Native Dancer: The Grey Ghost: Hero Of A Golden Age (2003) - Plot & Excerpts
I have a love/hate relationship generally with books on horse racing or that focus on a particular horse. I've stopped reading many of them for a variety of sins: being poorly written, anthropomorphizing the horse to a ridiculous extent, being boring (generally too much data with very little story), and/or lacking any kind of emotional tie to the subject and/or bona fides when it came to writing it. Of the ones I've stuck with before picking up this book (well, downloading it, it was my second Kindle read and a much more successful one than the first choice), I really only loved two: Seabiscuit and Ruffian: Burning from the Start. I think those take a pretty distant second to this book, but I caveat that with one thing. I know a lot about horse racing. A lot. I think it's possible this book is for someone like me and that may be why I loved it--it made a lot of assumptions that if you picked this book up, you understood racing in general, so I didn't have to wade through Racing for Dummies stuff like what a furlong is, or the difference between a handicap and a weight-for-age stakes. So it may not work for someone who just, say, likes horses but has never really followed racing.That said, what this book accomplishes is remarkable. First is the excellent craftsmanship of this--not always evident in non fiction. I had not one single moment where the writing itself made me go "Hmmm?" and that is unusual because I'm really picky (that said, I hope the print version of this book is put together with more care than the Kindle version. End quotes were missing. Periods were missing at the end of sentences. Paragraphs broken strangely (and not due to the font size chosen--I checked for that). If I hadn't loved the book so much I'd have marked it down a star for being so sloppily put together in this digital version. This is the future, publishers. Take some damn care with these eBooks: they are still books and deserve the same editing care as print. )The second thing that is remarkable is the storytelling. It's not always linear, and there are a ton of tangents, but the amount of restraint is notable and the end result hard to put down (and I don't usually have a hard time putting books down). The tangents add color and background, but they never go on too long and make you wonder when the story is going to get back to the horses. The narrative flow of the horse's career interspersed with comments by an admirable number of people involved in this horse's life was perfectly balanced. You could tell considerable research went into this. The story is also about a rich man as much as it is the horse, but Eisenberg managed to never make Vanderbilt either villain or hero as it details one of the last of the rich breeder/owners that racing doesn't have all that many of anymore.Which is an interesting thing since Native Dancer was the first real "TV" horse--and there is a lot here about the impact of TV, the way racing did or did not embrace it, and the cost to the sport of that choice. It's a theme that runs throughout and highlights the change in not just racing but all sports. It also probably was one of the things that changed the way horse ownership is handled. This was the last of the days when rich men bred horses for the goal of bettering the species and also controlled the stud farms. You would never see a group of everyday Joes buying a horse (I'm looking at you Funnycide connections) and running him in the Derby (and winning the Derby). But everyday people did follow and love racing--and they adored Native Dancer. At one point, TV Guide named Native Dancer one of America's top three TV stars, along with Ed Sullivan and Arthur Godfrey. Can you imagine that today? Other than the brief moment when people get excited for a possible Triple Crown, racing is ignored by the vast majority of viewers these days. It's hard not to compare Native Dancer to Zenyatta (and her sire line goes back to him several ways, so maybe that's appropriate). The style of running, the size and power of the horse, the ability to know where the finish line was, the love of the crowds--and the amount of love coming back from the crowds--the tie to one jockey, it all seems very familiar. What's not familiar however is how fragile this horse turned out to be--one person in the book posits that his size and huge stride and power made him simply too large a force for his legs to support and that's why he kept getting foot bruises that would derail his career, eventually permanently (but not fatally). I mention this because it's hard to find a horse racing in the Triple Crown level these days that doesn't have Mr. Prospector, Raise a Native, or Northern Dancer (or two or all three) in their pedigrees--and they are all descended from Native Dancer. Has the rash of injuries and early retirements--in an age where horses are barely raced compared to the fifties and sixties where horses raced between the Triple Crown races and routinely ran back days to weeks from a race instead of months--been partly because of the preponderance of this bloodline? The sheer size and muscle mass and power compared to feet that don't so happily support that? I don't know: that's a question for people who really understand pedigree, but it was impossible to follow The Dancer's career and not see the similarities with horses of today with the constant injuries and early retirements. Which is not usually the case when you're looking at the iron horses of yesteryear.All in all a wonderful book. I laughed, I cried, and I learned a lot of new things (this is a horse that is routinely ranked in the top ten of greatest racehorses who've ever run in America and I didn't know anything about him). What more can you want from a book about a favorite subject? It almost makes me want to read Eisenberg's book on Lil E. Tee, not a favorite horse of mine but for him I might be willing to risk it.
What do You think about Native Dancer: The Grey Ghost: Hero Of A Golden Age (2003)?
