Readers Up #29: Bare Knuckles & Saratoga Racing

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                October 20, 2020

            Readers Up #29: Bare Knuckles & Saratoga Racing

I'm not a New Yorker. Sometimes I wonder if I could be, but the Rubicon of bolting through yellow lights has yet to be crossed and I'm really bad at jaywalking (the soul of the New Yorker, as I've observed it, resides mainly in traffic habits). Despite this, even before I arrived in upstate I had sworn allegiance to NYRA as my non-Floridian racing body of choice; the NY-FL seasonal circuit of jockeys, horses, and training made intuitive sense to an East Coast sensibility and a lifetime of watching northerners vacation along Florida's coasts, while Gulfstream's comparatively sterling Twitter account boosted personnel until I knew ahead of time which riders would grind it out at Aqueduct for the winter and which would fly south like fine-boned birds for the GP Championship Meet. In some ways, settling down in Albany--with its direct routes north and south to each NYRA track--felt like fitting a puzzle piece into place. 45 minutes by car to Saratoga, 2 hours and change by easy, scenic, cosmopolitan rail to Belmont and Aqueduct: with familiarity comes comfortable contempt. You have to know an entity to rib it, tease it, cajole it, demand things from it. I could live in New York for the rest of my life (and considering the impending climate apocalypse, I likely will) and not truly know any of the NYRA tracks. 

Out of the three, Saratoga remains most mysterious.

This sounds counterintuitive. Saratoga is one of the most-hyped racetracks in the US, with Churchill Downs as its lone competitor in terms of fawning adoration and media focus. How then am I to say that I don't understand it? Maybe it's more that I don't want most of what it's currently selling. That said, between the Shake Shack and the Travers Day step-and-repeat you can still catch a glimpse of old-timers perusing the Form on green benches, Skidmore kids broing down with coolers and Xpressbet, the backyard's teeming life--all of it the legacy of upstate bootstrapper John Morrissey. Although Morrissey is all over the Capital Region, his remains interred in Troy and his Saratoga club house now a local history museum and his nickname adorning merch and his racetrack still gamely kicking home, I didn't know much about him. After all, it's not his name on the Spa's most decorated stakes race. Brien Bouyea's slender, eminently readable popular history is a great introduction to the man whose galaxy brain launched Saratoga Springs into American racing. 

Local opinion positions Troy as the up-and-comer of the Capital Region (I mean, they've even got their own brand of extreme music). A historic and gentrified downtown, assorted picturesque churches, and currently a helluva lot of beautiful, socially-aware graffiti... Troy is Claudia Kishi and Albany is without question Mary Anne Spier (Saratoga is Shannon Kilbourne, so that makes Schenectady, what, Abby Stevenson? I've lost control of my metaphor). So it seemed right to this reader that a figure as ineffably cool as John Morrissey would've arisen from Troy in its gritty boom years. Brothel bouncer to high-rolling client, homegrown boxer to landed gentry, political enforcer to politician, ship's hand to racetrack owner: the Hudson River swept Morrissey down to New York City on the coattails of commerce, and state history was made. Part of the charm of Bare Knuckles is that it lands as a New York Story™; I read it in part because it was on my eternal list, and in part because, along with a couple of fellow transplants, I've been reading books set in-state or authored by New Yorkers. This one felt like a personal gift, covering not only familiar geography but the origins of the racetrack closest to me, as well as juicy NYC gangster history. A far cry from drier recent Mob-centric reads, Bouyea's prose is suffused with blood.

Morrissey is nothing if not a classic rags-to-riches story, and we all know how much racing loves those. The son of penniless Irish immigrants, employed first by a house of ill repute and then by Manhattan's most notorious criminals (and also by the Dead Rabbits), Morrissey's bloodlines were murky at best and downright worthless at worst. What right had he to challenge established champions with his fists, seduce mobsters' girlfriends, woo gently-bred captains' daughters, buy land, run for public office? If you believe in the American dream, Morrissey embodied it. A walking FIGHT ME sign, his comparatively short life gave no quarter; most of us would be satisfied with attaining the American heavyweight boxing championship, but no, Morrissey had to go serve two terms in Congress and, you know, build a sporting venue and launch its debut in the middle of the goddamn Civil War... apparently because he didn't like being bored. The ultimate blue-collar horse, Morrissey's ascent smashed notions of class, as he hobnobbed with magnate Cornelius Vanderbilt and roped millionaire William Travers into backing a risky venture: a race course, at a time when Thoroughbred racing was all but illegal in New York and the citizenry's coffers were shattered by war and depression. It shouldn't have worked. Instead, it endures, a dizzying blur of fine pedigrees and hard-knocking ambition, barbecue-tinged backyard and champagne-misted box seats, a testament to the "deep and peculiar stamp" its creator left on New York.

In a year stripped of most of the usual ways we keep time, explore our surroundings, and connect with one another, Bouyea's book serves as a welcome anchor--shedding a little more light on the vast and improbable history of the state I find myself in, reminding me that the Saratoga season will come again.

If you'd like to ride along with Old Smoke on his way to steal your girl, you can order Bare Knuckles & Saratoga Racing from your local bookstore or through NMRHOF's gift shop, and find it at your local library. Happy reading!

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