Every year a few newly published books on horse racing and the Kentucky Derby arrive at our offices in telltale bulging brown envelopes. Most of them, sad to say, are as drab in the reading as those envelopes are in the viewing. These tracts come across as replays, from different angles if anything, of already chronicled moments in American horse racing and the 131-year history of the Derby.
From this pack of also-rans, however, a champion has emerged this spring. Like the first blossom on a late-winter landscape, Black Maestro, by Joe Drape (William Morrow, $24.95), captured my attention and, in an unexpected way, renewed my zeal for Kentucky Derby season. The book, on sale April 25, travels back in time to the rough-and-tumble turn of the 20th century, a fascinating era in American history. But it doesn’t stop there — it crosses the Atlantic to a Europe spinning in turmoil that would erupt into World Wars I and II. At the reins on this epic ride: a little black man from the Kentucky Bluegrass who rode Thoroughbreds on both continents.
Drape, a New York Times sportswriter who covers horse racing (and who wrote features for the Derby issue of Louisville Magazine in 2001 and 2002), jumped aboard the story of a lifetime when he began researching Jimmy Winkfield, who won Churchill Downs’ big race in 1901 and 1902. Winkfield was the last African-American jockey to ride a Derby winner. Black jockeys dominated the sport in the late 1800s, but, Drape points out, were dumped from the saddle during the days of Jim Crow, replaced by scrappy whites, many of them immigrants. The exploits of white riders, trainers and owners were widely reported by newspapers in the colorful yellow-journalism style of that time, but Drape discovered that even the most talented black men in racing were nearly invisible in print. He ran Winkfield’s name through the capacious Times archives, which go back to the 1850s, and found only a dozen stories that mentioned the two-time Derby winner and pre-eminent American jockey of his era. Newspapers in Louisville and Lexington added little for the record other than mentions in listings of race entries and obits after Winkfield’s passing in 1974 at the age of 91.
But Drape and his research team expanded their investigation to Russia, and later France, and struck a mother lode. The project widened to cover three years, and the author received assistance from a Russian-born researcher now residing in Texas (who took three trips to Europe) as well as three translators, two official researchers and several friends. Drape says that Team Winkfield “all worked for peanuts but got enraptured figuring this man out.”
His lifelong fascination with horseracing informs his lively writing style. He is able to convincingly and colorfully imagine Winkfield’s early career at Latonia Race Track in northern Kentucky and reconstruct the brawling wars between hooligan track owners in Chicago. His accounts of races run more than 100 years ago crackle with immediacy.
As democratically rowdy as the racing scene was in the U.S., it had a contrast in Europe, where determined business magnates and royalty preserved it as the sport of kings. A Winkfield who was ostracized in American by institutionalized racism found eager benefactors in Russia and France for his peerless ability with horses.
“It was publications from the Russian Empire that unlocked the saga of Jimmy Winkfield,” Drape says. “They had a half-dozen or so horse-racing journals that chronicled in depth what was its national sport, made it clear that Jimmy was the Michael Jordan of horse racing. It also was remarkable how color-blind the coverage was.”
Being excellent with the Thoroughbreds of industrialists and the aristocracy put Winkfield, Forrest Gump-like, in the midst of remarkable historical scenes — the Russian Revolution, which he fled with a group who drove more than 250 of the best-bred horses from the tsar’s kingdom to safety in Warsaw; the Vienna racetrack that was a passion for Archduke Franz Ferdinand, whose subsequent assassination sparked World War I; the racing community in Maisons-Lafitte, France, which he was forced to flee to escape the Nazis.
The tiny black man from Chilesburg, Ky., with a gift for horses broke from the human herd to rise from stable boy to Kentucky Derby winner to champion rider and trainer on the Continent. And thanks to Drape’s diligence — and some good “writing luck” — we now have a book that makes racing shine brighter today through a brilliant reflection of a century past.
— Bruce Allar
