Racing Loses Its Crown Jewel

Seattle Slew, a crooked-legged colt who was rejected by one sales company as a yearling before being sold cheaply by another, died Tuesday at a Kentucky farm, 25 years to the day of his Kentucky Derby victory and in the silver-anniversary year of his Triple Crown sweep.

Seattle Slew, who was 28, was the last surviving Triple Crown champion and leaves racing for the first time without a living Triple Crown winner. Sweeping the Derby, the Preakness and the Belmont Stakes in 1977, Seattle Slew was the 10th Triple Crown champion and the first and only horse to emerge from the series with an undefeated overall record. Affirmed, who in 1978 became the 11th and last horse to win all three races, died last year.

Overcome by arthritis and neurological problems, Seattle Slew had undergone two operations since 2000, the most recent on his neck in March. He had been removed from stud duty in February and transferred from Three Chimneys Farm near Midway, Ky., to the quieter Hill ‘n’ Dale Farm near Lexington, Ky., where he died in his sleep at 9 a.m.

With the colt were Mickey and Karen Taylor, who bought him at auction for a paltry $17,500, raced him in a partnership and managed his breeding career; two grooms, one of them Tom Wade, who had moved from farm to farm caring for the horse for the last 20 years, and John Sikura, owner of Hill ‘n’ Dale. Seattle Slew will be buried at the farm.

“He died peacefully--he had just had enough,” Sikura said. “He tried as hard as he could, but he just could not overcome. Everybody got to say their last goodbyes. It was about as noble and sad an experience as you could imagine.”

Almost to the end, at an age when many stallions would have been turned out to pasture, Seattle Slew was being mated with mares who will produce foals who will further enhance his world-wide reputation as a sire. Of his more than 900 foals, 102 have been stakes winners, and his entire get has earned more than $75 million. His progeny include A.P. Indy, the 1992 horse of the year; Swale, the 1984 Kentucky Derby winner; and the undefeated filly Landaluce. Seattle Slew’s stud fee, a record $800,000 in 1985, was $300,000 at the time of his death.

“He was the most complete thoroughbred the industry has ever seen,” Mickey Taylor said. “He just kept raising the bar with every record he broke.”

On the track, Seattle Slew lost three races in the year and a half he raced after the Triple Crown. He finished with 14 wins and two seconds in 17 starts and earned $1.2 million. He won Eclipse Awards all three years he raced, among them horse-of-the-year honors in 1977.

Seattle Slew suffered his first loss, after nine straight victories, when he ran fourth in the Swaps Stakes at Hollywood Park in July 1977. The race, won by J.O. Tobin, was run less than a month after the colt had marched through the demanding, five-week Triple Crown. Before the race, there was disagreement in Seattle Slew’s camp about whether too much racing was being loaded onto the broad shoulders of the near-black colt.

Seattle Slew took off the rest of 1977, underwent a training change from Billy Turner to Doug Peterson at the end of the year, and while in Florida nearly died in January 1978 from a blood disease. Recovering, he returned to the win column in May and finished the year with three wins in his last four starts, two of them major victories in New York.

The adage that nothing sours relationships faster than a good horse came true for the “Slew Crew,” a diverse collection of people brought together by a spectacular horse:

* The Taylors were high-school sweethearts, Karen a former airline hostess and Mickey a fourth-generation logger from Washington state who was relatively new to the horse business.

* Jim Hill, a New York veterinarian and an experienced horseman whose partnership in Seattle Slew included his wife Sally, was the son of a cattle rancher.

* Turner, who trained Seattle Slew for his first 10 races, was a hard-drinking, wisecracking former steeplechase jockey who spent many of his idle hours at Esposito’s, a popular bar for racetrackers across the street from Belmont Park.

* Jean Cruguet, who rode Seattle Slew to his Triple Crown victories, was a transplanted Frenchman whose career had all but stalled in the U.S.

The photogenic Karen Taylor and Sally Hill dressed in matching gold-and-black ensembles--the same colors that Cruguet wore atop Seattle Slew--and became as well known as their horse. But before the ride was over, Turner had been fired, Cruguet was replaced by Angel Cordero as Seattle Slew’s jockey, Turner sued the owners over a breeding right and the Hills won a $4.4-million judgment against the Taylors after charges of stable mismanagement. When Three Chimneys Farm threw a 20th-anniversary Triple Crown party in Kentucky for a still-robust Seattle Slew in 1997, only the Taylors of the original Slew Crew were there.

None of the infighting, however, could detract from Seattle Slew’s brilliance.

Mickey Taylor and Jim Hill were new acquaintances in 1975 when they bought the colt, a son of first-year sire Bold Reasoning and My Charmer, a Poker mare. The bloodlines of both parents are dotted with important horses, and they both go back to Nasrullah, an English stallion who became one of the outstanding sires in this country.

Still, the Keeneland Select Sale, a July auction for the country’s most sought-after yearlings, would not accept Seattle Slew. The colt was by an unproven sire, had clumsy ways and his right foot angled out, giving that leg a turned-out look from the knee down. Slew’s owners always insisted that his name wasn’t derived from the horse’s being slew-footed; he reportedly was named after the city near the Taylors’ home, and from the marshy sloughs of Florida, where Jim Hill grew up.

Seattle Slew’s breeder, Ben Castleman of Covington, Ky., finally was able to consign the then-unnamed colt to the Fasig-Tipton sale in Lexington. If the bidding on the horse had not reached $15,000, Castleman was prepared to buy him back. Jim Hill, before flying to New York for a horse surgery, had raved to the Taylors about the colt.

“He’s a runner, or my name isn’t Jim Hill,” he said. “He might not be a champion, but he’ll certainly be a runner. I like everything about him. The muscle, the angles of the shoulders, and his hips and pastern are all perfect. He has the balance of an athlete.”

With his wife ramming her elbow into his ribs to make sure he continued bidding, Mickey Taylor zeroed in on Hip No. 128, as the colt was identified at the sale. The bidding started at $3,000 and went up in small increments. Eighteen bids and 90 seconds later, the horse belonged to the Taylors and their partners. Informed of the purchase, Jim Hill turned to his wife and said, “I think we bought a champion.”

David Hofmans in California might have become Seattle Slew’s trainer, but he received five other young horses from the Taylors, and the other new purchases, including Slew, were sent to Turner in New York.

Seattle Slew didn’t start until late September of 1976, but he won all three of his 2-year-old races, including a 93/4-length victory in the Champagne Stakes. Early the next year, he won two races in Florida, then scored again in the Wood Memorial at Aqueduct to take him into the Kentucky Derby.

On May 7, 1977, he might have been the 1-2 favorite at Churchill Downs, but before the race Seattle Slew was a mess. He broke out in a sweat on the long trip from the barn to the paddock, and was no better by the time the 15-horse field reached the track.

What is more, Seattle Slew broke slowly, almost unseating Cruguet. Compensating, Cruguet’s colt quickly bulled his way into contention, lurked behind the leader, For The Moment, until the quarter pole, then pulled away and won by 13/4 lengths.

Two weeks later, at Pimlico, Seattle Slew won a less-adventurous Preakness by 11/2 lengths. The Belmont Stakes was three weeks away, but already John Esposito, Billy Turner’s favorite barkeep, was saying, “Slew will leave ‘em like a freight train leaving hobos.”

Not even a muddy track could prove Esposito wrong. Seattle Slew won the Belmont by four lengths and Cruguet, starting what’s become a custom, waved his whip at the crowd just past the finish line and almost fell off.

Eight years before, Majestic Prince had won the Derby and Preakness, but that colt had cost his owner $250,000. Seattle Slew had cost less than a tenth of that, and his price was about $36,000 less than the cost of the average horse at the Keeneland sale that had turned him down.

“Seattle Slew was one in a million,” John Sikura of Hill ‘n’ Dale Farm said Tuesday. “He showed us that anything’s possible in a game of impossibilities.”

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Seattle Slew Racing Record

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*--* Seattle Slew: 1974-2002 BY THE NUMBERS 11 Horses who have won the Triple Crown 0 Living horses who have won the Triple Crown, last won by Affirmed in 1978 $17,500 Price Mickey Taylor and partner Jim Hill paid for the horse as a yearling $1,208,726 Career earnings, off 14 victories in 17 starts 102 Stakes winners produced as a sire in 22 years $75 million Career earnings of offspring

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