Man o' War: Thoroughbred Legends by Edward Bowen

Author:Edward Bowen [Edward Bowen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Eclipse Press
Published: 2009-10-18T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 4: What A Marve l

A magnificent two-year-old is a magnificent two-year-old for one of two reasons: Either he is extraordinarily precocious, virtually as developed at two as he ever will be, or he is blessed with such exceptional qualities that he dominates even though he, like his contemporaries, is a stripling with considerable development still to come. The first kind, like a junior high football player with a full beard, will "come back" to his contemporaries and may not remain at the top of the lot at three. The second type has the scope to develop into a superb three-year-old and older horse, and is the sort likely to be recalled as a "great" horse in succeeding years.

If rival owners and trainers hoped that Man o' War had reached his individual peak in his two-year-old form, they would not have been encouraged to see what Feustel was seeing back at Berlin, Maryland, in the autumn and winter of 1919-1920. Despite the chasm between Man o' War and his fellow juveniles, Feustel would recall that he had never seen a horse come forward as much from two to three as Man o' War. The recorded facts bore out his awe: At Saratoga, Man o' War had weighed 970 pounds. Over the winter, he filled out to 1,150, and his height reached 16.2 hands.

He was already a public hero and, now with the War behind America and a era of bustling maturation awaiting the nation, sports figures such as Babe Ruth, Red Grange, and Jack Dempsey were ready to create a distinctive spice for a decade to be known as the "Roaring Twenties." (Prohibition had a role in that flavor, too.) Setting aside for the moment that "roaring" is a term used for a wind deficiency in racehorses, no sports figure was to "roar" louder in a positive sense than Man o' War in this engulfing Golden Age.

Sam Riddle was heading into the second of the racing seasons that were changing his life and assigning him an identity forever viewed as an entry with Man o' War. Horses, however, had always been a part of the identity of this sportsman whom J. K. M. Ross had likened to a British general. Riddle was born on July 1, 1861, in Glen Riddle, Pennsylvania, a village named for his father, who had established a textile plant. The land had been settled by a grandfather, and the name Glen Riddle paid tribute to the Scotch-Irish ancestry on the male side of the Riddles. On his mother's side, Sam Riddle was of Quaker stock. Riddle's father also had been associated with the Whitney-Widener-Elkins syndicate which had created the railways in Philadelphia and New York; thus, there was a distant, ironic link to the career of Man o' War's breeder, August Belmont II.

Sam Riddle participated in the family firm, but was essentially an outdoorsman. He told the story that as a virtual infant he had been lifted onto a horse "some time during the War Between

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