![]() Which he did with humour, compassion and the elegant, rolling prose of an accomplished writer and storyteller. Leerhsen for setting me straight and for ripping the “veil of enigma” from Dan’s story in the kindest possible way. But in “ Crazy Good” both the social and racing history are so absorbing that they risk obscuring the impeccible, meticulous research of the author. I’m not really a fan of non-fiction about famous horses (or people) for a number of reasons I won’t go into here. In fact, sports writers whose sterling reputations preceded them, notably John Hervey, had great difficulty in representing that brilliance, that “something” that placed Dan Patch in the ethereal, making him seem more deity than horse.īefore we begin, I wanted to acknowledge Charles Leerhsen for his brilliant book, “ Crazy Good: The True Story of Dan Patch, the Most Famous Horse in America.” And I do mean “brilliant.” This is a book that takes you on the most fascinating journey ever - into Dan’s world as it was at the turn of the last century. The whole “phenomena” of Dan Patch was as much the creation of his owners, trainers and the world in which he lived, as it was the story of a horse so brilliant that he was almost beyond human comprehension. But Dan’s life was so romanticized that ploughing through it all amounts to wading into the fraught waters where enigma reigns supreme. ![]() He is, of course, beloved to a nation and to the sport of harness racing. The story of Dan Patch is such a case in point. But when a horse is part legend and part enigma - and where the latter takes concrete form in publications, movies and an ocean of promotional material - even an experienced researcher can easily take the wrong turn and end up simply perpetuating the fiction. The issue that always confronts a researcher is the necessity of discerning fact from fiction. ![]()
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