A proud performer after all

Sporting News, The, June 21, 2004 by Dave Kindred

The story of the beautiful and haunting riderless horse in Ronald Reagan's funeral procession begins with the truth that a race horse suffering a case of the slows costs just as much in room and board as Secretariat did.

The slows can be hazardous to a horse's health because some owners, sentimental as fire hydrants, dump horses faster than J-Lo dumps husbands. As to where they dump them, the words to remember are these from Dave Brandwine: "I didn't want to send him to the glue factory." Yikes.

But business is business. Like his horses, Brandwine has to eat, and, unlike the horses, he has to pay for the hay. His affection for the noble steeds is apportioned in greater amounts to those that run the fastest and earn the most money at the track. The others, alas, are expendable, as on a January day in 1996 ...

That day the pacer Allaboard Jules ran third in yet another cheap race at New Jersey's Freehold Raceway, maybe earning $300, not enough to meet the blacksmith's bills. Brandwine, the trainer and owner, had put Jules in the race hoping another owner would take him for the $4,000 claiming fee.

That's about what the horse cost Brandwine two years earlier, and his fondest wish was to get out even. But no bites.

There never were any.

"Nobody wanted him," the trainer said. Everyone knew Allaboard Jules' problems. He was small, no more than 15 hands high, and any horseman looking at him would agree with Brandwine's race-tracker summary of the horse's conformation: "He was bowlegged and cross-eyed."

Meaning, he can't run, and he's ugly, too.

Cold.

Of course, he could run, just not quickly. And even the man whose livelihood depended on the horse's quickness knew that Allaboard Jules was a beautiful horse--alert, black, shining.

"But with his conformation, he was always going lame," Brandwine said. In two years, the horse had just five wins in 23 races and earned $14,881.

"Thing was, he was just so likable. A great personality, playful around the barn. He was more like my dog than my horse."

Still, business is business, and on that day in January of 1996, the trainer said to Marie Dobrisky, a New Jersey state racing official, "Listen, I've got to stop running Jules. He's trying so hard, he's going to kill himself."

Race horses no longer paying their way often are sent to auction and sold for various purposes, some of which keep them alive. From the New Jersey tracks, Dobrisky even has helped horses find homes pulling Amish buggies.

On this day with Brandwine, though, she had another idea. "You want to send him to the Army?"

The trainer laughed. "He'd be 4-F."

"No, no, he could do this."

The trainer saw a chance to get out from under. "Where do you want me to drop him off?"

Dobrisky's son is U.S. Army Staff Sgt. Frank Dobrisky. Raised with horses, the staff sergeant worked with the horses of the Army's honor guard near Washington, the Caisson Unit of the 3rd Infantry Division. Marie Dobrisky knew the Army used all-blacks, grays or dark bays for caisson duty. In Brandwine's little black horse, she saw no bowed legs, no crossed eyes. She saw majesty.

For a year off the track, healing up, Allaboard Jules romped with cows in a Jersey pasture. Then the Army took him in for honor-guard training. Frank Dobrisky has been quoted by the U.S. Trotting Association saying his buddies made fun of the new horse, how "small and scrawny he was." Besides, the name Allaboard Jules didn't quite fit in a stable starring "Lee" and "Grant."

Soon enough, Jules became Sergeant York, named after Alvin York, the World War I Medal of Honor winner. As part of his training, the horse was used in mock combat situations. Men fired machine guns from his back, and mock grenades were thrown in his path. Because Sergeant York never blinked, Staff Sgt. Dobrisky knew he had what Dave Brandwine never had: a winner.

In 1998, Sergeant York rose to the position of the riderless horse, the central, haunting image of a president's funeral procession in the nation's capital since Abraham Lincoln's death in 1865. The searing memories of John F. Kennedy's funeral in 1963 include Mrs. Kennedy's veiled face, little John-John's salute and the riderless horse Black Jack's fitful prancing that suggested JFK's elan and a nation on edge.

Now, in 2004, came an old athlete, Sergeant York, his coat shiny as black velvet. He walked behind the caisson bearing the commander-in-chief's flag-draped casket. In the horse's steel stirrups, as always, were a pair of boots turned backwards, symbols of a fallen officer. This time they were Ronald Reagan's own high riding boots.

From near the White House and up Constitution Avenue a mile and a half to the Capitol, Sergeant York walked with his head high, prancing sideways at times, ears pricked. At his new post in Hanau, Germany, Staff Sgt. Frank Dobrisky stayed up until 3 in the morning to watch his old friend do the work they once did together.

"He just did great all day," the sergeant said. "And such a great story. The horse has gone from worthless to priceless."