Slew

Perhaps no other sport lends itself so well to looking backward as horse racing. Although any sport worth its salt has a history, the traditions of horse racing and the importance of past horses and horsemen play a major role in what happens today in racing. Furthermore, as horseplayers, we continually look backward as we evaluate form. It is essentially impossible to assess what a horse might do or be capable of doing without knowing what its past performance has been.

For those of us who feel the pulse of history, however, the Thoroughbred offers peculiar pleasures. In what other context than racing could the smell and sight and sound of horses propel us backward three decades to a time when the exhilaration of the racetrack was the essence of a social afternoon.

In 1977, racing was riding the crest of a wave of popular interest sparked by the great Secretariat, who became the first Triple Crown winner in a quarter-century and raced across sports pages like a beam of light. The sport had not yet begun to feel the pinch as its immense base of fans began to age or as state governments began to operate other forms of gambling as revenue streams.

In those seemingly simpler times 30 years ago, the most important horse in America was Seattle Slew. The 3-year-old had crushed his opposition leading up to the Triple Crown. The nearly black colt overcame adversity to win the Kentucky Derby, then traveled to Maryland and won the Preakness.

He approached the Belmont Stakes as an unbeaten champion. No Triple Crown winner had ever completed the difficult series while unbeaten, but Seattle Slew was a very special horse. He was fast, but he wasn’t a sprinter. He had stamina, but he wasn’t a plodder. So dark that he was actually hard to see in the black and white photographs of the day, Seattle Slew was truly unique, combining the excitement of speed with the control of a professional. And he was owned by a quartet of personable young men and women who became part of the bright, young face of racing a generation or so ago.

A large part of Slew's appeal lied in the fact that this dark horse was a genuine "dark horse." Bought out of a select yearling sale for only $17,500 when a lot of people had that kind of money to spend on a racehorse, Seattle Slew was like hitting the lottery – over and over again.Every time the colt won, the story became more exciting, the tension revved up a little more. And Seattle Slew came through, winning the Belmont Stakes and the Triple Crown. He was so good that he made it seem easy.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Frank Mitchell lives on a farm where he writes and raises horses about 30 minutes from Keeneland Race Course in Kentucky. He's written two books on horse-racing and writes a regular column on Thoroughbred bloodlines for Daily Racing Form that can be found at drf.com.