“It’s still so real to me, although I’m sure I’ve forgotten some of the angles and the details. Hey, how many guys can say they won the Derby and then they didn’t win it? Only one. Me.”

 – Peter Fuller, owner of Dancer’s Image

Next to my desk, at a place where I can see it every day, I have a black-and-white photo that was on the cover of the May 11, 1968, issue of The Blood-Horse magazine. It shows owner Peter Fuller and trainer Lou Cavalaris leading Dancer’s Image into the infield winner’s circle at Churchill Downs following his stirring victory over Calumet Farm’s Forward Pass in that year’s Kentucky Derby. I’m clearly visible in the background, a couple of yards behind the gray colt. At 24, I was doing then what I’ve spent most of my life doing: Looking for a story for the next day’s newspaper.

At the time, I was working for The Courier-Journal, and my assignment was to do a sidebar on the Derby winner. So here I was, trailing the action surrounding the colt whose charge from last place had electrified the crowd on a bright and sunny afternoon under the twin spires. In the photo, I’m smiling, as are Fuller and jockey Bobby Ussery. Cavalaris looks nettled, his hand on the shoulder of a man in front. I can almost hear the crowd, still babbling and whooping over the thrilling bit of history it had just witnessed.
“Isn’t that something?” Fuller had said on the track as he led his colt with one hand and wave at the crowd with the other. “I felt like he would win all along. I was sure of it. This horse was destined to win.”

If so, then destiny has an incredible mean streak. After receiving the gold winner’s trophy from Kentucky Governor Louie B. Nunn – like him, a Republican – Fuller left it at the track for engraving purposes. He never got it back because, on the Tuesday after the Derby, the international sports world was shocked when the race stewards announced that Dancer’s Image had been disqualified and placed last because a then-illegal medication had been detected in his post-race urinalysis.

It was the first – and still the only – time a Derby winner’s number had been taken down. Angry and outraged, but mostly puzzled and confused, Fuller denied any wrongdoing and vowed to get back the trophy and the winner’s purse. For almost five years, he fought his way through every jurisdiction, from a hearing by the stewards to the Kentucky Supreme Court. But in the end, he and his colt lost in court what they had won on the track. Forward Pass was declared the official winner and Dancer’s Image was ignominiously placed 14th and last.
To this day, almost 40 years later, the mystery of what happened to Dancer’s Image remains unsolved.

Everybody who had access to the colt claimed to be innocent of any wrongdoing. The chemists who conducted the post-race tests stood by their work. Everybody had a theory, but nobody knew anything for sure.

As I walked behind the victory party that day, looking for an angle, little did I know that the biggest story of my career was right in front of my face. I became involved in the investigation in a very personal way, as we shall see. But after all was said and done, I had only one certainty to show for my work: Peter Fuller was the tragic hero and innocent victim of the damnedest story in Derby history.

I was leaving a message on his answering machine when the voice broke in, as familiar today as it was 40 years ago. “Bill, my friend, how are you?” He wasn’t surprised to learn that I had been asked to do a retrospective piece about Dancer’s Image. Almost everyone else who covered that year’s Derby is dead or gone. Besides, few of today’s newspapers have regular turf writers, and fewer still have reporters with the time and inclination to re-open what most consider to be a dead-case file.

“It’s a funny that you would call today,” Fuller said, “because I was talking to Sandy (his companion and caretaker) about that very thing this morning. She was asking me, ‘What about the police? Where were they?’ And all I could think to say was, ‘Well, what about the police?’ That’s a good question. It’s just one of the angles. There were so many.”

There were, indeed. In retrospect, one of the most amazing aspects of the Dancer’s Image story is that nobody had done a book about it, written a novel based on it, or produced a movie about it. Well, that’s not exactly right. Paul Daley, a New England turf writer, has done a book that he believes sheds new light on what happened. So far, however, he hasn’t been able to convince a publisher that the story is worth re-examining not only because of how it impacted racing history, but about how it fit into what was happening in America in the turbulent year of 1968.

After Dancer’s Image had won the Wood Memorial, for example, announcer Win Elliott of CBS told the nation that Fuller had decided to donate the entire winner’s purse of $68,000 to the widow of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., who had been assassinated by a sniper in Memphis, Tenn., only a few days earlier. To many, it was a courageous and magnanimous act, especially coming from a lifelong Republican whose later father had once been Governor of Massachusetts. But in Louisville, where King had appeared before the previous year’s Derby to lead an open-housing protest, many took a dim view of Fuller’s largesse. He even received death threats with postmarks from cities in the Old South.
But Fuller refused to be intimidated. All his life, he had been a fighter, both literally and figuratively. Born with celiac disease, which hampered digestion and caused him to frequently have an enlarged stomach, Fuller was a frail child who frequently was victimized by bullies who punched him and called him “Pot belly.” To say he overcompensated would be a gross understatement. He served as captain of the wrestling teams at both Milton Academy and Harvard, became a Golden Gloves champion boxer who once fought (and lost) to a fellow who had defeated Rocky Marciano in the future heavyweight champ’s amateur days, and almost made the U.S. Olympic wrestling team in 1964 at the age of 42.

In 1958, when General Motors executives tried to exercise the corporation’s option to take over the lucrative Cadillac-Olds agency that Fuller had inherited from his recently-deceased father, they didn’t understand who they were dealing with. As Fuller recalls it, his attitude was, “When you come to take it away, you better bring a bunch of —— people with you. I mean, you’re going to take something away from me that my father gave me and I worked hard at?” Eventually, GM changed its policy and gave heirs five years to decide what they want to do with dealerships.

When Fuller arrived in Louisville the Tuesday before the ’68 Derby, accompanied by 65 family members and friends, he immediately captivated the media. At the Derby trainers’ dinner the Tuesday night before the race, he delighted in telling the media about how he had almost sold Dancer’s Image for $25,000 as a yearling, only to have his wife, Joan, talk him out of it. He also told anybody who would listen that his colt was going to win the Derby. “I can see it,” Fuller said. “He’s going to be last, and Forward Pass will be leading at the top of the stretch, and then Dancer’s Image will come on and run by him.” The writers at it up, but some Kentucky hardboots were miffed. Who did this brash Yankee think he was?

“I guess I’d like to be remembered as a guy who had the balls to stand up for what he believed in,” Fuller told me. “I didn’t cheat people. I haven’t been a bad guy. Oh, maybe I’ve been this or that. But on the whole, I’ve been an O.K. guy. You’ve got to do what you believe in and whatever happens after that, well, it happens.”

He had the visage of the fighter he was, eyes piercing from under bushy eyebrows and a jutting chin that had to be an invitation for his opponents in the ring. In boxing and wrestling, he learned to how to accept both victory and defeat. All he asked was that the competition be fair. In the Derby, he felt he was playing against a deck stacked against him. He didn’t know who stacked it, but there was no lack of suspects – incompetent chemists, inadequate security, unethical attorneys and unscrupulous racing officials.

And then, of course, there was Dr. Alex Harthill, the veterinarian whose reputation for brilliance was exceeded only by his history of intemperate and perhaps illegal behavior. Known as “Derby Doc,” Harthill had an office and a laboratory in Barn 24 on Churchill’s backside. He had treated almost every Derby winner since Citation in 1948.

Upon the advice of Churchill president Wathen Knebelkamp, Fuller hired him to treat Dancer’s Image.

When the news about the disqualification broke, Harthill immediately became suspect No. 1. Or, as his buddy Doug Davis told him, “You might not be elected, but you’re sure nominated.” As was the case with many sons of the great Native Dancer, Fuller’s colt had sore ankles that needed constant treatment, so on the Sunday before the Derby, under the watchful eye of Cavalaris, Harthill injected a Butazolidin pill down the Dancer’s throat. Legal in many racing jurisdictions, Butazolidin – or phenylbutazone, to use its generic name – was neither a stimulant nor a depressant, but a pain-killer, much like an aspirin is to human beings.

In Kentucky at that time, it was legal to use “Bute” for training purposes, but not for racing. It generally took 72 hours to work its way through a horse’s systems, meaning that all traces of the Sunday injection should have been gone from the Dancer’s system by Derby Day. Yet when chemists examined specimen U3956 on Derby night – they didn’t know at the time that it was the Derby winner’s specimen – they claimed to find traces of “Bute.”
And so began the mystery of Dancer’s Image.
On the Tuesday after the Derby, when the news broke about the disqualification, I was driving to work at the C-J building at Sixth and Broadway in downtown Louisville. I couldn’t call anybody because only rich folks had mobile phones in those days. I found the office in chaos, everybody trying to get somebody on the phone for a reaction.

At about 11 p.m., I finally reached Ussery, the jockey, who said, “As far as I’m concerned, I won the damned Derby.” That was pretty much what Fuller was telling the media in Boston. He said he had no idea what had happened, but suggested that maybe the security at Churchill Downs had been penetrated by unknown race-fixers.
Intrigued by Fuller’s comments, I suggested to Jim Bolus, my colleague and friend, that when we got off work at 1 a.m., we should go by Churchill Downs to check on the security. After all, Dancer’s Image was still there, stabled in Barn 24. On the way, we stopped and got some White Castles.

When we arrived at Barn 24, where every stall had a light bulb in the rear, we got out of our car and intentionally made some noise, wadding up White Castle sacks to throw away. We peeped inside the tack room where the guard was stationed and found him sound asleep. Then we walked down the shedrow and patted Dancer’s Image on his nose before going back to wake up and question the guard, who turned out to be a 72-year-old retiree who was moonlighting to make ends meet.

The story ran on the front page of Thursday’s Courier and was picked up nationally by the wire services. A few days later, George Gill, then the C-J’s managing editor, asked me to return to Barn 24 to take some photographs and see if I could find anybody fresh to interview.
I pretty much struck out and was walking away when I heard someone yell, “Hey!” Looking around, I saw Dr. Alex Harthill coming toward me at a fast clip. He did not look happy. When I stuck out my right hand to shake, he grabbed it, jerked me toward him, and hit me on the jaw with a roundhouse left-handed punch.

As I lay on the ground, dazed and wondering if my glasses were broken, Harthill stood over me and screamed, “You’ve been to Mexico to check on that gambling coup, haven’t you? You’ve been to Canada, haven’t you?”

I had been to Canada, to visit Cavalaris at his home in Toronto, but the Mexican angle was new to me. What was he talking about? What gambling coup? And so, inadvertently, did Harthill give me something to think about and explore for years to come.

I learned later that on the Monday after the Derby, Harthill and his buddy Davis had concocted a bizarre scheme by which they “salted” the feed of Dancer’s Image with ground-up aspirin. They said they were going to tell Cavalaris it was “Bute” in order to see how he would react. If he tried to get rid of it, they figured, it would be an admission of guilt. But Cavalaris disappointed them. He immediately turned over the matter to Fuller’s attorneys, who reported it to the stewards.

Harthill and Davis eventually were ordered to each pay a $500 fine for their role in the “salting” scheme, the only penalties ever levied against any of the principals – except, of course, for Fuller’s loss of the trophy, the purse, and, to many Americans, his good name.

The week after the Derby, the cover of Sports Illustrated magazine showed a “ball gun,” the instrument used to administer “Bute,” superimposed on a photo of Dancer’s Image. But the story transcended the sporting press. Both Time and Newsweek did pieces about it. The stewards’ hearings were covered by reporters from the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, the Baltimore Sun, and other major national publications. The Times eventually called it “the most controversial decision in all of Triple Crown racing.”
During the long court proceedings, there was a point when the Kentucky State Racing Commission overturned the ruling of the stewards and ordered that Fuller be given the Derby trophy and the purse. But that proved to be an ephemeral victory. Calumet Farm filed an appeal on behalf of Forward Pass, and the Kentucky Supreme Court finally ruled, in 1972, that Forward Pass was the official winner.

The decision was greeted warmly by the racing establishment, at least partly because Calumet was the most hallowed name in the sport and its owners, Admiral and Mrs. Gene Markey, were universally respected and beloved. After winning the Derby seven times between 1941 and ’58, the farm had undergone a draught until Forward Pass came along. The colt came into the Derby off an impressive win in the Blue Grass Stakes at Keeneland, leading the Derby crowd to make him slightly favored with Dancer’s Image as the second choice.

When Fuller decided to fight the stewards’ decision, the Markeys weren’t the only Kentuckians who were furious. His detractors characterized Fuller as a “bad sport” who “couldn’t take his medicine.” They felt he needed to go away quietly, for “the good of the game.” But others, myself included, didn’t see it that way. We admired him for having the courage of his convictions. The man felt he had gotten screwed out of the grandest prize in racing. He wanted to know whodunit. Who could blame him for that?

Nothing if not consistent, Fuller always has said that he doesn’t care as much about the trophy or the money or the immortality as much as he does about knowing what happened.
“I promised myself I’d never go back to the Derby unless I had a horse good enough to win – and I never have,” Fuller said. “I didn’t want to become a curiosity – you know, ‘Oh, yeah, you’re the guy who won the Derby and had it taken away from him.’ So I’ve stayed away, but I’ve never lost interest. I watch the Derby every year. I remember what it felt like to win.”
I keep the photo from the 1968 Derby near my desk so I can remind myself about the vagaries of life. Of all the people I interviewed in pursuit of the story, I’m firmly convinced that Fuller was the only one who told me the whole truth, who never flinched, who was willing to endure all sorts of insults and indignities for the sake of doing the right thing. He became one of my heroes and role models.

Sadly, I’m afraid he will pass away without getting the closure he deserves. He turned 85 on March 22, and, while his mind remains sharp and his memory vivid, he has difficulty getting around. He spends most of his time at his New Hampshire farm, near the ocean, with occasional trips to Boston or Florida to visit friends or relatives.

His daughter, Abbie, only 8 in 1968, decided on that Derby Day that she wanted to grow up to be a jockey, just like Bobby Ussery. And she did, reaching the peak of her career when she won New York’s 1985 Triple Tiara – Acorn, Mother Goose, and Coaching Club American Oaks – aboard the filly Mom’s Command, who was bred and owned by her dad.

Earlier this year, Fuller lost Mom’s Command, who had become so ill and infirm that she had to be humanely put down. He gathered with family members and close friends to say good-bye with carrots and apples. Still, she was only his second favorite horse, behind the Dancer, who turned out to be such an undistinguished breeding stallion in the U.S. that he was sold to foreign interests, standing for awhile in France before ending his career in Japan, where he died on Dec. 24, 1992.

Like me, Fuller also has a photo on his wall that he ponders almost every day.

“It’s of me and the Dancer,” Fuller said. “He was still pretty dark then. It’s a picture of two pals. I like it a lot.”
He laughed appreciatively when I told him that to me, Dancer’s Image always would be the winner of the 1968 Kentucky Derby.

“Damn right,” Fuller snapped. “He was. We know. We were there.”