“[Charles] Hatton had no way of knowing it then as he sat on the bench, but there was a young racehorse turning the corner of the racetrack--perhaps 150 yards away--who would fulfill some ideal that he had been turning over in his head since Billy Walker put it there more than fifty years ago.
Secretariat walked down the pathway toward the paddock, toward the towering canopy of trees above the saddling area, toward Hatton, who saw the colt and came to his feet. The red horse filled Hatton's eyes of an instant, not striding into his field of vision but swimming into it, pulling Hatton from the bench to a standstill before him.
Hatton had seen thousands of horses in his life, thousands of two-year-olds, and suddenly on this July afternoon of 1972 he found the 106-carat diamond: "It was like seeing a bunch of gravel and there was the Kohinoor lying in there. It was so unexpected. I thought, 'Jesus Christ, I never saw a horse that looked like that before.”