Rider’s Eye View
The late John Oaksey’s bittersweet account of the 1963 Grand National:
It was, I think, setting out on the second circuit that the thought of victory first entered my head. Carrickbeg had long since made the fences look and feel like hurdles and, after jumping the water well behind, he moved up outside his field turning away from the stands with a surge of power that warmed my heart.
At Becher’s second time round he made one of the few mistakes I remember, and for an awful moment his big brave head seemed to rest on the quarters of another horse stumbling in front of us. But then, somehow, we were clear, and at the Canal Turn, as Ayala blundered badly, Carrickbeg nipped inside him like a polo pony.
Now there were only a handful ahead, and as the fences flicked by we pulled them back, one by one, until four from home, when for the first and only time in this hectic, wonderful race, fate took a hand against us.
He was denied the win. “I know who you are,” a man said to him on the street years later, “you’re the b—– who got tired before his ‘oss“.
Such Different Books
TD Thornton on why he wrote “Not by a Long Shot”:
I read a lot of great books about the sport’s champions and iconic figures, but after awhile, it started to dawn on me that very few of those books spoke of the racetrack as I knew it — minimum-wage stable hands busting ice out of frozen water buckets, jockeys who starve themselves to make riding weight, fragile, beautiful horses with immeasurable tenacity. All of these elements keep the industry humming along in unheralded fashion so the highest echelon of the game can bask in the spotlight, yet these people and horses never seem to have a voice. I wanted to give them one.
Jaimy Gordon on her motivation for “Lord of Misrule”:
Of course, I read “Horse Heaven,’’ Jane Smiley’s novel. But the owners in “Horse Heaven’’ are respectable, upper-middle-class people, not like people I used to know on the racetrack.
I hoped I might write a book like Leonard Gardner’s “Fat City.†To me, that’s the best novel about American boxing, and yet it’s about boxing at its absolute bottom end, around Stockton, Calif. That’s what I wanted to do — write a book about horse racing at its low end, in an era considerably before the present moment, and see if there wasn’t an open niche for that.
Such similar urges to storytelling.
More Misrule
John Williams reviews Jaimy Gordon’s racetrack novel:
Lord of Misrule isn’t a chore. It’s more accurate to say that it alternately charms and befuddles. It’s possible to move from deep admiration to deep suspicion of it in the space between paragraphs. It’s wise and flaky. It’s funny intentionally and unintentionally. It begins with a bit of overworked imagery and ends with a great plainspoken sentence.
Odds on the NBA winner collects the Dr. Tony Ryan Book Award?
“Lord of Misrule” is also among the 16 works competing for the Rooster in the Morning News’ annual Tournament of Books, which begins March 7. Tough competition there; “Super Sad True Love Story” is a solid favorite for the title.
Uneven Form
Janet Maslin in today’s New York Times:
“Lord of Misrule†edges toward some drastic final twists without ever escaping the impression that it is more of a short-story cycle than a full-fledged novel. And its texture is thick even when Ms. Gordon is at her most lighthearted. But this book is best remembered for flashes of startling beauty, despite a racetrack milieu of “la crème da la crud.â€
That sums up my impression of the novel, after I finished reading it last week. Amid the dense and often lumbering prose, a scene will open up, gorgeous and true in its rococo lushness. It’s best read for those stunning bits.
Writing the Racetrack
… with a literary slant …
Natalie Reinert, exercise rider:
But that was ten years ago, and I’d proven time and time again that I hated real jobs. I hated careers, I hated offices, and salt-laced lunch breaks, and, yes, air-conditioning, too — stale and tasteless and fluorescent-colored days — even worse in New York, where the winter sun rises after the business day begins, and sets before it ends, so that the brightest light you see all winter might be the neon and LED madness of Times Square glowing into a snow-filled sky.
Two horses galloped by, nostrils fluttering and snorting with every stride. I saw a break — the homestretch was empty. I gathered my reins, bridged them against the filly’s neck, and sent her back into a jog, and then a canter.
(Via @sidfernando.)
Elizabeth Minkel, pari-mutuel clerk:
I remember one woman with four young girls who came up to my window and went through the standard routine: frazzled, sunglasses dangling from her lower lip, she flipped through the program as her daughters shouted out horses at random. “I want the three!” one would yell, jumping up and down, and the woman would sigh and mutter, “I guess we’ll have the three,” holding up a single crumpled bill to accompany each bet. I imagined Mother Ginger sweeping a dozen dancing children under her skirts. As she sorted her stack of tickets, handing one to each girl, she glanced over all of her children and looked at me ruefully. “I just hope,” she said, “that I’m teaching them the right thing.”
Happy reading.
Reading Palmer
On the Second Pass, John Williams resurrects Joe Palmer for a new audience:
I don’t want to give the impression that an interest in the sport, or a knowledge of its history, is entirely unnecessary to an enjoyment of This Was Racing. But it’s easy enough to skim any confounding details and focus on the more universal sentiments. Like many great writers and conversationalists, Palmer mostly circled his ostensible subject, rarely landing on it. The most memorable stretches of the book aren’t about racing at all. They’re about recipes for jellied whiskey or the Australian hobby of “kangaroo chasing†or listening to a band torture “My Old Kentucky Home.†(â€I could have played it better on a comb.â€)
More than half a century removed from his work, it is good to be reminded of what a master turf writer Palmer was. Read the complete review (and then, if you haven’t, “This Was Racing”).
From the archives: An excerpt from “This Was Racing” about trainers Duval and Hal Price Headley, Menow, and the 1938 MassCap.
Readings: Alexander
Jockey Milo Valenzuela, retired in 1980 and inducted into the Racing Hall of Fame in 2008, died Wednesday at the age of 74 following a long illness. Valenzuela rode many good horses, including Tim Tam and Round Table, but none were better than five-time Horse of the Year Kelso, with whom he won 22 of 35 races. The excerpt below from “Chocolate Sundaes and Old Shoes,” by David Alexander, recounts one gallant loss, the 1964 Suburban.
The Old Man was running at last like the champion he had always been and he was gaining, no longer inch by inch but foot by foot, and Yacza, who must have thought it was over at the quarter pole, suddenly discovered it had just begun and his whip went down on Iron Peg’s dark bay hide to sting him into the realization that he was no longer playing with the boys he had beaten by six and seven and thirteen lengths, but with the men now; specifically, with the greatest Old Man of them all.
The daffodil-yellow and smoke-gray banner of Bohemia was waving proudly again down the middle of the stretch. The dark face of Milo Valenzuela was grim at the instant it came into the focus of the binoculars I grasped with sweaty paws. And now the crowd broke its silence as they went to the eighth pole and the yards between Iron Peg and Kelso became feet, and as they passed the sixteenth pole the feet became inches.
‘Kelly! Kelly! Kelly!’ It was a keening, plaintive prayer. I think the ones who had backed Iron Peg into almost equal favoritism with the old champ had forgotten the tote tickets in their pockets, for they were yelling, ‘Kelly, Kelly, Kelly!’ too.
A veteran horseman who had no vested interest in Kelso was standing beside me. I knew him as a calm and unemotional fellow. Suddenly his hand began to pound the ledge in front of him compulsively and his voice rose to the shrill hysteria of a schoolgirl’s.
‘Old Man! Old Man!’ he shrieked. ‘Jesus, let the Old Man win!’
The Old Man didn’t win, not quite. But the usually heedless crowd, the crowd that sometimes hissed and sometimes booed when champions have lost, was faced with the rare thing called greatness, and for once the throng fully recognized what it saw.”
Video of the 1964 Suburban from the British Pathé archive:
Readings: Smith
Excerpts from a Red Smith column (“The Melancholy Days are Come,” New York Times, 12/17/1971) that seem apt for this chilly, wet afternoon on which the Aqueduct feature, named for the much admired sports writer, is the final graded turf stakes in New York for the year and apprentice Jackie Davis earned her second career win aboard 9-1 Americanus in the third. Fellow “lady” bug Maylan Studart also picked up a win in the fifth on 6-1 Senor Enrico over the sloppy track.
Now is the winter of their discontent, the melancholy days without a thoroughbred running this side of Philadelphia, the cruel times when New York horseplayers are thrown upon the mercy of Howard J. Samuels and his off-track gambling hells.
Beaming through charcoal-gray darkness, yellow lights on the tote board at Aqueduct gave the time as 4:29 P.M. when the winner reached the finish of the 2,187th race of the season. Moments later the reedy voice of Fred Capossela came over the public address system for the last time…. On laggard feet, 25,380 immortal souls took their leave.
Reluctantly, they would go home. They would note with interest how the children had grown since March. Somehow they would get through 76 dark days squandering their earnings on rent and bed and shoes until the sun would shine again, however bleakly, and the bugle would call the horses to the post….
In the catacombs below stands, a man rapped on the door marked “Lady Jockeys.” “Are your eyes gray or blue?” he asked Robyn Smith. “Green,” she said, “but right now they’re red and green.”
Lady on Horseback
She was wiping away mud kicked into her comely face by Canning and Sip Sip Sip, who had burst out of the fog and rain and gloom in the last few yards to finish one, two in the final race and mete her back to third aboard Advance Warning.
The world’s prettiest jockey had five mounts on Getaway Day. She won smartly with Princely Margin at $50.39 for $2, was third with Advance Warnings and third with Schnappy, an 18-1 shot, finishing sixth and seventh with the others. Princely Margin was her 15th winner of the Aqueduct fall meeting. In 51 days she had 124 mounts and finished third or better with 37. Only nine males had a higher winning percentage.
“You’ve made it in the toughest league in the world,” a visitor told her. “You are one girl who has done what the others talked about.”
She agreed with a matter-of-fact nod….
“Has there been one ride that gave you special satisfaction?”
“The day at Saratoga when I rode Beaukins to a track record for Allen Jerkens….”
David Foster Wallace, RIP
Reported by Edward Champion, confirmed by the LA Times:
David Foster Wallace, the novelist, essayist and humorist best known for his 1996 tome “Infinite Jest,” was found dead last night at his home in Claremont, according to the Claremont Police Department. He was 46.
This is so sad and senseless. A suicide.
I am stunned. To say that Wallace was a literary hero and that his work had a profound effect on how I write, read, think about the world is an understatement. There was a time in my life before racing, when literature and writing were central, when talking about the oppressiveness of the ironic mode and the purpose of fiction and the merits of hysterical realism all seemed very important, because these were not only questions of literature, but of life and meaning. Wallace was an inescapable, but not unwelcome influence, the young writer who best captured the messy modern world, with its distractions and digressions, all of which required navigating with a sort of conscious uncertainty if one was really ever to experience anything. (And if that all sounds quite jejune, well, I was in my 20s and fresh out of a liberal arts college then.)
Wallace wrote with charm and intelligence on grammar, tennis, talk radio, taking a cruise, irony, infinity, etc. He had po-mo groupies, was adored by grad students, attracted his share of skeptics. The 1,079 page “Infinite Jest” was the dystopian, clever novel that made him famous; he became known for his footnotes (and was parodied for same). He was innovative, playful (with a gift for the absurd), and often hilarious, but never light — “he was not unfamiliar with the heft of existence.” His work still had potential; the best was possibly still ahead.
Horse racing was not a subject that drew Wallace’s attention, but he was a former athlete and a sports fan, and he wrote beautifully of what it is about sports that inspires passion in his essay, “How Tracy Austin Broke My Heart”:
Here is a theory. Top athletes are compelling because they embody the comparison-based achievement we Americans revere — fastest, strongest — and because they do so in a totally unambiguous way. Questions of the best plumber or best managerial accountant are impossible even to define, whereas the best relief pitcher, free-throw shooter, or female tennis player is, at any given time, a matter of public statistical record. Top athletes fascinate us by appealing to our twin compulsions with competitive superiority and hard data.
Plus, they’re beautiful. There is about world-class athletes carving out exemptions from physical laws a transcendent beauty that makes manifest God in man. So actually more than one theory, then. Great athletes are profundity in motion. They enable abstractions like power and grace and control to become not only incarnate but televisable. To be a top athlete performing, is to be that exquisite hybrid of animal and angel that we average unbeautiful watchers have such a hard time seeing in ourselves.
“Writers. They always break your heart.” Not unlike horses.
Readings: Kling
“In former days, if a business man was known to be a horse player, his credit was immediately cut off. The office boy who was caught reading a racing paper was fired on the spot. Nowadays, however, the business man not only plays the races, but owns horses as well, and the office boy gets a raise if he can pick some good tips for the boss.” — From “Stuff About Steeds,” by Ken Kling (Maywood, 1941)
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Jessica Chapel writes and edits in Massachusetts. Railbird is a Thoroughbred horse racing blog published from June 2004 to July 2019. More / Contact
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