Psychic Pull of an Injured Racehorse

May 24, 2006
Sports of The Times

Psychic Pull of an Injured Racehorse
By GEORGE VECSEY

STRANGERS are keeping vigil for Barbaro, waiting to see if the titanium brace saves his leg, his life. The odd thing is that relatively few people knew his name until he won the Kentucky Derby three Saturdays ago.

I knew him only as "Michael Matz's horse," having interviewed Matz at a show-jumping competition in 1989, only 10 days after he and his girlfriend, D. D. Alexander, survived a ghastly plane crash. Now the world has turned horrific again.

We saw the look of terror Saturday during the Preakness, when Michael and D. D. Matz, now married, instantly recognized that Barbaro had come apart.

The backup camera crew caught the deer-in-headlights panic as Matz rushed off to help an animal that was in distress because we had asked him to go out and win a Triple Crown.

("On Sundays the bulls get so bored/When they are asked to suffer for us," says the English version of the Jacques Brel song "Les Toros.")

The Triple Crown has this mythic pull on us, partly because of the difficulty of winning three major races in five weeks. Suddenly the whole distracted, overstimulated nation goes around like extras in the movie "Seabiscuit," living in a retro time, caring for a racehorse, leaving flowers and posting get-well cards outside the equine center in Pennsylvania where Barbaro, the previously anonymous Barbaro, fights for his life.

Horses have a psychic hold on us. Racing, the so-called sport of kings, was a pastime for the masses half a century ago but now is becoming a distinctly minority taste in America. It is hard for the public to stay with racing because these furiously bred animals tend to snap their fragile ankles before we know their names.

Barbaro's jockey, Edgar Prado, has been down this perilous road before. Last autumn Prado was riding Funfair, an English turf horse that was humanely destroyed after breaking down in the Mile at the Breeders' Cup, the biggest (and perhaps most haunted) day of the year in thoroughbred racing.

"That is part of this game," Prado said while winning two major stakes that day. "I put it away, but once I go home, I start thinking about it," Prado said, adding, "It was a nice horse."

They are all nice horses, yet racing is complicated by gambling. I have a suspicion that a lot of people who bet on poor Barbaro last Saturday would also bet on cockroach races, if parimutuel machines carried such action. Nowadays, people get faster thrills in ornate gambling dens in Nevada and New Jersey, or via grubby state-supported lotteries. Children numbly obliterate cartoon characters with a killer cursor upon the flick of a thumb.

It takes a certain mind-set even to get to the track and witness a thoroughbred moving at full speed. But, lord, when you get close to these bare, gorgeous creatures, how beautiful they are. No wonder Degas painted both ballerinas and racehorses, fascinated by their common grace and power and beauty.

Some horses just get to you. Jane Schwartz discussed the love of poor, doomed Ruffian in an essay Monday in The New York Times. I feel the same way about Secretariat. The only celebrity photo in our home is a color snapshot of Secretariat and me, on Sunday, May 7, 1989.

A friend escorted me to the Kentucky farm where the old champion was spending his final days. I will never forget the thunder of his massive, ancient body as he rumbled over the hill, checking us out, perhaps attracted by the sugar cube in my friend's hand, or just the need for sociability. His flanks were slipping.

He was an old man, as DiMaggio and Williams and Louis became old, but you could see this was a horse that once won the Belmont by 31 lengths. He was put down a few months later, but he got off better than a lot of great horses.

I've seen this all too frequently in my occasional forays to the track. In 1993, I stood outside Barn 21 at Belmont in a nasty drizzle and watched the trainer Tom Bohannan cry after Prairie Bayou was humanely destroyed, as the saying goes.

That afternoon I wrote: "Every time I see a horse go down, I wonder how long it will be before the animal-rights people take a look at racing. But I get around the barns, and I know racing people tend to love their horses, and I only hope for their sakes there is a respite from this horror." I still have mixed feelings about racing.

Secretariat's jockey, Ron Turcotte, made his rational choice to ride on the backs of large, moving beasts, and he has long since been paralyzed from a racing injury. That most humble of boxers, Floyd Patterson, who died May 11, had willingly exposed his brain to punches, and he lived to rationally defend his choice of occupations. Hans Horrevoets, the Dutch sailor who drowned in a big race in the Atlantic Ocean off England last Thursday, undoubtedly competed out of love for the sea.

These fragile thoroughbreds do not exactly have much say, other than demonstrating that they love to run. Perhaps that is why we love them and respect them and protect them, although not nearly enough from the stress of racing itself. After what we put them through, do we love them so much out of guilt?

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