Chapter 1: The Best at What You Do CHAPTER 1 THE BEST AT WHAT YOU DO Bob Baffert was born in 1953 in Nogales, Arizona, a dirt-scratch town within spitting distance of the Mexican border. It was high desert country, four thousand feet above sea level.1 The family''s adobe house sat like a belly button in the middle of acres of cattle fields. There were no neighbors for miles around. Boyhood in an Arizona border town sixty years ago had the sepia-toned feel of a world already disappearing by the time Baffert was born into it. But in the 1950s and ''60s, it was all he and his six brothers and sisters knew. They had no television because the cattle kept knocking over the antenna in the field, and eventually the Bafferts said the hell with it. The only real entertainment in town was a drive-in movie theater next to a swamp.

Baffert''s mother would slather them all with oil to keep the mosquitos away while they watched, then roll her grease-smeared children, already asleep, into bed without baths. Bill Baffert, Bob''s father, was known by everyone who mattered as "the Chief." He had retired from the army and wanted to live on a ranch, because he loved horses and needed somewhere to keep them. When he first took his wife to see the house, it was locked and she had to peer in through the windows. Ellie Baffert, a schoolteacher born and raised in Nogales, saw what she thought were gorgeous hardwood floors, but which turned out to be linoleum that had rotted through and had to be ripped up. There was no electricity and for a while, the house was lit only by gas lanterns. The children--Bill Jr. and Bob, Penny and Nori, P.

A. and DeeDee, and, finally, the surprise, Gamble--shared rooms even as the Bafferts progressively, and one has to think with a certain sense of desperation, added new rooms to the house. It was a close-knit family. Baffert was a fastidious child, even by his own admission, a hangover from a stretch of time spent with a doting aunt who would wash his hands, dress him in a bow tie, and button his shirt to the top. He would come home from time spent with Aunt Ludie and correct his siblings'' grammar and table manners over supper, until the Chief finally snapped at his wife: "What''s the matter with your sister? She''s going to make a sissy out of the kid." That small addiction to neatness would prove problematic for a boy growing up in a ranching town. There were always animals around, mostly livestock that made up some of the family income. Baffert''s father eventually ran cattle, but started out with a chicken business that topped out at about five thousand chickens in individual cages.

2 Chickens are, by anyone''s measure, disgusting. There were 4-H lambs as well, which Baffert hated because they, like the chickens, stank. Occasionally the local ranch hands whom the Bafferts hired to collect and crate the eggs wouldn''t show up Sunday morning, the sweeter libations of a night out in Nogales having proved too tempting, and the Baffert children had to collect the eggs. Baffert and his siblings walked the stinking, dusty rows of the henhouses, with the chickens raising unholy hell overhead, flapping their wings and stirring up the dust and chicken shit. They would come out of the chicken houses covered in a fine grain of filth. Baffert didn''t care for that part of owning chickens, but he proved adept at the business side of the venture, selling and delivering eggs for his father in high school. He was a natural-born salesman, making his own deals and adjusting prices to move aging stock over his father''s head--experience he would later credit with training him for a lifetime of making good business deals. When he was about ten, Baffert was invited by a friend whose family owned a large ranch in Mexico to fly down on a private plane and spend three days on horseback pushing three thousand head of cattle on a hundred-mile drive across the border.

It was a boy''s dream, in an era when John Wayne was king: They slept on the ground under the stars and lived on canned tuna and tortillas. Baffert rode point--the lead position at the front of the herd--and learned horsemanship from the Mexican cowboys. They were excellent, and taught Baffert how to go after cattle, how to really ride . But there was a problem. Baffert did not want to perform one of humankind''s most important and private functions in the middle of the wilderness: he did not want to poop. In desperation, he asked the Mexican cowboys what they used to wipe. The cowboys soberly informed him that they used rocks. Ten-year-old Baffert, a forlorn Little Lord Fauntleroy left with no other options, held it in for three days.

Nogales was about as far from the center of the horse universe as it was possible to get in those days. In Kentucky and New York, the 1960s and ''70s were a halcyon age in Thoroughbred racing, an era of giants of the turf still remembered today. The year Baffert was eleven, one of the most important Thoroughbreds in the history of the breed won the Kentucky Derby--although no one knew it at the time. A small and fiery-tempered colt with a powerful engine, Northern Dancer had been underestimated from the start because of his size. He was foaled late in the season for a Thoroughbred and consequently stood a mere 14 hands as a yearling, when his owners held an annual auction to sell their stock. Horses are traditionally measured in "hands," or the breadth of a human hand, with a "hand" standardized to four inches in the modern era. Anything less than 14 and a half hands, measured from the shoulder, is considered a pony. Tiny little Northern Dancer failed to meet even the low reserve of $25,000 and, unwanted, remained to race for his breeders.

In a sign of how little they thought of his long-term value, his trainer initially wanted to geld (castrate) the horse. But the scrappy bay colt quickly showed himself. He blew away the field by eight lengths in his debut, then went on to trounce the best two-year-olds in Canada, often while carrying ten pounds more weight than his lesser rivals.3 His first jockey, Ron Turcotte--who would later pilot Secretariat--had to be taken off the horse because Northern Dancer routinely ran away with him during races. "God knows how good he really was," Turcotte would later say, "for he was never a completely sound horse most of the time I rode him, and I still could not slow him down."4 He won the Kentucky Derby in a blazing two minutes flat, a track record that stood for almost ten years until it was broken by Secretariat himself. As a breeding stallion, Northern Dancer proved even more undeniable: decades later, he is the dominant sire in the Thoroughbred breed. In the 1980s, his offspring routinely sold for more than $1 million at auction.

5 A privately negotiated breeding to the horse in the final years of his life--with no guarantee of a live foal--cost $1 million.6 His sons and daughters appear wheeled out in the pedigrees of thousands of racehorses in America and Europe today.I The 1960s and ''70s were a time of historic farms, owned by old East Coast money, farms steeped in gentility that bred regal, long-legged Thoroughbreds whose value was steadily increasing as the boom years of the 1980s ticked closer. Families like the Vanderbilts and their friends the Phippses bred blooded horses--Thoroughbreds--for the sport of it. The Thoroughbred was noble, refined, a work of art, his classic beauty immortalized in London''s National Gallery in the form of the temperamental and heroic Whistlejacket, towering life-sized in George Stubbs''s iconic 1762 oil rendering. This was the sport of kings. It belonged to artists like Federico Tesio, an Italian breeder who wrote an influential book called Breeding the Racehorse in the 1950s, and the particular class of person who had the time and leisure to read Tesio. In Nogales, the Chief had gotten his son Bobby hooked on a very different kind of horse.

Ironically for a breed now associated so thoroughly with the American West, the quarter horse has its origins in the East Coast dating back to the colonial era. As early as 1611, settlers had begun crossing their English stock with a faster, squattier Chickasaw pony believed to be the descendants of Spanish barbs brought to Florida by early Spanish colonists. They would come to be known as the "Celebrated American Quarter Running Horse," so named for their brilliant speed over a quarter of a mile. Later, an infusion of mustang blood would solidify the American quarter horse as the horse of the West. They carried cowboys and settlers alike across the harsh and unforgiving plains, and in Texas became the mount of choice for cutting and driving cattle. Their sturdy build and muscular haunches gave them not only searing speed over short distances but also the ability to cut and wheel, to change direction on a dime in pursuit of the Texas longhorn--with power and stamina left over to race up and down Main Street for a jug of corn whiskey on the weekends. This was the horse on which the West--at least for white Americans--was won.7 The Chief acquired a couple of quarter horses to race when Baffert was about ten or eleven.

Bob won a couple of races with Baffert''s Heller, a horse possessed of a terrible beauty for an eleven-year-old boy. Baffert was in awe of the horse, but he was afraid of him and the horse kne.