Book Review: The Big Horse, by Joe McGinniss

McGinniss's decision to spend last year's August racing season at the famous track in Saratoga, New York, was that of a 60-year-old man returning to an old flame. The sport itself, meanwhile, had changed a great deal in the intervening three decades, and was now in danger of sputtering out. As McGinniss puts it: “By 2003, horse racing was no longer a vibrant part of America's sporting scene, but rather a faded relic of a bygone age. Far more people would go to a movie about a horse that raced more than fifty years ago than would watch a real horse race.”

That Seabiscuit summer was also the one in which Kentucky Derby winner Funny Cide was slated for a highly anticipated rematch with Empire Maker at Saratoga. So McGinniss rented a cottage for the summer and settled in to research his long-delayed Saratoga book. What he hadn't expected was meeting P. G. Johnson, the shrewd, plain-talking Hall of Fame trainer, now 78, who becomes his book's main character.