Real Quiet did not look or act the part of a champion early in his career. He was so crooked up front that he sold to Michael Pegram for only $17,000 as a yearling in 1996. He was so lacking in girth that his trainer, Bob Baffert, jokingly nicknamed him “The Fish.”
Sunday Silence spent a lifetime in search of respect, on the track and in the breeding shed. In the end, he earned it.
“He was very good,” said Shug McGaughey, a Hall of Fame trainer who handled arch-rival Easy Goer. “I ran against him four times and he beat us three times. And I ran a pretty good horse at him.”
Few athletes, human or equine, ever burst onto the national scene as quickly as Steve Cauthen.
In 1977, one year after he began riding, he paced all jockeys with 487 victories and emerged as the first to earn as much as $6 million in purses in a single season. In 1978, “The Kid” gained the distinction of being the youngest jockey to win the Triple Crown as his precocious talent helped Affirmed repel Alydar in one of the fiercest rivalries any sport has known.
Barry Irwin, now the head of Team Valor International, was entering his teenage years in Southern California when Swaps burst onto the scene in 1955.
“He just really excited me and caught my imagination,” Irwin recalled.
Irwin was hardly alone. Swaps’ popularity became so enormous that Union 76 gas stations began distributing posters of him. “I kept pushing my father to get gas there so I could get more pictures,” Irwin said.
