A Perfect Union

The Fair Hill Training Center in Northeast Maryland was quiet, the sun trying to break through the clouds on a crisp October Monday. A bit after 9 a.m., at the barn of trainer Michael Matz, a colt emerged from his stall, just across the shed row from where the young Barbaro was housed in 2005.

At 16.3 hands (67 inches), the colt is tall for a 2-year-old. If he continues to grow, Union Rags will be about as big as horses get. With a long blaze that starts just above his eyes and going all the way to his mouth and three white stockings on his feet, he is impossible to miss. "He's a beautiful 2-year-old," says Peter Brette, Matz's assistant, top exercise rider and a former jockey. "He was from Day 1, even when he first came in he was like a 3-year-old. He did everything correct. Got a great mind on him. He's a very exciting horse to be around."

Brette was atop the colt as he joined a set of horses for the slow 7-minute walk up a short hill to the racetrack. The group jogged quietly around the oval before making a turn and starting a moderate 1-mile gallop back. Not wanting to take any chances, Brette kept Union Rags a safe distance behind the other horses; he didn't want him caught in traffic or getting too competitive.

Some horses just want to run in packs. Others quickly realize they are going to get fed no matter if they win or lose. The great ones want to pass the other horses, no matter what. With a colt like Union Rags, there is a time and place for him to do that.

The next time will be the $2 Million Breeders' Cup Juvenile at Churchill Downs on Nov. 5, when the unbeaten colt attempts to cement the 2-year-old championship - and establish himself as the next great horse from the Delaware Valley.

In 2003, North Americans bet a record $15.9 billion on horse racing. That number was already heading the wrong way in 2008 when the worldwide economy tanked. Last year, $12 billion was bet on horse racing in the United States, Canada and Puerto Rico. In 1988, the annual foal crop was 45,258. Last year, it was 27,800. There were 82,708 races run in 1989 and just 52,771 run in 2010.

Yet on May 7, a record 164,858 fans crammed into Churchill Downs on Kentucky Derby Day, looking over the railings of the $150,000-a-year suites and overflowing the massive infield. Players around the world bet a near-record $165.2 million on the card, $112 million on the Derby itself. The sport is susceptible to all the existing economic forces, but the Kentucky Derby is not. The game's most important race is more popular than it has ever been.

Derby winners have a special place in the history of the sport, but they do not excite the major owners in the game nearly as much as the possibility of a Derby winner. And the hottest prospect for the 2012 Derby has been residing at Fair Hill, not far from the Pennsylvania homes of his trainer, Matz, and his owner, Phyllis Wyeth, a woman who was born into a famous horse-racing family and married into an even more famous artistic one. If Union Rags wins the Breeders' Cup, he would go from a hot prospect to being the most desirable animal in racing: the clear Kentucky Derby favorite.

On a picture-perfect fall Sunday afternoon, with her horses grazing the vast fields below, Phyllis Wyeth sat and talked on the terrace of the Chadds Ford home she shares with her husband, Jamie Wyeth, whose paintings are on the third floor of the nearby Brandywine River Museum, along with those of his famous father, Andrew Wyeth, and his famous grandfather, N.C. Wyeth.

The house is just 5 miles from the museum, hidden away behind a 1.2-mile driveway, the property straddling the Delaware and Pennsylvania border. From the terrace of the house, you can see the meandering Brandywine Creek, which runs behind a building that houses some of Jamie's best work, and a set of train tracks that disappears into the woods. A freight train comes through three times a week. "We love it," says Phyllis. "We wave to them."

A political-science major in college, Phyllis worked on Sen. John. F. Kennedy's 1960 presidential campaign and then - rather than return to school - continued on at the White House after the election. During her second year in the White House, she was driving in the horse country of Middleburg, Va., when a car, trying to pass a truck, veered into her lane and hit her head on.

Her neck was broken. She spent 9 months in the hospital, had two major operations, and many more minor ones. "[JFK] was the first person I got a handwritten letter from, saying I'll get a promotion when I get back from the East Wing to the West Wing," she says. But she never did go back. On Nov. 22, 1963, she was in New York, "going to get braces and we were driving up Park Avenue for our appointment," when she found out Kennedy had been shot.

After her accident, she was able walk for decades. Then, about 20 years ago, things began to get much worse. She had five hand operations and a foot operation, "moving tendons around so I didn't have to wear a brace." Eventually, six rods were put in her back for stability. Today, she gets around in a motorized scooter.

Her great-grandfather purchased the house in 1903. Parts of it go back to 1680. She moved there in 1965, a few years after the accident, and a few years before she married Jamie. She knows the history of the house and the land. George Washington, she figures, was atop Point Lookout getting a good look at the terrain before the Battle of the Brandywine. Today, the house may as well be another museum. On one wall is a Jamie Wyeth painting of his wife, driving a horse carriage. Off in a corner is a portrait of JFK. There is even a photo of Andrew and Jamie Wyeth next to Michael Jackson. "He was here for lunch," Phyllis said. "Glove and all."

Another huge photo hangs in her bedroom window. It's of Union Rags. "I usually put it next to the TV," she says. She doesn't yell and scream when she watches her horse run, she says: "I just cry."

On Jan. 21, 2007, a 15-year-old mare owned by Wyeth, Tempo, gave birth to her seventh foal on Mark Reid's Walnut Green Farm in Chester County, a Pennsylvania-bred that would eventually be named Durante. Afterward, it was obvious that something was wrong with the mare. Tempo had developed a uterine hematoma that was the size of a large softball. If such a hematoma were to burst, a horse would be in danger of bleeding out. Tempo was sedated for several days and put on anti-inflammatories. They nearly lost her.

Typically, a mare is bred back a month after she foals (sometimes sooner if it is late in the breeding season) so she can produce another offspring 11 months later. Tempo was in no shape to be bred, however, so she had no foal in 2008. But on March 3, 2009, Tempo's eighth foal was born in Kentucky, a colt by the good sire Dixie Union. Later, they would name the colt Union Rags.

Tempo's first seven foals started 116 races, with 20 wins, 18 seconds and 17 thirds for total earnings of $609,032. Nice numbers, but nothing that suggested greatness in her family's future.

Wyeth was advised by her accountant to sell Union Rags for tax reasons. When horses are a business, the IRS looks at deductions as reasonable. If the IRS deems horses a hobby, deductions are more scrutinized. So, she needed to sell some to show she was running a business. Union Rags was sold at a Saratoga Yearling Sale for $145,000 in August 2010.

Almost immediately, Wyeth had seller's remorse. She could not get the colt out of her mind. Every day, she thought about him. "I had this dream and I said, 'I've got to get this horse back. Let me see who has him, maybe I can call them.' " she says.

Providentially, the colt was entered in a 2-year-old-in-training sale in Florida this winter. So Wyeth sent her adviser, Russell Jones, a onetime member of the Pennsylvania Racing Commission and former owner of Walnut Green Bloodstock Agency, to Florida with a simple instruction: buy the horse back. When Jones asked whether she wished to see the horse again before the bidding began, she said, "Just get him."

They knew it was going to cost a lot more than the previous sale. Wyeth was not deterred. Her bid got to $390,000, a number she and Jones had discussed as an endgame for them. Nobody else bid. She had her horse back.

"It makes you think this was supposed to happen," Jones says.

Union Rags broke his maiden on July 12 at Delaware Park in a 5-furlong race that his trainer did not expect him to win. Matz was on vacation in the Galapagos Islands, and it took him a while to get the message that Union Rags had won. But the trainer was so impressed with the effort that a month later, he sent Union Rags to Saratoga, where he blew away the field in the Grade II Saratoga Special, winning by 7 1/4 lengths.

He waited 7 weeks before sending Union Rags up to Belmont Park for the Grade I Champagne Stakes. In that race, the colt didn't just overwhelm the competition, winning by 5 1/4 lengths, but showed the poise only the best of horses possess. Union Rags had to stop and start several times during the race. But when he finally saw daylight, the race was over in a flash, his finishing kick the kind that makes fans, trainers and owners dream of even bigger moments down the road.

In just three races, Union Rags has won $498,800. In 116 races, Union Rags' seven siblings barely won $100,000 more. The half-brother Durante, the one whose birth nearly ended Tempo's life, was sold for $15,000. He raced three times without winning. His best finish was a third. In the other two races, the horse was beaten by nearly 70 lengths.

How do you explain it? You don't. It's horse racing, a game of minor miracles and crushing heartbreak where winning and losing are determined on long, narrow legs supporting a 1,000-pound animal running at 35 miles per hour.

Phyllis Wyeth decided Union Rags was the one she wanted back because this colt would be the last foal for Tempo, a mare that traced back two generations in her family's Hickory Tree Stable to Glad Rags II.

Wyeth's parents, James and Alice Mills, owned some top horses, including Devil's Bag, a horse that would be king. In 1983, Devil's Bag won all five of his 2-year-old races, including the Champagne, by a combined 27 lengths. The colt was not just going to win the 1984 Derby; he was going to win the Triple Crown.

But then, in the lead up to the Derby, Devil's Bag was badly beaten in the Flamingo Stakes before winning two other minor races. Just before the Derby itself, trainer Woody Stephens declared Devil's Bag out of the race. The colt never ran again. Stephens' "other" horse, Swale, won the Derby that year.

Now - 28 years after Devil's Bag's perfect 2-year-old season - the Mills' daughter owns the colt that other horse owners want to fulfill their Derby dreams, her Devil's Bag. Economically, it might make sense to sell or make a stallion deal now, before history has the possibility of repeating itself. "They're having a hard time with me because I'm not looking at the business opportunity," Wyeth says. "I'm still looking at the emotional side of things. I won't listen to all my good business people . . . My husband's screaming at me, saying I shouldn't be foolish, that I should listen. I told him, 'You know you're second on this deal. You don't have any part of this horse.' "

If there is a stud deal down the road, Wyeth knows the drill. "I don't want to have them tell me what I can do with my horse," Wyeth says.

All that is for later anyway. She is still getting accustomed to being the owner of the best 2-year-old in America. "I have no idea of this type of thing," she says. "I kept thinking after the Champagne, 'This can't be true.' " Union Rags has become so newsworthy that when you Google "Wyeth" these days, she laughs, her name comes up before Jamie's.

Comparisons with Barbaro are inevitable, given the trainer then and now. Barbaro was unbeaten when he won the 2006 Derby. Anybody who watched the colt cruise past the finish line and gallop out to the first turn 20 lengths in front of the field - just running for the sheer joy of it - had to believe this was the horse that was going to win the first Triple Crown since Affirmed in 1978.

Then came the Preakness. Barbaro's right rear leg came apart in the first few hundred yards of the race. The odds were always against saving him, but they came close. Then in January 2007, it went really bad really fast. "Everybody was trying to save him," Matz says, sitting in his second-floor office, surrounded by pictures and memorabilia of Barbaro, tears welling in his eyes. "Everybody did the best they could do."

Matz was in Florida with his stable at the time." [Owner] Gretchen [Jackson] called me one morning and said, 'We've decided to stop with Barbaro, we'll wait if you want to come up and see him,' " Matz recalls. "I just said, 'I don't want him to suffer for me more and [I'll] try to remember him the way he was.' "

On Jan. 29, 2007, Barbaro was put to sleep. "You always think about him," Matz says. "You see pictures of him galloping. It always comes back into your head. And it should. He was a great horse."

Horse racing is a sport of extremes, and Barbaro was the ultimate example of that. The fear of injury is constant. The run-up to the Derby is intense. The 5-week grind of the Triple Crown is equal parts euphoric and scary. There was Smarty Jones on the big screen at Citizens Bank Park, winning the Derby. There was Smarty losing the Belmont and coming out of the race with leg issues that would never allow him to train again. Afleet Alex won the Belmont Stakes with total ease, but was later injured and never raced again. That is the backdrop with Union Rags. You hope. You also know.

Matz dreams of the Derby, but . . . "We always think about that day [in 2006] and we always look for the next one," he says. "That horse put up a pretty high standard on things. So far, this horse is undefeated and, hopefully, we can keep it that way."

Horses change from race to race. They really change from years 2 to 3, almost like teenagers who grow up overnight. Some never get it. The great ones do. "The standard is quite high," Matz says. "We always use [Barbaro] as the standard to say how good the horses are. They're just hard to find that way. We'll just never know how good that horse really was."

Perhaps we will get to find out with Union Rags. "Barbaro wanted to win; this horse wants to win," Matz says. "Going to and from the track, Barbaro was all business. This horse is a bit easier to handle. When Barbaro was ready to go, he was ready to go. This horse has more table manners."

Which is not to say he doesn't have a personality. When Union Rags walked out of the barn on his way to the track that October morning at Fair Hill, he stopped and posed for a photographer. "Obviously, he knew there was a camera," Brette says. "Haven't seen that before."

We have seen really good horses around here before. Each spring from 2004 to 2006, the Delaware Valley was the center of the horse-racing universe. On Nov. 5 and beyond, we will all get a sense of how good Union Rags is and might become. Whatever happens at the Breeders' Cup and in the early months of 2012, the goal never changes. When you have a colt with this kind of promise, it is always about that race in Louisville on the first Saturday of May.