The Eighty-Dollar Champion - Elizabeth Letts [119]
Harry did not realize it, but in those few minutes, the horse’s fame spread far beyond the confines of the Garden and of New York City itself. People were only beginning to understand the power of television. When Snowman walked back to Eighth Avenue and Forty-ninth Street, to the basement stables, he and his young rider had been transformed into celebrities.
Television viewers across the country were now tuned in to the outcome of this contest. Snowman was holding steady in second place, though First Chance still had a one-point lead. Snowman had been performing well, throwing himself into every event, but it had been a long, grueling week. This was a championship class, so the fences were higher and the spreads greater than they had ever been. First Chance, about four years younger than Snowman, may have had a slight advantage in terms of endurance. The top twelve horses from the last day’s afternoon event were invited to compete in this great stakes class—the last contest before the closing ceremonies.
Before the class, Harry gathered Johanna and the kids together. “Keep your clothes nice and don’t muss them up,” he told them. “If we win, we’ll all go out together.”
Before Snowman got his chance in the ring, Harry had to wait for the last of the international jumping contests, the Nations Cup, to finish. This competition pitted the six teams against one another over an identical course in two heats, afternoon and evening. The strong German team, which had beaten the Americans in both Washington and Pennsylvania, was dominating here in New York, too. Alice Higgins of Sports Illustrated had quipped at the Washington show, “The Germans were collecting everything but the tickets.”
Here in New York, there had been some isolated American wins, but Hans Günter Winkler, one of the top European riders, had turned in one flawless performance after another, and the German team was cleaning up on points. Harry waited on the sidelines for the drama to play out.
The nighttime performance of the American team was disastrous. George Morris had a knockdown and a refusal. William Steinkraus, whose performance throughout the week had been the one standout for the American team, had two knockdowns. Then Hugh Wiley, on the flashy palomino Nautical, who had won the King George V Gold Cup in London back in June, had a disastrous round—a knockdown and a refusal, followed by a frightening crash. Horse and rider were fine, but a photographer managed to snap a dramatic photo of the fall, which appeared in the next edition of Sports Illustrated. Harry was down in the basement doing last-minute preparations—checking his stirrup leathers and irons, tucking the leather keepers into place on his bridle, adjusting the crownpiece and throat latch—as the strains of “Deutschland über Alles,” the German national anthem, floated down the ramp and into his corner of the stables.
It had been eighteen years since the German occupation of his native country, but eighteen years was not nearly long enough to forget. As a Dutch immigrant and as a professional, he was barred from representing the United States, but tonight, Harry very much wanted to win in the open jumper stakes—the one place in the show where any rider on any horse had a chance to compete.
Tonight, Harry was not representing any one particular nation—he was representing the little guy. He was riding for anyone who had ever been kicked around or neglected or underestimated. Anyone who had ever been shoved to the margins, given up on, or rendered invisible. The special bond between Harry and Snowman was the bond of survivors: a horse so beat up that nobody thought his life was worth saving, and a man who, his life destroyed by war, had had to start fresh in a country where he did not speak the language and