The Eighty-Dollar Champion - Elizabeth Letts [121]
When Snowman soared over the final fence, Harry dropped the reins and raised his arms in an exuberant hurrah. As Snowman galloped calmly over the finish, he grabbed the horse around the neck and kissed him.
Not until they were finished did he hear the crowd cheering. They had done it. There were no challengers. Snowman had clinched the championship.
Down in the stables, Johanna and the children were waiting. Johanna looked lovely in a dark blue suit with fur trim. The boys had on blue jackets and bow ties, and Harriet wore a button-up party dress with a pretty flounce.
The children were young, the arena was large, and the crowd noisy and quite frightening, but the family followed their beloved Snowman up the steep ramp, through the big white gates, and into the ring. When the crowd saw the de Leyer family, with the darling children lining up in stair-step fashion, they went even wilder than before.
It was a clean sweep. The horse show Triple Crown. Snowman was Horse of the Year, the Professional Horseman’s Association Champion, and the Champion of Madison Square Garden’s Diamond Jubilee. He was presented with a snow-white cooler, a big, thick woolen blanket that covered his neck to his haunches and hung down to his knees. The cooler was embroidered with the seal of the PHA and had 1958 champion emblazoned on the side. From now on, whenever Snowman went to a show, he could parade around the grounds wearing that cooler. It was an honor that all the other owners, with all their money, could not buy.
Flashbulbs popped as newsmen snapped picture after picture of the champion horse and the de Leyer family. Harry had the big engraved silver tray in his hand. Behind him stood the beloved gray horse.
Harry did not realize it then, but from that day forward, things would never be the same. That horse, whose picture was splashed all over newspapers the next day, who had been seen on television—now it was more than just Harry’s children who loved him, and the girls at Knox, and the people lucky enough to be up in the stands. Snowman was the people’s horse.
Every child who saw the horse’s proud parade under the spotlights went home inspired.
On that November night in 1958, it started to seem as though anything was possible.
21
Famous!
New York City, 1958
No one truly knows how he will respond if struck by the blinding light of fame, unless it happens to him. Harry de Leyer arrived at Madison Square Garden in 1958 as an unknown and an underdog—appreciated by only a few serious people on the horse show circuit, his horse’s name perhaps remembered in passing from a mention in the morning paper, the kind of ephemeral notice that fades almost as soon as the reader turns the page. But in one glorious, blinding week at the Garden, all that changed.
At the end of the horse show, after the jumper stakes, after the family paraded under the spotlights, after the trophies were awarded and the photos snapped and sent out over the wires, that’s when the real business of the horse show began.
After the big win, the stable was abuzz with well-wishers and newspapermen, new fans and old rivals, come to pay their respects. But there was another tradition as old as the horse show itself. Around that ring, in the boxes, smoking cigars and wearing top hats, clustered some of the most powerful men in America. Men whose names were known in every American household, stamped as brand names on the products people used and printed in the society pages from New York to Palm Beach. Men who could have anything they wanted, and who were not accustomed to being turned down.
Snowman. The eighty-dollar wonder horse, the Cinderella horse, as the press was calling him, was the sports world’s newest sensation. He had shown under the colors of Hollandia Farms, Harry and Johanna’s small family enterprise. But now he was everyone’s darling.
Just hours after the big win, while Harry was still dressed in his work