by Bill Barich
She’s far better when she tackles Clevie Raines, a groom at Gulfstream Park, who likes to watch an Untouchables rerun when he rises for work at 3:30 in the morning. There’s a friendly intimacy to the scene that’s lacking when Mooney’s working to plan. Her portrait of Donna Barton, one of the first women jockeys to compete in major races, is equally sympathetic. In fact, her book serves as an excellent reminder that the track is only slightly less patriarchal and hard on a woman than it was in May-May’s day. Mooney’s chief virtue as a writer is her ardor. She wants us to care as much as she does, so we overlook the rough spots and applaud her attempt to make it all cohere.
* * *
Kevin Conley’s Stud is tighter and more focused, and it explores a smaller canvas. Conley has two gifts any reporter would envy: ceaseless curiosity and a great sense of humor. His touch is light, sure, and charming, and his style is clear and intelligent. He had luck going for him, too, when he stepped through the looking glass and entered the big, complicated business of breeding racehorses, where he encountered “the sexual act in all its mystery and brute mechanics.” He hit on a story tailored to his gifts. What comes across most forcefully in his narrative is the sheer amount of fun he’s having. It’s positively shameless.
The fun starts in the first chapter when Conley journeys to Lexington, Kentucky, to meet Storm Cat, the world’s No. 1 stud, at Overbrook Farm, a high-stakes breeding operation. Storm Cat earns $500,000 for each mare he covers in season, at the staggering pace—in our pathetic terms—of two a day. The price might sound excessive, but his yearlings sold for an average of $1.68 million apiece in 2001, providing a return on investment any day trader would relish. The stallion has hundreds of children by now and still has a productive decade or so ahead of him, barring injury, illness, anxiety, or ennui. It’s not surprising to hear that Storm Cat has a strapping libido, but Conley also serves up clever celebrity-type gossip about him, describing what he prefers to eat (bluegrass, oats, and sweet feed) and what he does for fun (rolls around in a sand pile).
Indeed, Conley’s ability to turn the horses he studies into believable characters is uncanny. They’re drawn sympathetically as individuals, from the majestic Seattle Slew—he is recovering from an emergency spinal fusion and must undergo physical therapy—to the hapless Honcho, a teaser stallion consigned to arousing a mare before he’s replaced by the stable’s star for the final act. Forever searching for parallels between the species, Conley claims to identify with the teasers (“like it or not”), because they have a “knockaround, real-life quality.” His travels teach us we have more in common with thoroughbreds than we might think. “We both bluff, exaggerate, ignore; maintain alliances, betray loyalties, reward courage, seek affection; we annoy one another out of boredom; we mock our betters; we respond to flattery; we punish and humiliate those we can, and with those we can’t we cultivate appearances. We try to get along.”
Conley tends to run out of steam a bit as his inquiry progresses. There are only so many ways to describe a stallion mounting a mare, after all. When he wanders into the farm country of New Mexico and California to talk to minor-league breeders, you feel he’s padding out the original idea. That isn’t to say he fails to entertain. He’s always witty and informative, but the material loses its edge, and though his prose is wonderfully colloquial, he has a taste for pop similes that can be distracting. When he evokes the noise Storm Cat makes during an orgasm, for instance—“frightening and long and full of the inevitable”—the air goes out of the sentence when he adds “like the squeal of tires you know will end in shattering glass.”
Horse lovers will discover lots to please them in both Stud and My Racing Heart, two first books displaying talent and grace. Conley arrives at the paddock in fine command of his medium, as frisky and playful as a colt, and he treats his readers to a lively ride. Mooney has passion on her side, and though the risks she takes on her initial outing don’t pay off entirely, she never gives it less than her all and manages to cash her share of winning tickets.
The New York Times, 2002
The Horse God Built: The Untold Story of Secretariat by Lawrence Scanlan
It takes a brave writer to tackle a subject as well documented as Secretariat, among the most popular racehorses ever. Already celebrated in two substantive biographies, Big Red, as he was called, was such a media darling that he has been commemorated on a United States postage stamp. As Lawrence Scanlan notes, Secretariat came of age during the corrupt Watergate era, and since he didn’t cheat, lie or order any illegal wiretaps, he embodied the wholesome values Americans treasure. When his picture appeared on the cover of Time in 1973, many readers found it “refreshing” to see the front end of a horse in the space often reserved for politicians.
Scanlan’s goal is “to paint a fresh portrait in words,” and he approaches the task from the perspective of an avid horseman rather than a track insider. His quest sends him on a road trip through Kentucky, South Carolina and Florida as he digs for any scrap of information that might provide a new twist on the old story. A zealous researcher, he seems to have read everything about racing and even attends such mundane events as the unveiling of a bronze statue of Secretariat in hopes that it will yield some clues.
From the start, Secretariat had the look of a matinee idol. Born at the Meadow Stud in Virginia, he was a handsome chestnut—“bright as an orange, shiny as brass”—and the manager of the farm described him as a “big, strong-made foal with plenty of bone.” Despite such assets, the colt was so clumsy when he first took to the track that he earned the nickname Ol’ Hopalong, and it would be months before he was comfortable with his magnificent physique. (His heart was twice the normal size, and his gait the most efficient ever measured, according to an M.I.T. equine specialist.) Under the tutelage of Lucien Laurin, his French Canadian trainer, he went on to astound the public, never more so than when he won the 1973 Belmont Stakes by 31 lengths.
It’s unfortunate for Scanlan that Laurin is dead, as are other members of Secretariat’s entourage. More than 30 years have passed since the horse’s last race, and memories grow dim. Racetrack folks are notoriously tough nuts for an outsider to crack, too, pledged as they are to a peculiar code of omertà. When a jockey or an exercise rider does open up to Scanlan, the results are hardly revelatory. Secretariat was a wonderful horse, they all agree, and everybody loved him. It doesn’t help matters when Scanlan consults the Internet and reproduces similarly bland sentiments from the fans.
Scanlan fares better with Edward (Shorty) Sweat, Secretariat’s devoted groom, a flashy dresser who liked vodka, danced the boogaloo and fathered four children by three different women. Powerfully built, with massive forearms, Sweat joined the exodus of Southern black men who hired on as grooms because the job paid a halfway-decent wage and beat picking cotton. The son of a poor sharecropper, he was working steadily with horses at 14 and eventually landed at Laurin’s Holly Hill Farm, the ticket that led him to the big time in New York.
Like Laurin, Sweat has been dead for years, so Scanlan must rely on the testimony of friends and relations. He locates Marvin Moorer, Sweat’s son, and the groom’s old cronies Gus Gray and Charlie Davis, among others. Again the comments he records are remarkably uniform. By all accounts, Sweat was kind and generous, with a habit of deference to whites and a gift for drawing out the best in a horse. He adored Secretariat and even slept on a cot outside his stall before important races. Their rapport was extraordinary. Moorer says Sweat talked constantly to his charge in a Creole patois known as Geechee, a centuries-old slave language, and Secretariat listened.
In the end, though, there’s a fair degree of unsolved mystery about Sweat, who lost his house in Queens in a dispute over back taxes and died a pauper. Drink played a part, apparently, and he may not have been properly compensated for his efforts on behalf of Secretariat and Riva Ridge, another Derby winner, but grooms are a strange tribe and often contribute to their own misery. Scanlan rightly praises them as unsung heroes who de
serve better pay and living conditions, yet they also resemble Melville’s Bartleby, in that they “prefer not to.” Shorty Sweat had the skills to be a trainer, for instance, but Moorer suggests he didn’t want the responsibility.
A case can be made that Sweat’s sad decline was a form of mourning for the horse he loved, and the celebrity that went with it, but it’s also probable that Sweat knew how to do only one thing—be a groom—and it wore him down. Scanlan is a compassionate reporter, but he doesn’t bring Sweat to life or explore his dark side, so the rough-and-tumble aspects of racing stay under wraps. Still, the author is an amiable companion on the road, and his portrait, though neither gritty nor entirely fresh, will satisfy those who can’t get enough of Secretariat.
The New York Times, 2007
Black Meastro by Joe Drape/Man O’ War by Dorothy Ours
Hard as it is to imagine, horse racing used to be nearly as popular as baseball, so rich in prize money and the profits from fixed races that Babe Ruth once demanded the Red Sox pay him as much as a top jockey. The Babe’s asking price was $15,000 for one season, or about five grand less than Winfield O’Connor, only 15, had earned as a contract rider in 1900. Dressed in a white vest with $5 gold pieces for buttons, Winnie relished the role of superstar and shared the spotlight with some famous African-American jockeys, none more extraordinary than Jimmy Winkfield, the subject of Joe Drape’s Black Maestro.
Born to sharecroppers in the Kentucky Bluegrass in 1882, Winkfield caught the racing bug as a pint-size kid and began working as a groom and exercise rider not long after. Since the days of slavery, owners in the Deep South had trusted blacks with their horses. As a black stable hand put it, the track was one of two places on earth where all men were created equal—on the turf and under it. Still, Winkfield didn’t have it easy. White riders banged him around, and the stewards hampered him. After his first race, in Chicago, he was suspended for a year over a questionable infraction.
Yet Winkfield survived, improved and won the Kentucky Derby twice, in 1901 and 1902. Along the way, he met a lot of eccentric characters, whom Drape captures in cameos—Father Bill Daly, for instance, a wooden-legged New York trainer and owner (but not a priest), who preyed on Irish street urchins, schooled them as jockeys and beat them if they rode badly; and the inimitable Winnie O’Connor, whose pasty face “was often black-and-blue from his third career as an amateur prizefighter.” His second was as a competitive cyclist.
The success of black riders led to a backlash, especially in the East. When Winkfield tried to crack the New York circuit, he got nowhere because white jockeys had formed “an anti-colored union.” The rides began to dry up in Kentucky, too, thanks to Jim Crow, so he headed to Russia, where he took the drastic step of signing on as a stable jockey to Gen. Michael Lazarev, an Armenian oil magnate. Winkfield was 21, stood five feet tall and couldn’t speak a word of Russian.
Drape’s impeccable research lends this aspect of the story scope and drama. In Moscow, Winkfield rode so brilliantly that he joined the city’s elite and married Alexandra Yalovicina, a beautiful White Russian. In Poland, he won the Warsaw Derby and became known as the Black Maestro. Even when the war broke out in 1914 and his apartment turned into a halfway house for wounded soldiers, he stayed busy until he was forced to move to quieter Odessa, leaving behind his wife and child.
Ultimately, the Red Army reached Odessa, as well, and Winkfield joined Frederick Jurjevich, a Polish horseman, on an incredible mission—herding 262 horses to Warsaw, so they wouldn’t be cannon fodder. Afterward, he set up shop in Paris as a jockey, married another Russian woman and began training, only to be uprooted again by World War II. He departed for the United States in 1941 with $9 in his pocket and started over as a 60-year-old groom in South Carolina, although his tale doesn’t end there. (He died in France in 1974.)
Drape’s narrative gallops along at a sprightly pace. Black Maestro reminds us how important black riders were in those early days, a fact that’s often overlooked or forgotten. The author, who writes about horse racing and other sports for The New York Times, does justice to an amazing life, but jockeys don’t typically keep journals or write revealing letters, so we’re left with a portrait that lacks psychological depth. Perhaps that’s as it should be for a man of action, and there’s more than enough action to satisfy.
* * *
Another legendary figure undergoes close scrutiny in Dorothy Ours’s Man O’ War. Arguably the greatest American racehorse, Man O’ War burst onto the scene just when the sport needed some fresh blood to wake it from the doldrums of a nationwide anti-gambling crusade. In 1911, only Kentucky, Maryland and Virginia offered state-sanctioned races with betting. New York was a wasteland until August Belmont Jr., the chairman of the Jockey Club, revived racing that same year with a “legal compromise” that allowed bookies to take wagers, although only via oral agreements with hundreds of “friends.”
Belmont bred Man O’ War, named in honor of his own efforts as a wartime major. By Fair Play out of Mahubah, the foal, who later acquired the nickname Big Red, was a tall chestnut with an impressive girth, so crucial for heart and lung capacity. Needing cash, Belmont took his yearling to the Fasig-Tipton Company’s sale at Saratoga Springs in 1918. Though Man O’ War acted high-strung and looked ragged from a recent bout of distemper, Sam and Elizabeth Riddle plunked down $5,000 for him on the advice of Lou Feustel, their trainer, and their friend Jim Maddux, who was thought to be “unexcelled as a judge of horseflesh.”
When Man O’ War proved to be a diamond in the rough, the principals all wanted some credit for spotting him, and Ours (who used to work at the National Museum of Racing and Hall of Fame) cleverly conveys their wrangling. Like Drape, she has a passion for research, although she seems to include every fact she’s uncovered, not always for the better. She approaches each of Big Red’s races in the same way, describing the track, the crowd, the weather and so on, and these passages become repetitive. But she’s good at sketching characters quickly, as she does with Feustel, who looked “as if the sculptor who had molded him got distracted before giving him a final polish.”
Man O’ War is clearly a labor of love, and it certifies Big Red’s claim to immortality. The colt won 20 of his 21 races, usually carrying lots of weight, and his only loss—to the aptly named Upset—may well have been the work of a crooked jockey. Indeed, Big Red was so feared that few owners would run against him. His final race was a match against Sir Barton, the first Triple Crown winner, at Kenilworth Park in Canada for a pot of $75,000. Man o’ War left Sir Barton in the dust, but he came back to the barn with a bruised foreleg and was soon retired.
At the Riddles’ Faraway Farm in Kentucky, Big Red became a major attraction. “Tourists ask first where they can find him and then where they can find the Mammoth Cave,” the farm’s manager said. When Man O’ War died in 1947 after several heart attacks, his funeral ceremony, “including nine eulogies and a bugler playing ‘Taps,’” was broadcast around the country. His story lives on, a treat for die-hard fans.
The New York Times, 2006
Horse Heaven by Jane Smiley
Horses have a knack for arousing our passions, especially at the racetrack. The sight of a talented colt or filly entering the starting gate wakes us from our usual doldrums and reminds us that we, too, are intuitive creatures and just as subject to the laws of chance. In an instant, we’re cut loose from our moorings and reintroduced to the uncertainty principle, at which point the adrenaline kicks in and the heart starts pumping for real. Beautiful and noble, complex and frustrating, thoroughbreds speak to us in a language all their own, but only those who listen with great care can interpret them as admirably as Jane Smiley does in her spirited new novel.
The track has many different levels, and Smiley chooses to concentrate on the upper reaches in Southern California, where big-money racing is the order of the day and the wealthy owners have a shot at getting to the Kentucky Derby or the Breeders’ Cup. Her trainers are modern fellows who bre
athe the same rarefied air as top trainers like Bob Baffert and D. Wayne Lukas. They’re businessmen by default, forced to cope with cell phones and fax machines while they tend to the wrapping of sore ankles. Some are as dignified and high-minded as Farley Jones, who follows the advice in The Tibetan Book of Thoroughbred Training, a laminated sheet of paper taped to his office door, and refuses to hanker after signs of progress or see any fault anywhere; but others are as wily as Buddy Crawford, a maniac, butcher, madman and jerk, who sometimes depends on crooked vets and illegal drugs to achieve a victory.
Horse Heaven is crammed with similarly colorful characters. Take Marvelous Martha, for instance, still an exercise rider at 53, who studies kundalini yoga as a sideline, or Elizabeth Zada, an animal communicator capable of reading the streaming thoughts of thoroughbreds and plucking hot tips from the flow. Jockeys, grooms, breeders and bloodstock agents, they all roll through the pages in pursuit of their fate, and their paths often cross in unexpected ways. That’s in keeping with the nature of the track, where the magical is commonplace and anything can happen. It seems perfectly credible that Tiffany Morse should walk away from her Wal-Mart job to join the posse of Ho Ho Ice Chill (think M. C. Hammer), a rap star who has “a real instinct for knowing what people wanted just before they wanted it” and rewards Tiffany with a horse of her own.
Smiley opens the novel in 1997, with a brief prologue that centers on four of the major equine players, all yearlings. Residual and Froney’s Sis are fillies, bred respectively in Kentucky and California, while Epic Steam is a Kentucky-bred colt. The most lackluster of the bunch, at least in terms of his pedigree, is an unnamed colt from Maryland, who’ll later be called Limitless and will confound the odds by going to Paris to run in the prestigious Arc de Triomphe as a 3-year-old. At the start, each horse is a cipher, with its destiny still unknown, but they should already be considered successful, Smiley says, since they have “gotten conceived, gestated, born, nursed, weaned, halter-broken, shod, transported and taught some basic manners with some misadventure but nothing fatal.” Such witty, energetic sentences are a hallmark of the novel.