When I was a horse crazy kid, my parents got me my first Breyer model. Give the kid a fake horse and maybe she’ll be satisfied, right? Well, the problem was it wasn’t just a model of any horse. It wasn’t a paint horse, an appaloosa, a backyard pony or a fancy Morgan. It was a plain, brown horse in the middle of a long, fluid step, with no remarkable features or even a hint of white. There was nothing special about that model horse at all, actually, save for one thing:
That model horse, inspired by a cranky but brilliant old gelding, whose accolades included two Horse of the Year titles over the course of a career that spanned an unheard of 10 years and one of the most memorable races of the decade in the inaugural 1981 Arlington Million , changed everything. From then on it wasn’t about horses, it was about hoofbeats. The roar of a crowd. It was about Man ‘O War. Ruffian. Citation. It was about roses and May and that elusive crown only thirteen horses have ever worn. That model horse is why I made treks into the Holy Land of horse country anytime we visited family in Louisville, why I skipped my prom to go to the Kentucky Derby, why the moment I had my Master’s degree in my grubby little hands I hopped in the car and headed down I-64 with the Kentucky border set dead in my sights. It’s why I memorized all of the Kentucky Derby winners on accident, have old binders filled with newspaper articles and boxes of archived issues of the Blood-Horse that go back to 1995. It’s why I had a nine year career in the horse industry. Took hundreds, thousands of photos of famous – and not famous – thoroughbreds. In many ways, the trajectory of much of my life traces back to this horse.
During his final years at the Kentucky Horse Park, where he became the first Hall of Champions resident and sole occupant of the first stall on the left until his death at the great age of 32 in 2007, his handlers told me stories upon stories of him cornering hapless seasonal workers in the corner of his stall, biting the person presenting him during the daily Hall of Champions shows, etc. etc. My favorite was the tale of his colic surgery, when a veterinarian smacked him in the nose as he was coming out of anesthesia to help him come around. “Watch it,” someone told him. “He’ll remember that.” Later, when John Henry was fine and frisky, he indeed got his revenge with a well-placed bite – on the hapless vet’s nose.
What an odd horse to fall in love with. John Henry didn’t have the blue blood of Secretariat. The elegance of Rachel Alexandra. The nobility of Northern Dancer. John Henry was the son of Ole Bob Bowers, who was about as illustrious as his name sounds, and his offspring was an ordinary looking creature with a less-than friendly attitude who reportedly earned his name after ripping a steel feed tub off the wall and throwing it at someone. You don’t come any more blue-collar than John Henry, from his less-than-humble lineage to his $1,100 price tag as a yearling to his 83 starts from 1977-1984.
John Henry started my love affair with thoroughbreds. He was my first idol. My first love. He was also the first time a legend stepped out of my imagination and became something real, from the first time I met him as a starstruck ten year old girl, to our last encounter shortly before he died.
The cranky old bastard was racing at its best, and I will never forget him.
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