The Eighty-Dollar Champion - Elizabeth Letts [137]
All these years, Harry had kept Snowman’s show bridle cleaned and at the ready in a place of honor in the tackroom. His students knew to keep it clean, and never to move it. If Harry came into the tackroom and it wasn’t clean and hanging on its hook, he would holler until it was returned.
The de Leyer family gathered in the huge modern arena of the new Garden and Snowman wore his bridle one last time. The big white gates swung open and Harry de Leyer walked into arena under the blazing luminescence of stadium lights. All cleaned up for the occasion, Snowman followed willingly behind. Behind him came Johanna and the children, lined up in order of height, all the way down to little Anna-Marie. The lights were dimmed and the horse’s coat gleamed under the blazing spotlights. Music played over the giant loudspeakers, and men and women wearing evening finery came out, bearing a red-and-white blanket of roses. Folded up in their arms was a cooler in Hollandia’s colors, green and yellow.
Harry leading Snowman around the arena at Madison Square Garden during his retirement ceremony. Snowman’s cooler is yellow and green, the colors of Hollandia Farms, and reads “The Cinderella Horse.” (illustration credits 24.4)
Snowman was startled as the show people started to put the cooler and the blanket of roses on him from the wrong side—a horseman always approaches a horse on the “near,” or left side, never from the right. But Harry steadied the horse with a gentle hand and a whispered word, and Snowman stood still, allowing the soft green cooler to be placed over his shoulders, followed by the brilliant red-and-white blanket of roses. Snowman and Harry circled the spotlit arena. The roar of the crowd thundered through the giant hall as though it would last forever. The lights flashed on, then dimmed, then came up bright, but the crowd kept clapping and cheering, rising to a standing ovation.
As Harry walked around the ring, leading his beloved horse, he remembered every step along the way, each image of Snowman: arriving at the chicken farm, his haunches covered in snow; finding the horse inside the paddock dragging a rubber tire and a bit of fence behind him; his first few stumbling tries over the cavaletti poles; and, of course, the moment when he won the national championship in ’58. But the strongest image was from that first moment on the slaughter truck, when something in the horse’s expression had caught his eye. A man could hardly be blamed for blinking back a tear on this night. Harry himself had almost missed this horse’s gift, but somehow, the horse had always given him another chance. On the side of Snowman’s cooler, in bold yellow letters, was his nickname:
The Cinderella horse.
And this horse truly was.
On the way out of the Garden, the paparazzi waited to catch a glimpse of the equine celebrity. Flashbulbs popped and the big gray champion was caught for the last time—his picture was splashed huge across the back page of the New York Post under the headline “SNOWMAN RETIRES.” The New York hero had given his last performance.
25
The Cinderella Horse
St. James, Long Island, 1969–1974
Life at Hollandia went on. Schoolteachers brought busloads of children to the farm, eager to see the horse they had read about in their book. In the morning, Snowman wandered out to the pasture on his own. In the evening, he went back to his stall, sometimes jumping the paddock fences to follow in the broodmares. Even now, as they were getting older and turning into teenagers, the de Leyer children still liked