Readers Up #3: Out of the Clouds
I like horror movies. I especially like body horror, not least because while in college I found it exhilarating to write papers for Victorian lit seminars that referenced Alien (and also kind of like I was cheating, but the whole point of being an English major is that you can write whatever you want as long as you scrape up textual support and cite it appropriately). Invasion fear is an age-old fear; horror across media has consistently relied on threats to the body (personal or civic) to produce terror. The particulars shift slightly according to the dominant cultural fear of the time, sometimes the encroaching Red Threat or the rise of baffling new illnesses impervious to science. Horror is always talking about what people are talking about. So is sports.
The story of Hirsch Jacobs is an invasion tale. The dignified and storied corpus of American Thoroughbreds, under assault by an unassuming teen pigeon-racer? It happened, folks. The OG boot-strap hero, Hirsch; a Jewish Brooklynite among WASPs, a self-taught veterinarian and trainer in the midst of dynasties, a modest and by all accounts honest businessman rising above what was then a wild, carousing sport often under the eye of Feds. Fellow trainers, rival owners, and longtime horseplayers lodged their digs by way of Jacobs’ status as a halterman, a claiming trainer, never mind his rapid and continuing success with lower-rank horses. It was infuriating to some pillars of the turf that a man could arrive from nowhere, benefiting from no particular background and no known name, to shake up their tracks, create a regimented operation of efficiency and precision, and make bank. The Jockey Club never even admitted Jacobs to their ranks. Thoroughbreds have always been a matter of blood. The blood, as more than one Dracula has intoned, is the life.
Out of the Clouds isn’t a horror novel, of course. It’s very good pop history, written by the co-authors of Duel for the Crown, thoroughly researched and engagingly presented. It's a good holiday-weekend read, if you're still looking for one: chunky but not daunting, detailed but not dense, and bearing my juvenile favorite aspect of non-fiction books, the sheaf of photographs nestled in the centerfold like delectable, sepia-toned nougat. Who could resist Hirsch Jacobs, based on these pictures and his unlikely story? Americans love an unlikely story, a fairy tale, an inkling that we too could be part of the myth--but we have a bad habit of flattening any characteristic marking the characters of a fairy tale as different from ourselves. Whoever they are, they become a cipher and template, rather than remaining a Jewish man or a Black woman. If they, the imperial they, have made it, anyone can, and the only thing standing in their way was a cosmic indifference to be overcome by sheer will, not institutional oppression. In this way, Jacobs fills in for anyone who achieves the American Dream. Yet his story is brimming with undeniable tones of ethnic othering, class and status concerns, and the political leanings that often seed from marginalization.
Hirsch Jacobs! He sure did make a stubborn clunker of a claiming horse into a superstar! He also supported backstretch workers, local New York breeders, and small-time trainers during labor disputes. That may or may not be as sexy to current Thoroughbred enthusiasts. But Jacobs' position as the halterman who made good and Stymie's as the people's horse are eminently relevant to racing conversations today, as is the question of which of Jacobs' legacies are being carried on: the significance of claiming horses, working-class perspectives, and personnel of color to the sport's vitality, or the business-first mentality that initially set Jacobs apart from racing aristocracy but morphed gradually into today's supertrainer barns and turn-and-burn campaigning? The great Jessica Chapel was kind enough to talk with me about some of these topics--find our chat below!
(Conversation condensed for clarity)
DIANA HURLBURT: So, Out of the Clouds! of course, Suffolk Downs has a giant Stymie banner right there in the main hall, and I'm absolutely planning to bring this book to Aqueduct when the race named for him runs.
JESSICA CHAPEL: Stymie is one of those horses with charisma across the decades. Kelso is another.
DH: Stymie in hindsight seems like almost as much of a Hollywood dream-factory horse as Seabiscuit.
JC: Yes, and Hirsch Jacobs and his relationship with Isidor Bieber seems ripe for the movies too. Something about the book that jarred me was the presence of Damon Runyon--as contemporary figure and as the sort of cliche he's become.
DH: Runyon is one of those figures that seem like they only could've lived when they did. There is probably no room in either literature or racing today for a Runyon.
JC: Totally. I want to see so much more of those stories explored in other mediums — especially because when reading a book such as Out of the Clouds, it becomes apparent how central racing was to their various endeavors.
DH: Runyon's bread and butter was writing about the ponies. Obviously his legacy is still with us, specifically in the form of Lemon Drop Kid babies.
JC: You're probably right about Runyon. I was struck by how much he and Hirsch seemed to be working together in creating the Pigeon Man's story. It was canny crafting on both their parts.
DH: But do we think it's safe to say that racing is rarely a focal point for popular art any longer?
JC: I think that's very true. The last effort was David Milch's Luck and there was an archness to that show that kept viewers at a distance. And yet, so much had to be explained for the average viewer. It had these compelling characters and a couple of story lines that really connected (for me), but it seemed to be struggling to reach an audience.
DH: Out of the Clouds is non-fiction, of course, and I've complained loudly about what I consider the bald spots in racing fiction--namely that Thoroughbred non-fiction is almost always more exciting and better written, and that the truth in this sport is inevitably wilder than any story. And Stymie seems part of that, as Seabiscuit does. It's hard to imagine a horse functioning for the public in our time as Stymie did.
JC: No, I can't think of a horse reaching a mass audience now. Zenyatta sort of crossed over, but she never became symbolic of anything in the way that Stymie or Seabiscuit could. My belief is, for that to happen, people have to know horses, have to be able to project themselves into the animals.
DH: Which seems to get less likely every year as three-year-olds go off to stud before we know them. If Stymie was a bootstrap story, I wonder what story we need to be told right now.
JC: Well, the story some people seem to be enjoying now is that of a horse as financial instrument for rich people to extract as much money out of the game as possible. Very private equity, very contemporary.
DH: The really weird thing is that, as nostalgia-drenched as the most obvious corners of the sport are, is the nostalgia ever for [Jacobs'] time, this type of horse, this claiming-king trainer, these city racetracks?
JC: No, except when the loss of one of those horses, trainers, or tracks is upon us.
DH: Stymie and Jacobs being so heavily associated with New York was on my mind the last few times I was in New York, of course. Sport is one of or maybe the great cultural glue and identity of American cities. The current-yet-eternal marketing conversations always strike me as amusing because, really, yes. We are all participating in the creation of identity here. But the identity I would pick is not Bluegrass. Racing has other identities available, that are maybe being subsumed in service to the glam.
JC: Well said. Glam is taking over all the other identities, and forget the working class identity bound up in racing — it's been blotted out, except when it crashes the glam heights.
DH: So that's what I was thinking while reading this book for the second time. What are readers carrying away from the page beyond that it's well-written and researched? Does it seem like a fairy tale to the extent that we can't imagine racing this way now? I do think it's a very good book. But it's easy to imagine it being received as, Oh yes this was a Time, and it is Past.
JC: I got a little bored with the (long) digression into pigeon racing and then I realized — this is what racing reads like to some people already (the past, blah blah blah) and could read like to many, many more in the future. Something I think about — and this goes back to what you were saying about racing no longer being a pop culture focal point — is that it was only a few decades ago that racing was a mass entertainment that drove millions in wagering, in technological development and adoption, and media.
DH: To have a horse be a household name... that's huge, and baffling.
JC: And now — I come across sporting histories and essays and other works now that don't even address that history. It's as though, because it's not mass now, we (researchers/writers) can't see it as the mass entertainment that it was. We're looking at it from a contemporary perspective, as this fringe thing — it's so hard to really see racing as it was (if you're not immersed in it, LOL, like we are).
DH: In popular media, racing now seems to occupy either the thriller aisle (Dick Francis, so aimed at the assumed graying fanbase), or a capital-L literary niche a la Jaimy Gordon and C.E. Morgan, where the sport is a lens for interrogating a certain Americana. Both aisles are fairly narrow and non-reflective of the sport in real time. I love a good, thick, motif-laden literary novel but Runyon's stories were *about* the horses and players.
JC: Runyon was about the horses and the players and he made them into characters — he played up the wild and the rogue, loved the language of them all.
DH: And it's easy to say, looking back, oh Runyon was doing this and that with his stories, this is what his stories tell us about the values of the time--but at the time, he was making entertainment.
JC: It's not just that racing is different, it's that news is different. The freewheeling, tabloid-y nature of early 20th century American newspapers is as gone as Runyon. And think about how journalists have become credentialized, just another profession — the working class newshound is dead.
DH: The question of journalist credentials in racing space, always a salient one. 'Who is allowed where' might be racing in a nutshell. Bloodlines, photographers, Hirsch Jacobs the Pigeon Man with no inherited connection to horses making his name.
JC: Impossible to talk about writing racing — or at least, writing non-fiction or journalistic racing — without talking about access and credentials and insularity and the decline of the trade press alongside the end of big-city turf reporters. That's it: Who's allowed where. The Stretch. The Clubhouse. Bloggers (sorry, that's an old fight).
DH: If racing by some miracle does see a resurgence in urban and/or blue-collar tracks, it will be less an instance of new blood moving in than people who were always there re-asserting themselves.
JC: Do you see that resurgence happening?
DH: I don't think I've been observing long enough, or visited enough tracks, to say. I will say that Aqueduct was without doubt the most multicultural fan environment I've been in so far.
JC: Something to be embraced. Part of the Bluegrass glam marketing that bothers me a lot is the extreme whiteness of it.
DH: Black horsemen have a birthright. The prime example of people who have always been part of the game, who built the game, regaining their presence--if that happens. And it really is easier to imagine it happening at city tracks, neighborhood tracks. For all that Tampa is a diverse city, Tampa Bay is not the most diverse apron.
JC: I can't say that Suffolk is/was, but there's something to what you're saying — there's a rightness to such a resurgence.
DH: There was a viral Twitter thing awhile back about a guy discovering hockey; basically his thing was 'why have White people been hiding hockey?' It was joyous, this guy discovering a sport that Americans (and Canadians) don't associate with African-American fans or athletes. And there's just no good reason why racing shouldn't be the sport of the people. It's so inexpensive. There are so many ways to engage.
JC: Exactly! And I believe racing needs to be a sport of the people if it's going to persist. We need a broad base of people who are engaging with it in all these different ways, as fans and owners and bettors, etc. if it's going to have any claim on cultural relevance.
DH: It simultaneously has a very low and very high threshold for entry. It only seems intimidating. But anyone could be the Pigeon Man.
JC: It depends — a big part of what drew me was the subculture aspects of it, and the literature and language. The intimidating parts came later. Anyone can be Pigeon Man! Although, one thing I thought, reading the description of his operation, was that Jacobs was, in some ways, the first Super Trainer.
DH: Absolutely. At some point during the Breeders' Cup this year, I saw someone refer to Aidan O'Brien's "fleet" which reminded me of Jacobs' "fleet of taxicabs."
JC: Ha! Nice connection.
DH: It's maybe too bad that Jacobs' inheritors are interested mostly in classy blood.
JC: You know, Baffert could be called Pigeon Man redux. Started with Quarter Horses. Now he's a two-time Triple Crown winner. Stakes are higher but similar climb.
DH: I guess we would say Baffert has a fleet of Lambos. In terms of image management, Lukas comes to mind. The precision (shedrows!), the rhetoric. As endearing as I find Jacobs, the ultimate point of his story and Stymie's is that hey, started off small and now we're here (where 'here' is 'millionaires').
JC: American Dream. (I'm Gen X, so that was said ironically.)
DH: Maybe the real fairy tale is one of a horse that's just a nice claimer. Always game, never quite Good Enough, retires sound after eight years of campaign, a pleasure to watch, never gonna see him in graded stakes but why would you want to? There's this sense that a horse or a trainer or the sport has to keep on going. Up, up.
JC: I think of claiming horses running as recently as the '80s — like Creme de La Fete. He was that horse, and he had his devoted fans, and was celebrated for that gameness.
DH: It's weird to suggest that an industry should shoot low, but sometimes I think racing should. You can stand at the top of the stretch, or you can pay to sit in a cushioned cubby in The Stretch, and meanwhile--the horses are running.
JC: In this way, the stories that we tell about racing — and take away from racing — are so tied up in the larger stories that we're telling about ourselves as a society. Who are we now? We want to to be Justify. We want to celebrate Justify. He is the fairy tale. Not my fairy tale, to be clear!
DH: And you know I hate that, like, I love Justify in a vacuum. He's a great fairy tale! But he doesn't exist in a vacuum. I would love if the stories we told about horses were About Horses, but the horses are metaphors, of course.
JC: Can they be just horses? Really — I'm actually sitting here a little gobsmacked trying to think this through — what has been written about a horse that is just about the horse?
DH: Not much in recent memory.
JC: No. Wow, this is hitting me as both a literary loss and a challenge.
DH: It's discouraging. Justify deserves to have his story be about him. Accelerate deserves more than to be a foil.
JC: They deserve to be seen.
DH: Given the tendency to retire successful colts early to cash in on that good-good, do you think racing has decimated its chances of seeing handicap competition as described in Out of the Clouds?
JC: Only until the next market collapse!
DH: Hm, that's a line of questioning. Who was big in racing in 2009? Rachel Alexandra was so close to being the next equine hero, if only the market had collapsed a little harder.
JC: I love Rachel Alexandra beyond reason, she was transcendent at her best. If only she hadn't crashed back to mortaldom as a 4-year-old. And yet I love her no less.
DH: Part of the true absurdity of Stymie was that he got so many goddamn chances.
JC: Seriously. Jacobs kept tinkering, kept listening to the horse, kept trying to find the right spots for him. This was not a man concerned about dinging a stud fee.
DH: They both seem like characters from a different planet, set alongside contemporary trainers and training practices. The authors of this book aren't really didactic, which is normally a good thing for pop history texts, but I'm almost afraid it's too easy to view the story as--a story. Nothing to be applied, too far removed, the past is a foreign country. Likely the exact circumstances that made Stymie possible can't be replicated now, but there's so much in this book that I want.
JC: Now, they don't tie it to the present, do they? Patrice, Jacobs' daughter, gets mentioned, but there's no discussion of how she continued to be involved in racing, no sense of how multi-generational the game can be.
DH: I wonder if that's an oversight, or an oversight. As in, who is the perceived readership?
JC: Or did it not occur to them that that was part of the story, as legacy?
DH: Either way, it's a weird blank. They might like to plug their other book for casual, non-racetracker readers. And they might like to lean into the idea of racing as a continuing story, for people already invested.
JC: That's an idea, racing stories as series, links in a larger tale.
DH: In my view, the most effective narrative of racing is one of interconnection, from the most successful instances of smaller, regionally vital tracks to the very nature of fan interactions along the fence.
JC: I'd like to see that narrative ascendant.
Many thanks to Jessica for diving into the book with me, and providing much fodder for thought, as she always does! Follow her on Twitter @railbird and check out the Railbird Style website for sharp commentary on racing's history, values, trends, and culture.
Yours among the claiming ranks,
Diana