REMEMBERING RUFFIAN : 10 Years Ago Today, the Filly Without Peer Met With Tragedy in a Match Race at Belmont

Alex Harthill couldn’t believe that it had been a decade ago. But it has indeed been 10 years since Ruffian, the strapping filly who always won and usually shattered records, broke down in the match race against Kentucky Derby winner Foolish Pleasure and had to be put to death.

The race took place 10 years ago today at Belmont Park, and about nine hours later--at 2:20 a.m. on July 7, 1975--Harthill and several other veterinarians could fight the thrashing Ruffian on the operating table no more.

The 3-year-old filly was given a huge, fatal injection of phenobarbital, and on the evening of July 7 she was buried near the base of the flagpole at Belmont, where she had run her only losing race the day before.

“We knew from the start that the injury was insurmountable, but we tried, anyway,” Harthill said the other day from his Louisville offices.

“Her right front leg was shattered into a hundred pieces. And by the time we got to where she was, there was nothing but a bleeding nub left. She was so competitive that she dragged the jockey (Jacinto Vasquez) another eighth of a mile, running the leg into the ground before he was able to pull her up.”

The beginning of the end for Ruffian came after she and Foolish Pleasure had run less than a half-mile of their $350,000, 1-mile race.

Had there not been the disaster, it would have been some race. Breaking from the chute, Ruffian reared slightly and ducked inside, enabling Foolish Pleasure to lead briefly out of the gate, but the filly regained her stride and was ahead of the colt by close to a half-length in a sizzling first quarter-mile of :22 1/5.

What happened in the next quarter-mile may have just happened, but there are two theories about what contributed to Ruffian’s misstep: the pigeons and the contact between the two horses.

“The pigeons might have had something to do with it,” said Frank Whiteley Jr., Ruffian’s trainer. “About four of them took off in front of her, and I saw her kind of hesitate a little bit, and then the next stride, she broke down. She was always an inquisitive filly, even when she was running in a race.”

The horses had to cross the main track in order to begin their run down the backstretch, a juncture where Ruffian bore out slightly and brushed or bumped Foolish Pleasure and jockey Braulio Baeza four or five times.

“Just as sure as I’m alive,” Harthill said, “I think the bumping was a factor in the filly hurting herself.”

Vasquez had been riding both horses, winning the Flamingo Stakes, the Wood Memorial and the Derby with Foolish Pleasure and sweeping New York’s three-race series for 3-year-old fillies with Ruffian. He chose to ride Ruffian, the 2-5 favorite, in the match race. Foolish Pleasure had finished second in both the Preakness and the Belmont Stakes, the other Triple Crown races.

“What happened to Ruffian was just one of those things that you can’t account for,” Vasquez said. “What happened to her happens to fast horses, horses with a lot of speed. Cheap horses don’t run hard, so they don’t break down as often in races.”

To collect the winner’s share of the purse--$225,000--Baeza rode Foolish Pleasure around the course, and under no pressure, the colt covered six furlongs in 1:08 3/5, the existing Belmont record, and he was clocked out in 1:35 2/5 for the mile and 2:02 4/5 at the wire.

LeRoy Jolley, the trainer of Foolish Pleasure, was criticized for his hard-bitten appraisal of Ruffian’s tragedy. “This game wasn’t cut out for anybody wearing short pants” is a quote that will follow Jolley forever. Though insensitive, Jolly’s post-race remark would have qualified for Ruffian’s epitaph:

“When horses run this hard, they throw all they have into it. If it kills them, it kills them.”

By running with Ruffian for almost a half-mile, Foolish Pleasure gave the filly an unaccustomed experience. In Ruffian’s 10 other races, in which her victory margins ranged from 2 to 15 lengths, no opponents of her own sex could stay with her. In 9 of the 10 starts, the near-black filly either broke or matched track or stakes records.

The only time she felt a jockey’s whip was during her 2-year-old season, in the Sorority Stakes at Monmouth Park in 1974. Hot N Nasty, winner of the Hollywood Lassie, moved at Ruffian in the stretch, but Vasquez hit her, and she drew off to win by 2 lengths.

Standing more than 16 hands (64 inches) and weighing 1,125 pounds (about 65 pounds more than the shorter Foolish Pleasure), Ruffian was used to more comfortable wins, such as the 13-length romp in the Spinaway in August of ’74 at Saratoga, where she broke the stakes record by three seconds.

She was probably ready for colts as a 2-year-old. The day after the Spinaway, 2-year-old colts were running in the split Hopeful Stakes and trainer Laz Barrera said: “If that filly was in the Hopeful, she would win by 20 lengths. If they ran the two divisions of the Hopeful as the first and eighth races, she would win them both.”

Ruffian didn’t make another start at 2, however, because of a hairline fracture in her right hind leg.

Stronger, more determined and somehow even better at 3, Ruffian frightened her trainer. “I was scared every time I sent her onto the track, in the morning or the afternoon,” Whiteley said. “She used so much of herself.”

In an attempt to at least repress some of that morning speed, the muscular Vasquez rode her for workouts as well as races.

“I didn’t think there was a horse out there that could beat her,” Vasquez said the other day. “She was a wonderful horse, always alert and never nervous or jumpy.”

Bred by her owners, Mr. and Mrs. Stuart S. Janney Jr. of Maryland, Ruffian was the result of a mating between Reviewer and Shenanigans.

Reviewer was a stakes winner whose brief career was frequently interrupted by leg fractures. Shenanigans, a daughter of Native Dancer, had a limited running career and, before Ruffian, had produced the good sprinter Icecapade.

Ruffian’s popularity was so great that several floral tributes have been sent to her grave site through the years. Although never seeing the filly run, a Long Island woman paid $54 for a wreath of red roses a few years ago. “Tears come whenever I see a picture of her,” the woman said.

Last year, Richard Rossano, a 36-year-old New York horseplayer, died unexpectedly. Rossano had turned 27 the day Ruffian was buried and said that when he died, he wanted his ashes scattered on the filly’s Belmont grave. Twenty of his friends and relatives honored that request. The late Richard Rossano was a longshot bettor, but he loved Ruffian, who was the favorite in all her races but the first one.

On a night early in 1976, Stuart Janney uneasily made his way to the microphone at New York’s Waldorf-Astoria Hotel to accept Ruffian’s Eclipse Award for the 3-year-old filly championship.

“It may seem strange,” Janney said in accepting the trophy, “but I would like to thank Lady Luck.”

The audience was quickly taken aback at that, but Janney immediately added:

“Yes, Lady Luck. For arranging the extraordinary combination of genes that were necessary to make this great horse.”