Word: jockey
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...Kilimanjaro. Robert E. Lee Hardwick, a talk jockey on KVI in Seattle, has a different audience, the white middle class, and a different approach. He has taken a group up the slopes of Kilimanjaro and guided an expedition of gem hunters to the wilds of Idaho and Montana. Along the way, he has started a mock fan club of 15,000 for Seattle Pilots Shortstop Ray Oyler, who had the next to the lowest batting average in the American League one season, and he has led angry taxpayers to Olympia, the state capital, to press for tax reform...
Adds Dr. Salvatore Maddi, a psychologist at the University of Chicago: "Loneliness is an endemic problem of our time, and there are many people who literally have no friends. A disk jockey, particularly one who seems interested in his listeners, fulfills a need-he's a substitute friend...
...often shattering and usually infectious joys of the turf are remarkably difficult to describe or explain, especially to outsiders. One of the very few writers who can do so successfully, appropriately enough, is a 51-year-old ex-jockey named Dick Francis...
Before becoming a writer in 1962, Francis was for some years the best steeplechaser in England, eventually becoming jockey to the Queen Mother. He knows the hedges and hazards, the sites and social slights of British steeplechasing the way a car owner knows the dashboard of his five-year-old sedan. He has used his experiences to produce ten more or less equestrian suspense stories that are also novels of métier and manners. His best books are Dead Cert (the first, written in 1962), Nerve (1964), For Kicks (1965), Odds Against (1966) and Forfeit (1969). At that level...
...ride-for-life, of course, is a horsebound version of those great chases across the English countryside in which Buchan heroes, and their heirs and assigns, foiled pursuit in everything from Bentleys to borrowed bicycles. The true Francis classic (Dead Cert), pitted the jockey hero, up on a splendid horse named Admiral, against the forces of darkness who chivvied him about in a swarm of radio taxis. By contrast, Bonecrack's ride is modest. The trainer, galloping prodigally crosscountry on his best racer, tries to head off the sulky boy-jockey from inadvertent assassination by one of his Mafia...