Blood Horses : Notes of a Sportswriter's Son
- Book Review,
by John Jeremiah Sullivan
From Publishers Weekly
Horse racing does not lend itself easily to the drama and characters of most sports, because, as the author puts it, "when your Sammy Sosa has four legs, cannot speak, and has, to all appearances, no idea what people are so worked up about, you have to work harder to generate narrative." In his own quest to trace racing's history and capture its urgency, Sullivan, a former Harper's editor, has indeed worked hard but made it look effortless. He has found narrative not in a particular horse but in The Horse—the cultural, literary and biological phenomenon. It would be easy to expect, in this post-Seabiscuit age, a tale of the triumphant underdog, but Sullivan has more reflective pleasures on his mind. He alternates a history of the South, particularly of Lexington, Ky., where he spent time as a child and where much of the American horse-racing industry is concentrated, with a larger cultural and historical examination. His riffs are also unexpectedly hilarious, especially when he takes a gonzo-ish trip to the Kentucky Derby. Running throughout is the story of Sullivan's late father, a longtime sportswriter and dreamer whom the author lovingly, but largely unsentimentally, worships, and whose presence provides a kind of magnetic pull without overwhelming the book. Sullivan, who won a National Magazine Award for the piece on which this book was based, has a fairly liberal approach to structure and pace, but no matter: he has written a history as sweeping as it is personal and whose coherence is made more impressive by its lack of central drama—a book that is, in short, as remarkable as the finest horses it documents. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Booklist
Sullivan has written a strange amalgam of a book: part personal reminiscence; part bittersweet elegy for his father, sportswriter Mike Sullivan; and part wide-ranging investigation into the history and culture of the horse, particularly the Thoroughbred racehorse. Spurred by his father's recollection of Secretariat's Kentucky Derby victory in 1973, the author devoted two years of intensive reading and travel to understanding the various aspects and allure of Thoroughbred racing. Although he remains in some respects an amateur, communicating what he has learned with an amateur's zeal and certainty, he has learned a great deal. In describing the roles horses have played throughout human history in war and peace and the way Thoroughbreds are bred, sold, trained, and raced today, Sullivan provides vivid detail and, occasionally, penetrating insight. His account of War Emblem's 2002 bid for racing's Triple Crown makes for especially compelling reading. Dennis Dodge
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Janet Steen, Details
A fine combination of memoir and reportage ... [Sullivan] narrates a skillfully selective history of thoroughbred racing.
Review
"Illuminates the art of the sportswriter like no book I've read, while tracing the startling links among animals, gambling, dads, and what we habitually think of as the more serious issues of the world. Secretariat, Funny Cide, Kafka, and Osama bin Laden? You bet." --James McManus
"Sullivan does his father, and horses--and an astonishing range and weave of related sources of fascination--proud." --Roy Blount, Jr.
"Sullivan takes us over the tangled courses that horse and man have run together with a natural lyricism and the born storyteller's knack for the unexpected. Blood Horses escorts us to the thick of this race, where the surehanded author looks mortality in the eye, and displays the gifts his father passed on in abundance: arresting language, a keen eye for the ridiculous, and a horseman's love for the mysterious creature at the heart of our shared history." --Kevin Conley, author of Stud
"In the genre of American turfwriting, John Jeremiah Sullivan's Blood Horses is truly an original--a literary hybrid that ranges gracefully from the horse in prehistory to the horse in war to the running of the Kentucky Derby; from the sad life of Stephen Foster to the limestone geology of the Blue Grass to Secretariat's astonishing tour de force in the 1973 Triple Crown; and from the blue-blood yearling sales at Keeneland to the poignant story surrounding the life and death of Sullivan's endearing, Irishly romantic father. Blood Horses is an always fascinating, often touching read." --William Nack, author of Secretariat
"A young man's day at the races and, along the way, a superb history of the gambler's sport." --Elizabeth Hardwick
Max Watman, The New York Sun
Tangential, quirky, and idiosyncratic ... erudite, insightful and funny ... Sullivan is not playing according to the typical rules of familial recollection.
Bruce Barcott, Outside
Engaging and essayistic ... as much about family as it is about horses ... its appeal isn't limited to the equine crowd.
The New York Times
"A splendid account of ... the Triple Crown."
The New York Review of Books
"An excellent modern example of the mixed form practiced by Swift and Melville [by] a greatly gifted writer." Christopher Benfey
New York Post
"An expert narrative"
New York Magazine
"Sullivan's sporting self-deprecation and voracious scholarship would have made him an inspired replacement for George Plimpton at The Paris Review."
Book Description
One evening late in his life, veteran sportswriter Mike Sullivan was asked by his son what he remembered best from his three decades in the press box. The answer came as a surprise. "I was at Secretariat's Derby, in '73. That was . . . just beauty, you know?"
Sullivan didn't know, not really: the track had always been a place his father disappeared to once a year on business, a source of souvenir glasses and inscrutable passions in his Kentucky relatives. But in 2000, Sullivan, an editor and essayist for Harper's, decided to educate himself. He spent two years following the horse-both across the country, as he watched one season's juvenile crop prepare for the Triple Crown, and through time, as he tracked the animal's constant evolution in literature and art, from the ponies that appeared on the walls of European caves 30,000 years ago, to the mounts that carried the Indo-European language to the edges of the Old World, to the finely tuned but fragile yearlings that are auctioned off for millions of dollars apiece every spring and fall.
The result is a witty, encyclopedic, and in the end profound meditation on what Edwin Muir called our "long-lost archaic companionship" with the horse. Incorporating elements of memoir and reportage, the Wunderkammer and the picture gallery, Blood Horses lets us see--as we have never seen before--the animal that, more than any other, made us who we are.
From the Inside Flap
"In the genre of American turfwriting, John Jeremiah Sullivan’s Blood Horses is truly an original—a literary hybrid that ranges gracefully from the horse in prehistory to the horse in war to the running of the Kentucky Derby; from the sad life of Stephen Foster to the limestone geology of the Blue Grass to Secretariat’s astonishing tour de force in the 1973 Triple Crown; and from the blue-blood yearling sales at Keeneland to the poignant story surrounding the life and death of Sullivan’s endearing, Irishly romantic father. Blood Horses is an always fascinating, often touching read." —William Nack, author of Secretariat "Sullivan takes us over the tangled courses that horse and man have run together with a natural lyricism and the born storyteller’s knack for the unexpected. Blood Horses escorts us to the thick of this race, where the sure-handed author looks mortality in the eye, and displays the gifts his father passed on in abundance: arresting language, a keen eye for the ridiculous, and a horseman’s love for the mysterious creature at the heart of our shared history." —Kevin Conley, author of Stud "Illuminates the art of the sportswriter like no book I’ve read, while tracing the startling links among animals, gambling, dads, and what we habitually think of as the more serious issues of the world. Secretariat, Funny Cide, Kafka, and Southern childhood? You bet." —James McManus, author of Positively Fifth Street: Murderers, Cheetahs, and Binion’s World Series of Poker
About the Author
John Jeremiah Sullivan is an editor at Harper's and a former editor of The Oxford American. This is his first book.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Excerpt from Blood Horses: Notes of a Sportswriter's Son by John Jeremiah Sullivan. Copyright © 2004 by John Jeremiah Sullivan. To be published in April, 2004 by Farrar, Straus & Giroux, LLC. All rights reserved.
THE KID
It was in the month of May, three years ago, by a hospital bed in Columbus, Ohio, where my father was recovering from what was supposed to have been a quintuple bypass operation but became, on the surgeon's actually seeing the heart, a sextuple. His face, my father's face, was pale. He was thinner than I had seen him in years. A stuffed bear that the nurses had loaned him lay crooked in his lap; they told him to hug it whenever he stood or sat down, to keep the stitches in his chest from tearing. I complimented him on the bear when I walked in, and he gave me one of his looks, dropping his jaw and crossing his eyes as he rolled them back in their sockets. It was a look he assumed in all kinds of situations but that always meant the same thing: Can you believe this?
Riverside Methodist Hospital (the river being the Olentangy): my family had a tidy little history there, or at least my father and I had one. It was to Riverside that I had been rushed from a Little League football game when I was twelve, both of my lower right leg bones broken at the shin in such a way that when the whistle was blown and I sat up on the field, after my first time carrying the ball all season, I looked down to find my toes pointing a perfect 180 degrees from the direction they should have been pointing in, at which sight I went into mild shock on the grass at the fifty-yard line and lay back to admire the clouds. Only the referee's face obstructed my view. He kept saying, "Watch your language, son," which seemed comical, since as far as I knew I had not said a word.
I seem to remember, or may have deduced, that my father walked in slowly from the sidelines then with the exceptionally calm demeanor he showed during emergencies, and put his hand on my arm, and said something encouraging, doubtless a little shocked himself at the disposition of my foot—a little regretful too, it could be, since he, a professional sports-writer who had been a superb all-around athlete into his twenties and a Little League coach at various times, must have known that I should never have been on the field at all. Running back was the only viable position for me, in fact, given that when the coach had tried me at other places on the line, I had tended nonetheless to move away from the other players. My lone resource was my speed; I still had a prepubescent track runner's build and was the fastest player on the team. The coach had noticed that I tended to win the sprints and thought he saw an opportunity. But what both of us failed to understand was that a running back must not only outrun the guards—typically an option on only the most flawlessly executed plays—but often force his way past them, knock them aside. Such was never going to happen.
In fairness, the coach had many other things to worry about. Our team, which had no name, lacked both talent and what he called "go." In the car headed home from our first two games, I could tell by the way my father avoided all mention of what had taken place on the field that we were pathetic—not Bad News Bears pathetic, for we never cut up or "wanted it" or gave our all. At practice a lot of the other players displayed an indifference to the coach's advice that suggested they might have been there on community service.
The coach's son, Kyle, was our starting quarterback. When practice was not going Kyle's way, that is, when he was either not on the field, having been taken off in favor of the second-stringer, who was excellent, or when he was on the field and throwing poorly, Kyle would begin to cry. He cried not childish tears, which might have made me wonder about his life at home with the coach and even feel for him a little, but bitter tears, too bitter by far for a twelve-year-old. Kyle would then do a singular thing: he would fling down his helmet and run, about forty yards, to the coach's car, a beige Cadillac El Dorado, which was always parked in the adjacent soccer field. He would get into the car, start the engine, roll down all four windows, and—still crying, I presumed, maybe even sobbing now in the privacy of his father's automobile—play Aerosmith tapes at volumes beyond what the El Dorado's system was designed to sustain. The speakers made crunching sounds. The coach would put up a show o ignoring these antics for five or ten minutes, shouting more loudly at us, as if to imply that such things happened in the sport of football. But before long Kyle, exasperated, would resort to the horn, first honking it and then holding it down. Then he would hold his fist out the driver's-side window, middle finger extended. The coach would leave at that point and walk, very slowly, to the car. While the rest of us stood on the field, he and Kyle would talk. Soon the engine would go silent. When the two of them returned, practice resumed, with Kyle at quarterback.
None of this seemed remarkable to me at the time. We were new to Columbus, having just moved there from Louisville (our house had been right across the river, in the knobs above New Albany, Indiana), and I needed friends. So I watched it all happen with a kind of dumb, animal acceptance, sensing that it could come to no good. And suddenly it was that final Saturday, and Kyle had given me the ball, and something very brief and violent had happened, and I was watching a tall, brawny man-child bolt up and away from my body, as though he had woken up next to a rattlesnake. I can still see his eyes as they took in my leg. He was black, and he had an afro that sprung outward when he ripped off his helmet. He looked genuinely confused about how easily I had broken. As the paramedics were loading me onto the stretcher, he came over and said he was sorry.
At Riverside they set my leg wrong. An X ray taken two weeks later revealed that I would walk with a limp for the rest of my life if the leg were not rebroken and reset. For this I was sent to a doctor named Moyer, a specialist whom other hospitals would fly in to sew farmers' hands back on, that sort of thing. He was kind and reassuring. But for reasons I have never been able to fit back together, I was not put all the way under for the resetting procedure. They gave me shots of a tranquilizer, a fairly weak one, to judge by how acutely conscious I was when Dr. Moyer gripped my calf with one hand and my heel with the other and said, "John, the bones have already started to knit back together a little bit, so this is probably going to hurt." My father was outside smoking in the parking lot at that moment, and said later he could hear my screams quite clearly. That was my first month in Ohio.
Two years after the injury had healed, I was upstairs in my bedroom at our house on the northwest side of Columbus when I heard a single, fading "Oh!" from the first-floor hallway. My father and I were the only ones home at the time, and I took the staircase in a bound, terrified. Turning the corner, I almost tripped over his head. He was on his back on the floor, unconscious, stretched out halfway into the hall, his feet and legs extending into the bathroom. Blood was everywhere, but although I felt all over his head I couldn't find a source. I got him onto his feet and onto the couch and called the paramedics, who poked at him and said that his blood pressure was "all over the place." So they manhandled him onto a stretcher and took him to Riverside.
It turned out that he had simply passed out while pissing, something, we were told, that happens to men in their forties (he was at the time forty-five). The blood had all gushed from his nose, which he had smashed against the sink while falling. Still, the incident scared him enough to make him try again to quit smoking—to make him want to quit, anyway, one of countless doomed resolutions.
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