'I Got the Horse Right Here' Review: Racing With Runyon

S E E D E D   C O N T E N T

Damon Runyon wrote his first piece about horse racing in 1922, and led with an anecdote about boxing. Jim Reisler, the editor of a new collection of Runyon's work as a turf hack, suggests that perhaps he was nervous, and so fell back upon that which he knew. I'm sure Mr. Reisler is right. Yet Runyon was bringing to the typewriter his own particular sensibility, in which heroes and villains were not isolated characters reducible to their roles. (Runyon, when he reported on Al Capone's trial, enthusiastically recorded the gangster's tailoring bills from Marshall Field's, and the shopping he did for his home.) In the pages of "I Got the Horse Right Here" you will find yourself in gambling halls and hotels, perusing potential color schemes for racing silks and learning the multigenerational tale of the concessions ownership at Saratoga.

Sports writing at the time was wonky, detailed and serious, but Runyon was amused above all else. Racing was just one of the things that happened at the track. Anyone sentimental for a time when boxing and horse racing were main events will get a kick out of this collection. Runyon's sense of the racing demimonde, though, promises deeper pleasures on offer.

Consider that concessions business. On Aug. 18, 1933, Runyon introduces us to the grandchild of Harry Stevens, the man who may (or may not) have invented the hot dog on a cold New York Giants opening day in April 1901. "A stout youth, with nice blond hair and pink cheeks, and a cheery, affable manner that reminds you, vaguely, of someone you know may be seen dashing at regular intervals from one end of the racing premises here to the other." Runyon continues: "Now he is making an end-run around the mob of bookmakers in the clubhouse, now plunging through the throng under the grandstand, and now hot footing for the $1 enclosure, which is more exclusive than the sacred precincts of the upper clubhouse stand itself." (It's more exclusive, Runyon writes, because "you have to lay that one bob right on the line." It is notable that despite regular coverage of the one- and two-dollar windows, Runyon himself was a plunger.)

Before we know it we are wrapped up in a story about how Harry Stevens came into his first substantial sum of money, when William C. Whitney, "former Secretary of the Treasury, founder of the present Whitney clan that is so powerful in racing, was the big gun of Saratoga racing." After volunteering to do some investing for Stevens, Whitney asked Harry "how much money have you got?" Stevens gave him $25,000 or $30,000.

He heard no more of the matter for some time. For so long, that he commenced worrying a little, as that kind of money wasn’t hay to Harry the First in those days. Then one day, William C. Whitney came along, handed Harry a slip of paper, and said, nonchalantly: “There, Harry, that’s what became of your money.”

And Harry the First found himself with a check calling for $215,000.

Little short stories like this are peppered throughout the book. And always, Runyon is dropping us right into the moment. At the start of the Preakness in 1936, he writes: “They come by way of a little gate near the clubhouse. Most of the riders are wearing brand new silks and the colors fairly sparkle in the waning sunlight of the May afternoon. The crowd rushes against the rails to be as close to the parading horses as possible.”

Damon Runyon’s journalistic legacy has been overtaken by the technicolor crooning and the patter of “Guys and Dolls,” the musical out of his short stories, in which desperate gamblers, flophouse habitués, hustlers and Salvation Army missionaries are transformed into characters in a lighthearted romance. What’s at stake in this fictional world isn’t prison, poverty and early onset decrepitude, but whether or not the wedding bells will ring. Comedy, in other words. The denizens of Runyon’s Broadway will get exactly what they have coming to them. The set ups are perfect, and the underdog comes out on top. Lady Luck does not, in fact, blow on some other guy’s dice.

The rhythm and music of Runyon’s prose is careful, and he mastered an idiosyncratic voice to which he adhered with religiosity. His fiction takes place within a cordoned-off world that is reminiscent of—but in no way an accurate representation of—a vanished, hyper-specific milieu. The journalism is qualitatively different, but there is a lot of crossover between Runyon’s fiction and his reportage, particularly in the constructed sense of community. The cordoned-off feeling remains, the colorful characters are here, only they use their real names, mostly, “Chicken Fry Ben” being an obvious exception. The setups aren’t all that different, either, as when he discusses two partners who needed to borrow money to keep betting: “Mr. Coggins and Mr. Durnell were very, very short at the time, but they got the owner of the horse to turn it over to them and then promoted a clairvoyant, who liked to wager on the races to bet $5,000 for them on the steed in a heat that they regarded as a soft spot for it.”

Damon Runyon was, at his core, a newspaperman. His grandfather ran a printing business in Kansas, and his father learned that trade and worked printing newspapers there and in Colorado. Runyon grew up in those print shops. His father’s name was Runyan with an “a.” In an early byline, a typo changed it to an “o” and Runyon liked that, so he kept it.

That was hardly the total of his self-fashioning, as we read in the introduction to this collection. A young Runyon once handed in a story to the sports editor at Hearst’s New York American named Harry Cashman. Cashman took a pencil to the byline, changing “Alfred Damon Runyon” to “Damon Runyon.” Of course Runyon was made by newspapers. How could the story go otherwise?

—Mr. Watman is the author of “Race Day,” “Chasing the White Dog” and “Harvest: Field Notes From a Far-Flung Pursuit of Real Food.”