From winning, to being abandoned, to finally coming home
By Mark Story
HERALD-LEADER SPORTS COLUMNIST

GEORGETOWN - If only horses could talk. What a story Taylor's Special had to tell.

The horse could've told you what it felt like to stand in the winner's circle on the pony grounds of Keeneland as champion of the Blue Grass Stakes.

And what it was like, 20 years later, to spend six weeks or so homeless, wandering the countryside in Washington state living off rainwater and the land.

If horses could talk, then right up until just a few minutes after 3 p.m. on Tuesday, when a veterinarian made the humane decision to pull a euthanizing needle from the back of her truck, Taylor's Special could have told you an amazing tale of survival.

If horses could talk, Taylor's Special might have begun his story with a little smack about April 26, 1984, the day he kicked dirt in the eyes of all those haughty thoroughbred pedigree analysts.

Taylor's Special's daddy, a horse named Hawkin's Special, was a sprinter. Because the father wasn't much count when running more than 6 furlongs, the racetrack wise guys assumed the son wouldn't be either. But on a spring day at Keeneland, Taylor's Special got a pace-controlling ride from an emerging 30-year-old jockey named Pat Day and won -- at a distance of one mile and an eighth -- the track's most prestigious event, the Blue Grass Stakes.

That victory gave an ambitious 30-year-old horse trainer striving to make the name Bill Mott matter in thoroughbred racing both a Grade I stakes victory and his first taste of the madness that is the Kentucky Derby trail.

"There were probably 20 microphones stuck in front of my face after we won," Mott says now. "I guess that was when I realized the significance of what we'd done."

In the weeks leading up to the Derby, Mott and Taylor Special's owner, retired Brown-Forman Distilleries executive William F. Lucas, let themselves dream of "stretching" the horse with the sprinter's pedigree another eighth of a mile. After all, to win the greatest race of them all, you have to run 11/4 miles.

Pedigree concerns aside, one man had foreseen the Kentucky Derby in Taylor's Special's future literally from the start.

On the night that Taylor's Special was born at a farm just outside Louisville, breeder Dravo Foley and a friend, banker Hiram Taylor, had relieved the night watchman.

They wound up delivering the mare Bette's Gold's foal themselves. That very night, Taylor predicted "this is a Derby horse." Foley named the newborn Taylor's Special in honor of his friend.

Such stories give Derby lore its flavor, but no Hollywood ending was forthcoming. Sent off as the fourth betting choice in the 110th Kentucky Derby, Taylor's Special came home 13th in a race won by Swale.

Two weeks later, Taylor's Special ran fourth in The Preakness (which was won by Gate Dancer). "By then, we had a tired horse," Mott said.

But not defeated. A hearty sort, after his Triple Crown defeats, Taylor's Special raced three more years. He was retired in 1987 with 21 wins in 41 races and slightly more than $1 million in career earnings.

If horses could talk, we could've asked Taylor's Special how he did it. How did a thoroughbred used to life at the highest levels of horse racing survive for weeks on his own with no one to look after him?

Maybe, too, he'd have told us what he thought when a group of strangers subsequently came into his life and insisted on calling him "Nigel."

It was Sept. 28, 2004, when Jenny Edwards got the first phone call. The president and executive director of Hope for Horses, a Washington state equine rescue organization, Edwards was told there was a large horse wandering the fields alone near Granite Falls, Wash.

Within two weeks, she was part of the Hope for Horses crew that went to pick up a horse with no home and, to them, no name.

"I knew immediately it was someone special," Edwards says of the mystery horse, "his breeding showed in his carriage and bearing, the way he held himself. He was very proud."

Not shockingly, the horse had starkly protruding ribs. According to the Henneke Body Condition chart -- a formula for quantifying the weight of horses -- 1 is dangerously thin, and 5 is an ideal body weight. Edwards said "Nigel" was at 2.5.

Hope for Horses gives a name to each of the animals they take in, working their way through the alphabet. They were at "N."

"We called him Nigel," Edwards says.

In a prior life, Jenny Edwards lived in Lexington. She met her husband, John, here. Though they left in September 1985, they still think of Lexington as home.

So, in 1984, when a horse named Taylor's Special was the toast of Lexington after winning the Blue Grass, Jenny Edwards lived here.

She does not remember being aware of the race.

But looking at the regal bearing of the animal she called Nigel made Edwards believe this was not a run-of-the-mill horse. Registered thoroughbreds each bear an identifying tattoo inside the upper lip. Edwards had Nigel's checked, but a key identifying aspect of the tattoo was faded.

"It was the part that would have told the birth year," Edwards said. "It got a little tricky. We were having trouble making it out. One of the reasons we kept him so long, we didn't want to start this big frenzy, then find out the horse wasn't who we thought he was."

Using a digital photograph, they eventually ascertained the faded evidence in the tattoo. Edwards searched Google for the tattoo. It led to an all-breed horse database. What came up was a "Taylor's Special horse-pedigree report."

Edwards realized that her Nigel had once won the Blue Grass Stakes and run in the Kentucky Derby.

How in the world, she wondered, had such a horse ended up on its own, wandering around Washington state?

Of course, the tragic endings in foreign slaughterhouses of retired American racing stars such as Exceller and Ferdinand showed that even famous horses are in danger of slipping into an abyss of neglect as they age and their breeding value diminishes.

Once retired to stud, Taylor's Special stood at a farm in Maryland from 1988-93, then was listed with a different farm in Wanham, Alberta, Canada, from 1994-99. His final foal crop of five foals came in 2002, and the breeder of four of them was a man listed in Washington state.

Edwards says she found out that the farm near Granite Falls, Wash., where Taylor's Special had ended up, was owned by an elderly couple. After they died, the farm fell into disrepair. Which is how a Blue Grass Stakes winner came to spend six weeks homeless.

At last realizing the stature of the horse she had, "it became real important to me," Edwards says, "to put him back in his roots where they would value what he did."

If horses could talk, Taylor's Special could have told you about his unlikely final days as something of a Central Kentucky tourist attraction.

Once she determined to send her Nigel back to Kentucky, Jenny Edwards eventually came in contact with a man named Michael Blowen.

Blowen is a former Boston Globe film critic who came to Kentucky to launch an organization, Old Friends, that is essentially an old folks home for past thoroughbred stallions. Many rescue groups don't want to deal with the equine version of grumpy old men because they can be, well, difficult.

This summer, Old Friends acquired a farm of its own just outside Georgetown. The public can stop and see such past champions as Precisionist and Ogygian. This weekend, Blowen will open a bed-and-breakfast on the farm. The money made, he says, will go back into providing for the 22 horses currently in the care of Old Friends.

Since May 29, 2005, one of Old Friends' most popular attractions had been the horse with the unusually compelling life history. When the tourists came to see Taylor's Special, Blowen would regale them with the tale of the Blue Grass winner found living in the wild.

One day early in the summer, I called Blowen, saying simply I was looking for a horse story with a happy ending.

"Have you ever heard about a horse called Taylor's Special?" said he.

For three months, in between my other job-related duties, I reported on and researched the 1984 Blue Grass Stakes winner.

On Tuesday, I had a 1:30 p.m. appointment to see Blowen and Taylor's Special for the final time before writing this story.

When I got there, I asked Blowen where Taylor was.

Blowen broke down in tears.

"I can't talk about Taylor right now," he said. "He had an accident last night. I'm afraid it's bad."

Eventually, Blowen composed himself and told me the story. He and his wife had returned from dinner out around 9 p.m. They noticed the shadow of a horse wandering free somewhere he wasn't supposed to be.

Taylor's Special had jumped the gate of his paddock.

The cuts on his left rear leg were noticeable, but Blowen called a horseman whose judgment he trusted to come look at the 25-year-old stallion. The man did not believe there was structural damage to the horse's bones.

Early Tuesday, Taylor's Special was being walked. Maybe the cuts on his leg were bothering him. Maybe he was just agitated. For whatever reason, Blowen says, the horse all but pounded his leg into the ground.

What resulted, Blowen says, was a noisy pop.

Shortly before 3 p.m., the X-rays came back and the news was grim -- a broken femur in the horse's left rear leg.

"These older horses are like people; their bones are brittle," said an attending veterinarian, Holly S. Aldinger.

Inside the barn, Taylor's Special was frantically shaking his head up and down and doing the same with his right front leg.

"This horse is in a lot of pain," Aldinger said quietly.

Obviously, there was only one humane option.

In the moment, you really wished horses could talk, because that would mean you could also tell them things.

One suspects Taylor's Special would have wanted to know that Mott -- who went on to train the great Cigar, to win Eclipse awards and become a Hall of Fame trainer -- never forgot the horse who did so much to help make his name.

When Taylor's Special came to Old Friends, Blowen says Mott made a financial contribution toward the horse's care. "He was really a springboard for me into bigger and better things," Mott said just last week.

As he took his final breaths, one suspects the champion horse who knew what it was like to wander a countryside alone would have wanted to know that the volunteers who took care of him over the past year cared so much, they were outside the barn leaning on each other, every eye ringed with tears.