Golden Gate Fields will permanently close after its final racing date this fall. Richard Friedlander has this Perspective.
The closing of Golden Gate Fields will leave Northern California without a major thoroughbred racetrack. To some this didn’t come soon enough. Racing is a brutal business. Horses die from maltreatment or overwork. Diminutive jockeys, teetering on their toes, get thrown from thousand pound horses going forty miles an hour. People blow their life savings on a creature because they like its name. And yet, I am of two minds about its passing from the local scene.
Racing horses has been a part of American life since colonial days. While it’s been called the sport of kings, it has thrilled people without a dime on the outcome. People from all walks of life, whose hearts leapt at seeing a race decided by a nose or a champion blow away the field. Who were overwhelmed by the beauty in action of these magnificent creatures. Who got emotionally tied to them the way they do with their two-legged sports heroes.
There are two books I keep by my bedside that never fail to raise my spirits. One is about Seabiscuit, a rags-to-riches ungainly horse who so caught the public’s imagination that in 1938 he was in newspapers more often than FDR and Hitler. The other is about Kelso, a smallish gelding, five-time Horse of the Year in the sixties who took on all comers on every surface for eight years, who not a few cognoscenti consider the greatest thoroughbred ever.
Both horses were winners, but it’s their palpable courage and their interactions with humans who loved and cared for them and treated them as equals that moves me. Jockeys will tell you that while speed and stamina matter, the very greatest horses win with their hearts. When Kelso was 28, he was brought up from Kentucky to be honored at New York’s Belmont race track. A crowd of forty thousand roared and clapped and wept their love for this four-legged athlete who had given them so much pleasure.