Thanks to everyone who sent both private and public get-well wishes for Madison—as of this morning, she seems to be feeling a lot better. She’s not quite back to her old self, but she felt well enough to put in a pick for today, and she’s much perkier than she’s been over the last few…
For a variety of reasons, the last week or so has been a tough one around the Backstretch household. An unexpected death in one of my communities has left many of us shaken, and it’s not every day that a jet lands in the water just a few miles from my home. Though that outcome…
A slight cat-astrophe delayed my arrival at the Big A on Monday, and when I got off the train at Aqueduct, I was fairly surprised to see it snowing. I didn’t recall seeing anything in the forecast about snow today, and I soon realized that I wasn’t alone: I don’t think many of us expected…
“The sport of horse racing is the only instance where the participation of blacks stopped almost completely while the sport itself continued—a sad commentary on American life…Isaac Murphy, so highly admired during his time for his skills and character, would have been ashamed of his sport.” –Arthur Ashe, quoted in Hotaling. Today, on the day…
Though the remarkable Searching was not a Jacobs homebred, her daughter Affectionately was, the product of the successful racing relationship between trainer Hirsch Jacobs and owner Isador Bieber. Unlike her mother, who raced twenty times without winning, Affectionately won nine of her first ten races, including three stakes races as a two-year-old, and in 1962,…
Searching wins the Correction Handicap of 1956 ©Keeneland-Morgan, credit to the National Museum of Racing and Hall of Fame Yesterday I wrote about the Hirsch Jacobs family, U.S. racing royalty. Though the Jacobs family frequently bred horses, one of their best stories is a filly purchased from Ogden Phipps in 1955. Searching (War Admiral –…
The three-day holiday weekend means Monday racing at Aqueduct—perhaps not something to which to look forward, given the forecast, but with stakes races each day, it’s not going to be hard to be convinced to head out there…provided, of course, that the weekend cards don’t go the way of today’s, which is to say, out…
Following, a collection of random thoughts, all of which has at least some tangential relation to horse racing, even if it is not immediately apparent. On a menu in Lexington, listed under imported beers: Sam Adams. The Garden District, New Orleans: doesn’t every neighborhood need one of these? That old hockey and horse racing connection:…
In response to the mild, followed by apocalyptic, followed by mild forecasts for Saturday’s weather, the New York Racing Association sped up post times to insure that all nine races could be run before the “storm” hit. Nine races run in approximately three hours and forty-six minutes—barely time to check the paddock, bet, get to…
Neither a champion nor a Hall of Fame inductee, Busanda nonetheless lives on in two ways: through her bloodlines and one of those Aqueduct winter races that, when I first started following races, sent me to the archives to figure out who those eponymous horses were. I don’t know whose idea it was to name a…
Brooklyn Backstretch 