“One of the great passions of my life is horse tracks and everything connected with them. I’ve been known to spend an entire day at a track in a fever of pleasure without betting a dime.”
Harry Crews wrote that opening in an article called “Tips on a Live Jockey,” which he penned for Sport magazine in 1977. Crews went down to Calder Race Track in Miami to follow around Gary St. Leon, a champion jockey. Horse racing also occasionally made an appearance in Crews fiction, probably most notably in his second novel, “Naked in Garden Hills.” One of the main characters in that book is Jester, a former jockey, who was forced to leave the business when a horse he was riding committed suicide by running into a wall a full speed. (At least that’s how I remember it – the book is long out of print, and it costs a bundle to get a copy on Ebay.)
Crews would have been glued to yesterday’s Kentucky Derby – he loved live sporting events of all types, and when animals were involved, that made it even better. (He wrote regularly about cockfighting and dogfighting.) In the Sport magazine article, he captured, as well as anybody, that overwhelming feeling of watching the horses run from the rail:
“Across the infield a great rhythmic surge of color broke from the gate, and the sound that every horse-player lives for, a sound that is kind of poetry, rose into the bright air. Far away, the solid feet of hooves, here on the rail the single baying cry of the bettors, and over it all the calm lilting voice of the caller, and then, as the horses turn into the stretch, the shouts and whistles of the straining jockeys, the incredibly sharp snap of the whips. And finally, as they came to the wire, the horses’ breathing like snorts of pain.”
