Absent Friends
I like nostalgia. I like being able to nose around the corners of the Internet and look to see what it was like way back when. Cultural histories fascinate me. Reading to see events of interest in the context of their time period and their own little world is something that holds my interest, and it goes for everything from news and events, to music, entertainment and sports. And the best way I get to experience that is by looking through Google’s newspaper archives (for free!).
It’s now defunct, because Google didn’t see much merit in allowing the Internet to document such silly things as news and information, from near and long ago. But Google’s newspaper archives are as thorough as a collective as anything could be, thanks to the vast and distinctive number of sources that Google allowed to be scanned into their archives. So I can go in and read up on various things from sources such as newspapers in Milwaukee and Pittsburgh, as well as from smaller towns like Schenectady and my current location, just outside of Prescott, Arizona (and within reason nearby to Roys, incidentally—hi, neighbor!).
Imagine reading up on the moon landing, the Vietnam War, JFK’s assassination, Watergate, even world wars, and seeing them in the context of other news of the day, big and small, like what TV shows were on the air, what music and fashions were popular….and what horse racing was like back when they covered the sport like a Kardashian without underwear.
It’s fascinating, as I may have mentioned in other articles here before, to read about what Kelso or Kauai King or Carry Back were doing back when they were as big stars as a LeBron James, Sidney Crosby or Peyton Manning are in current times. The every moves of the most popular movers and shakes in the Sport of Kings were treated as important doings within their realms. I’ve mentioned that I get horse names from the non-stars that I can remember from my early days of being a fan in the mid-1980s in New York, and I can do just the same thing reading a list of entries or results from a brand-new Aqueduct in 1959 in the Schenectady Gazette.
That day, September 14, 1959, heralded, according to the paper, the most modern track facilities in the world, costing more than $33,000,000 and offering some of the most contemporary experiences of its time a track could offer. The first race, a $5,000 allowance for 2-year-olds, was won by Four Lane, and the day would feature a fall by Willie Shoemaker and the Aqueduct Handicap, won by Hillsdale, carrying 132 pounds, over Bald Eagle and Tick Tock. It was one of many days you can scour the Schenectady Gazette for, for over 50 years, to find daily entries for the NYRA tracks as well as other tracks of regional interest, like Rockingham, Garden State and Narragansett.
Rockingham, Garden State and Narragansett…those names ring a bell to me (at least, Garden State and Rockingham do), but not completely for the right reasons. You see, the thing about nostalgia is in the learning. You managed to learn about the glory days of racing earlier, but the not-so-glorious days I managed to discover here as well. On April 14, 1977, Garden State’s grandstand would burn to the ground, killing 3 people but losing no equine lives. Rockingham and Narragansett would have similar incidents dotting their history, but with different endings. Rockingham would suffer tragic fires in 1965 (one of a string of them that year) and in 1980, where it, too, burned to the ground. Narragansett would also see fire and tragedy, in 1960 and 1976, only this time, backstretch fires claimed several horses. Backstretch fires in the past, and breakdowns in the present, have been two maddening sources of tragedy and loss over the years for racing.
Because of my interest in nostalgia, I read up on many of the stories of tragedy in the sport over the years, simply by accident. You Google Belmont, Saratoga, Aqueduct, or just “horse racing”, it’s inevitable to find your way to stories about heartbreak and sadness as much as you can find the uplifting stories and tales of the glories of horse racing long, long ago. And my empathy takes over. It started a few years back.
I read up in the New York Times archives, back when the vipers weren’t charging you your first-born for a peak, about the story of Hugable Tom. He was a plater in his time, who had finished fourth in the Queens County Handicap once but was generally a blue-collar horse on the NYRA circuit in the late-1970s and early-1980s. He was trained by David Jacobson, and seemed like a King’s Swan-type, one whose career could swing between glory and middle-class heroics, and he ran for a few seasons. Hugable Tom would die of laminitis in 1981, amid charges of animal cruelty on the part of his connections that would contribute to costing Jacobson his license for a number of years. Wherever the truth about Hugable Tom falls in reality, the story of a horse that might have lost his life because of possible neglect came about for me in the middle of an investigation of another person within the sport who had willingly let his horses fall into states of neglect, and who subsequently was “relieved” of his privileges within the sport.
I’m no softy. I’m not a fangirl dotting their i’s with hearts and talking about the poor, pwecious widdle horsies. But I read a story about neglect, or hear about a horse who tried hard on the track and left everything, including its life, out there, and I do think about the side of the sport we don’t get to see, or the side that’s hidden behind the fables of success in the sport, and I get a bit sensitive to the animals that do sometimes “give their lives for our pleasure”. (It didn’t hurt that ol’ CV’s first name is Tom, and that he’s plenty hug-able.) I bred a horse named Hugable Tom in 2006. He wound up winning twice, not bad for a designed bargain-bred, and it let to me beginning to take notes, about the ones that gave their all. I kept up on the lower-level horses who gave their all, and added them to my list of names I use for breeding. I would mix them in with the old friends I came to know when I first became that young fan in the mid-’80s, as well as my own names I came up with.
My list of names is now at about 800. (What can I say? I like options.) I’m never going to use them all up, but sure as hell I’m gonna try. I add to it often, not as a macabre exercise into the tragedies of horse racing, but as a way to remember those that raced hard, and missed out on the glory for whatever reason. I don’t want to forget the horses who never got a chance to meet their destinies on track as they went meant to. There have been any number of backstretch fires over the years, documented in my nostalgia trips on Google, such as the 1986 tragedy at Belmont, which I remember only because it was news when I was in high school, which was across the road from some of the barns on the Belmont backstretch. If something was big news at Belmont, generally it didn’t take much for word to filter back into the community. Back on point, I found a list of names of the 45 horses that perished in some archive somewhere, and I made a note of copying those names into my list, many of which were unraced horses, from the barn of trainer Johnny Campo. I did the same where possible for similar fires at Belmont in 1952, at Arlington in 1946, and places like Rockingham and Narragansett and Garden State, wherever there was something to document about a loss in the past of a sport I had come to love.
I debated writing an article like this before. I was concerned with how macabre it might sound, to talk about the unpleasant realities of life as a racetrack fan. In these challenging times for the sport, with questions regarding horse and track safety popping up at a few different tracks in the last several years, should I really feel the need with more gloomy tales I’ve discovered because of an appreciation for the past? I wasn’t sure I wanted to come off like someone who enjoys the side no one likes to see. But I guess I look at it this way: as a fan of horse racing who loves the sport in real time, and lets that love get fed by participating in a online racing game simulation, we’re all in a position to do more than just enjoy the sport as trainers, breeders, owners, announcers, management personnel, gamblers, dewy-eyed horse lovers and just ordinary fans of the Sport of Kings. We get the chance to remember the past, and in some small way, set things right. We breed and name and train and race our digital horses in the Sim, and we can approach it in the name of winning on our terms, and we can also approach it with an eye on remembering the bread-and-butter horses, those who race hard and don’t always meet the appropriate glory we hope they will, who may get forgotten as time goes by, circumstances change and a thousand other stories prepare to take their places.
I have 800 names, with the list building whenever I look around online for stories to captivate me. If you have an interest in helping me remember some of the absent friends of racing’s past, always feel free to shoot me a line if you need a name for any horse that I have on my list. There may always be all kind of Hugable Toms out there, and may always be in each generation of racehorse, but we should try to remember as many of them as we can; the sport, and the game, is constantly being build courtesy of the horses that have come before.
If you have use for a few of the following, just a sample of some of the names I have listed, why not try and use them this week for your breeding? The pedigrees don’t need to be fancy, they only need to be whatever you want them to be:
* COAX FOR A KISS
* DEAL YA
* HAWAIIAN SHAKER
* JOHN C. C.
* LITTLE OL’ CATAPANE
* MR. LIRES
* MY GAL SOW
* ROUGH RED WATER
* U.S. KNIGHT
* UNKIE B.
If you wind up using these names, let me know how things turn out. Even if the highest speed figure they earn is 30, they’ve at least gotten a chance to earn some glory on some level. In this sport, no worth should go unnoticed for all the sacrifices that are made.