This Crazy Thing Called Love by Susan Braudy

Author:Susan Braudy [Braudy, Susan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-8041-5335-5
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2014-09-17T04:00:00+00:00

* This portrait (donated by Havenstrite) would be flashed around the country in the week after the shooting of Billy Woodward.

15

HOME IS WHERE THE HEART IS

During the next six months, Billy continued to see Sally Parsons Oriel. He brought her a small Victrola, carrying it up three flights of stairs to Sally’s apartment on Seventy-second Street. Sally was impressed with his labor. “How nice,” she said to him, “that someone with all your advantages would carry it up all those stairs.”

Still, on July 2, Ann and Billy appeared together as Nashua entered the starting gate at Aqueduct, his forelock braided with red ribbon. It was a three-horse race; only two other owners dared challenge Nashua. This time Nashua really raced: he finished first, five lengths ahead of one horse and an amazing forty-five lengths ahead of the other. On top of the world again, Billy and Ann beamed as they collected $37,200 and another cup.

At the Arlington Classic in Chicago on July 16, Nashua took an early lead, but then fell substantially behind. At the last possible moment, he spurted across the finish line to win. Arcaro commented to reporters, “Nashua was not at his best, to say the least.” Later, Elsie Woodward asked her son to curb the jockey’s public statements about Nashua.

Meanwhile, behind the scenes, newspapers exaggerated the match race feud. They portrayed Rex Ellsworth as a rich former cowboy who owned the big red Swaps, unbeaten in five races that year, the finest thoroughbred to come out of the West, and Billy as the handsome playboy owner of Nashua. The two horses were written about as if they possessed emotions of love, conflict, depression, and pleasure.

Hollywood Park in California offered a gold cup and a winner’s purse of $100,000 for any reasonable date in July. Newspaper headlines began billing the proposed match race as “the race of the century.” The race would promote horse racing; millions would watch it on television.

The confusion mounted when the match race was announced for August 6 by Ben Lindheimer, owner of the Arlington track in Chicago.

As it turned out, Rex Ellsworth called off the race. Ellsworth telephoned Billy on June 10 to say that despite rumors to the contrary he had not agreed to ship his horse to Chicago. His horse would not be ready by August 6. Then Ellsworth called a reporter and claimed that during their most recent telephone conversation, Billy had finally agreed to a rematch in Hollywood Park, with a winner-take-all purse of $100,000. He said they promised each other not to say anything to the public until their horses had run their next races.

In a formal public statement published in hundreds of newspapers, Billy replied that he had never agreed to ship his horse to Hollywood Park.

Billy announced, “Although I am very much in favor of a meeting between the two horses, which the public demands, it is my belief that it would be unfair to Nashua and the public if we shipped him 3,000 miles at this time.

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