The Eighty-Dollar Champion - Elizabeth Letts [53]
If Harry had looked around the world of competitive jumping, he would not have found many role models for this kind of partnership. Horses belonged to people with money, who hired professionals to ride them. If a horse was good enough, it might become an Olympic prospect; it would then be loaned to the team, and taken over by one of the team’s amateur riders. The Olympics were amateur-only, the province of men and women who could afford to ride and not get paid for it.
In the elite world of horse show competitions, the professional was still considered a second-class citizen. The “ideal” of amateur sport came from the English public school notion of “a sound mind in a sound body.” Originally, even practicing sports was considered to be a form of cheating, since a person who worked on their technique would gain an unfair advantage over those who simply went out to play. The British gentility, and the upper-class Americans influenced by that tradition, truly believed that professional sports were vulgar and that only amateurs were truly engaged in “sport.”
The reality was that, prior to the mid-twentieth century, lower- and middle-class people had little time for play; a six-day workweek was the norm for even white-collar workers, and the one day off, Sunday, was a much-needed day of rest. The only amateurs who had the time to ride seriously were usually rich enough not to be tied down by a job. Yet professionals, who earned money from sports, were excluded from amateur competitions.
This mentality was alive and well in the horse world in the 1950s. Writers in horse-oriented periodicals discussed “the professional problem,” saying that amateur riders could not compete against professionals because amateur riders “were busy managing their affairs during the week,” while a professional “had nothing to do but ride all day.” That the amateurs in the equestrian world were usually managing the affairs of their inherited fortunes, and that the professionals needed to ride every day in order to eat, did not seem to factor into the equation. Harry, who made his living from horses, and who wore through the flaps of his saddle from riding so much, could ride a horse for an owner’s pleasure, but he could not join the ranks of the glamour boys who rode on the United States Equestrian Team. This did not weaken his determination to be more than a jockey for rich owners. He wanted to ride his own horse in the top competitions, pitting himself against the world’s best horsemen.
And in the fall of 1957, Harry was not alone in his sky-high aspirations. A dozen years had passed since the end of the war, and the social landscape was changing. In Little Rock, Arkansas, the National Guard came out to protect the black schoolchildren trying to enter Central High School, and Elvis Presley appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show, though shown only from the waist up, to hide his gyrating pelvis. Sports were changing, too—big money was entering into games and recreations that had once been strictly limited to upper-class amateurs, but were being increasingly opened up to the general public.
September 5 dawned cool and gray, with a forecast for sunshine later in the day. With his German shepherd Smoky at his heels, Harry headed out to the barn. As usual, he loved the dark, quiet atmosphere of early morning. With the wheelbarrow and pitchfork, he made quick work of the stalls.
Like every other morning, Snowy was the first to hang his head over the Dutch door, giving three loud whinnies when he heard Harry’s footsteps. Even in the dim light, the gelding’s coat glowed from all the extra grooming, and the braided forelock showed off his small ears. While he still wasn’t much of a looker, he cleaned up nice.
One of Harry’s summer students, Louie Jongacker, got to the barn early, carrying his