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The Dancer was bumped badly on the first turn. The post-mortems suggest that he did not get the best ride from Jockey Eric Guerin. The Dancer made a tremendous, express-train move, and pulled inside to the rail behind the front-running Dark Star. He was boxed in by a horse to his right and so Guerin had to pull up, swing him out and demand a big rush all over again. Once more, the Dancer surged in, pounded by Guerin all the way down the stretch, and almost caught Dark Star. He lost by a head. "In that last 100 yards or so,'' says Bill Winfrey, "he probably ran the fastest he has ever' run." The Dancer's groom, a devoted, venerable Maryland Negro named Lester Murray, insists that the Dancer was badly disturbed after that race by being led back to the stable without the accustomed halt at the winner's circle.
For the rest of the three-year-old season, the Dancer saw to it that the halt en route was not omitted. He took the other bright gemstones of the Triple Crown, the Preakness at a mile and three-sixteenths and the Belmont at a mile and a half, and just about every other three-year-old prize worth having east of the Mississippi. It proved that in addition to speed, the Dancer had stamina; the greater the distance, the better he seemed to go. But in September 1953 Trainer Winfrey detected some soreness in the Dancer's left forefoot and a limp in his walk. It was a stone bruise. The Dancer was retired for the rest of the-year. Tom Fool, a fabulous four-year-old, won New York's three big handicap races (the Metropolitan, Suburban and Brooklyn). Horsemen who had hoped to see Tom Fool and Native Dancer in the same race were disappointed.
Some insisted that Tom Fool would have won at a mile or less; some picked the Dancer under any circumstances. "Tom Fool was a big, tough marine, a smart s.o.b. who would give it all to win," said one track veteran. "But the grey horse . . ." He paused. "He's a genius, that's all."
The Comeback. For seven months, while his hoof was healing, the Dancer frisked about the comfortable reaches of Sagamore Farm. Early this spring he was ready once more.
Belmont's Barn 20 is an equine Ritz-Carlton, decorated with bright splashes of Vanderbilt's cerise and white and run by a veteran drill sergeant of a foreman who has Vanderbilt's and Winfrey's mandate to buy whatever he needs to keep the race horses fit and happy. Stall 6 is the royal suite. The Dancer, afflicted with the typical thin skin of the grey, suffers from the heat and can't stand flies, so there are fans to keep the air moving through the stall and an automatic fly-spraying system for the entire barn.
When he went back into Stall 6 to resume his career, the Dancer was a noticeably different horse from the one of a year before. He had put on hardly any weight, but the 1,200 Ibs. had plainly hardened. The dark grey had begun to lighten around the flanks; the head was now more on the white side of grey than on the black (if he lives long enough, the Dancer will turn snow white). Standing, he had a massive, granite look—a sculptured masterpiece waiting for a pedestal.