Brooklyn Backstretch

So it’s official: It’s holiday shopping season. Black Friday has come and gone; today is Cyber Monday, when, according to people who pay attention to such things, many, many work hours are lost by those taking advantage of their office computers to do a little online shopping.
You likely have plenty of gift options for the [...]

According to Matt Winn, she made the Derby “an American institution” (Hotaling).
According to a New York Times writer in 1914, her entry in the Sanford “caused something of a panic among the others who had starters” (“Whitney Horses”).
She made only 11 lifetime starts, but the mark that she left on racing is indelible, and her [...]

At the risk of scratching Teresa’s Aqueduct itch the wrong way, the Saturday after Thanksgiving usually signals the end of meaningful racing in New York until the Gotham rolls around the following March. The good news is that it always goes out with a bang, and this Saturday is no different. The traditional Aqueduct fixtures, [...]

The unthankful heart… discovers no mercies; but let the thankful heart sweepthrough the day and, as the magnet finds the iron, so it will find, in everyhour, some heavenly blessings! ~Henry Ward Beecher*

I am fortunate, particularly in an uncertain and trying time, that blessings are not hard for me to find. I have a healthy [...]

A maxim of authorship, it is said, is to write what you know. And there may well be no turf writer who knows trainers better than Karen M. Johnson, author of The Training Game: An Inside Look at American Racing’s Top Trainers.
The daughter of trainer P.G. Johnson, who died in August of 2004, Karen Johnson [...]

Tomorrow at Aqueduct the Discovery Handicap, named for Alfred G. Vanderbilt’s magnificent colt, will be run for the 66th time. A look at its past winners shows two horses whose victories came a generation apart but to whom American racing fans formed a profound attachment that may have reached its pinnacle on October 15, 1983.
Kelso [...]

I never met Bobby Frankel. Never said a word to him, though as he came and went from the racing office at Saratoga, from which he often watched his horses race, it was always sort of temping to say, “Hi, Bobby,” as if we were old friends. He was ubiquitous, and so familiar that it [...]

The Christmas carols were blasting jovially from speakers throughout the Woodbury Commons outlets on Saturday; beyond the annoyance of the inundation when Thanksgiving was still ten days away, I felt a frisson of guilt with every reference to the joy of giving, as I was shopping pretty much exclusively for myself.
Sometimes, though, an early start [...]

Hockey season is about a month old now, and there’s been nary a syllable written in this space about the Rangers. I’ve gone to fewer games than usual, and after a torrid beginning, the Rangers have settled comfortably into their usual mediocrity.
Sean Avery won again the other day—not the one who wears the blue sweater, [...]

Named for a major historical figure and won by Man o’War, Riva Ridge, Fit to Fight, and Seattle Slew, the Stuyvesant has suffered an awful lot of indignity, deemed to have been unnecessary in so many of the years since its inception.
First run at Jamaica, the Stuyvesant was originally a race for three-year-olds, and its [...]