The Canadian Sportsman
Tongue Tie Off
Back To Tongue Tie OffNovember 09, 2009
“The only people for me are the mad ones...” starts the most famous quote of one of the writers I worship, Jack Kerouac, from his most famous novel, “On the Road.” He talks about these people, who burn with enthusiasm, who damn the torpedoes and live in the moment, who are “desirous of everything at the same time.” Kerouac’s wild words popped into my mind as I looked at the Harrisburg sales results this past week, and I found myself thinking about the thousands of hardy souls who make up our community, how we are bound together through this inexplicable, irrational love for harness racing, and, with sirens going off and warning lights flashing all around us, we keep our hands on the wheel and our foot on the accelerator.
Be rational for a minute. Be logical. Go state to state, province to province, and tell me where the sun is shining. In the United States, at the moment, it’s getting awfully dark in Michigan. And it’s going to be a cold, hard winter in Ohio and Illinois. It’s been grey for awhile in California, and black in Maryland. The sun is shining in a few spots in New York, but not so much as was forecast in others. Indiana seems warm and bright. But Pennsylvania is being threatened by givebacks. And storm clouds seem to be gathering in force over New Jersey.
Does the weather for harness racing look inviting in Alberta? Will Quebec ever recover from the storms of this past year? The owners, trainers and drivers of Ontario are safe for now, but how will their lives change as they take in the refugees of these other disasters? For every horseman thriving in a jurisdiction where racing is healthy, there must be 10 compatriots struggling to keep their heads above water in neighbouring states. Did this seem like a good time for a horse sale?
But there they were, on the road, just like Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty in the novel, except instead of heading west to California in search of excitement and fortune, these dreamers burned, burned, burned toward central Pennsylvania, and proved they were mad. In a year where the economy had only just started to emerge from recession, in an autumn where the thoroughbred yearling sales cratered, the mad horsemen of our industry spent and spent, to the tune of a marked increase in yearling prices. And then they spent on racehorses, and they spent on broodmares, and they spent on stallion shares.
I have written piece after piece about the trouble I see ahead. About the difficulties we as a sport will likely endure. If you only know me from this blog, you probably find me Vulcan-like in my logic, pessimistic in my outlook. So I’ll end this with another famous Kerouac quote. “My fault, my failure, is not in the passions I have, but in my lack of control over them.” That’s my way of saying I, too, bought a yearling at Harrisburg. Mad, indeed.
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