Life After the Fast Life : Doug Peterson, a Former Trainer of Seattle Slew, Is Attempting to Rebuild His Career

Doug Peterson has gone through life usually being ahead of his time.

At 11, Peterson was working at Centennial Race Track near Denver, carrying hay and watering horses.

At 14, Peterson left Colorado and his parents, who ran a motel near Centennial, to begin a life as a race-tracker.

When he was 18, Peterson already had a trainer’s license and won the Land of Enchantment Futurity, a race worth almost $100,000, at La Mesa Park in New Mexico. Peterson saddled Texas Sky, a 2-year-old filly who beat the colts and earned $51,000.

When he was 20, Peterson got married. A year later, he was divorced.

At 26, Peterson was named the trainer of Seattle Slew, who in the months before had swept the 1977 Triple Crown.

Peterson got a head start in one other area. He started drinking when he was a teen-ager. Later, he began using drugs.

By 1984, Peterson says, he was out of racing, his drinking and drug habits having gone out of control. Peterson says he was gone from the game for 2 1/2 years, unable to stay sober, but the American Racing Manual indicates that his tailspin might have been even longer. From 1981 through 1986, the Manual doesn’t include Peterson, and its trainer section lists any conditioner whose horses earned a minimum of $30,000 a year.

It is immaterial, really, how long Peterson stayed in the bottle and on drugs. The point is, it was long enough to wreck one career. And now, Peterson is trying to start another one. He has a five-horse stable at Del Mar.

It would be unfair to say that there are no Seattle Slews in his barn, because there are no Seattle Slews--not even a Slew in the rough--anywhere at Del Mar. What Peterson has is what owner Penny Chenery Tweedy said she had after her Secretariat was retired--”just horses.” The best horse Peterson has is a winless 3-year-old filly who was claimed for $40,000.

Peterson is not bitter. On the contrary, he is thankful just to have a second chance.

“I know I’ve got a big black mark next to my name,” he said here the other day. “I’ve burned a lot of bridges. There are a lot of people that I have to make amends to.”

Ten years ago, when he distinguished himself with an encore year to Seattle Slew’s Triple Crown season, Peterson looked cover-boy clean. At 6 feet 4 inches and 220 pounds, with a smile toothier than Wayne Lukas’, he was a striking figure.

He is still a young man, only 36, but now he is perhaps 30 pounds heavier. He is slump-shouldered, bullfrog-puffy at the jowls, and he wears his hair short instead of long. His eyes sparkle again, but he has lost all of his boyishness.

He says he has been sober for 21 months, the result of a recovery home in Pasadena and the Winners’ Foundation, a group that deals with alcohol and drug problems on the backstretch. In the afternoons, Peterson dresses in three-piece suits that appear too tight. He is neat, but seems overdressed and out of place at the only major track in Southern California where a necktie isn’t required in the turf club.

Peterson’s memory for dates is uncanny. He says that Seattle Slew’s owners--Mickey and Karen Taylor, Jim and Sally Hill--hired him to replace Billy Turner on Dec. 12, 1977. You could look it up, it was Dec. 12, 1977.

Peterson also remembers the day he was let go--Sept. 19, 1980. He says his drinking was not a factor. “They were running out of stock,” he says. “They were down to seven or eight horses.”

Peterson was in California, at Santa Anita, with a division of the Taylor-Hill horses by 1979. The American Racing Manual shows that he won 13 races in 1980, the horses earning $291,000. The next year--the last year the Manual lists Peterson--he won 3 races and $62,000. In 1978, Seattle Slew alone won 5 races and earned $473,000 while in Peterson’s hands.

Peterson arrived in New York in 1972, to work as an assistant trainer for Bob Dunham, a lifelong horseman who had grown up with thoroughbreds in Kentucky. Dunham’s veterinarian was Jim Hill, who was three years away from going to a Kentucky auction as Mickey Taylor’s adviser.

Hill told Taylor that there was a colt in the sale who would be worth a bid of $20,000, tops. In a minute and a half, there were 19 staccato bids, and Hill and Taylor became the owners of the horse for only $17,500. They named him Seattle Slew--the first half because the Taylors had grown up in the Seattle area, the second name because of Jim Hill’s familiarity with the backwaters of his native Florida.

In early December, 1977, despite Seattle Slew’s Triple Crown sweep, and his certain election as horse of the year, the Hills and the Taylors had their fill of trainer Billy Turner, and he of them. A solid horseman, Turner was a hard-drinking, garrulous ex-steeplechase jockey whose life style and financial disarray had superseded his skills in developing Seattle Slew into a champion.

Turner crossed his Rubicon in Los Angeles in late June, less than a month after Seattle Slew, then undefeated in nine starts, had completed a debilitating Triple Crown campaign that had begun with prep races in Florida in March.

The Taylors said there was no resistance from their trainer, but Turner said that he didn’t want to run Seattle Slew in the Swaps Stakes at Hollywood Park, which had raised the purse as an inducement.

At 1-5, Seattle Slew finished fourth, beaten by 16 lengths by J.O. Tobin. It was only July, but it was Seattle Slew’s last race of the year, and in December Doug Peterson was visited by Jim Hill, who offered him the chance to train Seattle Slew as a 4-year-old. On a Monday, Hill told Peterson that he had until Thursday to make up his mind. Four days to decide.

“Did it take more like four seconds?” Peterson is asked.

“Sure, there was only one answer,” Peterson says. “But there was a lot of downside, too. The horse was sick at the time, and after winning the Triple Crown, what more could be accomplished?”

Plenty, as it turned out, but not without some potholes along the way. But Jim Hill thought that Peterson would be a capable trainer, despite his youth and inexperience in the big leagues.

“Doug was a tireless worker,” Hill said from Saratoga Springs, N.Y. “He paid attention to detail and he had a real love for the animal. When he was on his game, he was the best there was. When he had his mind on other things, he was not so good. Which I guess is what everything in life is like, isn’t it?”

In February 1978, Seattle Slew had been syndicated for breeding for $12 million, so when he recovered from a life-threatening virus in Florida, there were thoughts of retiring him.

“On Mother’s Day, we ran him,” Peterson said. “It was in the mud, but it was an allowance race and there was no pressure on him.”

Running for the first time in more than 10 months, Seattle Slew won that Aqueduct race by 8 lengths.

A minor leg injury kept Seattle Slew out of the Metropolitan Mile, so it was on to Saratoga. “It poured the entire time we were up there,” Peterson said, but on Aug. 12 Seattle Slew won another allowance race on an off track. He ran seven furlongs in 1:21 3/5, but Peterson still didn’t think he had the horse completely fit.

There was no Breeders’ Cup then, with the ultimate showdowns for handicap horses being the Marlboro Cup, the Woodward and the Jockey Club Gold Cup, three races run in a month’s time at Belmont Park.

Needing a prep for the Marlboro, Peterson ran Seattle Slew in the Paterson Handicap at the Meadowlands in early September. Slew lost the race, and his jockey, Jean Cruguet, the only rider who had ever ridden him. The spoiler was Dr. Patches, a son of Dr. Fager and a champion sprinter, who beat Seattle Slew by a neck with a 14-pound weight advantage.

Dr. Patches was ridden by Angel Cordero, and Peterson says that Cordero spent the hours before the race intimidating Cruguet in the jockeys’ room.

“If Cruguet got up to get a soda, Cordero would follow him,” Peterson said. “By the time Cruguet got to the paddock before the race, he was in tears. Cordero had destroyed his confidence. Cruguet told me that he didn’t want to ride the horse, and for a few minutes we gave it some thought about getting another rider.”

That was the last time Cruguet rode Seattle Slew. And who replaced him for his final four races but the devilish Cordero. Together they won the Marlboro, giving four pounds to Affirmed and Steve Cauthen and beating them by three lengths in the first meeting of Triple Crown champions.

Before the Marlboro, Peterson was reminded about that downside to training such a famous horse. Peterson says that Mickey Taylor told him not to run Slew unless he could win, because a loss to Affirmed would considerably diminish the colt’s stud value.

Affirmed skipped the Woodward, two weeks later, to wait for the Jockey Club. Seattle Slew won by four lengths, running 1 miles in 2:00 to tie Kelso’s 17-year-old stakes record.

In the 1 1/2-mile Jockey Club Gold Cup, Seattle Slew went off at 3-5 and Affirmed was 11-10 in a six-horse field.

It was a bizarre race. Cordero’s foot slipped out of Seattle Slew’s stirrup shortly after the start, but the jockey recovered. Craig Perret, riding Affirmed’s stablemate, Life’s Hope, was screaming like a banshee, hoping to stir up Seattle Slew. But Affirmed was between Life’s Hope and Slew, and Cauthen yelled over to Perret to shut up--just about the time Affirmed’s saddle slipped.

With Affirmed out of the race, Seattle Slew still had to contend with Exceller, the versatile West Coast horse who trailed early by 22 lengths.

At the quarter pole, with Cordero napping, Exceller and Bill Shoemaker passed them on the inside. Seattle Slew wasn’t finished, but even though he came back on and passed Exceller a stride past the finish line, the margin when it counted was Exceller’s nose at the wire. Slew had suffered the third and final defeat of his career.

“Angel told me after that race that he had gotten us beat,” Peterson said. “He didn’t hear Shoemaker coming. Angel rode the horse like a bug boy (apprentice). Slew got beat, but that was the greatest race of his life.”

A few years later, Doug Peterson was forgotten. Last fall, someone who looked like Peterson--sort of a bloated version--was spotted near the turf-club escalator at Santa Anita.

“Yes, that’s him,” confirmed a steward, Pete Pedersen. “I’ve heard that he was an entry clerk someplace.”

An entry clerk is an entry position in a track’s racing office. Peterson worked that job last year at the Orange County Fair at Los Alamitos, then worked as an assistant starter, helping to load horses into the gate, during the races at night.

During the interview here, his fiancee, Tracy Elias, sat next to Peterson on a bench. They met in church and plan to be married in October.

“What I’ve had is a disease,” Doug Peterson said. “But I won 2 races at Santa Anita this year, and of the 12 horses I started at Hollywood Park, 9 of them earned (purse) checks. God blessed me with a talent for working with horses. I’ll always have that.”