Secretariat

If you enjoy horse race non-fiction, take a look at "Secretariat," by the journalist and author

William Nack. It's not novelized at all, as even some nonfiction is these days (and some of it

very well done). This is so detailed and carefully brought together, it is like hanging around

the tracks for months, but also pretty thrilling on the races. In a YouTube interview Nack says

he first was assigned to writing horse racing at Newsday, the large Long Island newspaper, after

he stood up on the table at a Christmas party and recited every one of the Triple Crown winners.

The editor approached him afterwards and asked him if he gambled, and Nack said not so much,

it was the horses that interested him, and the culture around racing, so he was reassigned to write

about horse racing. If he'd been a gambler, it would have constituted a conflict of interest and the

paper wouldn't have touched him with a ten foot pole for track writing. Secretariat, you may

remember, won the final race of the Triple Crown by 31 lengths. In the pictures of him coming down

to the wire, you can't really tell it is a race, the rest of the field is so far in the background. He was

a huge animal and mostly figured out his own race strategy, which the jockey, Ron Turcotte knew

to let him do.

He stood stud for many a year, but apparently his progeny did not do all that well on the track. Breeding is incredibly tricky.

His best offspring were the females that turned out to be stellar brood mares and passed along some of his extraordinary

traits, but his offspring male and female didn't break the bank on the track. It was the "grandkids" and

"great grands" through the female line that brought back some of the glory. Before Secretariat won the Triple Crown his

owner sold off shares in his standing stud for $190,000 a share, at 32 shares. It was a record sum at the time, and it was

not a sure thing they could sell them. But they had to raise money to pay estate taxes and couldn't gamble on his racing

career. After he won the Triple Crown, some of his shares re-sold for $250,000 apiece. This was the 1970's, so you can

more than double everything. Secretariat ran his own races. He went beyond the horse race racket, a kind of one-creature

revelation.