Customer Reviews

Funny Cide

5 star:		(12)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Everyone loves a winner, especially when the winner is an underdog. That was certainly the case with Funny Cide, the never-heard-of gelding who won the Kentucky Derby and the Preakness thus almost copping the fabled Triple Crown. Yep, America loved him.

The resonant voice of Dan Cushman chronicles Funny Cide's amazing story from starting gate to finish. Of course, it's not just a horse's story but also the tale of friends, including a trainer and a jockey who were determined to win a race.

No one in this All-American story is a blue blood, not the racehorse or the men behind Funny Cide. They were blue collar workers from Sackets Harbor, New York (little more than a village with 1,386 residents) who pooled their resources to fund a small stable. They had a dream and, by golly, they were going after it.

All who loved "Seabiscuit" will root for Funny Cide and the men who believed they'd found a winner.

- Gail Cooke

Funny Cide was an exceptional racehorse. The gelding came out of nowhere to win the Kentucky derby! that's worth writing about. His story was closely followed in a way that you cannot see on television or read in the newspapers everything that happened. A great book to read. Funny Cide outstandingly successes Seabiscuit as the underdog that triumphed in the sport of kings.

Funny Cide was the 2003 winner of both the Kentucky Derby and Preakness (two legs of the prestigious horse racing Triple Crown). He was an underdog in the truest sense: unimpressive bloodlines and birthplace, with a jockey considered washed-up, and a group of owners from New York, who were neither outrageously rich or very horse savvy. In fact, they arrived at the Derby in a schoolbus: a handful of friends who had known each other since high school, who were in it for a good time and a way to bond.

Funny Cide's journey to the most well-known horse race in America is fast paced, funny and irreverent as many of the people closely associated with the colt. A must for horse lovers and racing fans - and everyone who loves to root for the underdog.

Sally Jenkins does a good job of telling the success story of Funnycide's career leading up to the "big three", but it's not your typical horse story. If you're loking for the insight on the how's and why's leading up to Funnycide's victory from the horse world's prespective, you will be let down. This reads as a biography of the entire Funnycide team (still a story worth being told). It's a great read for non-horsepeople, but those who are into horses and the world of racing will be disappointed from the perspective it is written from.

The bookstore near where you live probably has many categories --- fiction, nonfiction and children's books, if nothing else. If it's a large enough bookstore, there are perhaps books that focus on religion and spirituality, health, self-help, recovery, and sorrow.

It is one of the deficiencies of the bookstore experience that there is not a corresponding section about joy. If there were, this new book by Sally Jenkins would be there. The improbably titled FUNNY CIDE: How a Horse, a Trainer, a Jockey, and a Bunch of High School Buddies Took On the Sheiks and Bluebloods ... and Won, is steeped in joy. It is a gambler's joy, the joy you get when you figure out a point spread or get the right scratch-off lottery ticket or hit the winning exacta. But it is a pure, untrammeled joy, nonetheless. And in a culture so steeped in loneliness, anxiety and depression, anything that can promote and celebrate joy is a universal good.

The story begins where stories about horses usually commence --- in a stable. In the wee small hours of the morning, an Oklahoma-bred mare gave birth to a foal at a New York farm. He was one of 33,689 foals born that year, and as Jenkins says, there were no thunderbolts present at his birth. He was a young colt, given the name of Funny Cide, and largely left to grow up to see if he could amount to anything. No one at this stage of the game expected that this horse would be anything special.

Jenkins --- writing on behalf of the entire Funny Cide "team" --- tells their stories as well. The reader might know about the small-town friends who purchased the horse, how they pooled their money together in what seemed like a mad venture, how the circle of friends formed the "Sackatoga Stables" so they could get better seats and parking spaces at the track and feel like bigshots, and even make it to the winner's circle once in a while. What's not so well known --- and what Jenkins makes clear to even the casual race fan --- is the enormous gamble that putting money up to buy a horse is.

Putting a two-dollar bet down at the track is a known proposition; in pari-mutuel racing, you're betting against your peers and conceding a small percentage of the bet to the track and to the state to help cover expenses. Putting two hundred thousand dollars down on a horse --- and purebred Kentucky yearlings can go for higher than that --- is much more of a sucker's bet, with a higher risk of loss than even the most rapacious Las Vegas casino would allow. You're all but guaranteed, Jenkins tells us, to lose half the money you invest in any given racehorse --- that is to say that what you pay for the horse, and what the horse eats while you own him, generally won't recoup you half of what the horse earns in his lifetime. You must have an above-average horse to even think of breaking even --- and an exceptional horse, a classic horse, to think about making money off the deal.

On top of that, it helps to have top-flight people around the horse, people who know horses. (The principal partner in the Sackatoga circle is allergic to horses, we find.) Some of the best writing in FUNNY CIDE is about the horse's trainer, Barclay Tagg, and his lifelong struggle against pushy owners who think they know how to train a horse. Additionally, there's jockey Jose Santos, stuck on the backstretch at Belmont Park, waking up at five in the morning to exercise horses and riding longshots, hoping for the big score.

This makes FUNNY CIDE sound a bit like Laura Hillenbrand's magisterial SEABISCUIT, but the two works are very different. First, the Hillenbrand book was written with a certain grave, elegiac style; Jenkins's prose is much more bright and breezy, free and easy, with a certain Texas lilt here and there. Hillenbrand was rescuing a lost tale from the collective unconscious; Jenkins is retelling us information we largely already knew from ESPN coverage. Most importantly, SEABISCUIT is filled with loss, regret and nostalgia. FUNNY CIDE is about joy piling on top of joy, as everyone around the horse realizes what his true capacities and skills actually are. (A little too late, as it happens; we learn about Funny Cide's gelding in the story, which wipes out any future stud fees.)

Jenkins reminds us of the controversy surrounding Funny Cide's triumphant Run for the Roses, how a newspaper story alleging cheating was used to taint the horse's record and the jockey's reputation. That story is the only blot in the last hundred pages of FUNNY CIDE, all of which takes place amidst a torrent of joy, sparked by one horse who learned the right way to run, and to win, and never once forgot how.

--- Reviewed by Curtis Edmonds

I have never really been all that into horse racing except to make a point of watching the Kentucky Derby every year (it's a couple of minutes long after all! That's not exactly a Herculanean commitment)

Nonetheless I picked up this book to see what the deal was behind Funny Cide, and I was very surprised with this great little story. There's a sort of All-American, virtuous underdog who beats the establishment through honesty and hard work charm to the story. The owners of Funny Cide were a group of friends from tiny Sacketts Harbor New York who wanted to do something different with their lives. So they pooled their comparatively meager savings (for the world of Horse Racing) and wanted to buy a race horse to just try to get into the Kentucky Derby (the concept of winning practically never crossed their minds. Even getting in was a sort of fictitious goal.) Instead of a race horse, all they could really afford was Funny Cide however. (After going through a few others first.)

From the author's description of Funny Cide as a horse (I can't really say for myself, they all look the same to me) the concept of Funny Cide winning the Kentuck Derby must be comparable to, say, seeing Richard Simmons rocket past a Kenyan to win the Marathon at the next Summer Olympics. Funny was some sort of gangly looking runt, and a gelding at that. The crew from Sacketts Harbor were clearly not lusting for Empire in the horse racing world, they just wanted to have fun. But they picked their horse and stuck by him.

Their trainer was a very old and sympathetic character who was quite good at what he did but apparently hadn't racked up any accolades just yet. He's the kind of guy you really wanted to see get just one real victory before he moves on. He saw something in Funny he could work with. Despite his awkward appearance, everything was basically there, especially an abnormally high level of motivation in a horse. Funny genuinely liked to go flat out and the trainer nurtured him into a truly great runner. There were some especially involving sections of the book centered around training race horses. The author's description of how a horse is basically designed by evolution to do little more than sprint short distances at tremendous speeds was one. The types of injuries they can endure, and the differences between speed and endurance tracks were others.

Eventually Funny was winning races, and winning them by a LOT, and the impossible dream of actually reaching the Kentucky Derby began to dawn on the owners. Of course, if this were a Hollywood story, this is where our likable underdog hero would get some sort of ailment or into some situation that would cast the shadow of doubt on whether he could actually deliver in the film's finale. True to form Funny gets a mucus infection.

Of course we all know that Funny goes on to actually win the Derby, and nearly the entire triple crown, but the author crafts the story so well that you share the suspense, surprise, and sheer jubilation of his owners when he actually does cross the finish line.

This is a truly charming, happy ending story that affirms a lot of good values. It's a fun read and definitely recommended.

Funny Cide was a great story, and every racing fan knows it pretty much by heart. Even non-racing fans were caught up in the wonderful story of this basically unwanted gelding's run for the Triple Crown.

And unless you really want to know the details of the mundane lives of the "plain folks" who formed the syndicate that bought Funny Cide, then there's no need to buy this book. If you know someone who is just getting into thoroughbreds, then share this book with them. Otherwise, this book says nothing new.

This book is amazing! I learned so much about Funny!

a lively fun account of horse racing and winning against the odss. Reminiscent of 'Seabiscuit' this is set closer to modern times and is a wonderful account of the little guy. You will not be disappointed.

Seth J. Frantzman

This is a GREAT read. Terrific....the most enjoyable story in a long while.