Their healthy first born son, Joseph Pons III, arrived that autumn.įrom Maryland I traced the tale to Paulson’s Brookside Farm near Lexington, Cigar’s home as a yearling, where he was raised by Ted Carr and his son, Mac. Ellen took me for a walk in the pasture where the mare and little Cigar stretched their legs, and recounted the day the feisty colt kicked her in the belly, she being five months pregnant at the time. My first stop after the book deal was launched had been at Country Life Farm in Maryland, where the foaling stall in which Solar Slew gave birth to her Palace Music colt had been memorialized by proprietors Josh and Ellen Pons. Cigar, when in action, did that to people. The next day Cigar won as promised to a roaring throng while carrying benchmark 130 pounds, as I stood with Suffolk track boss Lou Raffetto, tears of gratitude welling in his eyes. We’d been served our fishes and loaves, and now it was time to go out into the world and spread the good word. I sat among them, absorbing the unabashed affection for their four-legged idol, until assistant trainer Tim Jones emerged from the shed row to politely shoo us away. One year and six wins later, he returned to Suffolk accompanied by a police escort and local TV crews to be greeted by a crowd of adoring fans who waved ‘Cigar for President’ signs and gathered on the grass within sight of his stall. After winning in Dubai, Cigar was given a few weeks’ rest then taken to Boston for an encore in the Massachusetts Handicap at Suffolk Downs. Even now, at 73, his pilot’s rating was world class, which explained his apology for the rough touchdown. His prowess at the controls was legendary as the chief of a crew that set a world record for a westbound circumnavigation of the globe, just eight years before. The landing hardly bothered me, a journalist along for the luxurious ride, but Paulson was embarrassed. Like the one he flew from the West Coast to Chicago – and bounced the landing – the day before the Citation Challenge on July 13, 1996, at Arlington Park. Endlessly curious as to how things worked, he seemed determined to dissect the little dime-store appliance in an effort to make it better, louder – who knows? This was the man who built, and flew, Gulfstream executive jets. He shared a bed with two siblings, scrounged for scrap metal in the town dumps, and won a movie theatre lottery prize worth just enough to buy a one-way ticket to California, where he was promised a job that led, by some strange kismet, to the employ of Howard Hughes and the aircraft industry that would make him a rich man.Īs he spoke, Paulson tinkered with a cheap alarm clock. Paulson, a born mechanic, was recounting tales of a childhood spent in Clinton, Iowa, steeped in the poverty of Depression-era America. Which is getting off the track and into conventional story-telling, when I should be recalling the evening spent with Paulson in the cozy sitting room of his home behind the seventh green of the Del Mar Country Club, which he owned. As for Solar Slew, she retired a maiden after seven tries. Ridden by French legend Yves Saint-Martin, Palace Music was good enough to thwart Pebbles under in an 18-1 surprise in the 1984 Champion Stakes at Newmarket and then, while trained by Whittingham two years later, he nearly pulled off the Breeders’ Cup Mile at Santa Anita. ![]() ![]() I’d been writing about Paulson and his growing stable of horses since the aerospace entrepreneur jumped headlong into the business in the mid-1980s.Ĭigar was a product of Paulson’s partnership in Palace Music with Nelson Bunker Hunt and his purchase of Cigar’s dam, Solar Slew, for $510,000 as a two-year-old. We clinched the book deal with Allen Paulson, Cigar’s owner, at the 1996 Kentucky Derby, there in the box seat section of Churchill Downs. The idea for the book was posed by Ray Paulick, my editor at Blood-Horse magazine, not long after Cigar won his 14th straight race in that first Dubai World Cup on March 27, 1996.īlood-Horse Publications was a going concern at the time – they had published my biography of training icon Charlie Whittingham a few years earlier – and I had been locked into the Cigar story since the previous summer, when the prodigal son returned to California, the scene of his early frustrations, to dominate a stellar field in the Hollywood Gold Cup. ![]() So, rather than a chapter and verse recitation of Cigar’s biographical particulars, I’ve opted for a meandering account of writing that biography Cigar: America’s Horse, and recall 27 years later what it was like to travel in the wake of a generational equine supers tar. ![]() This would certify Cigar as one of my favorite racehorses, which conforms to the theme established by this series but also belabors the obvious. It was my privilege at the time to be writing Cigar’s biography.
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