Triple Crown, Part II
(See previous entry.)
The winner is Mike Sullivan, far and away.
An essay, by Sullivan's son,
from Harper's magazine, Oct. 2002 —
Horseman, Pass By:
Glory, Grief, and the Race for
the Triple Crown
by John Jeremiah Sullivan
Far back, far back in our dark soul
the horse prances.
— D. H. Lawrence
"As opposed to the typical sportswriter, who has a passion for the subject and can put together a sentence, my father's ambition had been to Write (poetry, no less), and sports were what he knew, so he sort of stumbled onto making his living that way….
Two years ago, in May, I sat with him in his hospital room at Riverside Methodist, in Columbus….
I asked him to tell me what he remembered from all those years of writing about sports, for he had seen some things in his time…. This is what he told me:
I was at Secretariat's Derby, in '73, the year before you were
I wrote that down when I got back to my father's apartment, where my younger sister and I were staying the night. He lived two more months, but that was the last time I saw him alive."
Thanks to the New York Times for today's review of John Jeremiah Sullivan's new book, which includes the above.
See, too,