When bad things happen to good athletes
Crazy Good: The True Story of Dan Patch, the Most Famous Horse in America
By Charles Leerhsen
Simon & Schuster, 368 pp., illustrated, $26
Chalked Up: Inside Elite Gymnastics' Merciless Coaching, Overzealous Parents, Eating Disorders, and Elusive Olympic Dreams
By Jennifer Sey
Morrow, 304 pp., illustrated, $24.95
Play Hard, Die Young: Football Dementia, Depression, and Death
By Bennet Omalu
Neo Forenxis, paperback, 163 pp., $15.95
Dan Patch, perhaps the most famous racehorse ever to have run without a jockey, had a lot going for him. He was fast, he was durable, and he was amiable. While standing around in the paddock, he'd let small children run under his belly.
And that's not all. According to the horse's biographer, Charles Leerhsen, after races that he'd won, which meant nearly all of them, Dan Patch "turned to the grandstand and bowed deeply, seeming to acknowledge the applause."
Sounds like a horse out of Disney by Dreamworks, but Dan Patch was the real thing, and for much of the time between 1900, when he first pulled a sulky across a finish line, and 1914, when he made his last public appearance in a parade, harness racing was a popular sport, and the game's greatest star was among the nation's most admired athletes.
But "Crazy Good" is more than the story of a superb competitor. Like Laura Hillenbrand writing about Seabiscuit, Leerhsen recognizes that much of the charm of the story is in the two-legged characters aiding and abetting the horse in his adventures, shady and otherwise. Regarding one of the foremost among them, Myron McHenry, often the driver of the sulky before which Dan Patch paced, Leerhsen writes that he "never stopped drinking, and so even when things were good they were awful."
Leerhsen demonstrates once again that a book written about an accomplished horse can be an excellent read, especially when the author seems to be having a great time telling the horse's stories.
The subtitles of some books are so thorough that they might seem to make reading the books unnecessary. In the case of "Chalked Up," once you've noticed that the subtitle is "Inside Elite Gymnastics' Merciless Coaching, Overzealous Parents, Eating Disorders, and Elusive Olympic Dreams," what else do you need to know? The details, perhaps. The author, Jennifer Sey, was a national champion whose mother was apparently so invested in her career that when Jennifer said she wanted to quit the sport, Mom threatened to disown her. That would be the overzealous parent.
In one of the book's most powerful passages, Sey writes about herself as she tries, fighting the complaints of her tired and damaged body, to finish a workout in 1987: "Agitation and fright is my perpetual state of existence." Less than a year earlier, she'd won the national championship.
Sey first tells the reader about the pressures of "growing up in a world where underage and underweight girls were looked upon as cultural icons; as a fierce competitor in a culture where second place means losing; as a onetime winner who wasn't going to win anymore." Then she illustrates the generalities with specific stories about her own eating disorders, a doctor less concerned with the health of his teenage patient than with getting her back on the balance beam, and coaches who demean and slap their preteen athletes. People who read "Chalked Up" may be less inclined to see the female gymnasts on display in Beijing as pixies than as undernourished victims, which is perhaps what has led some members of the gymnastics community to adopt the bizarre defense of questioning Sey's right to tell the story of her own childhood.
And speaking of subtitles . . . Hey, NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell, how do you feel about "football dementia, depression, and death"? That catchy phrase sums up the concerns of Dr. Bennet Omalu, the forensic pathologist who's been studying the brains of men who've had those brains scrambled playing pro football.
"Play Hard, Die Young" collects the evidence Omalu has found that in many cases, multiple concussions suffered by players have seriously compromised their post-football lives. Perhaps as discouraging as that conclusion were the initial responses to Omalu's work by physicians associated with the NFL, who characterized his findings as "preposterous," "fallacious," and "purely speculative." The families of Mike Webster, Terry Long, John Mackey, Andre Waters, and various other former players who have died young or suffered irreversible brain damage would disagree.
Ironically, given the abuse that's been heaped energetically and unfairly upon his research, Omalu is a football fan. Toward the end of a chapter titled "What Should We Do?" he writes, "Let us all come together and solve this national problem, for what would life be in America without football? Football is the soul of America."
Writing in The
Bill Littlefield hosts National Public Radio's "Only a Game." His most recent book is also titled "Only a Game."
