• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1255 0

beyond the group of people who were physically present in the stands, and the increased viewership brought in more money. At the same time, sports started to open up to new competitors. Pioneers in a variety of sports started to break down such traditional barriers to participation as race, social class, and gender. Even in amateur sports like tennis and golf that had been considered bastions of the country club set, minority, female, and professional athletes started to make inroads. In June 1958, the African-American Althea Gibson won the women’s tennis titles at both the U.S. Open and Wimbledon. Babe Didrikson Zaharias, sometimes called the best female athlete of the century, helped found the Ladies Professional Golf Association in 1949, making golf the first women’s professional sport. Ben Hogan, a blacksmith’s son from East Texas, so dominated men’s professional golf that in 1953, when he was named the top professional athlete of the year, he was given a New York tickertape parade. These sports pioneers became popular heroes, and athletes like Didrikson, Gibson, and Hogan brought interest and spectators to sports that had traditionally been the private provinces of wealthy amateurs.

Television was shaking up the financial world of professional sports as well, with national considerations starting to reconstruct the landscape that had been dominated by local franchises and their devoted neighborhood followers. For New York City, 1956 was a year of triumph, as the World Series pitted two New York teams, the Yankees and the Brooklyn Dodgers, against each other in a contest dubbed the Subway Series. The Brooklyn Dodgers were the consummate everyman’s team, and after Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier in 1947, they became the first integrated team in major league baseball. Their beloved Ebbets Field, in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn, was just a subway ride and a ticket stub away for thousands of working-class fans. But by the end of 1957, both the Dodgers and the New York Giants had relocated to California, lured away by lucrative financial contracts, a betrayal that rocked New York’s sense of identity to the core. Then in January, the Dodgers’ beloved catcher Roy Campanella was in a car accident on Long Island. Campanella, the son of an Italian-American father and an African-American mother, had initially been barred from the major leagues, but then had gone on to play in every All-Star game between 1949 and 1956 and had received the Most Valuable Player award three times. Like other players of the era, he ran a small business in the off-season, a liquor store in Harlem. On January 28, 1958, after he’d closed his liquor store for the night and headed home, his car hit a patch of ice and skidded into a telephone pole. Campanella would never walk again. The loss of the Dodgers had left a void, and Campanella’s accident dug that hole even deeper. New Yorkers were on the lookout for a new homegrown hero.

On June 9, 1958, the big bay thoroughbred Andante stood in her stall at the Sands Point Horse Show looking much like visiting royalty. Her stall was festooned with custom-made drapes in gray and black embroidered with a monogram. Duffy Stables’ impressive stretch of the show grounds’ stalls looked impeccable, with immaculately groomed thoroughbreds peering out over the Dutch doors. A hand-painted tack trunk sat next to each stall, and a rubber stall guard buckled across the top half of the door kept the horses from mussing their braids. Several grooms, immaculately turned out in khakis, some sporting driver’s caps, tended to the horses—combing out tails until they were silken, polishing hooves with pine tar, or emptying plump grain into scrubbed-out rubber buckets. Each horse wore an oiled leather halter with a polished engraved brass name tag on it. Next to each stall a white lead rope hung, coiled in a perfect loop.

There was no mistaking which was the most important horse in the barn. In front of Andante’s stall lay a lawn of artificial grass, so that the mare’s polished hooves would not have to step onto the