Readers Up #17: Eclipse
You may have noticed that Thoroughbred people are obsessed with class. A Grade 1-winning horse running in a Grade 2 race is undergoing a drop in class. A Union Rags colt out of a Malibu Moon mare has classy breeding. That colt, if he wins first time out, is showing his class. In theory, anyone can buy class: if my lower-middle librarian ass shows up to Fasig-Tipton with a cool quarter-million, I might walk away with a favorable filly (an elegant roan Tapit, in this fantasy, might as well go balls-out) and into the winners’ circle only months later. But what my dollars have purchased is transitory at best, a money pit at worst, and the only true class mobility aims south.
Nicholas Clee’s 2009 book Eclipse: The Horse That Changed Racing History Forever is ostensibly about the horse whose name is given to racing’s ritziest back-patting ceremony and whose sire line has shaped racehorse breeding on both sides of the Atlantic since 1772. However, as with most works of popular scholarship, its sporting hook is the entry for a survey of a point in time, rather than a drilling-down into insider baseball. A fair majority of the text is concerned with the surrounding matrix of Eclipse’s ascent, the powdered wigs and royalty who were the “racing people” of the time, by dint of wealth and status, and the breeding, training, and racing norms of 18th-century Great Britain. This isn’t a slam; the book is a fascinating trail of bread-crumb historiography, particularly if you’ve mainlined the TV show Harlots (the show has roots in the life of Charlotte Hayes, famed madam and Dennis O’Kelly’s partner in assorted crimes) or were at any point in your wastrel youth an Anglophile. Lest casual readers get the impression that Thoroughbred sport throve and wilted contemporaneous to Eclipse, Clee does take the book forward in time, surfing Eclipse’s lineage to touch on such champions as Hambletonian, Phar Lap, and Secretariat. Racing and the larger world of equine sport have always been avid for Eclipse; his abnormally large heart presaged Secretariat's, and upon his death the horse was taken for all he was worth, in coin and metaphor. His hooves were converted into various trophies, his skeleton eventually housed at the Royal Veterinary C while his hide was gifted or sold, as though these portions of a great athlete kept his essence and power.
You may have noticed that Thoroughbred people are obsessed with blood. Class comes from blood, after all, human and equine alike; the obsession with Eclipse's physical remnants speaks to older beliefs yet. Horseplayers will go to great lengths to avoid calling modestly-bred horses “classy.” They have grit or heart but not class. Often the human connections’ bloodlines loom larger than their horse’s. The idea that California Chrome, a stellar racehorse descended from the likes of Bold Ruler and La Troienne, routinely has his class discussed tells you everything you need to know... or maybe the crux, in this case, is the image of a "people's horse" yet again failing to do what enthusiasts interested in revitalizing and expanding the sport might wish. Meanwhile, dynasties, think tanks, and grassroots initiatives alike seem wedded to spectacle, historic pomp, the bluest of equine blood reflected in elaborate human ritual: ritual that, at the end of the meet, has done nothing for public image or overall handle. Ron Paolucci, perhaps the contemporary answer to Dennis O’Kelly in terms of class ambition and big mouth, has yet to win enough purse money to turn his blood blue enough for entry into racing’s inner sanctum. The commonality of race falters when presented with presumed cultural or ethnic inadequacy. Unwritten rules are likeliest to come into play, and racing's lax and variable codes enforced, when a bourgeois upstart is stepping on well-heeled toes. Entering the winners’ circle one hundred and fifty nine times in a year doesn’t have quite the same ring when you’re from Cleveland.
Naturally, an enthusiast gleans something specific from a book about her beloved, and my eye kept returning to the book’s throughline of class--sometimes blatant, as when Clee remarks in his understated British asides on the status of jockeys historic and contemporary, but always present in the story of Eclipse and his outclassed owner. Dennis O’Kelly’s legacy is not twinned with that of his most famous purchase. O’Kelly (gambler, ex-convict, and, worst of all in the England of his time, Irish) was, however, the original stunt king of the turf. He was canny enough to see Eclipse’s ground-chomping stride for its possibilities; he was blithe enough to call himself a gentleman in rounded vowels, while padding his wallet with other, titled gentlemen’s cash. He was fortunate to own the greatest horse of the age, a horse which remains one of the few agreed-upons in Thoroughbred sport--fortunate, nothing more or less, as fortune is the ultimate hand on racing’s reins.
The nascent British Jockey Club hated Dennis O'Kelly and never permitted him into their ranks. It's easy to imagine O'Kelly's reaction as along the lines of Groucho Marx's, considering that the OG Jockey Club was just more of the same drink-fuck-and-fight nonsense of any other gentlemen's club of the time and O'Kelly already had plenty of that. But O'Kelly resented all the ways in which his sporting and monetary success failed to elevate him within turf's realm, particularly the most damning for horse people: certain Jockey Club bigwigs refused to send their mares to be covered by O'Kelly's stallions, even Eclipse. If the #MeToo era and/or the entirety of human history has taught us anything, it's that clubby men-only spaces are where norms are codified, partnerships made, opportunities seized--and that blood will always out. From fictionalized figures like Tommy Shelby in Peaky Blinders and the eponymous Hamilton to their predecessors and legacies in O'Kelly and Paolucci, men with ambition always want to believe that there's a dollar value assigned to class. That enough green will turn a blue collar white. That the best racehorse is fast enough to outrun fortunes of birth.
Infiltrating The Stretch for scientific research,
Diana