When many of his friends were getting bicycles for their seventh birthdays, Clinton Pitts got a pony.
“I’ve been with horses ever since," he said.
The 82-year-old Virginia man has few flashbacks of his life where horses were not in the picture. But one of his core memories was witnessing the greatest horse of all time winning the Triple Crown at a record pace that, 50 years later, has yet to be broken.
“He was certainly once in a lifetime,” said Clinton. “He got the nickname Big Red for a reason.”
Clinton’s long and successful career as a racing steward is what got him a front-row seat to history.
He believes only he and one other man are the last stewards alive that were around during that time.
He remembers first seeing Secretariat while he was exercising every morning at Pimlico Race Course — the site of the Preakness Stakes.
“I mean he was a great big, strapping horse. He’d just catch your eye if you saw him with a bunch of horses on the racetrack. He just stood out. I mean, he had a presence about him,” said Clinton. “He had a stride that was from here to halfway up the porch. He just looked like he was galloping, he never looked like he was working.”
Before Clinton’s path crossed with Secretariat's, he had known his jockey, Ron Turcotte. The two were riders together long before Turcotte was known for his post in Big Red’s driver seat.
“He was just a wonderful guy. I can’t say enough good things about him,” said Clinton about Ron.
Like most teams of athletes, Clinton said the riders were like one big family.
“We all knew each other, you know, our wives would come to the races. And if somebody got hurt, everybody went to see him,” explained Clinton. “We were just good friends. And we all worked together…It was a tight group, you know, sure, I’m gonna do everything I can to beat you [on the track] but afterward, let’s go have a drink.”
It was also during this time he got to know Eddie Maple, the last jockey to ever ride Secretariat during his finale at the Canadian International Championship Stakes in Toronto. He keeps in touch with Maple to this day.
Clinton was a jockey for roughly five or six years — a run he described as “moderately successful” despite having a case of trophies and a home peppered with photographs of his races frozen in time.
The sport’s promise of adrenaline is what initially drew him in, a high he said he was searching for after serving in the U.S. Marine Corps.
Breaking-in horses for the late Hirsch Jacobs — one of the most famous race-winning horse trainers of all time — is what transitioned him into riding professionally.
Clinton said he never feared climbing onto the unpredictable and emotional creatures.
“You’re gonna get hurt. I got hurt plenty of times. I’ve probably broken just about everything, but you get back up and do it again,” said Clinton, embodying a timeless idiom.
But after he got married, he said being on his back in a hospital was not the best way to raise a family.
“That job has a life expectancy…or a used-by date, anyway,” he said.
Clinton found safety with a job in the racing secretary’s office at Bowie Race Track in Maryland in 1969.
For $25 a day, six days a week he filed foal certificates, working early in the morning until the last race at night and every holiday.
Eventually, his dedication got him the position of patrol judge, the person responsible for spotting fouls during races, and reviewed films for the stewards after each day.
There were few positions around the track that Clinton didn’t have some experience in before answering his calling as a full-time racing steward.
“Law had always interested me. Basically, the stewards on the racetrack are the start of the judicial system,” he explained.
Everyone on a horse track from “hotwalkers” – who cool down the horses after they train or race – to the horse owners, trainers, and even the groomers, must be licensed. And the stewards are the licensees for the state.
They have the power to fine, suspend, or discipline anyone who isn’t complying with the rules.
“You had to be careful. You had to know the rules. And my thing was I just wanted to treat everybody equally,” said Clinton. “If you’re making $100 a week walking hots, I want to treat you the same way as I do Mrs. Tweedy or Mr. Phipps.”
Clinton's extensive knowledge of those rules got him top steward positions for the Maryland Racing Commission and the New York Racing Association.
He met big sports names at the tracks like NFL coach Don Shula and NFL player Johnny Unitas, late Baltimore Orioles owner Jerold Hoffberger – even the founding owner of the Pittsburgh Steelers, Art Rooney Sr., whose luck gambling on horse races is said to have brought him the fortune to keep the franchise afloat. But few renowned athletes struck him quite like Big Red.
“When they took off in the Preakness, they came through the stretch and they were, you know, bunched up like they normally were about halfway round the turn. I saw Ron go outside a couple horses and just took off like he was shot out of a gun, and I thought to myself, ‘What in the hell is he doing with seven-eighths of a mile to go? And he opened up about 10 [lengths]. And that's all he did. I don't think they got much closer to him,” Clinton recalled. “He just covered ground like he was eating it up, you know, it was just remarkable.”
He added, “The roar from the grandstand was just deafening. There was no question this horse was special…Ron said, this son of a gun’s got the biggest engine of anything I’ve ever been on.”
Even with a legendary horse under her name, Clinton remembers late owner Penny Chenery as a humble “first lady of horse racing.”
“She was just Penny. She was just as genuine, just as comfortable talking to everybody walking around the backstretches as she was the museum ball, the black-tie ball. She was wonderful,” he said.
Clinton took his stewarding talents up and down the East Coast, including to Colonial Downs in Virginia, and across the world to Hong Kong before hanging up his binoculars.
He spent the next few years shaping the education program that produces racing stewards found on the tracks today. He’s taught many seminars and worked with both the University of Louisville and the University of Arizona.
When asked if he ever goes back to see any horse races, he said, “No, I can see it there in my living room.”
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