REVIEWS
Big Red Returns
Dorothy Ours is on the prowl around Churchill Downs promoting her book Man o' War: A Legend Like Lightning. This is her first trip to the Kentucky Derby.
Man o' War didn't run in the Derby but won every start he ever made, except one.
It took her 11 years to write the book, though it wasn't a full-time gig. She says she did her first "major burst" of research in the fall of '94.
The 44-year-old author now lives in New Jersey. While working on the book, the Virginia native worked for several years at Racing Museum in Saratoga Springs, N.Y.
Scrolling through volumes of library microfilms of the news reports of Man o' War of that era convinced her there was enough that had been "lost in time" about the star.
"People assumed we knew all about Man o' War," she says.
When she started, she wasn't looking to "tear down" Man o' War, but discover the "real horse and not the myth. There is a lot of debris that builds up over the years, and I wanted to see the beauty. That's what I was trying to find with the project."
The book is published by St. Martin's Press. I got to thumb through the book and the photos alone are worth more than the $24.95 price tag.
Man o' War was dubbed the "Horse of the Century" by The Blood-Horse and is the featured cover boy of "Thoroughbred Champions: Top 100 Racehorses of the 20th Century."
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SPRING, AND TIME FOR A GOOD BOOK
Man o’ War lives again in a new book by that name, one of several good racing reads to hit the bookstores this spring
By Mary Simon
Reprinted from April 29, 2006 issue by permission of Thoroughbred Times
Man o’ War: A Legend Like Lightning, by Dorothy Ours (352 pages, St. Martin’s Press, New York, $24.95, hardcover)
Few are alive today who could say that they saw—and truly remember—Man o’ War in his racing form. He last trod the racetrack 86 years ago this fall, and when he retired from the course due to lack of competition, incipient unsoundness, and the specter of homicidal weight assignments, an enduring legend was born.
Nearly nine decades later, “Big Red” remains as much alive in our collective psyche as he was back in the day when he scorched American racetracks, shattered speed records, bore crushing weights, beat all rivals into humble submission, and by most accounts made it all look so utterly easy. He simply wore out the superlatives, then and now.
Man o’ War has understandably become an industry unto himself over the years, as the object of countless paintings, sculptures, poems, and literary volumes both fictionalized and historically based. But as author Dorothy Ours shows us, the truth needs no enhancement when it comes to Man o’ War—the simple reality of this immortal still has the power to enthrall.
Ours’s new biography, titled Man o’ War: A Legend Like Lightning, may well become the definitive work on the early-20th-century icon. Her in-depth chronicle takes the reader back in time and into the lives of Man o’ War and those connected with him. It does not read like a novel, but like a well-researched, handsomely constructed history-biography, honed to superb readability by a highly skilled writer.
As present-day readers, we missed out on the sublime excitement of horse racing in 1919 and ’20. Ours takes us there. While this is the story of Man o’ War, it is also the tale of the chronically sore, pharmaceutically enabled superstar Sir Barton, whose huge heart and enormous talent were counterbalanced by bad feet and a treacherous temper; of the expensive, beautiful, and faint-hearted speedball, Golden Broom; of the difficult, often overprotective owner Sam Riddle; of a modestly successful trainer named Lou Feustel who would be swept into the Racing Hall of Fame on the greatness of one horse; of elegant, socially prominent breeder August Belmont II; of feisty Johnny Loftus and tough-minded Clarence Kummer, two of the great race riders of all time.
Ours waxed eloquent on the glory of Man o’ War but did not shy away from the unpleasant issues of his life and times. She questions the career-ending suspension of Loftus amid rumors that he had purposely thrown the 1919 Sanford Stakes aboard the champion---the colt’s only loss in 21 starts—and also looks at the authoritarian, often unfair power of the Jockey Club in those days, the illegal but unchecked practice of “hopping” racehorses, the questionable character of a future Hall of Fame horseman, England’s contempt for American Thoroughbreds, and the heroic efforts made to safeguard Man o’ War from prerace “tampering” as his legend grew.
Above all, the author brought to startling life Man o’ War himself—that big, proud, high-headed bundle of nervous energy who in quiet moments would gnaw his own hooves just as people chew their fingernails. He was the flame-coated beast who plagued starters with his penchant for bolting the barrier prematurely and running off; who exhausted and horrified one Hall of Fame jockey to the point where he swore never to ride him again; who wore a bit in his stall to slow his voracious food consumption; who would rip the shirt right off a man if given half a chance. Man o’ War did nothing halfway. He was mythically, insanely fast, apparently capable of breaking a speed record any time they turned him loose. His name remains today synonymous with the absolute apex of our sport, and Ours does a wonderful job of showing us why.