Whirlaway

Whirlaway (USA) 1938 Chestnut Colt   Blenheim II (GB) x Dustwhirl (USA), by Sweep (USA)

Whirlaway may not have been the best of the eleven winners of the American Triple Crown, but he was surely the one who represented the highest pinnacle of the trainer’s art. A certifiable nut case, his chances of becoming a top racehorse would have been nil in the hands of all but the very best of trainers: Fortunately for him, he had the very best of trainers: the famous Jones boys of Calumet Farm.

On pedigree, Whirlaway was certainly bred to be a good one. His sire, *Blenheim II, won the 1930 Derby Stakes and had sired the 1936 Derby winner *Mahmoud prior to his importation to the United States. (*Mahmoud would follow his sire to America a few years later.) His dam, Dustwhirl, never raced, but she had already produced the good colt Reaping Reward, who won the 1937 Latonia Derby and ran third behind War Admiral in the Kentucky Derby. Dustwhirl’s sire, Sweep, was an important broodmare sire and the only horse to become the maternal grandsire of two American Triple Crown winners, as his daughter Brushup was the dam of War Admiral.

Whirlaway’s pedigree contained a flaw that could have been fatal, however. As good a sire as *Blenheim II was, he rapidly developed a reputation in his adopted country for siring horses with high-strung dispositions and mental problems. Jimmy Jones, whose father Ben Jones handled most of Whirlaway’s training, felt that *Blenheim II’s proclivity for siring mentally unsound horses was probably the reason that the horse’s owner, the Aga Khan, had sold the stallion to America after standing him in France for six seasons.

“He [*Blenheim II] got so many crazy colts,” the younger Jones said. “Those English trainers didn’t want to fool with them.”

Whatever problems *Blenheim II was passing on, Whirlaway inherited them in full measure. Not only was he highly strung – “as nervous as a long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs,” to quote Ben Jones – but he wasn’t very bright; in fact, the senior Jones called Whirlaway “the dumbest horse I ever trained.”

Whirlaway demonstrated his eccentricities in his very first start. Entered in a maiden race at the old Lincoln Fields track near Chicago, the colt bolted to the extreme outside right from the start and raced along the outer rail all the way. The fact that he still won after giving away so much ground was remarkable, but the Joneses hardly needed to be rocket scientists for this performance to tell them that getting the best from this horse would be a difficult task.

After winning two of his first three starts, Whirlaway moved up to stakes company. He ran fourth in the Hyde Park Stakes, third in the Arlington Futurity, and second in the United States Hotel Stakes, in each case closing strongly from well off the pace. Then, in the Saratoga Special, he reverted to the behavior he had shown in his very first start and went extremely wide, so wide he actually bounced off the outside rail – and won.

Following that effort, Whirlaway ran second to New World in the Grand Union Hotel Stakes while conceding the winner five pounds. Then, in the rich Hopeful Stakes, Whirlaway turned in one of his best efforts of the season to beat the United States Hotel Stakes winner, Attention, by a length. The race showcased not only Whirlaway’s talent but his courage, for he suffered an eye injury sometime during the running and was on the sidelines for nearly a month afterwards.

The Calumet colt returned in the Futurity Stakes and caught a buzzsaw in the form of the lightly raced Our Boots, who won by nearly two lengths over King Cole with Whirlaway a fast closing third. In the longer Breeders’ Futurity at Keeneland, Whirlaway turned the tables nicely on Our Boots, but in his next race, the Pimlico Futurity, Whirlaway threw away his chances by bearing out and finished third behind Bold Irishman and Our Boots. Whirlaway wrapped up his season by winning the Walden Stakes over Magnificent, himself winner of the Endurance Handicap, and shared the juvenile championship with Our Boots. He also led the Experimental Free Handicap and was the top earner among the juveniles of 1940 with $77,275 to his credit.

Although Whirlaway was clearly a top prospect for the major three-year-old races of 1941, his erratic racing style was a major headache for Ben Jones, who assigned himself as the colt’s personal tutor while Jimmy Jones handled the rest of the Calumet string. Blinkers, which Whirlaway started wearing midway through his juvenile season, had little effect. Keeping the colt to a strict routine and giving him lots of hand walking and grazing time seemed to calm Whirlaway’s nerves but did nothing for his bad habits on the track.

Jones finally concluded that Whirlaway’s dim intellect was his major problem: if the colt was forced away from the inside rail and out to the middle of the track, he could literally get lost out there. In that context, Whirlaway’s habit of bearing out all the way to the outer fence made perfectly good sense; once the colt found the outside rail, he had something to orient himself by, and there were no other horses around to force him back into the uncharted territory of mid-track again.

As a one-run horse with no extra burst of speed to call on, Whirlaway faced another problem: if his run was stopped or interrupted in any way, he would find it difficult if not impossible to regroup and get in gear again. Thus, Jones decided to leave the colt’s tail uncut, reasoning that other horses would be less likely to run up on Whirlaway’s heels and interfere with him if they had a long, whipping mass of horsehair waving at them. Whirlaway’s long tail became his personal signature, earning him the nicknames of “Mr. Longtail” and “The Flying Tail.”

 Whirlaway resumed training at Hialeah in early 1941 and made his three-year-old debut in a six-furlong allowance race, which he won. He followed up with a third in a similar event ten days later. At this point, Ben Jones felt that Whirlaway was not really ready to step up in class and needed more rest, but owner William Wright threatened to interfere. He had many friends in the Miami area and wanted to show Whirlaway off a bit by running him in Hialeah’s main event for three-year-olds, the Flamingo Stakes.

Jones knew that Whirlaway was probably capable of winning the Flamingo even if not one hundred percent, given the undistinguished nature of the likely field. But he did not want to jeopardize Whirlaway’s Kentucky Derby campaign by running the colt too hard, too soon. He also knew that Wright was not accustomed to being told “no” by an employee. So he employed a stratagem to keep Whirlaway out of the Flamingo. Instead of simply telling Wright that he would not run the horse, he applied a light blister to one of Whirlaway’s legs and then moaned up and down the shedrow about the colt’s lameness. Wright, seeing the colt done up in bandages, assumed the tale was true and quit pressuring Jones to run the horse.

Whirlaway ended up getting nearly five weeks’ rest before coming back to the races with a third-place finish in an allowance race at Tropical Park. He seemed dull in his return race, so Jones decided to try to sharpen the colt up a bit by putting him into a five and one-half furlong sprint a few days later. That brought Wright boiling back to the stable when he spotted the colt’s name among the race entries in the Miami Herald. He collared Ben Jones and demanded that Whirlaway be withdrawn: the colt was no sprinter, he said, and didn’t need to be in the race. Jones, infuriated by the interference, roared right back that he was the trainer and knew what he was doing. Whirlaway ran and won, getting up in the last stride, and Wright cooled off as he accepted congratulations from his friends and acquaintances. Later, he apologized to Jones and promised that there would be no further interference in Jones’ training of the Calumet horses – a promise Wright kept for the rest of Whirlaway's career.

Jones probably wished the problem of Whirlaway’s erratic behavior on the racetrack could be solved as easily as the problem of owner interference. Shipped up to Keeneland, the colt won an allowance race on April 11 with no problems but reverted to his bad habits in the Blue Grass Stakes, so badly that he lost by six lengths after looking a sure winner at the top of the stretch. And he did it again in the Derby Trial just five days before the Kentucky Derby, though he regrouped well enough to be beaten only three-quarters of a length by Blue Pair.

Jones felt a jockey change was in order. Although Wendell Eads, the Calumet contract jockey, had ridden Whirlaway with success, he clearly could not keep Whirlaway running straight and may have been a bit afraid of the colt as well. But Eddie Arcaro, the nation’s leading jockey, was available. He was under contract to Greentree Stable, but Greentree did not have a colt in the 1941 Kentucky Derby and Jones was on friendly terms with Greentree’s trainer, John Gaver.

Arcaro was not at all sure that he wanted any part of Whirlaway; he thought the colt was more than a little crazy. Still, at Gaver’s urging, he agreed to take the mount. He took his “get-acquainted” ride on Whirlaway the day before the Derby – a half-mile breeze with an unexpected twist. Mounted on a fat stable pony, Ben Jones planted himself and his mount about ten or twelve feet off the inside rail and told Arcaro to ride Whirlaway through the resulting hole. That set Arcaro wondering about Jones’ sanity, but as he later recounted in his autobiography, “I figured if the old man was game enough to stand there, I was game enough to run him down.” Whirlaway shot through the hole without any trouble.

That ride built Arcaro’s confidence in Whirlaway, which was doubtless Jones’ intention. It also taught Arcaro how to handle Whirlaway: take a long hold on him and freeze with it. “I might look like a coachman,” Arcaro said later, “but it was the only way to handle him.”

Jones also made an equipment change on Whirlaway, removing most of the cup from the left side of the colt’s blinkers so that the colt had unobstructed vision to the left; he hoped that this would reduce Whirlaway’s tendency to bear out. Although Derby legend has it that Jones made the change right in the Derby saddling paddock with the aid of a pocket knife, other accounts indicate that Jones may actually have made the change several days in advance. What is certain is that the Kentucky Derby marked the first race in which Whirlaway would wear the famous one-eyed blinker which, along with the long tail, would become a “Whirly” trademark.

Whirlaway’s charisma may perhaps be measured by the fact that he was the Derby favorite in spite of the fact that both the colts that had so recently beaten him were in the Derby field; in fact, Our Boots had beaten him in four of five lifetime meetings up to that time. As it turned out, Our Boots was never in contention, while Blue Pair faded after prompting the early pace. Whirlaway did just the opposite. Sixth at the halfway point of the race, the colt unleashed a devastating finishing kick at the head of the stretch and won by eight lengths over Staretor, with Market Wise – later a champion in the handicap ranks – third. Whirlaway’s final quarter went in :23-4/5, one of the best finishing runs in Derby history, and his final time of 2:01-2/5 broke the existing track and stakes record of 2:01-4/5 that had been set by Twenty Grand in 1931.

In fact, Whirlaway’s finish in the Derby was so strong that a rumor began to the effect that the colt’s performance had been drug-assisted. For once, the normally calm Ben Jones was seething at the innuendos, which he doubtless believed had been launched by one of his losing rivals. Churchill Downs officials were equally angry at the irresponsible talk, pointing out that the colt’s post-race drug tests had been negative.

Whirlaway moved on to the Preakness, where he proved just as devastating as in the Derby. Turned loose a half-mile out from the wire, Whirlaway won by five and a half lengths from King Cole, who would win the Withers Stakes in his next outing. Having himself skipped the Withers, Whirlaway prepped for the Belmont by defeating Mioland (the eventual co-champion handicap horse of 1941) and other good older males in an allowance race. As Arcaro was not available, Wendell Eads rode Whirlaway in the allowance, but Arcaro was in the saddle once again for the Belmont.

Only three other colts turned out to oppose Whirlaway for the Belmont Stakes, and their jockeys tried the only possible strategy: slow down the pace to blunt the Calumet colt’s famous finishing run. Arcaro, though, was not to be hoodwinked. Sensing the slowness of the pace, he gunned Whirlaway after the first half-mile and opened up a seven-length lead. The lead had dwindled to two and one-half lengths at the end of the race, but Whirlaway had never been remotely threatened. He crossed the line as American racing’s fifth Triple Crown winner.

Arcaro’s last ride on Whirlaway for the season was in the Dwyer Stakes, which the colt won over Market Wise. Whirlaway then shipped to Chicago, but as Arcaro had been suspended for some rough riding at Empire City, Wendell Eads rode the colt in his prep race for the Arlington Classic. Whirlaway won but reverted to his habit of bearing out while doing so, and Calumet turned to Alfred Shelhamer to ride Whirlaway in the Classic.

Whirlaway ran well for Shelhamer but came up a loser in the Classic as Attention outran him to the wire by one and one-half lengths, ending Whirlaway’s winning streak at six races. Any thoughts of a budding rivalry were dashed as Attention went unsound and did not reappear in 1941, but Whirlaway then had to tangle with War Relic, who came into the Saranac Handicap at Saratoga with 117 pounds against 130 on Whirlaway. This time, Albert Robertson had the mount on Whirlaway but proved no more able than Wendell Eads to keep Whirly running straight, while War Relic skimmed the rail during the run down the homestretch. The stewards had to review the print of the photo finish for several long minutes before ruling that what at first appeared to be a hoofprint on the track was actually Whirlaway’s flaring nostril, making him the winner over War Relic by about an inch. Samuel Riddle disputed the ruling loudly and vigorously, and he was not the only one to feel that War Relic had been robbed.

The Riddle colt was not in evidence for the Travers or the American Derby, both of which were won easily by Whirlaway. The two colts had their rematch in the Narragansett Special. War Relic got in with but 107 pounds, but as Whirlaway carried only 118, weight was probably not a crucial factor in the outcome. The key to the race was Ted Atkinson, who managed to get away with an artificially slow pace on War Relic. After a mile in 1:39, Whirlaway cut loose with his patented closing drive only to find that War Relic had more than enough left for a brilliant finishing run of his own. War Relic won by four and a half lengths, leaving Whirlaway to settle for second place.

Whirlaway finished his three-year-old season by winning the Lawrence Realization easily and then engaging in an epic battle with Market Wise for the Jockey Club Gold Cup. Probably the best stayer of his generation, Market Wise won by a nose after running Whirlaway down in the stretch and took a full second off the Belmont track record for two miles, hitting the wire in 3:20-4/5. It was Whirlaway’s twentieth start of the year and the twenty-second for Market Wise, who would race four more times that year and rack up three more victories before going into winter quarters with the reputation of having been the second best three-year-old of 1941. As for Whirlaway, he was a unanimous choice as champion three-year-old male and Horse of the Year.

The Calumet champion began the 1942 racing season by being shipped West with the Santa Anita Handicap in mind, but that goal had to be canceled when the Santa Anita racetrack was requisitioned for wartime service. (According to racing historian William Robertson, Santa Anita became the biggest ordnance center in the West during World War II.) As Whirlaway had thus missed the rich Florida winter/spring season, he did not get back into action until the Keeneland meet in April. He opened the year with back-to-back losses in the Phoenix Handicap and an allowance sprint, but it took two pretty good horses to beat him: Devil Diver, always a tough sprinter and an eventual champion in his own right, and Sun Again, later a top handicapper for Calumet. Both were only three-year-olds in 1942, however, and not as good then as they would later become. Still, Ben Jones was not perturbed; these races were merely tuneups for richer prizes later on, and they accomplished his goal of getting Whirlaway racing fit.

Whirlaway got back on track with wins in the Clark Handicap at Churchill Downs and the Dixie Handicap at Pimlico. Sent to Belmont for the Suburban Handicap, he ran into his old rival Market Wise, who beat him one and a half lengths while in receipt of five pounds. Whirlaway then tried to drop back to seven furlongs in the Carter Handicap and ran third behind Doublrab and Swing and Sway.

Nine furlongs at Aqueduct proved more like it for Whirly’s next start as he set a new track record of 1:49-2/5. He next stepped up to win the Brooklyn Handicap under 128 pounds, a performance that earned him a burden of 132 pounds for the Butler Handicap. That was a lot of weight to put on a small horse (Whirlaway measured about 15.2 hands as a three-year-old, later growing to 15.3 hands), and Tola Rose defeated him while carrying a mere 103 pounds.

Whirlaway’s next race was in the Massachusetts Handicap on July 15, in which he defeated the Irish-bred *Rounders and set a new Suffolk Downs track record of 1:48-1/5 for nine furlongs. The winner’s purse of $43,850 pushed Whirlaway past Seabiscuit as the all-time money-winning Thoroughbred. When Whirlaway next met *Rounders in the Arlington Handicap, however, he caught both a 130-pound weight assignment and a sloppy track and was easily beaten by the three-year-old, who was carrying only 103 pounds.

Whirlaway rebounded to win the Trenton Handicap at Garden State and the Narragansett Special, both under 130 pounds. Then came the first of his three meetings with the champion three-year-old, Alsab. Alsab had originally been slated to meet Whirlaway in the Special but had been scratched; as a sop to the crowd, which had been eagerly awaiting a meeting of the two stars, a match was arranged between the two one week later, on September 19, 1942. Both contestants would carry weight for age over a mile and three-sixteenths. Carroll Bierman got the early lead and the inside track on Alsab and that proved to be the difference; though Whirlaway and George Woolf were driving grimly at the end, Alsab continued on resolutely and just lasted to win by a nose. (One wonders why Woolf allowed Bierman and Alsab to take the lead, given his own experience in match racing; he had been the winning jockey in Seabiscuit’s famous match against War Admiral and surely knew the advantage of setting the pace in a match.)

Whirlaway next attempted to carry 132 pounds in the Manhattan Handicap and could not do it, being defeated by the good stayer Bolingbroke (who carried 115 pounds) in world record time of 2:27-2/5 for one and one-half miles on dirt. Then came the two-mile Jockey Club Gold Cup, in which Whirlaway and Alsab met again at weight for age. Once again, Alsab took the early lead, but this time Whirlaway had enough distance to run him down in the stretch, winning by a widening three-quarters of a length. But Alsab turned the tables in the New York Handicap at two and a quarter miles; this time Whirlaway came into the stretch with the lead only to be run down by the younger colt, who won by a head from the longshot Obash. Whirlaway finished third under 130 pounds, conceding seven pounds (two by the scale) to Alsab and 24 to Obash.

The Calumet colt went on to win the Washington Handicap and walk over for the Pimlico Special before losing the Riggs Handicap to Riverland, who was receiving fourteen pounds from the champion. He ended the season by winning the Governor Bowie Handicap and the Louisiana Handicap, avenging his defeat by Riverland in the latter. Whirlaway was an easy choice as champion handicap male and beat out Alsab for Horse of the Year honors, making him the second horse to win back-to-back Horse of the Year titles since official voting began in 1936. (The first was Challedon, who took top honors in 1939 and 1940.)

1943 was the end of the road for Whirlaway, who started only twice and did not win either time. He made his final public appearance under colors at Washington Park on July 5, 1943, with his regular exercise rider Pinky Brown in the saddle for the exhibition. He retired with 32 wins, fifteen seconds, and nine thirds from 60 starts for earnings of $561,161. The first racehorse to win more than $500,000, he was inducted into the National Museum of Racing Hall of Fame in 1959.

Whirlaway’s stud career was an anticlimax to his racing career. Although he was given the pick of Calumet’s mares at first and did eventually sire eighteen stakes winners including 1948 Coaching Club American Oaks winner Scattered, he was rapidly overshadowed by Bull Lea, who had already gotten 1944 Horse of the Year Twilight Tear from his first crop and would go on to win five titles as leading sire in the United States. It was no secret to anyone connected with Calumet that Ben Jones preferred the more physically and mentally sound stock sired by Bull Lea to Whirlaway’s progeny, many of which appeared to share his own mental limitations, and Warren Wright eventually gave up on trying to make a top sire of Whirlaway.

The horse’s best days as a stallion were already behind him when he was leased to the famous French breeder Marcel Boussac in 1950 (Boussac later bought Whirlaway outright) and exported to France. Whirlaway sired nothing of note in his adopted country and died on April 6, 1953, suffering an apparent heart attack after having covered a mare about ten minutes earlier. He was buried at Boussac’s farm, Haras de Fresnay-le-Bouffard, but was not forgotten at Calumet, where a memorial marker was placed in the farm’s equine cemetery.

Whirlaway left one notable legacy to the Thoroughbred through his daughter Rock Drill, whose daughter Lady Pitt was the champion American three-year-old filly of 1966 before founding a notable American family. Quarter Horse breeders also have reason to remember Whirlaway, for his daughter Scattered is the fourth dam of two-time world champion racing Quarter Horse Dash for Cash, one of the breed’s greatest sires. Still, his greatest legacy is the memory of his own electric brilliance and quirky personality, both of which brought his fans to the edge of their seats time and again. Few horses can ask for more than that.

Text © 2005 by Avalyn Hunter

Artwork © 2006 by Pat DeLong. Used by permission and may not be copied or distributed without the express consent of Pat DeLong. For information regarding purchases, reproductions, or licensing, please contact Pat DeLong at patdelongart@aol.com.