The Eighty-Dollar Champion - Elizabeth Letts [33]
But someone else stood near the railing that day, a savvy Irishman named Mickey Walsh. With his broad smile, white linen jacket, and bow tie, Mickey was an immediately recognizable figure. Irish through and through, the fifty-year-old had wavy gray hair set off by bright blue eyes. Between 1950 and 1955, Mickey Walsh was the first person to win a total of $1 million in the breakneck sport of steeplechasing, where horses compete at full speed over tall solid-timber fences. Now at the very top of his game, Mickey had recently founded the Stoneybrook Steeplechase in Southern Pines, North Carolina, a horse-centered community not far from McCormick’s farm.
Like many professional horsemen, Mickey had come up the hard way. Born into a family that had been in the horse business for generations, Mickey left home as a young man to seek his fortune in the United States. But he arrived in New York at a time when prejudice against Irishmen abounded and signs declaring NO IRISH NEED APPLY were emblazoned on shop windows throughout the city. Mickey finally found a job leading out horses in Central Park, until he managed to parlay his horse skills into a better line of work: on Long Island, as a horse boy for some of the grand estates.
Walsh soon became one of the most competitive jumper riders in the country, winning every major championship for a series of rich owners. That day in North Carolina, the dapper man with the nimble athletic build of a lifelong rider and the confident grin of someone used to winning looked up from whatever he was doing and saw a young fellow whose grace in the saddle was immediately apparent to an old salt like him. Maybe it takes a rider to know a rider, because Mickey—unfazed by Harry’s plow horse mount and provincial Dutch riding habit—recognized him in an instant for what he was: a man with a gift.
After Harry had secured his blue-ribbon rosette and the prize money, the Irishman approached. Harry’s understanding of English was still a bit rough, but he recognized the Irish brogue.
“What do you do, young man?” Mickey asked.
“I’m a farmer,” Harry replied. “I work on a tobacco farm near Greensboro.”
“You’re no farmer. You are a horseman. You should be working in horses.”
Harry’s heart beat a little faster. He could not imagine anything better. But even here, in a local show, Harry saw the kind of people who were involved in horses in the United States: women in white gloves and hats with veils, and tweed-coated country squires whose farms were funded by the kind of sharecropping labor Harry did. He wasn’t bitter; he was lucky to be in the United States, and he knew it. There were opportunities here and a land that seemed full of hope and promise, not scarred by the sadness of the aftermath of war.
But horses …
Harry remembered the times when everyone else had gone home, when the sky was darkening behind the church in St. Oedenrode, and he remained, bone-sore in the saddle, working on one move—a flying lead change or a tight turn—always trying to improve. Harry knew that he could read a horse, with just the touch of his fingers and the feel under his seat bones. He knew it absolutely. But he was a family man now; his wife was going to have a baby. Horses were for fun, and the tobacco farm was where his livelihood lay.
The Irishman looked at him with bright eyes and a broad, open smile.
Harry tried to form the word no, but it just wouldn’t come to him. He sat astride that old workhorse and for a moment, just one moment, allowed himself to imagine a better life, the life he really wanted.
“I don’t know if I’m good enough …” Harry said.
The blue-eyed man kept smiling. “Oh, you’re good enough,” he said. “I can tell you want to win more than most