The Eighty-Dollar Champion - Elizabeth Letts [52]
At several shows in the spring of 1957, while Snowman was still learning how to jump, Harry and Sinjon won the “green” hunter division, limited to horses in the first year of competition. Harry thought Sinjon might be able to compete over the bigger fences in the jumper classes, but his owner would have to agree to it, so Harry bided his time. Meanwhile, Harry kept working on Snowman, patiently teaching him to jump, one skill at a time. Snowman, the old paddock jumper, handled vertical fences—high fences with no element of spread or width to the jump—with ease, but he had more trouble whenever he had to jump not just high but also wide. Harry practiced gymnastic jumping with the horse, patiently adding height, then depth to the fences, teaching him to stretch out over a fence when needed.
A lot more training and testing would be needed to see if Snowman really had what it took to succeed in competition—but at least the horse could have a shot. It is almost inconceivable that a horse undergoing this kind of specialized training would not be removed from the toils of daily life and treated like a pampered athlete, but this is not what Harry did with Snowman.
Growing up on a farm had forever shaped Harry’s view of horses. In the world he’d been born into, people and horses spent time on hard physical labor. For Harry, riding was much more than performing in a show ring. Endless hours of mucking and currying, doctoring and schooling went along with it. And horses had their work to do, too.
Snowman’s job was to be a dependable lesson horse, and that was what he did, faithfully carrying the girls around on his back. The morning training sessions, the painstaking lessons where the former plow horse had to learn everything from scratch—those were simply added on to the horse’s daily routine.
But Harry approached the training of the unglamorous lesson horse with the same care, attention, and dedication that he gave to the more obvious prospects like Sinjon. Deep within Harry burned one desire: he wanted to ride his own horse, a horse he had trained with his own hands, nurtured and fed and cared for—not as a hired hand but as part of a team. Snowman was not the most beautiful, not the most naturally talented—not even as good as Sinjon, a scrawny racetrack reject that Harry had to teach how to stand still in the barn. Snowman had only one advantage: he belonged to Harry. Against all odds, Harry was rooting for him.
Harry worked on both of his prospects, the owner’s horse and his own—Sinjon and Snowman. The pair were a study in contrasts. Sinjon was hot to handle; Snowman was placid and friendly. Sinjon had the thin skin, refined features, fine coat, and air of hauteur common to well-bred thoroughbreds; especially in the winter, when he grew a shaggy coat, Snowman looked like a sheepdog with a sloppy grin on his face. Any horseman coming through the barn would have noticed Sinjon first. However, the two horses also had something in common. Both were at their best with Harry on their backs. Sinjon’s talent was apparent to everyone. Harry’s belief in Snowman’s true talent was the secret he kept in his back pocket and shared with no one. As Jack Frohm, another professional rider on the circuit, told the Palm Beach Post, “A lot of guys are starving in the business. They live from hand to mouth and only stay with it because they love it.” Harry did not seem close to finding a breakout champion, but at least he had a couple of horses to bring along—and if his eighty-dollar horse was the longest of long shots, it did not stop Harry from climbing back into the saddle every day and giving it his best shot.
12
Horses, Owners, and Riders
Huntington, Long Island, 1957
By September 1957, Harry was prepared to take Snowman to his first show. September 5 was the first day of the North Shore Horse Show at the Old Field Club. Unlike the small horse shows at Knox, where Snowman had carried beginners around at a walk and trot, this was one of the majors. Many top horses from all over Long Island and even farther afield would