Chapter OneThe 1900s was an age of Charisma, and some of the healthiest personalities, those with a natural endowment of the stuff, radiated their own heat -- a few seemed like walking planets. They had a gravitational heft that had nothing to do with physical size. -- Darin Strauss, The Real McCoy
The 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 ... read full excerpt from: Crazy Good: The True Story of Dan Patch, the Most Famous Horse in America ebook
