The Eighty-Dollar Champion - Elizabeth Letts [58]
A stylish and beautiful jumper, Riviera Wonder had been just four years old when he’d won at the Garden in ’55, and he still had dark dapples across his hindquarters, which would eventually fade to white. Al Fiore’s style over a jumper course was effective but unorthodox—at the fences he threw himself forward, leaning so far over the horse’s neck that he appeared to almost click up his heels behind him. It made the crowds gape with surprise.
Harry watched quietly. He respected Fiore as a rider, but that crazy sudden motion he made with his upper body over fences would throw many horses off balance. Riviera Wonder, Harry saw, had pretty much everything: style, grace, athleticism, and heart. It was no surprise to Harry that he came from the most renowned thoroughbred jumping line in the country, the descendants of Bonne Nuit. His owner, Bernie Mann, a famous jazz trumpeter, owned a popular nightspot called the Riviera. Mann’s string of jumpers, thoroughbreds with top-notch breeding, all had the word “Riviera” in their names.
Only one horse in this class could compete with Riviera Wonder, and that was Dave Kelley’s mare, Andante. After the first round, everyone had been eliminated but these two. The jump crew worked fast, raising the fences for the second round. Now the smallest obstacle was over five feet tall.
Riviera Wonder came up first. Fiore was a rough rider, but his years of experience showed. He guided the horse around the course with panache; each time he seemed to click his heels behind him over the fence, the crowd gasped audibly, but each time, the horse landed with a thump, leaving the bars intact. Another clean round. Next up was Dave Kelley on Andante. An incredibly competitive rider, Dave had more championships under his belt even than Al Fiore, and Harry recognized the particular quality that drove Dave. He won a lot because he was so good, but he wasn’t in it just to win. He was in it for the love of the game.
Where Al had made the course look challenging, Dave made it look easy. But on the last fence, Andante got a little sloppy with a hind leg; she rubbed the rail and sent flying the baffle, the light piece of balsa wood that sat atop the rail to detect any light touches. One half fault for a rear touch.
Riviera Wonder was the winner.
If he ever hoped to move up to the open jumper division, this was the level of performance Harry would have to compete against. In the open jumpers, there were no lesson horses, no former plow horses who’d just recently learned to jump—only high-priced horseflesh purchased by owners with money to burn, and tough-as-nails riders who had been competing at the national level for years.
Harry thought about the words of Cappy Smith: “You’ve got a horse who can jump high.” In the green jumper stakes, Snowman had placed sixth, but this was a horse with almost no training, a horse who had been to only one or two schooling shows, going up against some of the best jumper prospects in the country. Even thinking about trying to train Snowman to compete against horses like Riviera Wonder and Andante seemed like a crazy gamble. Harry would have to devote many more hours to training, to somehow squeeze it in among all of his other duties—teaching, managing the barn, and riding his students’ horses. Riding Snowman gave him no clear payoff except to stoke a distant and impractical dream. Riviera Wonder … Andante … the national champion horses had full-time professional riders and an army of grooms looking after them. Still, the only thing that could stop Harry would be a lack of gumption—and gumption was something that both Harry and his horse possessed in abundance.
The Knox school year was starting in just a few days, and it would be back to the routine—foxhunting and small schooling