he crowd rose as one to stare at the horse, and the horse, as was his custom, stared back.
        It was 4:35 p.m. on October 7, 1905, a brilliant fall Thursday at the Breeders Track in Lexington, Kentucky, and Dan Patch, a big, mahogany-brown stallion, had just finished an attempt to lower his own world record for the mile. He was still blowing hard, but after wheeling around and jogging back to the finish line–on his own, with no guidance or encouragement from the small, mustachioed man sitting in the racing sulky behind him–he had come to a dead stop and, with his head cocked slightly to the left, was slowly and deliberately surveying the assembled.
        This was a trademark move, something he did not do automatically, like a circus animal mindlessly performing a trick, but often enough, when the mood struck. People waited for it, and felt like they had gotten their money's worth when it came. Dan Patch's fans used to say–when they talked about him in taverns and barber shops and at dinner tables all over America–that the horse liked to count the house.
        A dramatic silence fell over the scene. An official clocking would come down from the judges at any moment, and a quarter of a second either way could mean the difference between the front page and the sports section. Had Dan done the impossible once again? In the press area, a finger hovered above a telegraph key.
        From where the horse stood he could hear the three timers in the judges' stand, a few feet behind and about 20 feet above him, murmuring confidentially as they consulted their chronographs; if their individual hand-timings differed, as they might easily by a fraction of a second or so, they needed to reach a consensus on an official clocking. In an age when horse-speed, and the mile record in particular, mattered to a mass audience, these racing judges were men of gravitas, doing important work. They wore suits and ties and natty straw boaters. They hefted 17-jewel stopwatches that had the power to transform a day at the races into an historic event. If Dan Patch had gone as fast as some in the packed grandstand guessed he had, everyone there would have a story to tell, maybe for the rest of his life. Tens of thousands who weren't there would also claim to have seen the beautiful brown horse power down the homestretch of the perfectly-manicured red-clay racetrack in the lengthening autumn shadows. It was a golden age of sports, horses, ladies' hats and bullshit.
        Seconds ticked by, tension increased, but the horse, as a reporter said later, was the calmest person on the grounds. Nine years old and at his physical peak, Dan Patch stood at almost the exact midpoint of a long career spent, for the most part, touring the country in a plush private railroad car and putting on exhibitions of speed. He knew the drill: first there was the Effort, the race against the clock, one mile in distance, with the galloping prompters to urge him on and stir his competitive spirit. Then there was the Silence, as judges checked their watches. After the Silence came either the Roar–a world record!–or the Sigh–alas, not this time. The Roar invariably involved flying hats and a surging wave of well-wishers.
        Dan Patch preferred the Roar. Which was odd, because why would a horse choose hysteria over a quiet walk back to the barn? What did he care about world records and the endless hype? The preference wasn't horse-like. Dan Patch was an odd horse.
        He was different to a degree, in fact, that experienced horse-handlers found amazing, even hateful (jealousy being a big part of the racing game). For example, though stallions tend to be skittish, lashing out with teeth and hooves at the slightest provocation, Dan Patch–an intact male who had already shown he had no problems in the breeding shed–exuded calm, allowing strangers to approach him and small children to run back and forth beneath his belly. He wasn't frightened of the world human beings had made. He did not waste energy worrying, or see danger where there wasn't any, or fret about things he could not change. He trusted–a quality humans found terribly flattering, and loved him for. As for the racing and touring, he seemed to get it, to understand that his job was to be this new thing in America: a superstar. Whenever he saw a photographer, he stopped.
        That evening in Lexington, Dan Patch would be led into the lobby of the Phoenix Hotel, where happy drunks would pat his nose and perfumed women would want to nuzzle. Whatever he was thinking down deep when people pressed around him, Dan remained charming and affable; the boors and the rubes always went away feeling noticed and cared-for. Fans sometimes pulled hairs from his tail to twist into key chains or put into lockets; in such cases, Dan might spin his handsome head around and cast a sharp glance, but he never kicked. He had an admirable sense of his own might, and others' vulnerability. The only person Dan Patch ever bit was a young Minnesota boy named Fred Sasse who would grow up to write an appallingly bad book about him. You just had to love a horse like this.
        And people did. They turned out to see him, 80,000, 90,000, 100,000 strong, paying usually a one dollar admission, a day's wage for the average Edwardian Joe. Sometimes when Dan would amble out, unannounced, for a few warm-up laps, hours before he was scheduled to race, the crowd would erupt in a sustained huzzah that would not subside until he headed off 20 minutes later–sometimes but not always taking a little bow at the top of the exit ramp, stirring up his fans even further. Teddy Roosevelt, the American president during Dan Patch's prime, bragged about having a Dan Patch horseshoe at his home in Oyster Bay, Long Island ("A gift from his owner–from the race in which he broke the two-minute mile!"). The actress and courtesan Lilly Langtree visited Dan in his gleaming-white custom-built railroad car with his almost-life-size picture emblazoned across both sides; as famous as "the Jersey Lilly" was (mostly for being the mistress of both Edward the VII and his nephew, Louis of Battenberg), the meeting clearly meant more for her career than his.

continue > >