The Eighty-Dollar Champion - Elizabeth Letts [112]
The international teams paraded in, each stopping in the center of the arena under a ring of spotlights as the Army Marching Band played its country’s national anthem. Every time he saw the parade of nations, Harry could not help but feel some mixed emotions: sadness that his native country of Holland was not represented, an underlying sense of dismay at the presence of the German team, and a pride in the team of his adopted homeland, the United States of America, tinged with just a shadow of regret that as a professional, he would never be able to carry his adopted homeland’s flag into the ring.
The Cuban team paraded into the ring to the stirring trumpet blasts of “La Bayamesa,” flanked by the blue, red, and white of the Cuban flag. Suddenly the crowd erupted, spewing forth a group of men who stormed down from the stands into the ring, shouting protests against the Cuban team and trying to grab the Cuban flag and disrupt the Army Marching Band from playing the anthem. In a flash, the arena was filled with the “Irish Mafia,” the dedicated network of ring stewards and groundskeepers who informally policed the show. A moment later, brass-buttoned, billy-club-toting members of the NYPD escorted the rabble-rousers out of the stadium, and the show continued. Some in the crowd hooted and heckled as though this were one of the prizefights the Garden was famous for hosting. It was unclear whether the noisy spectators were supporting the hecklers or the police who quelled the protest.
World politics erupting in as sheltered a venue as the National Horse Show seemed unthinkable, and the front-tier crowd seemed embarrassed by the spectacle. The horse show was unaccustomed to being the center of a nonequine matter. Just seven weeks later, on January 1, 1959, Castro would overthrow the Batista government and set up Communist rule in Cuba. But that night, the horse show crowd did not seem to know what to make of the unexpected intrusion of politics from a foreign land.
By 1958, it was getting harder and harder to shut the gates around this bastion of privilege. Cracks were appearing in the venerable seventy-five-year-old institution. The people in the stands did not know it then, but the National Horse Show would never again be quite as sheltered from the world at large.
The world was pushing at the edges of the horse show, and the audience was opening up to a new breed of fans. As one journalist put it, “The crowd seemed to have inherited a lot of Dodger fans.” The Brooklyn Dodgers no longer existed; Roy Campanella, their beloved catcher, was in a wheelchair; and the excitement of the Subway Series that had pitted the Yankees against the Dodgers was no more. But nothing said New York like the National Horse Show. In 1958, the spectators seemed different. They were noisy and boisterous, clapping and whooping from the stands. And in 1958, they were in love with an upstart gray horse and his brash, smiling rider. Even in the noise and din of the Diamond Jubilee, there was a little magic.
As the program continued, the heckling crowd gradually settled down. After the international parade of teams, the Canadian Mounties, brilliantly clad in red coats and riding all-black horses, came in to show off their precision quadrille. Johanna was far too strict to allow her children to join in the general mayhem of the crowd, but they sat quietly on the edges of their seats, drinking in every sight and sound of the thrilling spectacle. Still, they were eager for the jumper contests to begin. In the center of that ring, horses and riders morphed into movie stars and royalty. At ringside, in the press box, the “lady reporters,” Marie Lafrenz and Alice Higgins, of Sports Illustrated, jockeyed for space as they rat-a-tatted away on their manual typewriters.
The announcer, Otis Trowbridge, was famous for mumbling and mispronouncing riders’ names; spectators had