Crazy Good CHAPTER ONE
The 1900s was an age of Charisma, and some of the healthiest personalities, those with a natural endowment of the stuff, radiated their own heat—a few seemed like walking planets. They had a gravitational heft that had nothing to do with physical size.
—Darin Strauss, The Real McCoy
THE CROWD ROSE AS one to stare at the horse, and the horse, as was his custom, stared back.
It was 4:35 p.m. on October 7, 1905, a brilliant fall Thursday at the Breeders Track in Lexington, Kentucky, and Dan Patch, a big mahogany-brown stallion, had just finished an attempt to lower his own world record for the mile. He was still blowing hard, but after wheeling around and jogging back to the finish line—on his own, with no guidance or encouragement from the small, mustachioed man sitting in the racing sulky behind him—he had come to a dead stop and, with his head cocked slightly to the left, was slowly and deliberately surveying the assembled.
This was a trademark move, something he did not do automatically, like a circus animal mindlessly performing a trick, but often enough, when the mood struck. People waited for it, and felt like they had gotten their money’s worth when it came. Dan Patch’s fans used to say—when they talked about him in taverns and barbershops and at dinner tables all over America—that the horse liked to count the house.
A dramatic silence fell over the scene. An official clocking would come down from the judges at any moment, and a quarter of a second either way could mean the difference between the front page and the sports section. Had Dan done the impossible once again? In the press area, a finger hovered above a telegraph key.
From where the horse stood, he could hear the three timers in the judges’ stand, a few feet behind and about twenty feet above him, murmuring confidentially as they consulted their chronographs; if their individual hand-timings differed, as they might easily by a fraction of a second or so, they needed to reach a consensus on an official clocking. In an age when horse speed, and the mile record in particular, mattered to a mass audience, these racing judges were men of gravitas, doing important work. They wore suits and ties and natty straw boaters. They hefted 17-jewel stopwatches that had the power to transform a day at the races into an historic event. If Dan Patch had gone as fast as some in the packed grandstand guessed he had, everyone there would have a story to tell, maybe for the rest of his life. Tens of thousands who weren’t there would also claim to have seen the beautiful brown horse power down the homestretch of the perfectly manicured red-clay racetrack in the lengthening autumn shadows. It was a golden age of sports, horses, ladies’ hats, and bullshit.
Seconds ticked by, tension increased, but the horse, as a reporter said later, was the calmest person on the grounds. Nine years old and at his physical peak, Dan Patch stood at almost the exact midpoint of a long career spent, for the most part, touring the country in a plush private railroad car and putting on exhibitions of speed. He knew the drill: first there was the Effort, the race against the clock, one mile in distance, with the galloping prompters to urge him on and stir his competitive spirit. Then there was the Silence, as judges checked their watches. After the Silence came either the Roar—a world record!—or the Sigh—alas, not this time. The Roar invariably involved flying hats and a surging wave of well-wishers.
Dan Patch preferred the Roar. Which was odd, because why would a horse choose hysteria over a quiet walk back to the barn? What did he care about world records and the endless hype? The preference wasn’t horselike. Dan Patch was an odd horse.
He was different to a degree, in fact, that experienced horse handlers found amazing, even hateful (jealousy being a big part of the racing game). For example, though stallions tend to be skittish, lashing out with teeth and hooves at the slightest provocation, Dan Patch—an intact male who had already shown he had no problems in the breeding shed—exuded calm, allowing strangers to approach him and small children to run back and forth beneath his belly. He wasn’t frightened by the world human beings had made. He did not waste energy worrying, or see danger where there wasn’t any, or fret about things he could not change. He trusted—a quality humans found terribly flattering, and loved him for. As for the racing and touring, he seemed to get it, to understand that his job was to be this new thing in America: a superstar. Whenever he saw a photographer, he stopped.
That evening in Lexington, Dan Patch would be led into the lobby of the Phoenix Hotel, where happy drunks would pat his nose and perfumed women would want to nuzzle. Whatever he was thinking when people pressed around him, Dan remained charming and affable; the boors and the rubes always went away feeling noticed and cared-for. Fans sometimes pulled hairs from his tail to twist into key chains or put into lockets; in such cases, Dan might spin his handsome head around and cast a sharp glance, but he never kicked. He had an admirable sense of his own might, and others’ vulnerability. The only person Dan Patch ever bit was a young Minnesota boy named Fred Sasse, who would grow up to write an appallingly bad book about him. You just had to love a horse like this.
And people did. They turned out to see him, 80,000, 90,000, 100,000 strong, paying usually a one-dollar admission, a day’s wage for the average Edwardian Joe. Sometimes when Dan would amble out, unannounced, for a few warm-up laps, hours before he was scheduled to race, the crowd would erupt in a sustained huzzah that would not subside until he headed off twenty minutes later—sometimes but not always taking a little bow at the top of the exit ramp, stirring up his fans even further. Teddy Roosevelt, the president during Dan Patch’s prime, bragged about having a Dan Patch horseshoe at his home in Oyster Bay, Long Island (“A gift from his owner—from the race in which he broke the two-minute mile!”). The actress and courtesan Lillie Langtry visited Dan in his gleaming-white custom-built railroad car with his almost-life-size picture emblazoned across both sides; as famous as the Jersey Lily was (mostly for being the mistress of both Edward VII and his nephew, Louis of Battenberg), the meeting clearly meant more for her career than his.
On days when the horse wasn’t performing, people would wait in line for hours just to see him standing in his stall, sometimes looking less than regal with his pet rat terrier perched atop his head. Dwight Eisenhower recalled queuing up with his parents to see Dan at the Kansas State Fair in 1904; Harry Truman, in his postpresidential dotage, remembered sending Dan a fan letter.
People exaggerated their connection to the horse to make themselves seem more important, or better human beings. A common boast in the 1920s, ’30s, and ’40s—a kind of urban myth comparable to saying you were at Wrigley Field when Babe Ruth hit his famous “called shot” home run—was to say you were once at a racetrack someplace, leaning on the fence and watching Dan Patch warm up, when his trainer drove the horse over, picked you out of the crowd, and asked if you’d like to take ole Danny boy for a spin. The story, which was told all over the country, had two seemingly contradictory points: that Dan, like Jesus, moved among the common folk, and that you were somebody special for being picked to drive him. (Some said they jumped at the chance to sit behind him in the sulky; others, unwilling to weave a more tangled web, claimed to have demurred.) In their obituaries, many who had never met Dan Patch—or who had perhaps only the slightest connection, having mucked out the stall next to his at a state fair one morning, say—were identified as his trainer, owner, breeder, horseshoer, or groom, their impressive fibs following them relentlessly to the grave. So many people lied about having groomed the horse that one Dan Patch Web site lists as a FAQ, “How can I verify that my relative was Dan Patch’s caretaker?” (The answer: You can’t, because the poor soul almost certainly wasn’t.) In 1923 an early author of self-help manuals, Harry Heffner, published a pamphlet called Dan Patch: The Story of a Winner, in which he revealed how to become a more highly effective businessperson, friend, spouse, and Christian by acquiring the virtues of the by-then-deceased horse. In the introduction to a book called The Autobiography of Dan Patch, written by a publicist named Merton E. Harrison and published in 1911, the author writes, “The work of his caretakers, trainers and drivers has always been high class, but it has always been supplemented by the self-esteem, the care and thoughtfulness of the horse himself. Dan Patch has come to be spoken of as ‘the horse that knows.’”
Even John Hervey, the preeminent turf writer of the early twentieth century, a florid scribe at times but usually a sober one, fell hard for the horse. “A kinder, a wiser, a finer dispositioned spirit in equine form never lived,” Hervey wrote of Dan in the 1930s. “He was goodness personified. And wisdom. That he knew more than most of the men then on earth was the firm conviction of those who knew him. It was almost unbelievable that a horse with so mighty a heart, so dauntless a courage, such endless masculine resolution, strength and power, could at the same time be so mild, so docile, teachable, controllable, lovable. Those constantly with him worshipped him—would have died for him, I veritably believe, had it been necessary.”
In this one animal, humbly bred and congenitally malformed, had come together all the virtues the horse-drawn world had ever imagined. To use the parlance of the day, Dan was crazy good. Dan Patch madness was still approaching its peak that day in October of 1905, when the horse, with tremendous fanfare (which is to say, the usual fanfare), came to Lexington. The local hardware store by then might have a Dan Patch calendar hanging on its wall, and anyone could buy Dan Patch cigars and sleds from stores and mail-order catalogs, but the great wave of Dan Patch merchandise, the washing machines, breakfast cereals, rocking horses, dinner plates, pocket watches, pocketknives, pancake syrup, automobiles—even Dan Patch real estate and the Dan Patch stallion shield, to prevent the family carriage horse from masturbating—all these fine products and more had yet to hit the marketplace. Further in the future, too, was a certain morbidly cold, rainy day in Los Angeles, when the track was slippery, the crowd was thin, and the party was long past over.
At Lexington in 1905, though, life was good, and the rose was still blooming. Dan Patch, that day, was all about hope and promise and a possible payoff in the betting for those who had wagered, at even money, that he would beat his famous world record for the mile.
At last, a man in the judges’ stand stood up and lifted a megaphone to his lips.
In the grandstand, women leaned forward clutching the souvenir Dan Patch horseshoes that their husbands and beaux had bought them for a dollar on the way in. Men leaned forward too, and touched the brims of their straw boaters, aware that hats might have to be flung.
Dan Patch stopped panting and pricked up his ears.
“The time for the mile . . . ,” said the judge, and then he shouted the numbers, declaiming them clearly in the direction of the crowd. But for once there was neither the Roar nor the Sigh. There was only more silence. The crowd seemed not to believe what it had heard.
The judge, bemused, lowered his megaphone and waited five or six heartbeats. Then he raised it up and shouted the numbers again, hitting each one hard, until his voice rasped.
Silence, still, for another heartbeat.
And another.
Now came the Roar.
The events of this book may seem as if they transpired on another planet.
Harness horses have not made front-page headlines across the nation since fast food meant oysters. Racehorses of any ilk don’t linger in the mass media these days unless they have terribly cute names or sad stories involving shattered cannon bones or kids with cancer. The sports and pop cultural paradigms have shifted so radically in the interim that it is difficult to wrap one’s mind around the truth: this pacer was the most celebrated American sports figure in the first decade of the twentieth century, as popular in his day as any athlete who has ever lived.
Who even knows what a pacer is anymore?
Backward leaps the imagination trying to comprehend it all. America was already sports-mad when Dan Patch made his public debut at a little country fair in Indiana in 1900—but only boxing, baseball, and horse racing really mattered. The latter, which mattered most of all, was divided into two distinct, and deeply rivalrous, pastimes: Thoroughbred racing, in which horses run various distances carrying various weights, most famously for the roses each spring—and harness racing, in which they don’t run at all, but compete rather at either of two gaits, the trot or the pace, pulling a two-wheeled rig called a sulky, almost always at the distance of a mile, the weight of the passenger being of relatively small significance.
Before Dan Patch’s day, and dating back to colonial times, the Thoroughbreds were the closely watched breed; it was their major races that tentpoled the sports calendar (such as it was in the pre–Civil War years), their hard-charging champions whom the masses cheered; if you said “horse racing” before 1885 or so you meant the sport of kings, the galloper’s game. By the time of Dan’s death in 1916, the same rules applied: the Thoroughbred had reclaimed the throne, which he has retained into this inglorious era of 3,000-person “crowds” at Belmont Park; “racinos,” where people literally turn their backs to the horses while pumping quarters into video slot machines; and Yum Foods Presents the Kentucky Derby. America’s sports fans, let it be acknowledged, have clearly shown their overall preference for this handsome, hyper, powerful-yet-fragile breed that the English confected in the eighteenth century and still so steadfastly admire.
Yet between its two lengthy marriages to the Thoroughbred, America had a passionate fling with the light harness horse, or Standardbred, as he is more formally known. For the final fifteen years of the nineteenth century, and the first fifteen of the twentieth, it was him they clearly loved best, and they followed his sport—known generically as trotting, despite a plethora of pacers—more fervently than any other.
Trotting and pacing races highlighted hundreds of city, county, and state fairs during this period, and rich men paraded their prized harness horses down Manhattan’s Third Avenue every Sunday, rain or shine, sometimes competing in informal “speed brushes” for side bets—a cask of oysters, say, or maybe a case of wine, a Florodora girl, or dinner at Luchow’s; the “Sealskin Brigade,” the drooling masses called the rotund, mustachioed millionaires who sat behind the dappled bays and grays. In 1873, a group of Standardbred owners and breeders started the Grand Circuit, a traveling race meet for the best stock, a kind of movable major league. The first example of an American sport organizing itself into a business with published schedules and standardized rules—baseball’s National League would follow shortly—the “Roarin’ Grand” b...
