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Among breeders, owners, trainers and jockeys, who devote their money and energy to other thoroughbreds for the express purpose of beating Native Dancer, there are those who half hope that they will not succeed, so great is their reverence for the horse. On the day of his most recent race, the Big Grey walked majestically into the paddock at the head of a parade of nine entries. Wealthy Horseman Jock Whitney, owner of the No. 2 choice in the betting, gazed admiringly not at his own Straight Face but at the Dancer. "f any one beats him. I hope it's my horse," mused Whitney. "It's strange, but I hope the Dancer wins."
The Sport of Kings & the People. Until time, the breaks, the handicapper's lead weights, a bigger heart or better blood dethrone him, the Big Grey reigns as popularly chosen monarch over a domain that has grown into the nation's biggest spectator sport.
Last week, about 700,000 Americans went to the races. In 1953 the turnout was 30 million in all. Around the calendar, rain or shine, there were 107 thoroughbred race tracks to go to—such huge showplace parks as Belmont. Hialeah and Santa Anita; such tradition-misted places as Kentucky's Churchill Downs, Maryland's Pimlico or upstate New York's Saratoga; such concrete-and-asphalt betting receptacles as New York's Jamaica and Aqueduct; dozens of obscure little tracks that horsemen call "bull rings." There were 50,000 registered thoroughbreds, at least half of them in racing training, and 1,400 tough, undersized and often brave little men to don the silks of 1,400 registered racehorse owners and ride the thoroughbreds for money.
Racing is a sport and a business built largely on an unstable compound of chance and judgment: 1) the monetary chance-plus-judgment of race-betting, which last year drew some $2,064,572.984 across parimutuel counters, and 2) Mendelian chance-plus-judgment, which governs the horsemen's old and insatiable yearning to breed a horse with more speed and more stamina than the last one. Out of the mating of these two lines come numberless thrills, frequent beauties, many sorrows and not a few ills of commercial horse racing. Racing lives in constant worry of the anti-betting moralizers and of the legislators who write the tax laws (currently, 26 state treasuries are taking an approximate $150 million-a-year cut of the annual betting handle).
Why Is It Thrilling? It is no longer a rich man's monopoly (although it is still dependent on wealthy men willing to invest in the breeding, training and racing of thoroughbreds). Its adherents are a mixed bag of rich and poor, high, middle-and lowbrow: those who get their kicks from the beauty of the horse and the excitement of the race, those who look only at the tote board, those who find in the combination of these attractions all the attributes of a poker game, circus, picnic, athletic contest, suspense movie, as well as an escape from the lesser, daily race in office or factory. For those who do not see it at all, they have no argument, merely sympathy.