Weddings and Horse Racing

I spent the weekend at Erin and Wink’s wedding in beautiful Horseshoe Bay. I’ll spare you the particulars but it really was an impossibly beautiful wedding. There were times I felt like I crashed a movie set of a wedding scene. It was that perfect. When talking to the groom, after the usual congratulations and such, the talk turned to sports because, well, we’re guys and that’s all we’re capable of talking about intelligently (except other select topics like action movies and beer).

Anyway, it was Preakness Saturday, a big day for Marylanders such as myself not because we love horse racing (which I kind of do), but because it’s a day we all have fine memories of. Memories so fine I cannot discuss them in a public forum until the statute of limitations expires. It’s a day which usually centers on gambling and drinking, two skill sets I possess.

So Wink and I talked a little about the ponies and it dawned on both of us that Big Brown, the winner of the first two legs of the Triple Crown, might have the best life of any professional athlete on the planet. I would trade places with that horse in a second.

Essentially, he’s a teenager. He’s got a good portion of his life ahead of him, and let’s face it, if he wins Belmont and becomes the first Triple Crown winner since 1978, he’s probably never going to race competitively again. OK, maybe he’ll show up for the Breeder’s Cup, but this is pretty much it. That will mean, his pro career will be only six or seven races. That’s it. Big Brown will have put in seven days work in his life, and still a teenager, retire to his next life of getting busy with the mares.

Big Brown’s stud fee is already millions upon millions of dollars. He’s far more valuable as a stud than as a racehorse, especially if he wins Belmont, so only a moron would ever run him again and risk the millions of dollars he would lose if he got injured. So Big Brown is about to become a gigolo. There are NBA players who would kill for Big Brown’s lot in life. Some of them (I’m looking at you Shawn Kemp), did it for no additional fee.

My stud fee is somewhere around $20. The lesson here is that I’m nowhere near as valuable as a horse. But we already knew that.