The walking death of pari-mutuel racing in Tennessee, Part 3

by Frank Cotolo

Part 1 ishere.

Part 2 is here.

Living and working in the country music capital of the world left me little time to wander libraries or struggle through research on the then-juvenile World Wide Web to learn any history about standardbreds in Tennessee. All hope was not lost. I tried to rely on my closer business relationships with bloodlines borne in the Volunteer State; starting with my project manager we will call Joe Slevin.

“I had an uncle,” Slevin said, “who told me his father knew a fella who bought racing horses up in Kentucky. I remember this because he told me the fella bought into a horse named Phallas [sic] and that name made a big joke of the fact.”

The information a few others I asked on the topic was bare to none. Then I made what should have been an obvious move in the first place. In the one-thousand-plus compendium Care and Training of the Trotter and Pacer by James C. Harrison rests all the bloodline and breeding details available to this day between two covers. My edition, (c) 1968 United States Trotting Association, was collecting dust by the time I moved to Tennessee. Not just due to my poor packing abilities while traveling to live in states across the country but because I was a gambler from Brooklyn, NY. A Yankee, and a modern standardbred journalist, not an historian. All I knew about Tennessee as horse territory was a bad joke I wrote about Davy Crockett’s remorse for not having a fast trotter to escape the Alamo.

The subject of harness horse breeding for just about all pari-mutuel gamblers is as tantalizing as dentistry. This is why it was strange to me that Harrison’s explicit contents about generations of standardbreds became, dare I say it, interesting.

Foremost, and funniest for me, was the fact that the trotting breed was unrecognized officially when Davy Crocket fought to his death at the Alamo (jokes are not bound to facts). Harrison wrote that its most popular sire to date, Hambletonian, was assigned number 10 on the top 10 positive identification list of sires in 1882; when his sire, Abdullah, was number one on the list.

The word Tennessee does not appear in Harrison’s book until page 30 where he wrote, “Director sired Direct, a double-gaited horse that was extremely game and [in competition] waged some memorable races against Hal Pointer, the pride of the Tennessee Hals.” The next mention of the state in the book refers to Direct standing stud there in 1895.

Still with me?

All right then. Direct “was bred to the mares of the Hal blood. From one of them was Bessie Hal. He sired Direct Hal and thus founded the line that comes down to us today through Billy Direct, the former world champion pacer.”

Aside from the fact that whomsoever named the Direct foals was wanting for names with no hints to bloodlines, the facts show the state of Tennessee was prominent breeding standardbreds and producing important horse-flesh heritage at the turn of the century. With some setbacks.

Next mention of the word Tennessee is on page 39 where Harrison details the failure of sire Hal Pointer to “establish a sire line that would have kept the Tennessee Hals alive” after being exported to New Zealand. It most likely had nothing to do with a summer of winter weather and vice versa. The entire Tennessee Hal line is available in a single box on page 1,010.

So much for names as clues. They are literally a dead end. Going back to square one presented a matter of blood but led to a matter of purpose. Harrison’s pages revealed the Tennessee walking horse’s history led to the Narragansett pacer whose “pacing tribe” mixes with Canadian pacers owe their existence to Spanish mustangs from Texas.

(Sidebar: Another pacing tribe of note from Canadian pacer blood was the Davy Crocketts [sic]. No joke. But the fact made me need to change the trotter to a pacer in my Davy Crocket joke.)

It turned out Tennessee walkers served mankind as all-purpose horses on plantations and farms; bred and used for riding and pulling and random private racing. If there was any gambling involved (no records indicate any) it is safe to believe horse owners risked winning or losing something or other for personal pride and profit. But that was a private matter. And though horse racing of all kinds was becoming popular and profitable and growing as an industry during and after The Civil War the Tennesseans were waltzing and their standardbreds kept walking away from any commercial ventures.

And again, why no pari-mutuel racing?

I was talking with an old timer at the Opryland Hotel. The subject of gambling and the lack of it in the state came up. I said, “You would think it is plain-out against the law.”

He looked at me and laughed and said, “Because it is against the law.”