• U.S.

Sport: Derby on the Delta

2 minute read
TIME

The country’s swankest mule race was held a fortnight ago at Greenwood, Miss. Five thousand Delta planters and cotton pickers packed the American Legion ball park for the fourth annual running of the event. The card consisted of five heats and a sweepstakes. Stubborn Delta plow mules, bedecked for superstition’s sake with turkey feathers, squirrel tails and paper festoons, were mounted by Negro plowboys in overalls and gaudy silk shirts. Proceeds were earmarked for Mississippi’s underprivileged preschool children.

The armed truce that exists between mules and plowboys during the long cotton-growing season was broken for one day only. The jockeys rode bareback (or muleback as Deltans say) with the assistance of knees, heels, hands and profanity. What the mules lacked in speed they made up “for in mulishness. They balked, wheeled, vaulted over fences, ran countertrackwise. The crowd howled with delight and kept pulling at its corn.

Excitement was high as the gun sounded for the sweepstakes. Little Joe, with ebony-skinned Flash Gordon up, took a clumping lead at a dizzy 15 m.p.h. He had the championship almost won when instinct told him to make a dash for the feed box. This enabled rawboned Pippin, Jockey Cal (for Carroll County) up, to claim title as the fastest mule in the Delta country.

The annual U.S. harness-racing classic, the Hambletonian (TIME, Aug. 23, 1943), was also held last week, at Goshen, N.Y. As usual, a sign hung in front of the county jail reading: “Welcome Horsemen.” The race brought out what the black-dirt farmers of Orange County called a “middlin’ crop of three-year-olds.” The favorite was Yankee Maid, owned by Arch L. Derby of Wichita, Kans., first horse from west of the Mississippi ever to win the event. She won as expected. Her fastest time over the mile course was 2:04.

The payoff on this unexciting Hambletonian was that one day later, Darnley, a four-year-old owned by Aaron Williams of Corning, N.Y., trotted the distance in 1:59¾ for the fastest competitive mile ever recorded on the Goshen track.

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