In the latest instalment of his unmissable series, Cigar’s biographer Jay Hovdey recalls what it was like to write the story of the equine great who equalled Citation’s record of winning 16 straight races
It takes about 90 minutes to drive from Ontario International Airport, serving the eastern reaches of greater Los Angeles, to the stable gates of Del Mar racetrack, southward by the sea.
It’s a little longer if you’re trailing a horse van. Halfway there, down Interstate-5, I glanced over my shoulder to see Bill Mott napping peacefully in the back. Up front on the passenger side, Jim Bayes was eyeballing the big Hubbard van rambling along in the right hand lane. The head of a horse appeared briefly in the van window, bearing the familiar glare from a white-rimmed eye.
“Look at him,” Bayes said. “Just another day at the office.”
The ‘him’ to whom Bayes referred was Cigar, alone in the big van and on his way to a date in the million-dollar Pacific Classic in August 1996. Bayes was an elite farrier to the stars, and Cigar was his premier client.
At that point, the six-year-old son of Palace Music had won 16 straight races, among them the inaugural running of the Dubai World Cup. A 17th in the Pacific Classic would have pushed him past Citation on the all-time list of winning streaks accomplished at the top of the sport.
And yet, win or lose, he was already the most popular, most photographed, most respected Thoroughbred racehorse in the world.
It was my privilege at the time to be writing Cigar’s biography. This would certify Cigar as one of my favorite racehorses, which conforms to the theme established by this series but also belabors the obvious.
America’s horse
So, rather than a chapter and verse recitation of Cigar’s biographical particulars, I’ve opted for a meandering account of writing that biography Cigar: America’s Horse, and recall 27 years later what it was like to travel in the wake of a generational equine supers
tar.
The idea for the book was posed by Ray Paulick, my editor at Blood-Horse magazine, not long after Cigar won his 14th straight race in that first Dubai World Cup on March 27, 1996.
Blood-Horse Publications was a going concern at the time – they had published my biography of training icon Charlie Whittingham a few years earlier – and I had been locked into the Cigar story since the previous summer, when the prodigal son returned to California, the scene of his early frustrations, to dominate a stellar field in the Hollywood Gold Cup.
We clinched the book deal with Allen Paulson, Cigar’s owner, at the 1996 Kentucky Derby, there in the box seat section of Churchill Downs. I’d been writing about Paulson and his growing stable of horses since the aerospace entrepreneur jumped headlong into the business in the mid-1980s.
Cigar was a product of Paulson’s partnership in Palace Music with Nelson Bunker Hunt and his purchase of Cigar’s dam, Solar Slew, for $510,000 as a two-year-old. Ridden by French legend Yves Saint-Martin, Palace Music was good enough to thwart Pebbles under in an 18-1 surprise in the 1984 Champion Stakes at Newmarket and then, while trained by Whittingham two years later, he nearly pulled off the Breeders’ Cup Mile at Santa Anita. As for Solar Slew, she retired a maiden after seven tries.
Which is getting off the track and into conventional story-telling, when I should be recalling the evening spent with Paulson in the cozy sitting room of his home behind the seventh green of the Del Mar Country Club, which he owned. The country club, that is.
Paulson, a born mechanic, was recounting tales of a childhood spent in Clinton, Iowa, steeped in the poverty of Depression-era America. He shared a bed with two siblings, scrounged for scrap metal in the town dumps, and won a movie theatre lottery prize worth just enough to buy a one-way ticket to California, where he was promised a job that led, by some strange kismet, to the employ of Howard Hughes and the aircraft industry that would make him a rich man.
As he spoke, Paulson tinkered with a cheap alarm clock. Endlessly curious as to how things worked, he seemed determined to dissect the little dime-store appliance in an effort to make it better, louder – who knows? This was the man who built, and flew, Gulfstream executive jets.
Bumpy landing
Like the one he flew from the West Coast to Chicago – and bounced the landing – the day before the Citation Challenge on July 13, 1996, at Arlington Park. The landing hardly bothered me, a journalist along for the luxurious ride, but Paulson was embarrassed.
His prowess at the controls was legendary as the chief of a crew that set a world record for a westbound circumnavigation of the globe, just eight years before. Even now, at 73, his pilot’s rating was world class, which explained his apology for the rough touchdown.
In contrast, his horse was perfect. After winning in Dubai, Cigar was given a few weeks’ rest then taken to Boston for an encore in the Massachusetts Handicap at Suffolk Downs. One year and six wins later, he returned to Suffolk accompanied by a police escort and local TV crews to be greeted by a crowd of adoring fans who waved ‘Cigar for President’ signs and gathered on the grass within sight of his stall.
I sat among them, absorbing the unabashed affection for their four-legged idol, until assistant trainer Tim Jones emerged from the shed row to politely shoo us away. We’d been served our fishes and loaves, and now it was time to go out into the world and spread the good word. The next day Cigar won as promised to a roaring throng while carrying benchmark 130 pounds, as I stood with Suffolk track boss Lou Raffetto, tears of gratitude welling in his eyes. Cigar, when in action, did that to people.
My first stop after the book deal was launched had been at Country Life Farm in Maryland, where the foaling stall in which Solar Slew gave birth to her Palace Music colt had been memorialized by proprietors Josh and Ellen Pons. Ellen took me for a walk in the pasture where the mare and little Cigar stretched their legs, and recounted the day the feisty colt kicked her in the belly, she being five months pregnant at the time. Their healthy first born son, Joseph Pons III, arrived that autumn.
From Maryland I traced the tale to Paulson’s Brookside Farm near Lexington, Cigar’s home as a yearling, where he was raised by Ted Carr and his son, Mac. Brookside was a showplace, with chandeliers in the stallion barn and guest houses dotting the property like five-star hideaways.
Cigar became known as ‘The Hammer’ as a yearling for being a hard-headed so-and-so. He also survived a nighttime panic of some kind, when he and his fellow young colts ran amok and Cigar sustained a nasty gash in his right shoulder.
Back home in California, it was an easy jaunt down the freeway to Brookside West of Madeleine and Allen Paulson, located near the inland town of Bonsall on land more suited to terraced vineyards than a training ground for Thoroughbreds. Cigar was there as a two-year-old, then later at nearby San Luis Rey Downs Training Center, in the care of Alex Hassinger, the Paulsons’ California trainer.
Care and patience
Without Hassinger’s care and patience through Cigar’s frustrating three-year-old season, primarily racing on grass, the horse could have been ruined. As it was, Cigar needed the skills of Dr. Lynn Richardson at the Helen Woodward Clinic in Rancho Santa Fe to remove small chips from both of Cigar’s knees.
“That’s the table we put him on, and that’s where Allen and Madeleine stood and watched,” Richardson told this visitor.
Back to Chicago, where Cigar made efficient work of his field in the Citation Challenge to equal Citation’s 16-race streak in front of 40,000-plus fans. The Paulsons were on a tight schedule to make a fundraiser back in Los Angeles that evening, so, after recovering my luggage stored in the office of track boss Richard Duchossois, I boarded a helicopter – along with Oliver, Madeleine’s Jack Russell – that was parked in the infield. I’m sure the takeoff was a spectacular sight from ground level. I think I waved.
A few hours later, Allen took the controls of the Gulfstream on approach to Santa Monica Airport. It was still daylight on the coast. The Pacific sparkled in the distance. As the ground rose up to meet us, Paulson brought us gently to earth with what pilots call a paintbrush landing. You get the idea. He looked over his shoulder and smiled.
I still had in my possession a round-trip ticket east, purchased before the invitation to accompany the Paulsons on their jet. My plan had been to travel from Chicago to upstate New York after the race to visit Cigar at the Greentree training stables near Saratoga racecourse, where Mott was sending his horse for a brief freshening. Now I would be taking a cab from Santa Monica to LA International, a red-eye from LA to New York, and a rented car up the Hudson Valley to Saratoga Springs.
I arrived late that Sunday morning. The place was a revelation. Built by John Hay Whitney in the 1930s, the facility included a long wooden barn with generous stalls, a residence fit for landed gentry, and a one-mile oval training track that went over the crest of a hill before sloping back toward the barn. To train on the Saratoga main track, horses walked from Greentree down a wooded lane reminiscent of Chantilly. Mott, droll as ever, greeted me with mock surprise.
“Let me get this straight,” he said. “The race was yesterday in Chicago. You flew back to Los Angeles, got on another plane to fly back to New York, then drove up here this morning. Doesn’t that seem a little strange to you?”
I had to agree. Anything for the book, though. And it was worth observing Cigar in the serenity of Greentree, far from the busy efficiency of Mott’s Belmont barn, or the intense atmosphere during away games.
To that point, Cigar’s 16 consecutive wins had taken place at nine different tracks in New York, Florida, Arkansas, Maryland, California, Massachusetts, and Illinois. And Dubai.
Ultimate road warrior
He was the ultimate road warrior, and now he was quiet in his Greentree stall, still imperious and forbidding, an all-business Thoroughbred who disdained any kind of intimate human contact other than the ministrations of his groom, Juan Campuazano, or the affection lavished upon him by stable veteran Erma Scott.
The Del Mar experience went by in a blur. More than 200 media were credentialed. I saw people who showed up only for a Kentucky Derby. Grizzled veterans said they hadn’t seen a horse followed with such passion since Secretariat – and I believed them.
On the day before the race, Cigar was led from his stall to the shed row of his temporary digs in the barn of Patrick Gallagher, who trained several of Paulson’s West Coast horses.
Jim Bayes strapped on his leather apron and went to work replacing Cigar’s hind shoes. I remarked that I’d started a modest collection of souvenir shoes worn by very good horses, like Best Pal, Perrault, and John Henry.
“Is that right,” said Bayes, now bent over with a hind foot resting on his thigh. He pried off the racing plate and knocked off the nails, then looked up and smiled.
“Here you go, lad,” he said, and tossed the shoe at my feet.
Kids, though, were a different matter, which I learned first-hand when the daughter of a stable hand ducked into Cigar’s stall and reached up to give him a pat on the shoulder. Her head came up to his lowered nose. He gave her a sniff, and that was that.
By then the text of the book was all but written, or at least that was my story to the publisher, and I was sticking with it. The decision was to hold off publication until the quest for Citation’s record came to an end. Seemed like a fitting, and probably happy ending.
Welcoming committee
So there we were, driving down I-5, a weary trainer dozing in the back seat and a police escort leading the horse van. The reception at Del Mar was a far cry from the welcoming committee the last time Cigar arrived in California, for the Hollywood Gold Cup on July 2, 1995.
That day, there was exactly one representative of the media on hand as the Hubbard van arrived at the big cement block barn across from the racing office.
Cigar had won eight straight at the time, an admirable streak that put to rest his mediocre record of two wins in his first 13 starts. As he was led down the ramp, a gust of wind tickled his mane, and he gave a swish of the increasingly familiar brown tail highlighted by strands of gray.
History will show that Cigar was not at his best for the Pacific Classic, and he had to be to handle the challenge from the two thoroughly tested runners sent forth by Richard Mandella – Hollywood Gold Cup winner Siphon and the Alydar colt Dare And Go, who won the Strub Stakes the previous season at a mile and a quarter.
Cigar chased Siphon early, but had no response to the late run of Dare And Go. Once the result was obvious, Jerry Bailey relaxed on Cigar to finish second, 3½ lengths behind the winner. The streak had ended.
Just like that, the book had a dramatically poignant final chapter. I followed Mandella through the grandstand in the wake of the race as he was stopped every few yards to autograph a program. Back at the Gallagher barn, the Cigar troupe assembled quietly in deference to their hero.
Allen Paulson said he felt bad for the fans, some 44,181 strong. Madeleine Paulson declared Cigar had given them so much, no-one could ever complain. Mott took one of several deep breaths and offered wisdom for the ages, and the book.
“You know, sometimes they just get beat,” he said. “The expectations for Cigar are incredibly high. I mean, for a long time he was able to overcome all the things that get even the best horses beat: injuries, Mother Nature, racing luck, all those things.
“It would have been nice to have set the record. But seeing Cigar’s name up there alongside Citation … well, there’s nothing wrong with that. He’s still Cigar as far as I’m concerned.”
Mott then turned his attention to his melancholy tribe of friends and family in town for the race. “Is there someplace local we can go, a family kind of place where we can just kick back?” he asked.
I assured him there was and told him I’d meet them at Fidel’s, a Mexican restaurant not far from the track, and gave him what I thought were good directions.
An hour later, the Mott party still had not arrived. He had called a couple of times – we had cellphones the size of bricks back then – but apparently I was no help. They finally trudged into the place, justifiably tired, sad, hungry and ticked off at the local yokel who evidently didn’t know up from down. The margaritas helped, but nothing could erase the taste of the day.
Out of my hands
In short order the book was out of my hands and on its way to the printer. The hope was to have it on sale in time for a signing at Belmont Park when Cigar was scheduled to run in the Woodward Stakes.
The book showed up – splendid in its dust-jacket cover photo by Barbara Livingston – and so did Cigar, who rose from the ashes of the Pacific Classic to win by four lengths in a romp. Back at Mott’s barn, the gathered faithful were all smiles. The big horse was back.
Sometimes the word ‘privilege’ is overused or insincerely deployed. In my case, it was more than a privilege to record the story of Cigar. It was an honor, and in the end it felt like a duty to preserve for some kind of posterity what this horse meant to the sport I held so dear.
And because no older horse has approached his accomplishments in the more than quarter of a century since he retired, Cigar remains that mountain other Thoroughbreds must climb to be held in similar regard.
Allen Paulson died in 2001. Jerry Bailey retired in 2006, and Cigar took his last breath in October 2014 at the Kentucky Horse Park, where he reigned as the main attraction at the Hall of Champions.
As for Mott, he is still going strong, currently enjoying a banner year with a stable that includes the wildly popular colt Cody’s Wish. On a roll of seven straight wins through his victory in the Metropolitan Handicap on June 10, Cody’s Wish has a mini-streak going that has Mott fans recollecting Cigar in all his glory. Someone should be writing the book.
“Yes, I hope he’ll be able to show up out there for the Breeders’ Cup at Santa Anita later this year,” Mott said in a recent conversation. “You wouldn’t happen to know a good Mexican restaurant, would you?
• Read all Jay Hovdey's features in his Favorite Racehorses series
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