Readers Up #26: The Sport of Kings and the Kings of Crime
First, the frisky two-year-old Thoroughbred in the room: yes, it is August. But is it, though? Is it not, spiritually, March 148th? I feel a little bad for not getting the July newsletter out in Actual July, but by now it should be clear that linear time is an agreed-upon fiction. The French Republican calendar is cooler anyway.
Second, I'll be bald about it: this is not a particularly enjoyable book. I'm loath to call Steven A. Riess's The Sport of Kings and the Kings of Crime a "bad" book, because it's not, objectively, bad; however, as Teresa Genaro warned me when I took a copy off her hands, it's a slog and I resent it a little bit for not being what it could've been (one non-expert's opinion). I can't in good conscience recommend it to those who read racetrack lit for fun, nor those interested in the always-incredible history of the New York Mob, although if you create turf writing in any manner--journalism, fiction, or non--it's an excellent reference volume to have in your collection. From Tammany Hall to Anthony Comstock, from Jerome Park to Aqueduct, and from Dwyers Phil and Mike to Bill (no relation but I like to pretend the stakes race is named for him instead), every highlight and heavy hitter of 1800s New York-racing-centric vice is here. Kudos to you if you retain any of it. Raids, assassinations, backroom legislative deals, silk-swathed high-rollers, an enviable glut of metropolitan racetracks, the names--equine and human--that scaffold the current sport: Riess journeys through all of it, managing to exit without a speck of grime on him.
So the real question is, how did the author manage to hold forth on two inherently fascinating topics, two of my absolute favorite topics, and turn out 350-odd pages of dry tedium?
How do you talk about Thoroughbred racing (a flashy sport of long, winding, and often fascinatingly corrupt history) and organized crime (this is a Mafia appreciation household and my bar is very low) without capitulating naturally to the native juice? It's almost impressive, but not when you're in the middle of another paragraph composed entirely of dates and dollar amounts. I can't speak to the readability of Riess's other sport-history books, and of course "readability" is subjective, so perhaps my ire is misplaced... but horse racing, as we have seen, is home to a lot of nonfiction that finesses research with true page-turning quality. Jennifer Kelly, Ed Hotaling, and the Linda Carroll/David Rosner team are just a few fine examples of authors dedicated to presenting racing history in prose that enlivens and amplifies, rather than serving merely as a delivery vehicle. I'm something of a dry, tedious person myself, and I have no objection to academic writing nor do I typically find it unreadable. I also consider myself a pretty generous reader--it's rare for me to set books down for long periods, let alone walk away from them entirely, and when I dislike a book my automatic reaction is to wonder why I'm experiencing the wrong thing, the thing the author absolutely did not intend.
(Maybe my grim recollection of reading this book, which I finished in mid-July, is heightened by my enjoyment of another doorstopper of sordid horse-adjacent history, David Hill's The Vapors.)
In a way, though, The Sport of Kings and the Kings of Crime is a nice little nutshell for the sport. An unflattering one, but sometimes the mirror shows a face we'd rather not see. US horse racing, as big brains from America's Best Racing to The Blood-Horse to any given racetrack's media team keep fretting, is bad at marketing itself. A Thoroughbred in full flight makes an easy case for the most beautiful animal on the planet. There's money if you like money, and there's grit if you aspire to an interesting backstory. There's architecture, there's the conversations of race and class and gender, there's rural charm and coastal beauty and eye-popping urban impact. There is, since early March of this year, an unexpected and near-total sports void, a niche to be handily exploited if that was something racing thought useful to itself or to the legions of sports bettors suffering from too much bankroll. Like the sport about which he's writing, Riess takes a helluva lot of a good thing and somehow squanders it. I'm reminded of the vintage meme format:
1) Collect fun factoids about the tumultuous marriage of equine sport and organized crime
2) ??
3) profit
Except there's no profit. There's no pay-off, save for a vague well, if I ever write that historical romance about a Nellie Bly-type reporter undercover in Saratoga falling in love with a Kiki Roberts-type showgirl, this book will be useful for worldbuilding. There are no dividends for racing, either, when its chief proponents fall back on nostalgia to sell the modern sport while simultaneously eliding the most trenchant dialogues of racing's history and present. Or maybe the current malaise stems from the United States becoming unmoored in time; the wall calendar is out of sync with the capitalist markers of work and school used to track and imbue time with value, while the racing calendar has been remade piecemeal. It's Whitney Weekend as I type this, but the Kentucky Derby has not run. "Win and You're In" has less oomph when I consider the possibility of a Breeders' Cup without spectators. The functions of time and bodies in space within racing--a sport so attuned to fractions and noses, post delays and horse lengths--are at odds. The bleak joke of choice for horseplayers is that spectator-free racetracks look a lot like racetracks in any other recent other year. Before the pandemic, before the current round of doping scandals, before PETA and government pressure, before any solitary factor to which we can now lay blame, racing's straits were dire. The strange lack in Steven Riess's book, the feeling of something being less than the sum of its parts, the potential spaces glaringly apparent... these are part of the larger conversation of how racing talks to and about itself.
If racing can continue operating while removed at ever-greater distance from its cradle culture, is that a point for or against the sport's vitality?
Distantly yours,
Diana