud horse on the other end and he was just as gentle as he could be.”
Even growing old, as her walnut face withdrew inside a frame of white hair, she had a mind as quick as a crack of lightning and always drove to the racetrack in the morning by herself, without a chauffeur, steering her Bentley south from Spring Hill, the marble palace on Long Island.
Mrs. Phipps must have seemed the picture of some innocent eccentric—the way she tipped back her head to see the road above the dash, the way she gripped the wheel with both hands, the way she climbed from the car with the poodles beside her and walked into the barn at Belmont Park. Her horses turned to watch her coming. She carried sugar, and she wore a plain dress, sometimes a stocking with a run in it and sometimes moccasins or gym shoes. The men at work in the stables stepped gingerly around her when she walked up the shed, some nodding deferentially and saying hello, and she returned the salutations but did not speak at length to them, only to Sunny Jim Fitzsimmons, her crippled trainer.
On summer mornings they would sit as if enthroned like ancients from another time. He was the sage, a former trolley car motorman from Sheepshead Bay in Brooklyn who became one of the finest horsemen of all time, the only man to train two winners of the Triple Crown, Gallant Fox and Omaha, and almost three and four in Johnstown and Nashua. She was the patron, fulfilling the aristocratic role, racing horses for the sport of it and never complaining, win or lose. She was the stable bookkeeper and knew how much each horse had won. She would ask how they were doing, how they were eating, and when and how they were working, and when and where they would race again. She was an independent little statue of a woman who went her own way, and she would walk up to the shed and stop to pet and feed her horses, complimenting those who had won, scolding softly those who had just lost: “You dope,” she would say, holding a cube of sugar. “I don’t know if I should give you one.” But she always did.
By William Nack👑
Secretariat
