Book Review: The Big Horse, by Joe McGinniss
The Big Horse, By Joe McGinniss
Simon & Schuster, 263 pp., illustrated, $22.95
By Bill Beuttler (Boston Globe, August 29, 2004)
Joe McGinniss made his reputation while still in his 20s with The Selling of the President, 1968, his account of the public-relations makeover given Richard Nixon by Republican strategists for his presidential campaign. Since then McGinniss, 61, has become even better known — notorious, actually — for three fat, controversial bestsellers: the true-crime excavations Fatal Vision and Blind Faith, and his early ’90s look at this state’s senior senator, The Last Brother: The Rise and Fall of Teddy Kennedy.
Fatal Vision famously begat a book of its own — Janet Malcolm's The Journalist and the Murderer, which used McGinniss as the poster boy for journalists' willingness to mislead and exploit sources — and the Kennedy book was widely denounced for taking liberties with private thoughts and conversations of Kennedy's that McGinniss allegedly could never have had access to.
It may be no surprise, then, that lately McGinniss seems to have been going out of his way to avoid such controversy, by choosing less ambitious, quasi-autobiographical projects and focusing his undeniable skills as a storyteller on two sports, soccer and horse racing, that are generally off the radar of most Americans.
The Big Horse is the second of these, and it's a nicely matched pairing of author and subject matter. McGinniss was a horse-racing buff throughout his young manhood. The second book of his career was a novel about the sport, set at Hialeah, Florida, and he'd begun work on a nonfiction book on horse racing in 1971 that he set aside suddenly when his father was diagnosed with a fatal brain tumor.
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.
As a result, this little volume turns out to be several books in one. It's part autobiography, with McGinniss describing how he rebelled against his mother's notion of horse tracks being even more sordid than what she called "gin mills.” (“In response, I developed an extravagant fantasy life, in which I lived in a gin mill next to a racetrack, dividing my time equally between them.") By the time he got to college in Central Massachusetts, he was hitting tracks from Saratoga to Suffolk Downs whenever possible.
The book is also part evaluation of the current health of horse racing, with McGinniss offering nine specific reasons that hardly anyone comes to the track anymore. One biggie: “More efficient and faster-paced means of gambling (and not only on horses) became widely available to the common man.” Another: “Most of the people who used to go to the racetrack were dead.”
The most satisfying part of the book is the condensed history of American horse racing that emerges from McGinniss's capsule life of Johnson, much of it told in P.G.'s own voice as McGinniss apparently makes like Studs Terkel with a tape recorder. The Johnson-narrated chapters describe how he went from his beginnings in horse racing as a Chicago teenager to building himself a career as a trainer and breeder, specializing in matching less-than-perfect horses with promise to create talented progeny on the cheap.
Johnson's top achievement in that line is Volponi, the big horse of the book's title. On October 26, 2002, Volponi had won the annual Breeders' Cup Classic, besting that year's Kentucky Derby winner, War Emblem, and overcoming odds of roughly 40 to 1 against him. Johnson's share of the $4 million purse was more than $2 million, Volponi was thought to be likely to fetch as much as $8 million when Johnson sold him for stud work, and Johnson had the added satisfaction of the event having been held for the first time that year at Arlington Park, Illinois, outside his hometown. It was a story fit for Hollywood, and Disney actually came along and optioned the screen rights to it.
The narrative tension in McGinniss's book is in seeing whether Volponi can score another big win at the 2003 Saratoga Breeders’ Cup Handicap or afterward. For all Johnson's high hopes and confidence in his big horse, McGinniss tells us, in horse racing 90 percent of the game is disappointment.
McGinniss propels his story along with casual charm. His reporting, in fact, will likely be too casual for some. He covers a couple of Volponi's more important races by TV and cellphone, whereas most authors would be expected to bestir themselves to do so in person. He also passes along rumors about a rival trainer doping horses without bothering to investigate matters himself, other than quoting the trainer's offhand denial of those rumors at a press conference.
But The Big Horse isn't meant to be investigative journalism. As a quick, highly readable look at the status of present-day horse racing, it succeeds quite admirably. And Johnson gives McGinniss a hero his earlier books have rarely had: one who holds his admiration from start to finish.
Bill Beuttler teaches feature writing at Boston University. He sometimes went with his father to watch the horses run at Arlington Park while growing up near Chicago.