The Eighty-Dollar Champion - Elizabeth Letts [69]
This show was to be Snowman’s first test of the new season, the moment to find out whether all of the winter schooling had paid off. This year, he would not be eligible for green jumpers, the easier classes for horses in their first year of showing. He would move up to the open jumper division. Many horses seemed competent during schooling sessions but could not reproduce those results in the high-pressure, unfamiliar situation of a show ring. A show jumper needed to be able to negotiate a course of obstacles designed to test a horse’s balance, consistency, and problem-solving abilities. Just as a gymnast needs to demonstrate different skills during a floor routine, a horse needs to jump fences that require different skill sets. Solid fences, where the landing is hidden, require bravery; verticals—fences that have height but no depth—force a horse to snap his legs up tight and make a short, high arc; spread fences require a horse to clear not just height but also depth. Courses are specifically configured to present challenges; certain combinations of fences require a horse to speed up, then slow down or spread out, then tuck up. Some fences are designed with visual tricks or with distracting shapes and colors. Harry had patiently trained his horse to jump over different kinds of fences, but there was no way to predict how he would handle an unfamiliar course in a new place. The only way to find out was to give it a try.
With Knox closed for the summer, there was nothing to stop Harry—no school events or anxious headmistresses. The summer season of 1958 was all his.
By the summer of 1958, America was ready for a hero. The country feared that the Cold War might no longer remain “cold”; Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev had repeatedly threatened nuclear warfare against the United States. The relative prosperity enjoyed after World War II had come to an end as the world entered a global recession. It was the first major economic downturn since the Great Depression, and the public was fearful. The first quarter of 1958 had set a postwar record with a 10 percent drop in gross domestic product (a record that stands through mid-2011); five million people, or roughly 7 percent of the labor force, were forced into unemployment; and the automobile industry was struggling, with the rate of unemployment in Detroit reaching a high of 20 percent by April. In Kankakee, Illinois, members of the chamber of commerce constructed an effigy called Old Man Gloom, and staged a mock execution. International tension and the economic downturn both loomed as immediate threats to people’s sense of security.
Perhaps looking for more cheerful distractions, Americans were riveted by sports, and that appetite only increased with the advent of television. The Kentucky Derby was televised live for the first time in 1952, and interest in the race was so keen that, two years later, the purse had doubled from $50,000 to $100,000. In May 1958, Tim Tam captured the Derby and went on to win the Preakness. He looked poised to win the Triple Crown for the first time since Citation’s 1948 victory. But then—in the back stretch of the Belmont Stakes, as Tim Tam held a commanding lead—disaster struck: a fractured sesamoid bone slowed the horse to a hobble, finishing his racing career and crushing the hopes of his fans—fans who were caught up in the drama of the moment because they were watching the race on television.
Spectator sports had entered a new era. Television exponentially expanded the audience