The Great Black Jockeys: The Lives and Times of the Men Who Dominated America's First National Sport [Englisch] [Gebundene Ausgabe]

The most engrossing sports stories have a way of sneaking up on you. They explore issues much broader than competition, who won, and who lost; they are sports stories because they take place on the fields of play, but the light they shed illuminates much more than the athletic arena. On one level, The Great Black Jockeys is certainly about sports--indeed, racing was America's first national sport. But it's also about much more than that. It's an absorbing history, at times tragic, at times inspiring, of a nation in transition and the complex interrelationship between sports, society, attitudes, and race.

The overriding tragedy here is that this particular story essentially ends just after the turn of the 20th century. Before that, black riders dominated the game. In slave days, race riding could be a route to freedom. It was certainly a route to fame and a share of fortune. Whether a match race for bragging rights in the field, or a leg of the prestigious Triple Crown, black riders had at least a fair shake. Isaac Murphy, whose winning percentages have never been matched, won a trio of Kentucky Derbies. Jimmy Winkfield won back-to-back Runs for the Roses in 1901 and 1902. Yet, no black rider has piloted a winner in a major American stakes race since 1909. What happened?

By introducing us to a forgotten chapter in sports history and a host of deserving athletic legends sadly overlooked by time, Hotaling explores what did happen, and why a sport that witnessed blacks and whites competing as equals for so long at the highest levels suddenly locked the starting gate. The story Hotaling tells is as fascinating as it is painful, a story of opportunity unsaddled by prejudice and fear, and never significantly remounted again. "This is not black history," he makes clear. "It is not white history. It is American history." And like so much of American history, it's more complex than black and white. --Jeff Silverman

More than 200 years before Jackie Robinson broke the color line in professional baseball, black athletes, then slaves, dominated what was then and for a long time afterward America's most popular sport: horse racing. Black jockeys continued to be a major force in thoroughbred racing until the early part of this century, when they all but disappeared from the sport. Hotaling tells the stories of the greatest of the black riders, from Austin Curtis, who was born midway through the seventeenth century, through Jimmy Winkfield, who died in 1974. They are fascinating stories, previously untold, and they constitute a very significant contribution to the history of race and sport in America. Hotaling's politically correct explanation for the current paucity of black jockeys (racism) seems too easy and too easily arrived at, though it might be largely true. Still, one can understand Hotaling's caution: as a young reporter, he asked the questions that led Jimmy "The Greek" Snyder to utter his now-infamous remarks about black athletes--remarks that brought about the immediate destruction of Snyder's career. Dennis Dodge

"This may be the most fascinating untold sports story in American history. We are lucky that it is so well told now by Mr. Hotaling in his wonderfully written book. It is more than a sports story, though. It is a human story. These were exceptional athletes who competed successfully against their white counterparts and more than held their own. Yet how many Americans today, how many racing fans even, realize that the winning jockey in the first Kentucky Derby was a black man? These African American jockeys, great as they were, were driven out of the sport and then out of history. It was as if they were never there. To read Hotaling's book is to discover important missing pages of history. Not just sports history but American history."
— Charles Osgood, anchor, CBS News Sunday Morning
"Rich and masterfully written. Hotaling displays a keen sense of the interplay between culture, power, and history as he uncovers the enormous experiences and achievements of African American jockeys and restores them to their rightful 'space' in sports history. What emerges clearly in this work is a key element of the American narrative—that is, how the most ordinary lives are made extraordinary through an individual's sense of agency."
— Anne Butler, Ph.D., director, The Center of Excellence for the Study of Kentucky African Americans, Kentucky State University
"The Great Black Jockeys is a fascinating journey into a little-known part of African American and American sports history."
— Ira Berlin, professor of history, University of Maryland
"Congratulations on your achievement. It is a real contribution."
— Henry Louis Gates, chair, Afro-American Studies Department, Harvard University

More than a century before Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier in major league baseball, black athletes were dominating America's first national sport. The sport was horse racing, and the greatest jockeys of all were slaves and the sons of slaves. Cheered by thousands of Americans in the North and South, they rode to victory in all of the major stakes, including the very first Kentucky Derby. Although their glory days ranged from the early 1700s to the turn of the 20th century, the memory of these great black jockeys was erased from history. Who were these athletes and why have their names vanished without a trace?

"This may be the most fascinating untold sports story in American history. We are lucky that it is so well told now by Mr. Hotaling in his wonderfully written book." — Charles Osgood, anchor, CBS News Sunday Morning

The Great Black Jockeys is the first book about the lives and times of the forgotten men whose extraordinary skills were a wonder to behold, men with names like "Honest Ike" Murphy, Abe Hawkins, Willie Simms, Austin Curtis, Jimmy Winkfield, and dozens more. This is also a story of a young country where whole towns turned out in cleared fields to cheer and place wagers on magnificent horses and the men who rode them, and where the greatest athletes in the land were the property of others. For fleeting moments on the racecourse black riders in colorful silks tasted the glory and freedom that slavery had denied them.

In The Great Black Jockeys, the exploits and courage of America's earliest and best athletes are finally remembered.

Stunning Endorsements for The Great Black Jockeys
"This may be the most fascinating untold sports story in American history. We are lucky that it is so well told now by Mr. Hotaling in his wonderfully written book. It is more than a sports story, though. It is a human story. These were exceptional athletes who competed successfully against their white counterparts and more than held their own. Yet how many Americans today, how many racing fans even…realize that the winning jockey in the first Kentucky Derby was a black man? These African-American jockeys, great as they were, were driven out of the sport and then out of history. It was as if they were never there. To read Hotaling's book is to discover important missing pages of history. Not just sports history but American history."--Charles Osgood, anchor, CBS News Sunday Morning

"Congratulations on your achievement! It is a real contribution."--Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Chair, Afro-American Studies Department, Harvard University

"Rich and masterfully written. Hotaling displays a keen sense of the interplay between culture, power, and history as he uncovers the enormous experiences and achievements of African-American jockeys and restores them to their rightful 'space' in sports history."--Anne Butler, Ph.D., director, The Center of Excellence for the Study of Kentucky African Americans, Kentucky State University

Edward Hotaling, a leading social historian, is the nation's preeminent authority on the history of black jockeys. An Emmy-winning writer and producer for the NBC television station in Washington, D.C., he is the author of They're Off! Horse Racing at Saratoga (Syracuse University Press). In addition, he has published articles in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, International Herald-Tribune, and many other publications. Mr. Hotaling lives in Washington, D.C.

From the Introducion, a Look Back at the First Kentucky Derby
"Today will be historic in Kentucky annals as the first 'Derby Day' of what promises to be a long series of annual festivities, which we confidently expect our grandchildren a hundred years hence to celebrate in glorious centennial rejoicings."
The confidence of the Louisville Courier-Journal would prove justified, to put it mildly. Now, 125 years hence and going into the twenty-first century, the Kentucky Derby is still one of the most moving public gatherings in America, in or out of sports. Its phenomenal on-site crowds of well over 150,000 people—something baseball and football and basketball can't dream of—still stand as one as they try to follow the local folks to the strains of "My Old Kentucky Home," a heart-tugging few minutes worth the race itself. At a venue almost void of physical charm, in a sport almost dead, one of the most magical moments in sports is still created around—what? An idea? A tradition? Hype? The best the sport can offer? Better to leave it a mystery. At the same time, however, as the Derby enters a third century, it is many furlongs behind the original in one aspect: the representation of African Americans in important roles.
The first Kentucky Derby—foreshadowed by the 1839 Kentucky sweepstakes matching Wagner and Grey Eagle—began modestly. It was certainly no more impressive than America's first derby, day eleven years earlier in New Jersey, with its huge New York crowd, raving press coverage, and guaranteed participation by the major stables. Yet it held considerably more promise than that 1864 derby in Paterson. Unlike New Jersey and New York, Kentucky knew right away that it had bottled something precious, something that it had always possessed, its identity. It was—and to those who look closely, still is—symbolized by the women of Kentucky, not only in the way that the states of the Old South crowned their reigning belles, but in the way that nation states coined a national woman, in the way that America, in eleven years, would put one on a pedestal in New York Harbor, even if she would spend the rest of her stone cold life trying to get down, proving that she wasn't from Kentucky. When the Courier-Journal's rival, the Louisville Commercial, reminded everybody, "Kentucky is proverbial the world over for its beautiful women as well as fine horses," the compliment was graciously accepted. And when the women turned out in force that Monday, they were really more than a measure of commercial success; they were the most important part of the event. Kentuckians saw not only their new derby but especially the women there as a rare and valuable expression of statewide unity and pride.
"Until the close of this first day it has been the wont of our people to refer with glowing enthusiasm to the extraordinary aggregation of beauty which congregated at the Gray [sic] Eagle–Wagner contest of thirty-five years ago," said the Courier-Journal. "It would seem that no impulse, in the long interval since, so served to draw together the people of Kentucky; but we now have another great event."
That first Wagner–Grey Eagle event had drawn about ten thousand people; so did this one. And just as editor William T. Porter had waxed on about the beauty of the ladies watching Cato ride Wagner to victory over the Kentucky-bred Grey Eagle, the Courier-Journal's man at the first Kentucky Derby couldn't stop once he had started on their daughters. He led off his report with the crowd, with the results of the race taking a back seat.
It was made up of every element; but place aux dames et demoiselles before the pen shall treat of another feature. It is much, indeed, when attention and admiration may be diverted from the prime object which has gathered a great assemblage together, but not the Derby itself, with its absorbing interest and excitement, will linger as long in the minds of the spectator there, as the brilliant array, arranged in dazzling groups and lines, from the outermost limit of the stand full a hundred feet to the black mass beyond, which marked the half space set apart for the men, and in its serried parallels stretching up in twenty tiers back to the outer railing. Blondes and brunes there were, stately beauties and petite, matrons and maids, in such bewildering number as to daze the eye, except that the cumulative effect was striking and even glorious to such a degree as may not be seen twice in a lifetime. We dare assert that the most glowing description given to this feature of yesterday's gathering cannot be too extravagant to adequately picture the panorama, constantly shifting with its varied and brilliant colors, during five hours of the day. There were a thousand women there, each exemplifying in her own enchanting face that
"Loveliness, ever in motion, which plays
"Like the light upon Autumn's soft, shady days,
"Now bare, and now there, giving warmth as it flies
"From the lips to the cheeks, from the cheeks to the eyes."
Obviously, it was hard on the frontier. To this day, no great sporting event attracts as large and enthralled an audience of women as the Derby does. And only a Bluegrass belle could appreciate the compliment, quoted on that first Derby Day, that a passing horse trainer once paid to "a high-bred Kentucky girl" when he exclaimed, "By George, she looks like a thoroughbred Glencoe filly." After all, she was likely to know that the imported Glencoe was an incredible "filly sire," the progenitor of 481 children, of whom an astounding 370 were daughters, a good many of them champions.
The ten thousand at the first Kentucky Derby were also inaugurating the Louisville Jockey Club and its new track on the old Churchill family land, to be dubbed Churchill Downs a decade later. "The stand is second in size only to Saratoga and will seat 3,500," the Courier-Journal boasted. The prices ranged from ten dollars to watch the finishes from the quarter (home) stretch to a dollar for the grandstand to fifty cents for the "field stand," or bleachers with not much of a view. Within a few years, admission to the vast infield, circumscribed by the track, would be free of charge, "both to people and wagons," and home to about two-thirds of the crowd. While the grandstand and quarter-stretch crowd represented "social life," one reporter noted, "the swarm of free visitors typified popular (including negro) life."
Reviving one of Yelverton Oliver's dreams, M. Lewis Clark, grandson of the explorer William Clark, had organized the new Jockey Club, but the loudest presence, with his white hat and red ties, was the flaming Irishman H. Price McGrath, who had been John Morrissey's former partner at Saratoga and Abe Hawkins's self-proclaimed protector. McGrath was now loudly lording it over his home state. If there was something going on, McGrath was in the middle of it. Born poor, he was after success with a vengeance, and he was now creating a Kentucky racing stable and stud farm of his own, discreetly named McGrathiana, its manor house modeled, with equal modesty, after Saratoga's cavernous United States Hotel.
"For two and a half cents I was denied an education," said the bitter McGrath. As a boy, he had given a dime to a wealthy neighbor and asked him to bring home a spelling book from the city. Returning without it, the rich neighbor gave the boy his dime back, explaining, "The book cost twelve and one-half cents." Still trying to get that two and a half cents out of the rich, McGrath flew his green and gold on two entries in the first Derby, Chesapeake and Aristides. They were the favorites, too.
"A dense, pushing and...