Crazy Good

So who says horse books aren't hot?

This, from Newsweek, about Charles Leerhsen's newest tome, Crazy Good, the story of Dan Patch, a harness racer who captured the heart of a nation in much the same way that Seabiscuit did. "But before World War I, horse racing was the nation's leading sport and harness racing....was more popular than the Thoroughbred game," writes Tony Dokoupil in his review.

This popularity, Leerhsen's theorizes was due to the public identification with a horse pulling a cart, their primary means of transport. The fast trotting harness horse was in effect, "a chance to cheer on a faster version of something you have at home."

That said, Dan Patch provided a lot of opportunities for cheering. First of all he raced for NINE years, from 1900 to 1909, and he was incredibly fast. "More than 100,000 people would flock to watch his exhibitions of blinding speed, where he frequently pierced the two-minute-mile mark, and eventually shaved the record to 1:55." He also earned close to $1 million, hardly pocket change in his era or today. And in versions of the merchandising craze on which careers are built today, Dan Patch even had his own line of products ranging from pancake syrup to washing machines!

The book gets a great review ("From start to finish, this book has legs," writes Dokoupil), and the author, an executive editor at Sports Illustrated, gets kudos for resurrecting another equine superstar that time forgot. As much an homage to an era where horse power was literal as well as figurative, the book brings the horse alive through his connections in much the same way that any story about a main character who cannot speak must.

So perhaps the answer to my still-not-sold book proposal is to let Barbaro go away only to be resurrected in another, say ten or twenty years, by a public lacking long-term memory. The only problem, of course, is that the story won't go away because of all the issue tied to racing that it has come to represent.

Just another chapter in what I think is an even bigger story with even longer legs.