Horse Racing: The 100-Year Binge

Some dyspeptic Iroquois brave named it “Se-rach-to-que,” which has been translated as “Floating Scum upon the Water.” Among dip-minded suburban housewives it enjoys minor fame as the birthplace of the potato chip. James Gordon Bennett was moved to entitle it “the seraglio of the prurient aristocracy.” To the rheumy rich of the ’90s it was “The Spa,” and its eggy sulphur waters were just the ticket for constipation and gout. But now the seltzer baths belong to the state, and for eleven months out of the year Saratoga Springs (pop. 16,000) is a quiet upstate New York town with no visible means of support. Then August rolls around, and Saratoga miraculously comes alive. Bottles of Bellinger go on ice, stables are swept out, hotel prices skyrocket, and bunting drips like Spanish moss from Broadway’s stately elms. In August, for 24 days, Saratoga is the race horseman’s Brigadoon.

“That Woman.” This August is a special one for Saratoga: the 100th anniversary of that shimmering summer day when Lizzie W., a three-year-old filly with a one-eyed jockey in the irons, ran three grueling miles to beat a colt named Captain Moore in the first race ever held at The Spa. Last week everybody celebrated—inlanders and outlanders alike. Bearded men and crinolined ladies bounced through the streets in horse-drawn carriages; diamonds glistened like dewdrops of Saratoga Vichy at black-tie parties. Sousaphones harrumphed, fireworks whiz-banged, and chicken sizzled to a crunchy golden brown. Welterweight Champion Emile Griffith was signed for a nontitle fight; Arnold Palmer and Gary Player were booked for an exhibition golf match. All in all, just the sort of shindig that would have delighted John Morrissey—the man who started the whole bawdy binge a century ago.

Bible readings were Saratoga’s biggest thrill when “Old Smoke” Morrissey hit town in 1861. But not for long. Gambler, dandy, ex-bordello bouncer, heavyweight boxing champion (and later a U.S. Congressman), Morrissey opened Saratoga’s first race track, spent $190,000 building his Club House into one of the most enticing gambling mousetraps in the Western Hemisphere. Practically overnight, high livers from around the world began beating a path to Old Smoke’s door.

Carpetbaggers and copper barons rubbed elbows on verandas of the cavernous Grand Union and United States hotels; Eastern empire builders frittered away fortunes at chuck-a-luck and roulette. Diamond Jim Brady loved to strut down Broadway wearing 2,548 of his favorite gems, all at once. Lillian Russell (“that woman,”” Saratogians called her) pedaled around town on a gold-plated bike. E. Berry Wall, “the King of the Dudes,” once changed clothes 40 times in one day to win a wager. And John (“Bet-a-Million”) Gates was the talk of the town when he won $150,000 in one night at the faro tables; counting his afternoon’s fortunes at the race track, it left him minus $250,000 for the day.

And a Wrist Compass. At 47, Old Smoke was cut down by an untimely stroke after serving as a Congressman, but the years that followed did little to still Saratoga’s effervescence. A new generation steamed up on the New York Central to howl over the time Ella Widener threw an egg at a night-court judge and the day Liz Whitney arrived at the track straight from a nightclub, wearing a ball gown and leading a small pack of dogs. Or the time Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt sent so sorry a horse to the post that he sympathetically gave the jockey—instead of riding orders—a sandwich, a bottle of milk and a wrist compass.

Then there was the income tax, the world wars, and a kind of modern-times puritanism that mournful Saratogians refer to scathingly as “Kefauver fever.” The Spa seemed suddenly spent. The Club House became a museum, and the last open crap game had to start floating 13 years ago. The United States Hotel became a parking lot and stores, and the Grand Union is now a shopping center, with a supermarket of the same name. Broadway is a honky-tonk jumble of shoeshine stands, rooming houses and has-been hotels.

A Graveyard. Only at the race track do the old traditions survive. Gentlemen must still wear coats in the clubhouse; horses are still saddled and mounted graciously on the cool grass under the elms behind the peak-roofed grandstand. The annual August yearling auction is still the No. 1 event on a true horseman’s social and business calendar; prices on unraced thoroughbreds run as high as $87,000. And Saratoga is still a “graveyard of favorites.” It was there, in the 1930 Travers Stakes, that Jim Dandy, a 100-1 shot, galloped through the mud to beat Whichone and the Triple Crown winner, Gallant Fox; it was in the 1919 Sanford Stakes that Man o’ War suffered the only defeat of his career at the heels of a horse named Upset. Kelso, three-time Horse of the Year and one of Man o’ War’s great-grandsons, helped even matters when he ran away with the $55,000 Whitney Stakes by 2½ lengths.

Racing at Saratoga is hardly lucrative. The unrepentantly old-fashioned track holds only 30,000 spectators (v. 80,000 at Long Island’s Aqueduct) and earns enough money to cover only 90% of its purses. The New York Racing Association makes up the deficit. That annoys Albany politicians, who nowadays count on racing revenues to provide some $110 million (about 4%) of the budget, and would like an even bigger take. But a tradition-honoring state law guarantees Saratoga 24 days of racing each year, and horsemen insist that they will never give them up. “Not till the springs dry up,” says one. “We work for the state all year at Aqueduct. Saratoga is for us.”