Bob Duncan Making the Gate an Open Door

[Wandering Eyes]

There's nothing a horse can tell Bob Duncan about the terrors of a confined space. He was already on the gate crew, back in 1968, when he went to visit his parents at Laurel, where his dad was training a small string. After an evening at a nearby bar, his buddy threw him the keys. Different car, different handling. Coming to a railroad bridge, he suddenly realized that he wasn't going to make the turn.

“We hit these cement pilings, plunged over the side,” Duncan recalls. “We had waist belts on. No shoulder straps, which turned out to be fortunate. Next thing I know, I'm waking up, somehow stuck under the console–and I can hear running water. I'm upside down, trying to fight my way out. Then I pass out again.”

It was a couple of hours before someone spotted them. Next time he returned to consciousness, metal was crunching in the jaws of a winch. He assumed his friend must be dead. But they were both hauled out, stitched up in the hospital and sent home next morning. Duncan will never forget his mother's face when he walked in.

“I looked like I'd been beaten with a bat,” Duncan recalls. “We went over to see the car and this guy comes over and says, 'Yeah, there were two kids in that thing last night. Both dead.'”

A plank was protruding from the back window, immovable under the crushed roof. The headrest, steering wheel, everything above the console was flattened.

Duncan's wrecked car | Courtesy Bob Duncan

Duncan often thinks back to that miraculous escape. He was 19 and what a lot he would have missed, had the path of his life ended there. But perhaps the episode also helps to explain the unusual empathy which has made that life so interesting. For Duncan is still getting up before dawn, year-round, Palm Beach Downs to Saratoga, to help Thoroughbreds overcome phobias at the gate.

It's the ultimate behind-the-scenes vocation. People on the backside know his work, especially at the Todd Pletcher barn, but all that matters to Duncan is the recognition of the horses themselves.

Any wider celebrity probably traces to Quality Road, who notoriously refused the gate in the GI Breeders' Cup Classic.

“He's a dominant horse, and that was what had gotten him in trouble,” Duncan recalls. “Because he would get away with stuff. If the van's over there, and the grass over here, he'd drag you over to the grass. 'That's okay,' they'd say, 'it's Quality Road.' But it got to the point where he'd do it at the starting gate, they got after him with the buggy whip–and all hell broke loose.”

Coming to the barn a few days after the incident, Duncan noted that playfulness. But he could also sense the horse's concentration: he was trying to read Duncan, responding, the rope just dragging along as Duncan walked him round, never a hand laid on him. Duncan looked over at Pletcher. “I don't think we have a problem here,” he said.

“We just kept advancing each day,” he recalls. “First, into the gate without a rider. Next day, rider on, in and out. Third day, over to the paddock, dressed for a race, into the gate. Finally we shipped him over to Aqueduct with the other horses, put him through everything with them. Not once did he do anything wrong. His next race, he hesitated a step but then walked right in.”

Duncan working the gate | TDN

Such mastery seemed a remote prospect, the first time Duncan shared a confined space with a nervous Thoroughbred. This was back around the time of his Laurel reprieve, when given the chance to accompany a couple of horses on a transatlantic flight. Some chance! One of them had once got loose and run into the barn. When the outrider found them, the horse had his trainer by the chest. They put a raincoat over his head to pull him clear.

So they gave this horse a tranquilizer, and Duncan a box containing a lethal extra dosage.

“That's all you had if something went wrong,” he recalls. “Back then, it was just a plywood box with a rubber mat. He was so nervous: wasn't trying to bite me or anything, just looking for help. As we start rolling, his feet are peeling up that mat. And all of a sudden he's splintering the box, front and back.”

They were right under the cockpit. A face appeared atop the ladder: the captain wanted to know whether to abort.

“But I was just a kid and wasn't going to be the one to turn a plane around,” Duncan says. “So I'm petting and petting him as he's sliding and falling and jumping. Finally he just collapses. The other horse never turned a hair. Eight hours later, I'm all bloodied walking him out, he's a wreck, mad and sweating, bandages hanging off. These Irish guys who were taking him on couldn't believe their eyes.”

Not, on the face of it, an experience calculated to inspire anyone to spend more time than necessary with these animals in a state of high anxiety. On the other hand, gate work now looked a stroll in the park. You don't even need a parachute to vacate the scene. The only problem was that Duncan found himself haplessly reinforcing collective, ancestral error.

“These last 25 years I've been apologizing for what I did the first 20,” he says. “You didn't know any better. You're following tradition, being told what to do, there's peer pressure. I remember trying things and my foreman saying, 'You got to show that horse who's boss.' It was coercion. It put the horse between a rock and a hard place: he doesn't want to be in there, but is even more scared by that buggy whip out back. It's like going into kindergarten and nobody talks your language. And when the teacher yells at you, and you don't understand, they start hitting you.”

There had to be a better way and, especially once his son David was old enough to help, Duncan strove to find one. The turning point was a demonstration by Monty Roberts.

“He had this 14-year-old mare they'd always had to drag till her knees buckled to get anywhere near a van,” Duncan recalls. “So he has this step-up van backed into the round pen, and he's just standing there talking away, obviously he's a wonderful speaker and storyteller. Meanwhile the filly has one of his halters on, and he has this long lunge-line wrapped in his hands. And even though he's not really looking at her, he's getting her to back up; then asking her forward again. After about 15 minutes when he's going one way, so's she. It all starts from his face; she's watching him. With all these people crowded around, she needs a friend. So what he's doing is creating leadership, showing that he knows what her mother taught her about movement.

“Then he drops a good portion of the rope on the ground, turns away, and walks toward the trailer. And, seeing him leaving, she goes jogging after him. He steps in the back of the trailer and she jumps up behind him, turns around and hangs her head over his shoulder, the pair of them just looking out at everyone.”

Bob Duncan | Bob Coglianese

Now obviously a tuned-up Thoroughbred would be a different proposition. But Duncan and his son drove straight down from Massachusetts, parked by the starting gate, took a nap, and promptly tried what they had witnessed on the first two horses to come over. It was probably all a bit clumsy, and maybe they were easy horses, but they left in high excitement. You could get them on your wavelength, just from your demeanor.

“Because they're so acutely attuned to their environment,” Duncan explains. “They take all the information in, because it's what keeps them alive. It's an energy they have. You watch a herd run around, it's like a school of fish–and they do it at the gallop.

“So you show them that you have the language, that energy in your shoulders or eyes. It's really very basic. It's about movement. Literally in minutes, you can have that horse moving with you like a dance. Even though he's 1,000lbs, you hardly have to do anything. You just have to be consistent.”

With other horses milling around, all the people and noise, Duncan says they're relieved just by calm and kindness cutting through.

Duncan at Saratoga | TDN

It wasn't only Roberts; priceless lessons were also gleaned from Pat Parelli and Ray Hunt, who had learned from old ranchers out West. But it was never going to be easy, getting this kind of lore past the hard-pressed, hard-headed guys in the gate crew.

“I had some people mad at me for a while, as I was trying things,” Duncan admits. “Because it was all new to me. There was a lot of learning out in the middle.”

The first public test was a little filly who had a habit of standing meekly in the gate before suddenly flipping out of nowhere. The rest of the crew watched Duncan and his boy with a mixture of concern and derision. She strolls in, no problem; but then the adjacent horse goes berserk, gets hooked on the back and starts thrashing the barrier. “And while all this commotion is going on, she just drops her head right on David's chest,” Duncan marvels.

Nobody conceded a syllable of approval, muttering that she sure looked happier loading in the chute today.

“People struggle with change,” Duncan observes. “They have a fear of failing at something new. And, just as some people have a natural feeling for it, others have a certain negativity. There's something about them the horse does not buy into, you can see them get aggravated, start looking for the exit.

“In the old days, we were always putting them on the side of the cliff: fight or flight. And in that mindset, the adrenaline goes up, the heart rate, you're hyperventilating, building oxygen for the quarter-mile that you can outrun any four-legged animal in the woods.”

To Duncan, moreover, gate work represents a single dimension of overlooked behaviors. One of his few regrets, in fact, is that he has had to specialize: he would love to explore uncharted fields of equine communication. For instance, he feels that horses prefer to warn than harm. It's not good for a herd to contain an injured horse. So if we feel lucky, when a kick just misses us in the shedrow, luck may have little to do with it. Yet Duncan has observed experienced trainers still relying on domination.

He might well have made a trainer himself. When Duncan's father died, Art Rooney of Shamrock Farm wrote that he had never known a better horseman. Duncan was only a kid when first working on the backside, though other growing-up experiences would follow out in the world: time at college; a draft that fortuitously sent him to pacified Korea, instead of Vietnam; he even did some modeling. (There's an old cigarette advertisement where he resembles Robert Redford's better-looking brother.) But in between he also worked for Eddie Neloy, and learned that rubbing a horse meant something different in a Hall of Fame barn.

Bob Duncan | Diana Pikulski

“I'd never touched anything beyond an allowance winner, and suddenly here are six of the top horses in the country in one barn,” Duncan recalls. “I was put right next to Buckpasser, and an Irishman named Patty Cleary was with Queen Empress on the other side. I'm rubbing my horses one morning, thinking I'm doing a good job, and suddenly here's Mr. Neloy ducking under the rope. And you don't know whether he's looking at you or not, with his one eye. He takes my brushes, works on the horse, hands them back, never a word. So I went to Patty and said, 'What are you doing, to get that shine on the horse?' He said, 'Well, for a start, never wash your rag. Let those oils build up.' And he gave me his rag to feel, and it was so heavy, almost gamey.”

If some old school lessons were precisely those he eventually had to unlearn, then Duncan is today proud that in 20 years with Pletcher he hasn't once “tailed” a horse in the gate. He doesn't use blindfolds, doesn't even own a buggy whip.

“They're so engaged,” he says. “They have curiosity. They're looking for you to give them something to do. Pat Parelli would take off the rope and halter, and say: 'Now the only thing between you and that horse is the truth.'”

And that revelation has been the greatest blessing in a life of privilege. Duncan thinks back to that car wreck, or to contemporaries who never returned from Vietnam.

“How can anyone be so lucky?” he says. “Scary things happen in life, but wonderful things happen too. I've never taken any of it for granted. I didn't do anything special and yet fell into this wonderful work, with these amazing animals. I know what a good run I've had, and just how lucky I am.”

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