Headless Horsemen by Jim Squires

Ellen Parker

          The one thing that kept running through my mind as I read this book was the theme song from the TV detective series “Monk”:  “It’s a jungle out there, disorder and confusion everywhere.  No one seems to care, well I do, who’s in charge here?”

          Further, as I read things I had always known but had never seen anyone else put in print before – about steroids in our major runners – Secretariat for instance, Curlin for sure and Big Brown admittedly not to mention sale shenanigans we had witnessed in person when forced to cover those boring venues.  (Have you ever had to sit through a horse sale when you were not buying or selling anything?  This of course must mean you are a reporter!  Which entails running after people for commentary who either don’t want to be interviewed, have egos as large as Texas, have no idea why they bought what they did, or who were signing for “buy backs”). 

          Agents alone take a beating in Squires’s book, and deservedly so.  Particularly vivid (though the author admits apocryphal) is the tale of the trainer who thusly described his initial encounter(s) with new investor Satish Sanan:  “When I first met Sanan, he had “F—K ME” written on his forehead.  So I did.”  That agents should be licensed, no exception - goes without saying.  After reading Headless Horsemen, you may simply want them all shot at sunrise.

          Plus, you have to love a guy who names names and says of the Irish horsemen (we assume he got away with this because he later says his grandmother was Irish):  “While hardly alone as purveyors of intrigue and skullduggery, the Irishmen must at least be credited for viewing it as more gamesmanship than outright venality.  They play it the way they do soccer and politics – with brutal tenacity often explained by their native poets and philosophers as a kind of genetically engineered revenge of the oppressed, a nonviolent taking up of the guns against English Protestants.”  Talk about a new description of passive aggressive!

          There are things to criticize here as well as things to admire.  There are numerous errors, from dates to coat color to pedigree commentary.  The man knows horses and conformation; as a pedigree analyst, he is a miserable failure.  Further, as we’ve always said about drugs:  It’s a chicken or the egg thing.  Are horses what they have become because of drugs?  Or are drugs needed to sustain badly bred ‘commercial’ horses?

          I have another problem with the book when he dwells too much on “Cowboy trainers”, because like everybody else they are neither all good nor all bad and when he tries to tell us that Eight Belles was not genetically predisposed (bull!) to breakdown, or that A. P. Indy is a source of unsoundness (ever check the mare population to which he is bred?)  As the only ‘commercial outcross’ (i.e. devoid of Raise a Native and Northern Dancer), A. P. Indy is consistently bred to a mare population full of this unsound garbage.  Freely translated:  It’s not him, it’s them!

          He spends too much time, too, defending Larry Jones (his own trainer) for Eight Belles breakdown and does not seem to know quite where his loyalties fall when it comes to those Masters of the (Horse) World he calls “Dinnies”, like Will Farish and Robert Clay.  Plus we’d really like to see him address outcrossing and bringing in some new bloodlines to strengthen the Thoroughbred.

          No book is without its flaws and this one tells it like it is with a minimum of apology.  If we would have liked more positive suggestions as to how to improve things, we likewise know this is a man who is still struggling to come to grips with his own love for a flawed sport.

          All told, this book is highly recommended.  I would surely like to know Squires.   In fact, after reading his book, I’m quite sure of two other things, both good:  His heart is in the right place and he loves horses.

          Now if we can just figure out who’s in charge here, we’ll be all set.