Readers Up #8: Headless Horsemen

I’m always surprised that there’s not a blind gossip site for horse racing devotees. A significant chunk of comment sections on Blood-Horse and Paulick Report, not to mention any given Twitter thread, ultimately devolve into a lot of exaggerated-wink, just-this-side-of-libel, not-quite-name-dropping accusations and tales--so it’s clear there’s a market for the Lainey of Thoroughbreds, whoever that might be.

Then again, we have Jim Squires, so maybe we don’t need Lainey.

Call him Gossip Grump, perhaps. Headless Horsemen, his second pop-racing text after Horse of a Different Color, is a who’s-who of the Thoroughbred world’s famous and infamous. The OG Dinny himself, Ogden Mills Phipps, Will Farish, Alex Harthill, even D. Wayne Lukas doesn't come off quite complimentary, and the text is awash in anecdotes that from a lesser writer might be termed petty. You can practically hear the Kristen Bell voiceover any time Squires refers to his wife by her cute nickname, or alludes to an event that anyone raised on hay, water, oats, and outré social norms would recognize. Spotted: shameless lawyers S and W wining and dining the Righteous Bros over cocktails at the Flamingo Room! The book is a time capsule of the industry in the early-mid Oughts, despite its author’s putative attempt to provide context for some of the Jockey Club’s more interesting decisions, map tentative reforms, and record the timelessness of grift and greed. Honestly, it’s a pretty tacky read. I have no beef with tacky, or with whistle-blowers, but it’s unclear whether the latter is what Squires is actually doing. If Headless Horsemen is written for industry insiders, then it’s abundantly obvious that everyone already Knows About Bob Baffert. Newcomers, on the other hand, will walk away more confused than before. What does “medication” actually refer to? Depends on the day, the racetrack, the trainer, the stewards. Are Dinnies to be dismissed as moral voids unless they’re buying you a drink at Belmont? Yes. Who is trustworthy? No one, except maybe Larry Jones.

The barriers to entry in horse racing are $3 and a nation’s worth of history, none of it located in the same library.

Reading about 2008 from any angle in 2019 is an exercise in futile regret (keep your eyes peeled for Kentucky senator Mitch McConnell, who also has another job title these days). Squires thought things were in shabby shape then? Boy, none of us had a clue. Readers who have been at this longer than me: was it shocking to see Curlin as the poster boy for exposé? Is it shocking now to see his name only in the context of uber-hyped sires, no apparent fall-out from Squires’ doom-saying, no national sea change in medical regulations or training practices, no attitude adjustment in the back rooms and clubhouses? The thing about racing that I can never quite nail is emotional calibration. What is a reasonable response to actions that, in other industries, might be termed bid-rigging or fraud? Why am I supposed to care intensely about horse health and only consider rider safety after a jockey dies? Why are the travails and fuck-ups of rich white men and slightly younger rich white men still front-page news? What exactly am I buying when I shell out my $3 at the door, my double-that-and-make-it-lukewarm coffee at the bar, my $2 on a likely longshot?

In a recent post to her very good Patreon, Natalie Keller Reinert brought up the idea of fandom versus patronage. We buy a thing, or we invest in an idea. This is the stakeholder; for librarians, patrons are the most obvious stakeholders, the raison d’etre. Stakeholders pull up those stakes and find something else to care about and spend money on if they’re not getting any returns. It’s easy to say I have no stake in racing: I don’t own a racehorse, I rarely bet on them, the job I use to feed myself and buy flowers and pay student loans is in an unrelated field. I am new and green and, by most metrics, it isn’t just that I don’t have a stake... I don’t have a place. If I’m not buying things (measurably, I’m not), what ideas have I invested in? What dividends--joy, relationships, creative fire--are returned from my modest investments? How long can an enthusiast survive on starvation rations before abandoning love for reality? What stories are racing selling to themselves, and their possible audiences? As you probably know by now, I'm interested in narratives to a fault. At its best, racing is an unparalleled gold mine of stories, awe-inspiring and heartbreaking, the stuff of high drama. Multiplicity is an evolutionary boon; if no one's story of racing is quite the same, if everyone is here for a slightly different reason, the blood thickens. At its worst, racing's vision narrows, one story prevails, and there is a lone object visible at the end of the tunnel.

It's shaped not so much like a horse as like a stack of money.

Squires: "Detection [of steroids], not the impact on the animal, became the focus."

Around every turn on the racetrack, I expect to find some explanation more charitable than whose fist clutches the most bills at once, but each scenario (such as the above quotation) is only as deep as its metaphor. Racing and its optics! Racing and its myopic belief that wealth is inherently interesting or even sought-after. In the rush for money to change hands, horse and plot are lost. The plot, as recapped by this tweet in an eerie echo of Headless Horsemen's trajectory, seems to have been lost for some time. Jim Squires is a newspaperman, an editor and a pithy writer, a storyteller with a story to tell. Headless Horsemen is less sports journalism than memoir, more cruelty catalogue than sizzling exegesis. He’s probably a little pressed that his whopper of a New York Times reveal (“racehorses are raised on steroids”) has been outstripped by ever more mindboggling tales from the track, and that the Overton window of what the racing public will and won’t put up with is basically Ron Swanson’s swivel desk. Ultimately, nothing seems to have changed since 2008, when Squires observed that racing receives only the mainstream media attention it can afford to purchase--except for those times when tragedy creates its own publicity.

As of this writing, twenty-one horses have died on the track at Santa Anita since the season opened in December 2018. That’s quite a headline… and as clickbait engineers everywhere know, sometimes a headline is as much of the story as the reader gets.

xoxo,
Diana