Product Description

A hundred years ago, the most famous athlete in America was a horse. But Dan Patch was more than a sports star; he was a cultural icon in the days before the automobile. Born crippled and unable to stand, he was nearly euthanized. For a while, he pulled the grocer's wagon in his hometown of Oxford, Indiana. But when he was entered in a race at the county fair, he won -- and he kept on winning. Harness racing was the top sport in America at the time, and Dan, a pacer, set the world record for the mile. He eventually lowered the mark by four seconds, an unheard-of achievement that would not be surpassed for decades.

America loved Dan Patch, who, though kind and gentle, seemed to understand that he was a superstar: he acknowledged applause from the grandstands with a nod or two of his majestic head and stopped as if to pose when he saw a camera. He became the first celebrity sports endorser; his name appeared on breakfast cereals, washing machines, cigars, razors, and sleds. At a time when the highest-paid baseball player, Ty Cobb, was making $12,000 a year, Dan Patch was earning over a million dollars.

But even then horse racing attracted hustlers, cheats, and touts. Drivers and owners bet heavily on races, which were often fixed; horses were drugged with whiskey or cocaine, or switched off with "ringers." Although Dan never lost a race, some of his races were rigged so that large sums of money could change hands. Dan's original owner was intimidated into selling him, and America's favorite horse spent the second half of his career touring the country in a plush private railroad car and putting on speed shows for crowds that sometimes exceeded 100,000 people. But the automobile cooled America's romance with the horse, and by the time he died in 1916, Dan was all but forgotten. His last owner, a Minnesota entrepreneur gone bankrupt, buried him in an unmarked grave. His achievements have faded, but throughout the years, a faithful few kept alive the legend of Dan Patch, and in Crazy Good, Charles Leerhsen travels through their world to bring back to life this fascinating story of triumph and treachery in small-town America and big-city racetracks.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #278701 in Books
• Published on: 2008-05-20
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 368 pages

From Publishers Weekly
In this spirited narrative, Leerhsen, an editor at Sports Illustrated, tells the now-forgotten saga of Dan Patch, a race horse that at one time drew an estimated 60,000 people to a single event in 1903. Admitting from the outset that the events of this book may seem as if they transpired on another planet, Leerhsen delivers a mesmerizing look into a strange corner of American sports and folk history when Dan Patch became a household word, earning roughly $1 million a year at a time when, Leerhsen notes, the-highest paid baseball player, Ty Cobb, was making $12,000. The arc of Dan Patch's career involves a range of often unscrupulous entrepreneurs: his first owner, Dan Messner Jr., who overpays by mistake for an injured pace horse and whose drunken decision to breed the pace horse with a wild stallion results in Dan Patch's birth; the horse's second trainer, Myron McHenry, who despite his conflicts with Messner grooms the horse for success; and M.W. Savage, the horse's final owner, who makes millions from Patch-related merchandise while overworking an obviously tired animal. But the heart of the book is Dan Patch himself, a horse with an almost human capacity for calm and determination that deserves to be rediscovered by a modern audience. (June)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist
*Starred Review* It is difficult for the contemporary mind to fathom that there was a time when harness racing—trotters and pacers—was king in America. Yet from about 1885 to about 1915, an era when the horse and buggy were the most common form of transportation, harness racing was more popular than Thoroughbred racing, baseball, and boxing, hands down. And in the middle of that era, the undefeated pacer Dan Patch was the king of harness racing. After he ran out of equine competition, he paced against the clock, setting and repeatedly lowering track, state, and world records while drawing crowds up to 117,000 and pocketing appearance fees of up to $21,500. His most lucrative activity, netting up to $1 million a year at a time when the dollar was worth 20 times its current value, was “endorsing” scores of products ranging from tobacco tins to washing machines. Leerhsen tells the story of Dan Patch and his connections—the series of scoundrels and self-promoters who served as his owners and drivers—with humor and a fine sense of detail. The author no doubt owes a debt to Laura Hillenbrand’s Seabiscuit, which created both the mold and the audience for a certain kind of exhaustively researched book about a horse and his people; but that doesn’t make his work any less fascinating. --Dennis Dodge

Review
"It's a terrific look at a legendary if now forgotten equine superstar named Dan Patch. Leerhsen does for early 20th-century American harness racing what Laura Hillenbrand's Seabiscuit did for Depression-era Thoroughbred racing." -- USA Today

"One of the many satisfactions of Crazy Good is that it goes farther than Seabiscuit -- Laura Hillenbrand's popular resurrection of another unlikely superstar -- in explaining how a horse could be so feted, then forgotten...With wit and a winking charm, Leerhsen, an executive editor at Sports Illustrated, makes sure this handsome brown stallion resonates...From start to finish, this book has legs." -- Newsweek

"Mr. Leerhsen's thoroughly entertaining history betrays no trace of the sentimentality that so often adheres to tales of bygone sports heroes...[Crazy Good] has the moments of sweetness and triumph that only a sports story can provide. Not least among the triumphs is the fact that, with Mr. Leerhsen's help, Dan Patch at long last has been given his due." -- Wall Street Journal

"Leerhsen vividly recounts Dan-mania and digs up dirt on the colorful gamblers and shady horse handlers of the 1900s. In rescuing Dan from the mists of history, he also draws a wry, moving account of America's first epidemic of sports fever." -- Entertainment Weekly

Customer Reviews

The Standardbred Legend Comes To Life
Talk about a superstar, fans used to say that the legendary natural pacer, Dan Patch, would stop on the track before a race and look to the stands to count the house.

And from where this forgotten legend had come from, that gaze was worth its weight in gold.

Author Charles Leerhsen brings to life the amazing career of this Standardbred racer who set his mark on the track and in sponsorship deals; from chewing tobacco and toys to washing machines and automobiles, there was even an "air-line" named after the stallion.

Born with a crooked-leg in 1896, his original owner thought the Indiana-bred would only have a career in front of a delivery wagon. Not raced until age four, Dan Patch quickly became a sensation on the national Grand Circuit and in exhibition races; his average paced mile in his 73 GC events was under two minutes and he banked more than $2 million in prize money.

But it was September 8, 1906, at the Minnesota State Fair race track, where Dan Patch set an amazing mark before 93,000 fans. He paced a mile in 1:55, a record that stood for 32 years. Dan Patch was retired in 1909 and died in July 1916.

And with the triumph came tragedy and memories of a golden era fading away as years quickly rolled into decades. Dan Patch will again forever stand tall as a titan in sports, as Leerhsen has brought this incredible story back on track.

Wacky Rich
Rich referring to not just Dan Patch's owner, but also to Leerhsen's book, multilayered and full of tasty stuff. Villains and/or complicated characters abound. The one sure hero is Dan Patch, whose history and personality are revealed like a mystery being solved, while Leerhsen schleps us around the early 20th century racing circuit, and we bask in such emerging or time-honored cultural phenomena as mass marketing (often bogus), absurd product endosement, racetrack corruption, gross material excess, the cult of celebrity, and road domination by the motorcar. We meet descendants of some of the important humans in Dan's life and the current day keepers of the Dan Patch flame, including Leerhsen himself, the obsessed lead detective who's loved the track all his life. Besides fascinating, Crazy Good is misty-eyed poignant and laugh-out-loud hilarious, with fabulous writing ranging from sportspage dramatic to erudite to profane. Wacky Rich.

Entertaining, Enlightening, Engaging
Crazy Good is just plain good. Even if the only horses you've ever seen have policemen on them, you will enjoy this story of a superstar who just happened to be a horse.

Dan Patch, the star of this book, is unblemished and brilliant, but the people around him? Maybe not so much. Hence the captivating story.

Leerhsen tells the tale of this unlikely hero, born as he was with no expectations and a physical deformity to boot. He keeps the reader entranced through the emergence of Dan's brilliance and the story of how he draws hundreds of thousands of fans a year. The Beatles had nothing on Dan Patch.

Get this book for Father's Day, for Flag Day. Get it for any time you want to leave the past behind and allow yourself to be pulled in by the magnetism of a horse who lived 100 years ago.