Brooklyn Backstretch

My parents owned harness horses when I was a kid, and when I was a teenager, my family moved to Saratoga. Until I was about 23, I was around racing pretty regularly and even though I didn’t follow the sport that closely, I went to the track a few times a year and considered myself [...]

It took me more than five hours on Sunday afternoon/evening to get from Delaware Park to my abode in Brooklyn, usually a two-hour trip. My whirlwind tour of three mid-Atlantic racetracks (Atlantic City Race Court, Pimlico, and Delaware Park) provided enough pleasure to make every single moment of travel time worth it, but the ROI [...]

I was already feeling guilty about not supporting one of my home tracks on its closing weekend; now that the Withers has become something of an end-of-season embarrassment, I am even more chagrined about my defection to points south instead of being at Aqueduct today.
This storied race, first run in 1874, drew a field of [...]

I’ve just discovered (thanks, Ernie) that the photos uploaded of ACRC aren’t appearing in the blog…the html code for them is showing, but the original photos are on a computer at home, so I can’t do any triage at this point. I’ll fix it later…and thanks for the info!
Grumble, grumble…

I learned three things on my sojourn Thursday to Atlantic City Race Course:
–Do not rely on Mapquest for directions to the track (Mapquest didn’t provide an exit number, and the state highway route number was wrong).–Do not, under any circumstances, miss the exit off the Atlantic City Expressway (you have to go an additional ten [...]

It’s hard for me believe that we’re coming up to the last weekend of the Aqueduct meet; I’ve always been fond of the track, and having spent more time there this meet than any other time, it is truly with some regret that I will bid it farewell until October.
OK, so the racing’s not so [...]

I’m in the middle of reading T.D. Thornton’s Not By A Long Shot (better late than never), and shortly after reading last week’s report that the Jockeys’ Guild recommended a 50% cut in the fees that jockeys pay their valets, I came across this paragraph:
Aside from laying out the equipment for three or four jockeys…a [...]

Slowing down as we age is distastefully inevitable–I wish that running fast and far was as easy today as it was ten years ago–and even if we do a pretty good job of denying it in ourselves, we find ourselves reminded of its truth when we are lucky enough to watch some of our favorites [...]

Alerted to the New York Times review of The First Saturday in May by J.S’s comment on Friday, I was as dismayed by Manohla Dargis’s review as J.S. In my writing classes, students often workshop their papers, sharing them with classmates to get feedback and comments for improvement, and I always caution: “Don’t suggest that [...]

…and it’s Rangers in 5. I attended the opening of The First Saturday in May on Friday night, and as the movie ended and John Hennegan opened the Q&A segment, he announced that the Rangers were up 3-1 (having seen the movie twice before, I was tempted to check the score on my little [...]