BIG RED

5 May 2025

I read the book, Big Red, by Jim Kjelgaard. during my grammar school days, sometime around the 3rd grade.  I don’t recall much about it, other than my sense that the Irish Setter is not the most reliable of breeds when it comes to following human commands.  (Beagles are so much more obedient!)

Books based on dogs, horses, and lions were the mainstay of my childhood reading which, looking back, I can honestly say did not comprise many children’s books.  I was more interested in the books that my two next-eldest (adolescent) siblings read.

There were seven of them, my older brothers and sisters; very few of them learned from books.  Practical, hands-on experience was the forte of my much-older (by 10-17 years) siblings.  I followed in their pathway, of working well with my hands, but my manual dexterity was quickly recognized by my father as one of artistry, not mere application of technical skills.

My father had an 8th-grade education, partly because he’d been expected to work on the family farm; but, I believe, even more because he didn’t learn from books, teachers, or even other people.  He was very much a loner, self-taught, self-directed with a sense of privacy that could appear sphinx-like.

He read an electrical/electronics schematic the way others read books.  I do not recall seeing him read anything, except the letters I sent to him when he was in the hospital the summer before he died.  His letters to me were composed with excellent grammar, no mis-spellings, and a quality of thought that I, even as a nine-year-old, recognized as original and enlightened.

His time on earth ended too quickly, at the age of sixty, for him to have seen the results of his creative “visions” that involved coordinated components of stereo equipment become reality.  My mother told me once that he was living in a world that was going too fast for him.  I tried to believe that statement for a long time, but I came to the conclusion that he “saw” just where the world around him was going, and he felt powerless to do anything about it.

Some people are born ahead of their time, some too late.  With my father, I think it was a case of both incongruities, at once, with the clock.

His intuitive insights were going too fast for the world that LBJ was crafting, a world that was, already, very behind-the-times because LBJ lived in FDR-land.  And FDR-land was dated by the time that Franklin Delano Roosevelt died.

My father disliked FDR, somewhat because of the socialist strain in that politician, but, even more, because Franklin was a Dutchman.  For a Dutchman to con people in the way that he did, well, that deceitful behavior was beyond the pale regarding the frank honesty of any Dutchman.

Even more beyond the pale were the efficiency experts and the aptitude tests that were overtaking business and decision-making in the United States.  I was a young warrior in that arena, having proved myself to be a Gifted Student, not a Backward (slow) Learner, in the 2nd grade.  That experience, at the age of seven, pretty much ended any admiration (which wasn’t much) that I might have had for The Experts.

To look at the mess that America has dug for itself with The Experts Running Things, through pocketing obscene amounts of consultant-cash — is to understand a portion of the wrong road that this country has been traveling for about 50 years.

The tyranny of the technocrats started with the efficiency-experts of the 1920s and 1930s, continued with the egg-heads from Harvard and Yale in the 1960s (whom LBJ loathed, and for good reason), and exploded from the 1990s onward with the Consultant Class, grooming the electorate to install the Power-monger Class in legislatures everywhere.

Common sense got shoved in the ditch so those frauds could get rich.

I recently watched a documentary about the real-life Big Red:  Secretariat.  This EPSN SportsCentury production dates back to 1999. I was hesitant to watch it, yet again, because I knew I’d cry.  And I did cry.

I was a teenager in New Jersey during that phenomenal series of Triple-Crown races.  I’d already expressed a love of horses, a fascination with equines, an affinity with them that then led me to many a racetrack, horse farm, horse ranch, and, ultimately, to live in the West — and write Westerns.

The world of horse-racing has always been subject to dirty tricks, dirty riders, dirty deals, dirty tactics.  There’s always been an underworld to this game of risk involving the most sublime of earthly creatures, the horse.  I try not to recall a trip I took to a small race-track in West Virginia where, behind the scenes, horses were being shot up with Bute.

Then there’s the tragic tale of Alydar.

I won some good, legal payoffs for betting on Affirmed to go 3-in-a-row.  It was more than just my quick assessment of the Daily Form.  Affirmed had that special something that Alydar didn’t.  I can’t explain what it was.  Maybe Affirmed needed Alydar to spur him on, from beside, or behind, or even ahead, much in the same way that Secretariat needed Sham, the dark bay, also with a super-heart, to promote him to victory.

I cannot, however, fully enjoy those memories of Affirmed & Alydar, knowing what I know about what humans did to that exquisite animal in November 1990.   I’m sure there are good people who, to this day, suffer pangs of guilt from what they knew, but couldn’t tell:  If They did that to a horse, They’ll do even worse to me.

When Barbaro shattered his leg in the Preakness Stakes in 2006, I was so upset that I swore off watching any horserace ever again.  I’d been to Pimlico dozens of times.  I have only one word to summarize that race track:  Baltimore.

In 2022, however, for the first time in almost twenty years, I watched Rich Strike weave his way to winning the Kentucky Derby.   I still watch the bird’s-eye-view video of that upset-race.  Inspiring!!!

This past weekend, I took a look at the “mudder” Sovereignty defeat Journalism!  Symbolism in spades!

I therefore felt up to looking at Secretariat, the horse with the super-heart.

Alongside the tears at watching this magnificent Big Red, and his magnificent jockey, Ron Turcotte. I was stunned to recall the world of the 1970s in America.   We were a much poorer nation then, economically speaking.  There were vast untapped resources and potentials that have yet to be realized.  The most obvious, and jarring, reality to me, though, was the existence of the Sportswriter.

I knew who each of those guys were, what newspaper they wrote for, and what the House Style of each paper had been.  Each writer had his own morality tale about life, that he boldly and succinctly expressed through his interpretation of any competitive game:  winner and losers.

These men spoke very openly, some tearfully, about God, divine inspiration, divine lots of things.

Can you imagine today hearing a Sportswriter speak of God, playing a role in the life of anything, much less a horse named Secretariat?

Can you find any Sportswriter, at all, who knows, in depth, the subject of the Sport about which he writes?

Fifty years is not an eternity; it’s not even a lifetime anymore.  It’s half-a-century.  That SportsCentury hearkened back to the beginning of the end of an America that played sports, played fairly, played intelligently, played freely, played.

I recall high-school classmates intent on becoming sportswriters.  I cautioned them that the world of sports was changing too fast for them to emulate the sportswriters of the Northeast, the jocks and wanna-be-jocks that they admired, even idolized.

Those adolescent boys didn’t take my advice well, or at all.  They countered with:  “Well, you’re not gonna make it in Journalism cause you’re too sensitive.”

I fully agreed.  My sensitivity, however, wasn’t what drove me away from the 4th Estate.  It was more of a very visceral gut reaction to the low-life grossness of the D.C. Media.

Not much has changed in that arena — except it’s gotten worse!

The Sportswriters of yore knew their subjects well.  They knew their audience well.  They knew what sold, and what didn’t sell.  By the end of the life of Secretariat, Big Red, in 1989, the sports world was beginning to fall apart.  Advertising, a primarily American creation, was headed for the chopping block and the glue factory because of the ever-increasing infestation of global markets.

No Made-in-The-USA-products to pitch = no ads needed for any uniquely American vehicle of commerce.

Whether or not there will be another SportsCentury is not up to the corporatized sports in America.  It’s up to Americans, to determine if there will be an American Century.

I’ve cast my bet on this one.  It’s not pari-mutual.  There’s no WIN, PLACE, or SHOW.

There’s only FTW:  For the Win!