National Thoroughbred Racing Hall of Fame Class of 2012 - Racing Across Centuries

on August 10, 2012 at 3:08 PM, updated August 10, 2012 at 7:09 PM

Today six new members to the National Thoroughbred Hall of Fame were inducted at Saratoga, and trainer Roger Attfield and jockey John Velasquez will accept the honor on their own behalf. The great horse Planet, and jockey Anthony Hamilton raced just before and just after the Civil War respectively.  Trainer Robert Wheeler had passed away before this celebration of his talented career, and Hall of Fame trainer Bobby Frankel, who conditioned Ghostzapper, is no longer with us.  This two part series moves from the 1800's through to racing as it is now enacted through six stories. These stories are part of a tapestry that continues to be woven each day at the track, and deserve to be remembered and celebrated.  Portions of each appeared in the Saratoga Special.  Here they appear in their original forms, as different as the lives they honor.  Here they appear as one, chronologically, a thread running through the years from Planet in 1858 to active trainer Roger Attfield and jockey John Velazquez. 

Planet: 1855- 1875

The more things change, the more they are the same.  Olympic athletes taken out of competition for not trying, a new Mars rover.

In 1858, astronomers were staring at the skies, trying to figure out which planet might be like a second earth, an analog Earth, deciding on Mars.  They had discovered the minor planet Virginia in 1857, then Nemausa in 1858, two orbitals that were actually asteroids.  On May 2nd, 1858, the third comet of the year was spotted and tracked for three nights across the spring sky, its trajectory noted against the brightness of the stars.  In Fairfield Va, on the afternoon of May 4th, before the sun had set and those stars against which the trajectory could be measured rose, a three year old chestnut colt, wearing the flaming orange silks of owner and breeder Thomas Doswell's Bullfield Stable stepped up to the line in the Doswell Stakes and beat four other horses in a race of  one-mile heats. 

He was the first foal of one of Boston's finest daughters, Nina, a mare whom Richmond businessman Thomas Doswell purchased as an already successful 4-year old, and raced until she was  retired in 1854 after breaking down on the track.  She had won at various distances, but had been known for her successes in three- mile heats. 

She was taken to the Doswell family farm where Thomas Doswell had taken over the operation in 1850 from his father.  He was determined to deepen the family's roots in racing on this property that was more than a farm, more than a place where thoroughbreds were bred. It was a center of racing in Virginia before the war with three tracks and a famed spring meet.  This mare would add a depth the their breeding and establish them as never before, and it would be her first foal who would step beyond the farm and light the east coast with his fire.

He was a horse who seemed to be able to do it all. He won at distances from one-mile up to four-mile heats. In the races that he ran, there were flags placed forty yards before the finish line so that the horses in the field behind the winner were shown to try and not just reserve their strength for later heats.  These were distance flags that had to be passed before the winner crossed the finish or they would be disqualified from the next heat, distanced from the finish. Owners of other horses put up money to race against him, drawn like gravity to try their luck, and he would not just beat them, chances were he would distance them, make that next heat impossible. They were drawn to run against him up and down the east coast, drawn as to the sun, but most could never get close enough to challenge his brightness. When he did win decisions of two out of three, he ran mile heats between 1:47 and 1:54, two miles between 3:47and 3:52, and four miles between 7:35 and 7:51

He was a son of the south, racing in Virginia, Georgia, Alabama and Louisiana, states that seceded five days after his last race, a loss that could be seen to foreshadow 'The Cause'. When the first shot in the war was fired at Fort Sumter, it effectively ended racing in the South.  W.S. Vosburgh had described the Thoroughbred breed thus: "Racing as an institution began with the idea of affording sport for the owners of horses and at the same time of perfecting a breed capable of carrying high weights at the highest speed, and thus to be useful for cavalry purposes in time of war."   As horses were pressed into service, he was exempted, his battles already fought on the track, his victories already won.  He had forayed further north than the Confederates would, and he had won at New York's Fashion Racecourse a year earlier, distancing Congaree in a four-mile heat that took him 7:39 to complete. By the time he had run that last race as a 6-year old, he had taken his record to  27 wins in 31 races.

To escape capture and forced service to a Northern master, he was hidden in the woods while his owner, now Major Thomas Doswell volunteered as the Aide de Camp of Louisiana General  Starke.  It was known to happen that certain Northerners had an eye for horses, and a memory from before the war of who certain horses had raced for and where they were from, and were on the lookout specifically for the kind of stock that could enrich their own barns.  He would have been a sought after prize.

His list of foals seems small, not much more than some modern sires get in a single crop, but he missed some of his best years at stud hiding in those woods from the Union soldiers, a few more as the south brought itself back after the war, and Virginia, the center of the Confederacy, struggled back to its feet. 

Three years after the war ended, he was sold to RA Alexander of Woodburn Farm in Kentucky, where he stood as third stallion behind Lexington and Australian, two great sires who stamped the breed forever.  In 1875, six months after the inaugural running of the Kentucky Derby, his sun set, but he had been a star against which others progress across the sky would be measured. A star who shone brightly. 

There were five years between the death of Planet, and the beginning of the career of Anthony Hamilton as a jockey, and in those years, the face of racing changed.  Races became shorter, and were longer run as heats.  A day at the races was no longer the spectacle of a single event, now it became a day of race cards, of multiple events, and opened the door for more horses, jockeys and trainers to rise to prominence in the sport. 

Anthony Hamilton: 1866-1907

One year after the war, one year on in that bombarded city where it all began, in Charleston SC, Anthony Hamilton was born the first free son of parents who were once slaves. One year after he was born, the civilian  government there was replaced by the army, gave Freedmen the vote, and kept ex-Confederates from holding office, but just because the war had ended, it didn't mean that life was easy or equal.  With Jim Crow heading into town, it would take nearly one hundred years for Dr. Martin Luther King to still be fighting to be 'free at last, free at last' . 

You worked in conditions relatively unchanged by the war, by your freedom, and you worked in those conditions because you couldn't leave, and the land of milk and honey was maybe a million miles away, somewhere to the north.  You still worked in the fields and the big house because you had to.  But you rode because you could, and you won, like Hamilton did, because you had a gift that was there in your hands, in your heart, in your mind.  Maybe his family did go north, and he raised as a child in New York as his wedding announcement from the New York Times says.  But he wouldn't have had to leave Charleston for a racing education- not with the Washington Race Course running there from 1792 until 1882.  It was there that Planet beat South Carolina mare Hennie Farrow in two heats in 1859.  The track was a prisoner of war camp during the war, and on May 1st, 1865, the year he was born, thousands of African-Americans came to the cemetery to honor the Union soldiers buried there who had died in the camp.  The first Memorial Day.

Anthony Hamilton won his first major race at the age of fifteen, the Phoenix Stakes in Kentucky, at the Keeneland Race Track, and from there he took the racing world of the time, took the world at that time, by storm.

He had his apprenticeship with the ex-jockey turned trainer William Lakeland, a master at running horses back something more than quickly, and who with that savage older horse Exile once won two races in the same day. More than any other, the association between Mr. Lakeland and Mr. Hamilton seems somehow always there, something that must have transcended the work one did for the other, and been deeper for both.     

There are no stakes named for him, only a few jockeys have achieved this level that his contemporary Jimmy Winkfield did, but there are stakes named for horses and two of his, Lamplighter and Salvator, have been immortalized at Monmouth Park, joining the names of the stakes that he won there: the Monmouth Oaks (1889, 1890), the Monmouth Invitational Handicap (1889, 1892), and the Sapling Stakes (1891) on a colt named Air Plant. 

Like the rootless spanish moss that lives on the live oak trees in the south, Anthony Hamilton was an air plant as well, amassing a list of stakes wins on horses like Firenze, juvenile champion Potomac, and Sligo as he moved across the north, through New York, New Jersey, Chicago and St. Louis.  He won the Twin City stakes at Sheepshead four times, twice with the same colt, William Lakeland's Exile in 1888 and 1889, a horse whose name would soon carry extra meaning for Mr. Hamilton.  He was commonly known as Tony, but called the Black Prince and the Black Demon, either in bitterness or admiration depending on where you stood on the race. He is the only black jockey to win the Brooklyn, Metropolitan and Suburban Handicaps, a triumvirate more impressive than the Triple Crown at the time.  In early 1893, while his star was still high in the sky, a New York Times article describes him as reporting to August Belmont's training headquarters to ready the large Nursery stable's racing division.  The previous season he had first call for Pierre Lorillard and second for Keene, but decided having a second call is a bad idea.  "If a stable which has second call on a man finds him riding against them, they feel hurt," he told the Times.  It was, in other words, freedom to choose. 

There is a photograph of him sitting in the saddle, his silks and cap emblazoned with stars, his hands so strong on the reins, his face set and resolute.  The stars make it seem somehow so American, as if they had come to him from a flag, but nearing the end of the century things were changing in the jockey room, and African Americans like Mr. Hamilton, like Jimmy Winkfield and others, were being forced out, and so they left. He had been exiled from the track and so he went where he could ride, and he raced across Europe, continuing his winning way in Poland, Austria and Germany.  Did he die in France three years after a bad injury in Russia? Was it of consumption on his private train car in Germany? In a way, it doesn't really matter how or where he died.  It only matters that he lived.

Thirteen years after the death of Anthony Hamilton, trainer Robert Wheeler was born in Nebraska. The East Coast was still the Nation's center of racing, but the feelers that had moved West were taking root, and deepening with the opening of Santa Anita in Arcadia, California, in 1934. While racing had been the sport of Kings in England, and was the sport of dynastic families in the East, in California it became the playground of stars and starlets, popularizing the industry with their instant recognition, making it glamorous to go to the races. But behind the scenes, there was the work, hard work that was no different in Newmarket, England, than in New York or California.  Robert Wheeler was one trainer who built the bridge between racing at the turn of the century, a bridge to racing as it is now. 

Robert Wheeler: 1920-1992

The foundations of legacies are works: hard work, affecting work, work that makes a difference and precipitates change.  Legacies build legends.  Johnny Appleseed was a real man named John Chapman, a man who planted apple trees.  It is what he did as a man that grew into what he became as a legend, as stories that are told to children.  There is a child in California who will be told stories of a man named Robert  Wheeler, a man whose legacy is no less potent than any others who have become legend, a man whose name lives on with this boy named Wheeler Semkin.  His father, trainer Sam Semkin, was Mr. Wheeler's step-grandson and assistant, and talks about him as having been his best friend, no step between them, the relationship as near as blood   Sam Semkin will tell stories to his son, and the stories the child will remember will come from the most reliable source, the heart.  These are some of those stories.

The 1920's were a time when there was a different idea of necessity, a different idea of comfort, a different idea of education.  It was a time when values were rooted in different soil and produced what many today would think of as strange fruit. It was during the 1920's that Robert Wheeler came home from his Nebraskan grade school one day and told his mother that he was not going back.  She told him to sit on the couch and wait to tell this to his father, so he did as he was told, sat and waited for his father to come home from delivering mail.

His father said, "Well, you can't stay here.  The truant is going to come looking for you."  So he left. He was in the fourth grade.  He went back home only once, at twelve, to mend a leg that had been broken in Kansas City. Early independence can make a man a loner, a hoarder of information, brisk, but this is not the kind of man Mr. Semkin describes when speaking of his grandfather. "He would help anyone if they were honest, true."   

By the time Robert Wheeler began training, the industry's body had been there for centuries but he was one of the link between hands, heart, and that part of the brain called common sense.  His hands were his tools, sitting and working a piece of leather in the tack room at the barn, or the one he set up in Arcadia, the hands he used as he trained his horses.  He had come to the San Rey Downs area when he was 18 years old and always said he wanted to retire in that part of the country.  He never did retire, but worked with those hands until the end.

The first thing that caught Mr. Semkin's attention about his grandfather happened the day they met over Thanksgiving dinner in Arizona.  As they were sitting down to eat, Sam dropped his knife.  Robert Wheeler caught it before it hit the floor.

To this day, his grandfather is always in Mr. Semkin's thoughts. "When I have a problem with a horse, I think, 'What would Gramps do?' " he says.  Then the things he learned from his grandfather come flooding in, and his legacy is reaffirmed with each of the horses his grandson works.

He would say things like raising horses is like raising children and the most important thing he taught was consistency.  You had to figure out the best way to discipline them.  Colts, he felt, colts and horses, you disciplined once hard and that was it. They didn't take the picking at, the little more aggravation that a filly or gelding would. 

It wasn't that he felt he had a way with fillies, even though they dominate the list of great ones that came through his barn, it was just that he felt he was sent better fillies than colts, and it was with a pair of fillies one crop apart that he dominated the races in California - B.Thoughtful and Taisez Vous in 1977 and 1978.  "Those were the best he had when I was with him." .    

You used common sense with the young ones, thought in terms of your own comfort.  "If you didn't like working when you were hot and sweaty, why would they?  So, don't get them hot and tired."

'If something is not working, you need to change, even if it is worse, you are doing something different.  You are trying.'

'Don't laugh at what someone else is doing.  You never know what might work.'     

"It's hard to describe," says Mr. Semkin. "He was a Hall of Fame person."

There is the legacy of the track, the horses trained, the races won, and that is why he is being celebrated by the National Thoroughbred Hall of Fame. But there was more to this man than the track. The seeds the Robert Wheeler sowed were planted in the heart, and will grow.

One more thing that Mr. Semkin relates.  It was something that his grandfather told him, something he will pass on to his own son. 

"If you are doing something to get patted on the back, you're not doing a good job.  Recognition of a good job comes from within."