Arguably the greatest rivalry in all of American sports was born in a barn. Affirmed and Alydar were conceived in the same barn and then born a month apart in 1975.  

My dad used to take me to the racetrack for my birthday. What a great dad. Makes you pity the Chuck E. Cheese crowd. How can a pizza-eating rat compete with live thoroughbred racing, beer-soaked homeless gambling addicts and shady racetrack touts in soiled sports coats? So much fun. Fuck clowns and birthday cake. Alydar was sired by Raise a Native and Affirmed by his son, Exclusive Native. Maybe more key, they both had the great Native Dancer – the Grey Ghost – in their pedigree. They would end up racing against each other ten times, finishing first and second in nine of them. Affirmed ended up beating Alydar seven times, and in their epic Triple Crown duels, Affirmed’s combined margin of victory was less than half of a second.

We’d usually go to Santa Anita, literally one of the most beautiful places on earth on a big race day. Pops would give me a few bucks and let me pick my own horses. He taught me how to place a bet with the right combination of betting jargon so that the cigar-chomping old-timer at the window wouldn’t get pissed off. He showed me how to figure out what a horse would pay based on the odds, pretty much the most sophisticated math I ever mastered. Hernando Cortez brought sixteen horses (one was a pinto – the dappled horse, not the Chevy) to Mexico in 1519. Ultimately the Spanish were forced out of New Mexico by the Pueblos. The thousands of horses left behind became America’s wild mustang herd, resulting in millions of wild horses on the plains by the eighteenth century.

There were no horses like Affirmed racing on my birthday trips to the track, but I didn’t care, I felt like a big shot anyway. A couple of times I had pretty good luck. My handicapping style was fairly sophisticated; I either picked the horse with the name that appealed most to a nine-year-old or on the one that had the most attractive racing silks (sound gambling formulas that endure to this day). And I always bet my money on the nose, ’cuz my dad said the exotic bets were for suckers.

One lucky race day I doped out a horse named Cuando Cuando. He finished first and I went to the window. Two bucks on the nose returned about $12, as I recollect. At Chuck E. Cheese the best you could hope for is a stupid plastic ring from a nickel vending machine and an upset stomach. I invested my winnings on Dumbo to finish first in the eighth race. Asian elephants weigh about 11,000 pounds, their trunks are longer and heavier than a man. They eat 600 pounds of food a day and their sense of smell is six times more acute than a bloodhound.  

Pops: “Are you sure you wanna bet all of that?” Me: “I’m on a hot streak, pops.” As Sammy, my father-in-law and future horseracing homey would say, “That horse is still running Patrick!” Dumbo was a dumb movie anyway. Broke, I started picking up spent tickets off the ground, hundreds of them. I had heard that boozed-up players sometimes dropped or threw away winning tickets. Surely looking pathetic, my dad gave me two more bucks: “Invest wisely, because that’s it.” Saratoga Racetrack is said to be the oldest and most storied sporting venue in America, opening in 1863. How do you get there, you ask? “From New York City you drive north for about 175 miles, turn left on Union Avenue and go back 100 years.” My eager eye was drawn to a horse called Mule Train who was rolling with some sporty kelly green silks and a big white shamrock on the jockey’s back. It was clearly a sign of luck from the racing gods, and I recalled a Bugs Bunny cartoon where Bugs was singing, “I’m looking over a three-leaf clover that I overlooked be-three.”  

My long-shot Mule Train didn’t run like a mule, but he still finished second and that had me feeling like an ass. I held on to the ticket for weeks after, thinking someone might call me telling me that my ticket was a winner on account of some rare, super-late inquiry. Mona Best, Pete Best’s mom (The Beatles’ original drummer) had good luck on a long shot. She bet on a horse named Never Say Die in the early ’60s, winning enough dough to build the Casbah Coffee Club at her house in Liverpool.  

Ahh yes, the sport of kings. Given that racehorse ownership is still a game dominated by the rich and famous, Middle Eastern money and the legacy American bluebloods, that expression remains valid in many ways. But for most of the twentieth century, the royalty associated with horseracing, in various forms, meant much more than millionaire owners. The horses themselves often had a cult following and thousands of Americans flocked to the racetrack, and later their televisions, on race days when one of their horses was running. Affirmed and Alydar were stars. People took sides in the rivalry, often bitterly so, generating true rooting interest. These champions of the racetrack were on magazine covers and the day’s emerging sports TV schedule. Nowadays most can’t remember when horseracing was every bit the equal to today’s team sports, but through the Affirmed–Alydar rivalry of 1978, that was a fact. Football and basketball had yet to become the juggernauts they are today, so horseracing and its equine idols were a constant presence on the front page of American sports sections. Seabiscuit was an absolute legend in the 1930s and ’40s and he didn’t even use the Triple Crown races to earn that following. In the 1950s, Native Dancer won 21 of 22 career starts and his come-from-way-behind style captivated sports fans like no other. Racing at the advent of television, his race dates were must-see TV, in part because his gray coat allowed viewers to easily pick out the Grey Ghost on black-and-white sets.  

And since I’m sounding like a toothless old fart, I may as well take you back to the days of Dan Patch, a pacer who was undefeated his entire career from 1900 to 1909. One hundred thousand people would routinely show up on race day just to get a glimpse of him. He would go on to be a product endorser extraordinaire, with his likeness on everything from cigarette tobacco to breakfast cereal.  

I have a hunch that the racetrack isn’t on the approved list for birthday destinations anymore. That’s too bad. It would be better for a kid to put $20 on a gelding in the fifth, than to pin the tail on a donkey. What’s the sport in that? Me and my pals, in the spring of 1978, would race our bikes home from the park as if we were jockeys on the backs of Affirmed and Alydar … “It’s Affirmed! It’s Alydar! It’s Alydar. It’s Affirmed! They’re approaching the finish together …!” Every kid should know how to place a bet, read the Daily Racing Form and appreciate the beauty of horse and rider sharing a single form as they race to the wire. Thanks pop.