My love of horses began when I used to follow some of the great equine athletes of the 1960s mostly on a weekly telecast from Santa Anita. That soon transferred to weekly horseback riding at a local stables. A couple of neighborhood friends and I would go every Saturday morning for a few years. I had a job working for a family across the street from me. I'd clean their swimming pool with a special vacuum for pools and then monitor and add chlorine weekly. For that I got $2.00 on Friday night. By 11 o'clock Saturday morning it was gone. I'd return home with dusty Levis and a desire to go again the following week.
Later on, as a 22-year-old VISTA volunteer in Texas I owned a horse. That fulfilled a childhood fantasy. As a young teacher in the Bay Area I chanced to make the acquaintance of another teacher who had a couple of horses for her kids. When her son joined the Navy, I took over partial ownership of a coal black quarter horse called shotgun.
When that ended a couple of years later, I was horseless for a bit. My love for the animal combined with a desire to study American subcultures soon took me to the backside of a race track. As often happens, an opportunity to write about Thoroughbreds and the people who inhabit the subculture of the racetrack came my way. The next 20 years took me to many barn. Many conversations with owners, trainers, jockeys, racing officials, clockers, and turf writers followed.
The rise in technology changed the sport like it did many social institutions. There was a time nobody save a doctor could make a phone call from a racetrack. Imagine trying to enforce that now.
Today you can view and bet a race from just about any track in the world via computer. People still watch races, but they don't go to the racetrack, with the exception of the Kentucky Derby and other major racing events.
The Derby this year made history. The actual winner was disqualified, for the first time. This comes on the heels of the sport being under a microscope by animal rights advocates because of an abnormally large equine deaths this year. Santa Anita, which bills itself as "the great race place" had to close for most of the month of March. So, when Maximum Security ducked out sharply rounding the turn for home, and took the path of another rival, the Inquiry/Objection light flashed. It might as well have been flashing for the future of the sport. The disqualification of the winner will remain unpopular and controversial into the ages. That you can bet on.
For me, all this doom and gloom, this unsettling controversy, this malaise that has filtered into everything it seems, is all part of the dark time our country and culture is experiencing right now. The tremendous social change impacted by the rise of the new technologies and the fear and anxiety, the polarization we have right now has blanketed most everything.
We can't go back. Like the number of racetracks closing for good, or the demise of department stores, or gas guzzling cars, or hundreds of other things that seem to have suddenly happened to us we must adjust and move forward.
Just about the best time to be t a racetrack is at dawn. When the sun rises on the backstretch, all things are possible.
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