Word: backstretch
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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High on the wall facing the triple jump runway (or the backstretch, if you're of the running mindset) at the Gordon Indoor Track and Tennis Center is a large HEPS spelled out in red tape...
...glaring sunstorm boiled the fewest Louisville customers in 15 years (down almost 20,000 to about 108,000, mostly a matter of ticket prices' doubling) and baked the dirt track until the word blew about the backstretch shed rows like a whisper on a breeze: "It's Highway I-65 out there." That cinched what had been the popular wisdom all week. This race would turn on the two speedballs in the field of 13: Spend A Buck and Eternal Prince. Should both dart out ahead, might they form a suicide pact? "Sure, they could kill each other," Jockey Angel...
...stumbles out of the blocks and never really recovers, still dragging that foreleg. And that it isn't raining. 'Cause if Big Red comes out steppin' high with nostrils flarin, and the weather is downright early, Mr. Multiflex may be sucking wind before they're too far into the backstretch. And you may be tearing up your tickets and flipping the stubs at the teller in the $2 window...
...resonance that has grown rare in daily journalism. To be sure, some of the 300-odd pieces gathered in these two volumes should have been left in yesterday's newspaper. But most are timeless, literate and witty enough to appeal to readers who do not know the backstretch from the front nine...
...John Henry, a six-year-old bay who won eight of his ten races in 1981 and $1,798,030, to extend his record winnings to $3,022,810. John Henry is not a steel-driving man exactly; he is a gelding, a tragic condition referred to around the backstretch as the unkindest...