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The memory of the true champion lives on for generations after the mathematics of his achievement have been forgotten. His epitaph is not the thin type of the record book or the chestful of blackened silver trophies. It is legend. The Champ is inevitably bested. His record is broken. He dies. Or he retires in paunchy undefeatedness into the musty interior of a bar & grill, a half-interest in an oil well or the edible greenness of a southern pasture. Faster, stronger, younger, flashier pretenders rewrite the record books. But then they recede into the mists and, as before, memory clutches at the same old names. "There," says memory, "was a real champion."
No one has ever quite documented how or why the legend of a champion grows.
The present has its pressagents as the past had its poets (Was Achilles really that good, or did Homer just make him seem so?), and the ballyhoo is plastered no more thickly around movie folk and politicians than around the men and animals who compete with the elements, with the clock, with weight or age or strength or with each other, in the name of sport. But a true champion's feats endure because of what the champion himself adds: an undying spirit of competition, an ability to inspire awe, a willingness to gamble on losing, the guts to lose and rise again, an elusive mixture of spirit and showmanship. Whatever it is called—flair, class, style or what Hemingway once termed "grace under pressure"—it is the quality that breeds sport legend.
In the stable area of New York's elegant Belmont Park—Stall No. 6, Barn No. 20—lives a champion who at the age of four already seems destined to be the hero of such a legend. He is a big, muscular, aristocratic racing colt who stands 16.2 hands (5 ft. 6 in.) high and weighs an above-average 1,200 Ibs. His name: Native Dancer.
The Horse in the Living Room. Known to countless admirers as the Dancer, to track habitues as the Big Grey, and to a smaller group of intimates as the Big 'Orse, he is the Saturday matinee idol of several million TV viewers, many of whom have not seen a horse in the flesh since the milkman switched to a truck.
His bearing, strength, speed and record suggest that there is not a horse now running that can beat him. He has already matched the record of the great Man o' War—21 races, 20 victories—and he has more big races to run. When he lost the 1953 Kentucky Derby by a head, thousands turned from their TV screens in sorrow, a few in tears. Hundreds of people, old and young, have sent him letters and greeting cards. Little girls have organized fan clubs in his name.
He has captured the admiration of the racing world's two indispensable castes, the expert horsemen and the two-buck bettors. Every time he goes, bettors by the thousands trust him to the extent of wagering $1 to win a measly 5¢. A South American millionaire recently produced figures to prove that he could have added more to the family fortunes last year by betting Native Dancer to show (a minimum of 5% profit) than by investing in securities or playing the stock market.