The Big Horse
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“Horses stay the same from the day they are born until the day they die… They are only changed by the way people treat them.”
—Tom Smith
I've had this weird fascination with Thoroughbred horse racing for years. Triple Crown season kick-starts it back up again. A storyline always develops. This year it's Rich Strike at 80-1 winning the Derby in a sort of crazed sprint from the back of the pack during the last few hundred yards. Nobody saw it coming, even the track announcer, who only noticed what was happening at the last second and nearly lost his shit completely. The horse was like an apparition suddenly appearing on the rail. Ultimately NBC had to show a replay of the race from above....with the horse highlighted the entire time...because that was the only way you could actually see what happened. I've seen the replay at least 100 times and I still can't believe what I saw.
And then a few days later it's announced that Rich Strike will not run in the Preakness. So, no Triple Crown this year. But the horse will run the Belmont in a few weeks. It remains a great underdog story, and I'll be watching. And maybe you will be too.
Anyway, my OCD kicked in and I dug out all my horse racing books, which took a few days because my books are in no order whatsoever. They sit every which way on shelves and on the ground and in closets and stacked on every corner of my desk and to find one I have to pick through them ALL. But I got 'em. Bios of Man 'o War and Secretariat and Seabiscuit and Dan Patch. Books on down and out race tracks and down and out gamblers convinced they're on the rim of a huge score. Books on the wild assortment of characters forever haunting the backstretch looking for what's called The Big Horse......the one born with a huge heart (Secretariat's heart was more than twice the normal size) and an extra gear and a certain star quality that's impossible to define but hard to miss.
In 1938 an undersized, crooked-legged racehorse named Seabiscuit, who was sometimes mistaken for a cow pony and spent most of his days sleeping, captured the heart of a nation bruised by the great depression and threatened by war. When he ran his left foreleg was likened to an eggbeater, but his trainer Tom Smith never tried to “fix” his gait, and allowed the horse to share his stall with an old horse named Pumpkin, a stray dog, and a spider monkey. Smith also allowed the horse to sleep in as late as he wanted. In his most famous race, his jockey had instructions that, if in the lead, he should slow the horse down so Seabiscuit could look his main tormentor in the eye before finishing him off.
That year Seabiscuit was our nation's biggest newsmaker, trailed by Roosevelt, Hitler, and Mussolini, in that order. Laura Hillenbrand’s biography of the horse (later turned into a movie) remains the greatest sports book I’ve ever read.
There's lots of romantic bullshit in all of this for sure. Two and three year old Thoroughbred's are like babies. They haven't fully developed yet. They break down easily and often. Not everybody involved with the sport has the animal's best interest in mind (Heroin was not called “Horse” because of its first letter, but because it was frequently given to Horses before a race to enhance performance)......and for every well-lit Hollywood story, there are 1000 that are played out in the dark. Horses are majestic, blameless animals. Man? Not so much.
But still we get hooked. As a kid I can remember the Saturday afternoon's with Seattle Slew, and the epic duals between Affirmed and Alydar. Little Stevie Cauthen, the jockey who looked about as old as I was. Jim McKay and Jack Whitaker in their iconic yellow ABC Sports blazers.....intoning with the sort of gravitas that zapped the head of a pre-teen. And always, all of them, sharing the stage with the ghost of Secretariat.
I was seven when Secretariat made history....winning the Triple Crown by demolishing the field in the Belmont Stakes by 31 lengths. The horse was running so fast people feared for his safety. They assumed his jockey had lost his mind. The track announcer likened the horse to a "tremendous machine" and that's probably as apt a description as any....coined in the heat of a battle that only the horse understood. Jockey Ron Turcotte was so stunned by the ride that he actually turned around in the saddle to see how clear he was. Secretariat was moving close to 50 mph. He moved so fast that it was hard to even make out the rail he was flying by. It was just a constant blur. His Belmont record of 2:24.00 for the mile and a half STILL stands all these years later. It was as close to perfection as an athlete has ever come. Watching alone from his home in Ohio, Jack Nicklaus wept. ESPN ranked Secretariat 35th on their list of the 100 greatest athletes of the 20th century, two slots ahead of Mickey Mantle and more than 30 clear of Bo Jackson.
I'm sure there were others, but Bruce Springsteen is the only living thing I know of other than Secretariat to be on the cover of Time and Newsweek magazines simultaneously. The horse was the BOSS. It was said that as soon as he heard camera shutters, he would pose. Kinda like Bruce.
In a bit..
—tf