Readers Up #12: A Tale of Two Fan Guides
2001 was a banner year for author Betsy Berns: not only did she have a book entitled Win, Place, and Show: An Introductory Guide to the Thrill of Thoroughbred Racing out with the publishing arm of Daily Racing Form, she also produced The Female Fan Guide to Thoroughbred Racing for NTRA.
Wait a sec. This text looks startlingly familiar...
Let’s talk about barriers to entrance. Racing is a sport that appears opaque to outsiders, an industry staffed largely by dynasties, a pastime built on inheritance. It requires learning a foreign language, but actual participation is uncomplicated. You head to the track with $5 in hand and pay attention for about ten minutes at a time. Essentially, you show up and things happen--what comes after that is up to you. Now and then the movers and shakers really go in on this, seeming for lack of trust in other marketing options. A hobby that invites hours of attention to detail, endless multitasking, and dancing with multiple sets of rules that may or may not be applied in any given scenario? In this economy? Despite this, and despite the ultimate unfriendliness of racing’s official facade, new fans can happen. New fans should feel welcome. New fans will find any number of niches to be rolled around in like a horse with a mud puddle. New fans, at some point, become fans--or they don’t.
This must be true of every sport, but I don’t care about every sport. I care about this one.
A fan guide and a female fan guide--naturally, obviously--set up a false reality where male is default, implicit, and female is other. One feels compelled to inquire why DRF’s logo is on Win, Place, and Show and NTRA’s on Female Fan Guide; it sort of feels like our default New Fan is of the budding-horseplayer variety, enticed by jargon and the street-level expertise of a historic industry rag. Meanwhile, the New Female Fan occupies a space where female is the sole operative word, where ushering is required, where the content can be anything as long as the trappings are palatable, where an ambassador is more valuable than a tout. Of course, one feels compelled to wonder why two of the same book were produced in the first place, considering that their interior text is indeed identical (barring an introductory note from NTRA’s then-Commissioner in FFG, which encourages women enthusiasts to step out of the shadows and have their time in the sun). If there’s one thing men in charge are good at, it’s belatedly realizing they’ve left money on the table… and then washing their hands of the necessity to do anything actionable about it.
The friends I’ve made in the world of racing are cast in similar molds: detail- and data-oriented, meticulous, creative, unquestionably expert in their niches--and most of them are female or non-binary people. The stereotypes of ladybrain pursuits racing seems to want to reinforce in its marketing and products are rarely reflected by reality. More to the point, Berns’s guide is a good one. It’s thorough, comprehensive, and multifaceted without getting bogged down in racing’s extreme minutiae. It features of-the-Millennial-moment hot items like a day in the life of Jerry Bailey and an interview with Tom Durkin, dismantles anatomy and betting structure with equal finesse, and provides matter-of-fact commentary on horse ownership. The furlong structure of chapters is a fun gimmick, ranging from Thoroughbred conformation in the first furlong to past performances in the fourth and how the Triple Crown works in the homestretch. It’s introductory in the best sense, and it sure would’ve been a great book to have in hand after I began my free-fall into Thoroughbreds several years ago.
Instead, looking at my library options and finding narrow, specific titles such as The Skeptical Handicapper and seminar-level histories like How Kentucky Became Southern, I cobbled together multi-page Google Documents containing bullet points like “broken or sprained fingers are not generally taped during a race, as this limits dexterity” and “‘common’ is a bad thing to say about a horse.” Paulick comment sections, personal blogs, Twitter arguments, Tampa Bay’s racing programs, and scopey academic texts took the place of a handy all-in-one fan guide. Could I, five months into actively following racing, have defined exotic bets on demand? Probably not. Could I have told you everything there is to know about Rick Dutrow’s New York suspension? Duh. Would I have benefited from finding the nuts and bolts of an unfamiliar sport in one spot? Totally. There’s an obvious place for fan guides in an overarching culture that continually sidelines equestrian sports, and maybe even more of a place within a sport whose fanbase is rapidly graying.
The question remains: what is so different about a female fan’s experience that would necessitate a re-branded guide? There’s nothing specific to American womanhood in FFG. There’s no chapter entitled “Where the (White) Women At: Race and Gender Disparity in U.S. Jockeys’ Rooms.” There’s no sidebar of tips on avoiding handsy horseplayers at the bar, there’s no list of talking points about female riders and trainers, and there might be a chapter about how to throw the best Derby shindig ever, but that’s in both WPaS and FFG. Apparently dudes like to party too (to wit: every livestream from the Pimlico infield). Slapping a blond author photo and the word female onto a book cover doesn’t change the genderless content, nor is it particularly appealing to female readers. Marketing Black Eyed Susan Day as a girls-only affair might be intended to welcome women to the track, but serves only to corral female enthusiasts into predetermined modes of engagement. The corpus of a sport is inherently neutral; it's the surrounding cultural matrix that requires examination. Having endured girl-oriented marketing from my favorite musicians (thongs bearing the band logo, total must-have) and movie franchises (why was Jedi-themed perfume a thing?), I'll say it: blatant cash-grabs have never not been embarrassing for any medium. The chagrin compounds when it's obvious no actual effort was made. Either there's something singular about female participation in racing, in which case the sport has reckoning to do--or there isn't, and fan becomes an all-encompassing welcome.
As well-rounded as Win, Place, and Show/Female Fan Guide is, and as strictly-business as its tone tends to be, sometimes Berns too falls prey to insidious masculine centrality, as in the case of a cartoon diagram of a Thoroughbred's heart. One chamber is labeled courage, the second food, and the third fillies. Even the default racehorse is always male.
Still pondering that pink starting gate,
Diana