Gary's StoryStack

Horse racing: Don't give a darn? Bet you'll love this yarn . . .

They just ran the Belmont Stakes, the final leg of horse racing’s Triple Crown, at the Saratoga Springs Raceway, in Upstate New York.

Whenever I think about Saratoga Springs, I think of the great sportswriter and editor Stanley Woodward, and a story he loved to tell about that Gilded Age resort. But more about that later.

Woodward was an intellectual and a taskmaster. He worked at the best-written newspaper in the country, The New York Herald Tribune. He did the world of readers a favor when he hired Red Smith, who had been working at The Philadelphia Record, and who became one of the greatest newspaper writers anywhere.

But Woodward got fired from the Herald Tribune. And, as should be perfectly obvious, for the most logical reason. The paper’s owner, the super-wealthy Mrs. Ogden Reid, insisted that he print the golf scores that she and her girlfriends recorded at their suburban country club.

Woodward refused; she cut him loose; he landed at The Miami News— for him, Siberia.

But he never slackened his standards. He despised clichés. When a Miami staff writer handed in a story that said a baseball player had “belted a home run,” Woodward whipped the belt off his own trousers, pushed it up to the writer’s face and said, “You ever see a guy hit a ball out of the park with one of these?”

Finally, Red Smith persuaded Mrs. Reid to rescue Woodward from Miami.

Which brings us to Saratoga Springs. Woodward wrote about an elderly Manhattan dowager who took the train to Saratoga Springs for the resort’s curative waters. She taxied to her hotel – typical of several extremely rambling structures in town that dated from the late 1800s – a tired clapboard building that looked as if it was awaiting the serving of high tea.

When she checked in, a bellhop picked up her luggage and invited her to follow him to her room. They started down a long, long hallway, made a turn at the end and headed down another long, long hallway — our dowager in a steady, but slow gait — then made yet another turn down a third long, long hallway and finally reached her assigned suite.

The bellhop deposited her luggage, accepted a tip, and left. Whereupon, she plopped onto the bed, picked up the phone, called the front desk and demanded, “What time does this room get to Chicago?”

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Gary