Readers Up #35: Sports Movie Double Feature
Well! The Kentucky Derby is this weekend. Contrary to Pandemic Time, it's even happening when it should be. Here's a bad tip from me: just play Soup and Sandwich. You know you want to. Also, tell me your favorite soup and sandwich combo. I've been craving grilled cheese and lentil stew during Albany's dreary, protracted early spring.
In other Pandemic Time news, April is nearly gone. Have I read a book? Yes, but was it about horse racing? No. Next month, I hope we'll return to our regularly-scheduled programming--but for this edition, it's movie time. Friend of the newsletter Jonathan Silverman hipped me to a Silver Screen classic, Thoroughbreds Don't Cry, that I simply had to get my hands on through interlibrary loan; after two (!) viewings, I decided it paired nicely with a DVD I'd slipped into my own Christmas stocking this year, Ride Like a Girl. Filmed 80 years apart, this duo makes explicit the fact that little has changed for jockeys, domestic and global, in that lengthy span.
But first things first: don't let the musical-comedy nature of Thoroughbreds Don't Cry, nor its mediocre 1937 box office performance, fool you... it's not a bad movie. At least, it's not a bad racing movie. The nuts and bolts of prepping a Thoroughbred for a stakes race are doled out in fine detail, from the horse-shipping norms of the day to backside set dressing, top-jock drama, and a couple of close-up race sequences. The general plot, of a race-throwing incident that affects livelihoods from jockey to owner to gambler, is timeless. Best of all, The Pookah's young owner Roger has an eye for jockey style, aspiring to someday be a race-rider himself; the connection between experienced, talented, and volatile Timmie Donovan and Roger was surprising, yet effective to the point that Judy Garland's thin role as Cricket often feels like an intrusion (both to Donovan and the viewer) The lingo, racetrack scenes, and industry drama are unexpectedly pitch-perfect, and it's not Judy Garland's fault that everyone thought she had to be singing all the time. For any fans in the house, I'd warn that this isn't a Garland film. It's a Mickey Rooney and Ronald Sinclair film.
It's a jockey film.
Of course, Ride Like a Girl--the Michelle Payne biopic depicting the story of the first female jockey to win the Melbourne Cup--is also a jockey film. Teresa Palmer and Sam Neill star as Michelle and Paddy Payne, the patriarch and final scion of an Irish-Australian racing dynasty. As straightforward a sports movie as they come, Ride Like a Girl follows Michelle from her childhood idolizing the family string of older-sibling jocks along her own path to stardom and success. An accident that should've been career-ending, the constant and dangerous struggle with weight, sexist dismissal from male trainers and riders: each beat is familiar to any racing enthusiast, although the film might be eye-opening to laypeople. The ultimate arc of a sports film, basketball or football or horse racing, is never in doubt. The underdog will triumph, in the concrete or the abstract. If this sounds like damning with faint praise, rest assured that Ride Like a Girl is an enjoyable cruise to the wire--Neill is never anything but delightful, while Palmer's relationship with the real-life Stevie Payne is heartwarming and the Australian landscapes of Flemington and myriad farms provide stunning backdrops. For viewers starved of on-track race-day experiences for going on two years, the Melbourne Cup eye candy is delectable. But any sports movie ultimately has to reckon with whether it's content being a vehicle for verisimilitude, if it has any thirst for analysis.
Maybe Steve Albini is right, and no one should expect social responsibility from a goddamn punk rock band. But the binding agent of these two films, separated by decades and delineated by styles, is the figure of the jockey. Mickey Rooney's Donovan is at the top of his game, yet eternally precarious, pugnacious, ready to finish a fight to prove he needed to start it. Teresa Palmer's Michelle is only unconvincing within the necessary scope of the film's universe and arc--her prowess and willpower are never truly in doubt. Inside the vacuum of jock's room or objective viewing, race-riders are indeed the toughest athletes in the world; Mike Smith should never have to ask for a mount; and jockey safety (not to mention safety's relationship to money) would've been codified in stone decades ago, not perennially up for debate.
Ride Like a Girl passively relays the realities of eating disorders, extreme weight-loss methods, and misogynist workplaces, never pausing to question whether we have the capacity to imagine a different world. Michelle's success pays lip service to paving the way for other female riders, when the day-to-day life of most female jockeys at American and Australian tracks remains the same (Australia leads the US in numbers, with about 30% of Aussie jocks being women, compared to about 8% for us). Thoroughbreds Don't Cry takes as a given that talented riders are also assholes, necessary evils for trainers to deal with but not respect, and morally flexible when the pressure is on. Donovan's character is redeemed because of his friendship with Roger, not because the external factors of his workplace and employers change for the better. The intense individualism of the average jockey story is, by this point, oppressive... and it's unfortunately all too true to racetrack life.
Top-down policy changes privileging public optics but affecting jockey safety, without their participation and input. A willingness to tout environmentally destructive, financially abusive last-ditch Band-Aids rather than commit to foundational change. Pressure from animal rights groups affects racing policy, but where is sports medicine's call for rider safety? Where are labor activists in the conversation about backstretch workers and the rider as independent contractor? As long as the onus for success, health, and ethicality is on the lone rider (and trainer, and breeder, and owner), Thoroughbred racing will cash its checks, bemoan its shrinking fanbase, handwring over its public image and muse on its lessened cultural cachet, pretend bafflement that no one takes its greatness seriously. As long as no fundamental changes are undertaken, as long as the historic culture of precarity and distrust persists, the horseplayers professing confusion over the New Jersey jocks' objections to whip rules will be the same bettors damning jockeys for not "whipping and driving."
There's always a "first jockey to" or "first jockey since," never a bones-deep systemic shift that alters the landscape, broadens the conversation, and spurs growth rather than survival. Across the pond, an overture occurs now and then. The American racetrack, from the railbird's perspective, remains a closed circuit.
My thanks to Jonathan for telling me about Thoroughbreds Don't Cry, and to Target for having Ride Like a Girl in the check-out aisle last December. Sometimes you just need to zone out, watch a couple of lightweights having a good day, and then think too hard. Maybe we'll get back to serious literature in May.
Overthinking it always,
Diana
The California setting compounded by a close, sometimes physically intimate relationship between the young men, also reminded me of On Swift Horses. What a book!