Staring Down History

When they are finally enshrined, Paulson will have done his part to put them there. The 73-year-old aviation tycoon—for whom the taking of risks has always been part of the natural order of things—has been as bold and aggressive an owner/breeder as Mott has been a deliberate and careful trainer. Different as they are in style and approach, they grew up fleeing the same cold terrain of the same American hinterland. Paulson, the son of a farmer who went bust in the trough of the Depression, was raised on the banks of the Mississippi River, outside Clinton, Iowa. His life in turmoil, his father broke and his mother ailing with tuberculosis, Paulson was working as a janitor in a Clinton hotel in 1939 when he won $33.33 at bingo, which he invested in a bus ticket to California. "Everything was easy after I survived my childhood," he says.

He is the archetypal self-made man. In 1941 Paulson was working as an airplane mechanic for Howard Hughes, and following the end of World War II, with something of Hughes's touch for making money, he was buying hundreds of surplus B-29 engines then disassembling them and selling the parts around the world. He also began to convert old passenger planes into cargo carriers and sell them. Paulson took his biggest gamble ever in 1978, when he pulled together $52 million—some of it his money, some of it others'—and bought the money-losing Grumman subsidiary that built corporate jets. Paulson thus began the Gulf-stream Aerospace Corp., and in just five years, while turning it into the world's largest maker of small private jets, he boosted sales tenfold to $1 billion a year and pretax profits to $100 million. "I turned it around," he says quietly.

By the late 1980s, after selling the company to Chrysler for $637 million in '85, Paulson had invested more than $100 million in horses and land on which to raise them. Brookside had become a foaling factory, and Solar Slew was just one of hundreds of highborn mares who paraded through the breeding shed. While carrying her son of Palace Music, the mare was vanned in February 1990 to Country Life Farm, 30 miles north of Baltimore, where she was to be bred again that spring to an obscure Maryland stallion named Corridor Key. She dropped Cigar on April 18, and there they stayed, in this storybook nursery timbered with giant maples and oaks, until she could be bred again 30 days later.

The mare and her foal returned to Kentucky in July, but not before the flaxen-tailed rascal had left his mark. Farm owner Josh Pons's wife, Ellen, five months pregnant, was walking Solar Slew and her son from one field to another one day when the colt suddenly cow-kicked her in the stomach and knocked her down. When Joseph Pons III was born four months later with a single dimple on his cheek, no one thought much of it, but the origins of the mark have since become a part of family lore. Five months after that, back in Kentucky, the colt nearly killed himself smashing through that fence, and a year after that, scarred but sound, he was galloping around the fields with Mac Carr on his back.

"He was a pretty thing," Carr recalls. "A big, high-headed, high-striding horse. Covered the ground good. But he was just another horse, another son of Palace Music. I remember thinking before he went to the track, I'd like to have this horse when he comes back home. He'd make a real good lead pony."

Over the next three years—until that fateful fall day in '94 when Mott finally switched him from the grass to the dirt—the only long-term future he had was as a pony. Alex Hassinger took over his training at Santa Anita when he was a baby, but he never raced as a 2-year-old. "A big gawky horse with structure but no mass," Hassinger says. The catchiest thing about him was the fineness of his head and the curious white marking on his forehead. It looked like a little aerial photo of two white sandy islands. That and his name, which he didn't have until he was a year old. Paulson names many of his horses after aviation checkpoints around the world, and Cigar is somewhere in the Gulf of Mexico between Tampa and New Orleans.

The colt won his first race on the dirt as a 3-year-old—in his second start, at Hollywood Park, on May 9, 1993—but Hassinger wheeled him back on the turf, where his Palace Music pedigree insisted he belonged, and he staggered home fourth after leading deep into the stretch. So there was never any thought of entering him in the Triple Crown races, a series run exclusively on the dirt. The colt raced with laudable consistency on grass that year, placing in two minor stakes and failing only twice in nine starts to earn a check, but he chipped a knee in his final start as a 3-year-old, in the Hollywood Derby on Nov. 20, and soon after underwent surgery. Mott took him over in January, and for the next six months he did what he does best: He fussed with Cigar, waited for him to come around, fiddled with him and waited some more. The colt was found to have stress-induced ulcers, and Mott had him treated for that.

The ulcers were not caused by overwork. Pedigree be damned, nothing could cure the colt of his coldness toward the grass. Mott started him four times on the sod as a 4-year-old, and each time the colt grew closer to being Mac Carr's lead pony. "Every race was worse and worse," Mott says. Finally, out of exasperation he dropped Cigar into a main track mile at Aqueduct on Oct. 28, 1994. Voilà! He won by eight, under a stunned Mike Smith, who rode on cruise control. "A remarkable turnaround," says Mott.

Thus began, on that autumn afternoon in Queens, N.Y., the most extraordinary transformation of a racehorse (from the highly suspect to the truly sublime) in the recent annals of the turf. Jerry Bailey had ridden Cigar six weeks before that victory, when he got beaten by nearly nine lengths at Belmont Park, but Bailey had left early that October day at Aqueduct and had not seen him run. That night, at the Meadowlands, Smith asked Bailey, "Remember that horse Cigar? You wouldn't believe the race he ran today. He was off the screen."

Mott swung Cigar back in the Grade I New York Racing Association Mile on Nov. 26, but Smith was committed to ride another horse, Devil His Due, so he lost the mount to Bailey. Mott was in Fuchu, Japan, that day, waiting to run Paradise Creek in the Japan Cup, and that night he called the racing secretary's office in New York to see how Cigar had done. "Won by seven," a voice told him.