Sports have been an important part of my life since I can remember. My earliest memories of any sport date from the late 1950s, when I was no older than six, sitting with my parents in a Depression-era stadium, watching St. Cloud State’s football team. I didn’t necessarily understand everything I saw, but I loved it. And as I grew and understood more of what I saw, I watched more. By the time I was fifteen, I was an avid fan of most sports – some more than others.
I’ve seen a large number of remarkable sporting events over the years, a few in person, most on television. But the most remarkable event I’ve ever seen might be the horse race I watched on the second Saturday in June 1973. I was so intent on seeing the race that I left band practice for an hour; the informal group – in which I played piano – was trying to nail down several songs we were scheduled to perform the next day as part of a youth celebration at church. But late in the afternoon, I stood up from my bench, said, “See you guys in an hour,” and drove eight blocks home.
This is what I saw:
Up to that spring, I’d followed horse racing only tentatively. I generally watched the Kentucky Derby and followed the winner into the Preakness and the Belmont Stakes. But I’d never been emotionally connected to any of the horses I watched. Secretariat was the first. And I know I wasn’t alone in that attachment: That spring of Secretariat, those five weeks from Derby Day on May 5 through the running of the Belmont on June 9, saw that big red horse treated like a rock star. And when he came around the final turn and bolted down the home stretch, winning the Belmont – and the Triple Crown – by an official margin of thirty-one lengths, all I could do was stare at the screen, mouth open. I’d never seen anything like it.
Neither had anyone else. Years later, after Secretariat was dead, William Nack – a writer who covered Big Red’s stellar spring – wrote “Pure Heart,” a piece about the horse and that season. It ran in Sports Illustrated on June 4, 1990, and was selected for an annual collection of the best American sports writing the following year. The piece makes it clear that even in the sometimes jaded worlds of racing and sports writing, Secretariat was special, a phenomenon.
As Seth Hancock of Kentucky’s Claiborne Farm said in Nack’s piece: “You want to know who Secretariat is in human terms? Just imagine the greatest athlete in the world. The greatest. Now make him six foot three, the perfect height. Make him real intelligent and kind. And on top of that, make him the best-lookin’ guy ever to come down the pike. He was all those things as a horse. He isn't even a horse anymore. He's a legend.”
Two years ago, I thought Barbaro might become a legend as well. I’d watched all the Triple Crown races over the years, and Barbaro in the 2006 Kentucky Derby was the first horse since Secretariat that had tugged at my imagination and my heart. Of course, Barbaro became a different kind of legend: The Texas Gal and I watched in a Milwaukee hotel room during a vacation as Barbaro broke down at the start of the Preakness, ending his career and beginning the long and sad saga of the unsuccessful attempt to save his life.
And this spring, there’s Big Brown, who today will run in the Belmont Stakes, trying to become the first Triple Crown winner in thirty years. He’s a beautiful horse, and I’ll watch him race today. I’ll be glad if he wins and sad if he doesn’t. But so far, he and his story haven’t grabbed hold of me. And that’s fine. I have a feeling that no matter what marvels I may see on a track for the rest of my life, Secretariat will always be my horse.
So what music can one possibly find to mark the renewal of one of the oldest events in one of America’s oldest sports? After all, thoroughbreds have been racing in American since around 1750, according to one source I saw, and the Belmont Stakes has been an annual event since 1867. Well, a song written by a man considered the first popular American songwriter seems appropriate.
Beautiful Dreamer: The Songs of Stephen Foster was released in 2004 by American Roots Publishing and featured eighteen of Foster’s most famous songs performed by current-day artists. As is the case with most of what Foster wrote during his brief life – he died in 1864 at the age of thirty-seven (with thirty-eight cents in his pocket) – the songs on the CD echo in all forms of today’s music, from country, bluegrass and gospel to rock & roll, jazz and American standards. Classical baritone Thomas Hampson is quoted in the CD’s notes as having said that Foster is the trunk of the tree of American music.
The songs on Beautiful Dreamer touch on all aspects of American life, whether in the 1850s or today: joy, sorrow, reunion, separation, reverie, celebration and play. That last – represented by horse racing – is the topic of one of Foster’s most famous songs.
Here, as performed by the rootsy Canadian band, the Duhks, is Stephen Foster’s “Camptown Races,” today’s Saturday Single.
The Duhks – Camptown Races (2004)
4.14 MB mp3 at 192 kbps
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