Staring Down History

Don't Look Back
Cigar is closing fast on the record held by Citation (above) for consecutive victories by a U.S. thoroughbred in the modern era, but other great racehorses have also run off brilliant streaks. Number 1 of all time is Cameraro, who won 56 in a row in Puerto Rico in the 1950s. A nose behind is Kincsem, the Hungarian race mare who retired undefeated after 54 races in the late 1800s. Here are the leading winning streaks of American thoroughbreds in the 20th century.
WINS	HORSE (date of streak)
16	Citation (1948, 1950)
15	Buckpasser (1966-67) Colin (1907-08)
14	Man O' War (1919-20) Cigar (1994-96)
13	Personal Ensign (1986-88)
12	Morvich (1921-22) Spectacular Bid (1978-79)

It must have happened sometime in the middle of the night because the blood had already caked and dried over the coil's shoulder and down his right leg by the time Mike Barber found him shivering near a broken section of fence on the north end of Brookside Farm. Barber, the foreman of the place, reached in a panic for his walkie-talkie.

It was a few minutes past 7 a.m. on Oct. 11, 1990, some 20 miles west of Lexington in the Kentucky bluegrass country outside Versailles , and Mac Carr, the assistant farm manager, had nearly finished loading his gear in the Jeep Wagoneer and was rushing to leave on a hunting trip to Colorado . In fact, Carr had just slipped his Winchester rifle into the back of the truck when he heard Barber's wail over the radio: "Oh, God! The Hammer's gonna die! The Hammer's ripped himself wide open! Get up here. Now!"

Carr jumped inside the Wagoneer and roared out the gate onto Route 60, heading east. "At about 300 knots," he said.

The Hammer was the nickname that the farmworkers had given the unnamed son of Palace Music out of the broodmare Solar Slew, a daughter of the 1977 Triple Crown winner, Seattle Slew. Carr thought of the weanling as "a little puppy dog." but one worker who handled the babies would exclaim, "He's crazy. He'll step on your head!" And thus he became known as the Hammer.

Little else distinguished him. Carr had always liked Palace Music, who had earned five of his seven victories on the turf, because he thumped into the breeding shed "like a tyrannosaurus, bawlin' and squallin' like he was gonna eat ya alive." All that sound and fury signified almost nothing. Palace Music was crooked in front and sickle-hocked behind, and he tended to pass on these deformities to his offspring, who were born largely with the slows. Brookside's owner, Allen E. Paulson, had paid $510,000 for Solar Slew as a 2-year-old, but she had struggled as a racehorse, and in the fall of '90, when she was eight. Paulson sold her to an Argentine stud farm for a song of $20,000.

The weanling did not move as Carr approached him in the field. There were coyotes around, but they had not caused this. Coyotes would have run him down and cut him off and chased him until he dropped, then killed him where he lay. No, a deer had done this. Carr had seen them up there, and nothing will stampede a herd of weanlings faster than a bounding deer. Carr could picture the colt crashing through the dark into the fence, snapping the top wooden plank, tearing the wire mesh from the pole and cutting his right shoulder so deeply that Carr could nearly put both his hands in the wound. The foot-long gash began at the point of the shoulder and ran right down his chest.

"A horrible hole," says Ted Carr, Mac's father and the Brookside manager. "He was probably in front by 10 when he hit that fence."

"But he was walking sound," says Mac. "And when I came up to him, he looked at me like to say, 'Well, where's breakfast?' A tough little bird, I tell ya."

The son of a failing sire and a castoff mare, the Hammer was not worth much to begin with, and at the age of 176 days, standing bloodied in that field, he had no prospects as a racehorse. In the class of 110 other surviving foals born that spring to Paulson mares, the Hammer was at the bottom. He took about 30 stitches that morning, but within days the rapscallion had burst through the sutures, and grooms were treating the wound by spraying it with water from a garden hose. No telling what price you could have bought him for back then. "You couldn't have got 50 cents for him," Mac says.

Racing lore abounds with stories of horses rising from obscurity to make a run at history. From Armed to Canonero II to John Henry , they twine the braids of hope and romance through the harsher narratives of the sport. But no modern tale of this kind has resonated so sharply as the one about the weanling who grew up to be Cigar. Has any blooded horse, from any period of racing history, risen so spectacularly from the moors of nowhere to enduring legend in the manner of this 1,100-pound bay with a splash of white down his forehead and the ticktock balance of a Swiss watch?