Word: jockey
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...horse traders who camped near the track every summer taught him how to judge a horse's legs and wind. When he was older, he walked race horses around the ring while the grooms shook up the stalls. On Sundays he read funny papers to an old Negro jockey named Tom Connors, wrote letters for him to his girls. It was several years before young Townsend learned why the old Negro used to line his room with newspapers and smoke a sweet-smelling pipe before he rode a race. Tom was a hophead...
Leading a Winner, a groom with a dirty rub rag looped from one hip pocket to another, leading a sweating thoroughbred into the paddock, the jockey hunched up like a peanut on his back...
Smitty's Tack* Room, showing the jockey's iron bed, saddle & bridle on a peg, table with empty beer bottles, and the cheap fur coat and red slippers of one of Smitty's girlfriends...
That stable was figuratively erected on Wall Street when, near the end of the 19th Century, Financier William Collins Whitney began to buy race horses with the open intention of winning more races than Speculator James R. Keene. He never succeeded. But in 1900, with the help of famed Jockey Tod Sloan who was imported from England for the occasion, a Whitney horse, Ballyhoo Bey, won the Futurity Stakes, richest race in the world for 2-year-olds. Next year Volodyovski, racing in the silks of William Collins Whitney, won the English Derby and gleeful Mr. Whitney set up Coney...
...Depression days a Wall Street delegation actually beseeched him not to impair public confidence by giving up the country's No. 1 stable, an act which would have looked like economy in high places. Sentiment and enthusiasm for a horse named Equipoise finally determined his application to the Jockey Club for permission to race under his father's colors, "Light-blue jacket, brown...