The Sport of Kings and (Some) Conservatives

Some things we believe to be good without being able to articulate very convincing reasons why. One of those things, for me, is horse racing. The Breeders’ Cup will be run on Saturday, so Yahoo News Photos features some lovely photos from Santa Anita, like this one of a horse being washed after his training run:

One of my favorite parenting moments was when my son, then twelve or so, after assessing the horses in the paddock, turned to me and said “Come on, Dad. Let’s go box an exacta!”
Which reminds me that this week’s Sports Illustrated has a nice profile on Gary Stevens, the Hall of Fame jockey who played George Woolf in Seabiscuit and is now back in the saddle after a nearly-fatal accident. Which almost, but not quite, balances a disgusting piece by Rick Reilly on GIs playing a makeshift game of baseball in Iraq. Reilly is an extremely talented writer, but a liberal of almost Stalinist rigidity, and he can’t get through a paragraph without taking a snide shot at the war and the Bush administration. Neither piece is available online; in the former instance, that’s unfortunate.