I might get in trouble for this, but I wanted to make sure everyone got to read today's installment of "NYC," a column written by Clyde Haberman for
The New York Times Metro Section. I really enjoyed it. Hope you do, too.
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It's a Bird! It's a Plane! It's a Horse?
By CLYDE HABERMAN
GENUINE New York heroes have been in short supply lately, whether in government, politics, business, law enforcement, sports or — need it be mentioned? — journalism. So wouldn't you know that when a hero finally does come along, it's a horse.
Well, why not? Humans, for the moment anyway, are not exactly providing great role models.
The animal in question is a 3-year-old gelding with the funny name of Funny Cide. Two and a half weeks ago, he became the first horse bred in New York to win the Kentucky Derby. On Saturday, in Baltimore, he won the Preakness Stakes by so many lengths that the rest of the field looked as if it were in a different time zone.
Now Funny Cide is back at his home track, Belmont Park, on the border of Queens and Nassau Counties, getting ready for the Belmont Stakes on June 7. If he can win that grueling race, too, he will become the first horse from New York to win racing's coveted Triple Crown, and the first horse from anywhere to do so since Affirmed in 1978.
In racing, for those of you who think a furlong is a winter-coat size, the Triple Crown is the holy grail. It's the World Series, Super Bowl and Stanley Cup rolled into one. It's an O'Neill drama, it's Whistler's mama, it's Camembert. It's the top.
For many New Yorkers who follow the horses — and whose horses may follow the horses, to steal from Joe E. Lewis — the prospect of having a homeboy reach such heights is dizzying.
It may strike some as fatuous to invest so much emotional energy in a horse. But it has happened before.
A similar phenomenon occurred when the incomparable Secretariat captured the Triple Crown in 1973. As with Funny Cide's race with destiny, that feat had not been accomplished in 25 years. Secretariat simply blew away the competition, winning the Belmont Stakes by an unbelievable 31 lengths. If he'd gone any faster, they would have had to name a NASA rocket after him.
America in 1973 was a nation in trauma. The Watergate scandal had reached full bloom. The Vietnam War lurched toward an inglorious end. The economy stumbled. One national institution after another came under fire.
Then Secretariat showed up, a tonic on four legs. One woman told the sports commentator Heywood Hale Broun that after all the turmoil, this horse was what restored her faith in mankind.
New York could use a little restoring itself right now. These are not days of glory for the city.
The police, lionized with firefighters for their Sept. 11 valor and pain, have been tarnished by a disastrously flawed drug raid in Harlem a few days ago that appears to have scared an innocent woman, literally, to death.
The politicians in Albany spend more time fighting among themselves and posturing for the cameras than producing a budget that is genuinely balanced, not flimsily held together with more than $4 billion in borrowing that will leave their grandchildren to pay for the mess.
The civic nobility displayed after the attack on the World Trade Center has yielded to squabbling over government compensation for the victims' families, with everyone saying it isn't about money even as they demand more money.
SOME of the city's leading business executives are accused of criminal behavior or, at the least, sordid finagling.
The Metropolitan Transportation Authority is found by a judge to have misled New Yorkers about its finances, the result being an extraordinary court order to rescind new fare increases on subways and buses.
On New York sports teams, the two-legged athletes look far more ragged than heroic. Even the supposedly invincible Yankees seem suddenly, if perhaps temporarily, frail.
As for journalism, is there anyone in town unfamiliar with the crisis at this newspaper, brought on by the fabrications and plagiarism of a rogue reporter?
To the rescue, piercing the gloom, comes Funny Cide.
Winning the Belmont Stakes will not be easy. It is a long race, a mile and a half, and it has a history of making losers of sure winners. Indeed, Funny Cide is the fifth horse in the last seven years to approach the Belmont as a Triple Crown contender. None of the others made it all the way.
But many knowledgeable racing people believe Funny Cide has a good chance.
In the Preakness, by the way, he ran in a field that included an entry called New York Hero. That horse finished sixth.
The lesson, perhaps, is that it is not enough merely to be called hero. This is one label that you have to go out and earn.
