We are attracted to Thoroughbred racing because it offers freedom and risk

My entire life has been informed by a single instant that occurred in 1973, in as unlikely a place as Charles Town racetrack. I was six years old, and it was there that I saw my first racehorse, a low-rent claimer named Blue Barry. He stopped in a post parade and gazed my way, and at that moment everything around me ceased to exist. It was the first time in my life that I recognized something as beautiful. Blue Barry, backed by $5 from my father, won his race.

I never got over it. At 14, I papered my bedroom walls with Andy Beyer columns. At 15, I ponied up babysitting money for Greyhound tickets to the track every weekend. My Mom knew my sister and I were beyond retrieval one Thanksgiving when we sawed the legs off her turkey, wrapped them in aluminum foil, and toted them off to Bowie racetrack. At 20, I was writing for a racing magazine, grateful for the byline even though the checks they kept promising never arrived.

Racing offers dazzling rewards to its biggest winners, but thinking over all the days that I've spent communing with racetrackers, I can't recall meeting more than a handful who have actually won at this game. One of the most gifted jockeys I ever saw lived in a Winnebago with his parents, sister, and a Nebraska bird dog. Half the trainers are crashing on someone else's sofa. For the Greyhound riders, the daily ritual consisted of touting mortal lock winners on the way out and listing their excuses on the way home. And behind every great owner is an exasperated accountant. It's no wonder that, to the uninitiated, we all look like fools.

Yet no one ever seems discouraged, and no one ever does the sensible thing and heads for more lucrative pastures. The lifelong losing bettor has his ashes scattered at the Pimlico Race Course finish line. The blind owner comes to Belmont Park even though he can't see his horses. The cardiac patient warned to avoid the excitement of the track sits in his Buick in the Santa Anita Park parking lot, just to be near his beloved claimers.

What is it about the track that keeps drawing us back? Why is this place, with all its losses, so pleasing?

Since my career began, I've tried to define the peculiar lure of racing, but the words never quite hung right. The resplendence of horses remains central for me, as does the spectacle of supreme athleticism. But there's something else, and I was never able to isolate what it is.

Until I found Red Pollard. A principal subject of my book, Seabiscuit: An American Legend, he tumbled into the story on August 16, 1936, a half-blind failing jockey, down to his last 27 cents, a sugar cube, a couple of volumes of great literature, and a flask of bow-wow wine. He was, statistically, one of the sport's worst riders. But at the Detroit Fair Grounds that day, Red had the one extraordinary stroke of luck in his extraordinarily unlucky life. He gave his sugar cube to a battered racehorse named Seabiscuit, a kindred soul, and won the job as the horse's rider. For Red, it would be the lone success in a career punctuated by incomprehensible hardship.

It was as a boy, riding his pony on a dirt road, that Red chose to be a jockey. Though his exceptional intellect and love of literature could have given him a tidy life in academics, he never wavered in his decision. In 1925, he was abandoned at a makeshift track cut through a Montana hayfield. He didn't try to go home. He slept in stalls, riding bad horses by day, earning food money by getting punched bloody in cow-town boxing rings by night. He was utterly unsuited to his career. In jockey's rooms packed with uneducated ruffians, he pored over Emerson and Shakespeare. Far too tall for a small man's trade, he starved and desiccated himself until he fainted, lay in fermenting manure piles to sweat off pounds, swallowed tapeworms. He was incredibly accident-prone.

Horses crushed his chest, blinded his eye, virtually sheared off his leg, kicked out his teeth, broke his back, and fractured his skull. He lacked the talent to justify the torture. Before and after his days with Seabiscuit, he was consistent only in mediocrity and loss.

What was so arresting about Red was his absurd love of a career that had punished and humiliated him. He had no desire to do anything else. He plugged away for 30 years, grinning and eternally buoyant. Retirement only came when no one would hire him anymore, and even then he wouldn't leave the track, spending his days cleaning the boots of other riders. His body was so mangled that he soon needed full-time care. He died in a nursing home built over the ruins of Narragansett Park, where he and Seabiscuit had once raced. He had no regrets.

Through Red Pollard, I finally grasped the allure of the track. One of mankind's passions is freedom; instinctively we seek and savor it, and our imaginations impel us to shake off constraint and reach for every possibility.

But most of us compromise ourselves. We become obedient not to our imaginations but to fear. Afraid of injury, financial loss, derision, and failure, we live safely, leerily, avoiding risk, protecting ourselves. We do this for good reason, but when we refuse to incur risk, we narrow our experience and curtail our freedom. Life holds much less promise for the cautious. And even in the comfort of a safely guarded life, our aversion to constraint pulls at us.

It is to this urge that the racetrack appeals. Racing is predicated on the embrace of risk. All involved stake something on fragile, erratic, willful creatures competing in events in which anything can and does happen. There may be no other industry in which players have less control over the outcome of events and less ability to forecast them. The track is, in short, chance's domain. We check our fears of the unknown at the gate.

It is the enormous risk of this game that makes it so hard to win, but what I learned from Red Pollard is that it isn't about winning. I think we come to the track because the act of defying our fears and venturing something, even if it is lost, is liberating. There is a tantalizing freedom and dignity in living not to avoid the possibility of loss, but to invest in the possibility of gain.

Because of this, the racetrack is, for me, the most optimistic place on earth. We each venture something different, from the bettor who stakes $5 to the jockey who stakes his life, but everyone joins in the heady release that comes from embracing risk. It is there that the track's sweetest pleasure lies. For all his failures, Red Pollard lived as he chose, without constraint, and was more free, and thus more fully alive, than anyone I have known. Perhaps, like Red, we are all fools for joining in this riskiest of games. But perhaps, in some small way, we are all more alive for it.