The Horse That Could Be 'too Damn Fast'

Horse and pony are starting to walk around the track. Honest Pleasure apparently has been taken in. When other horses go by him, galloping or breezing, he never turns a hair. Perhaps his competitive instincts remain unaroused because of disdain for ordinary horses. Would an Olympic sprint champion, out for a leisurely Sunday morning stroll, be jealous of an overweight middle-aged jogger who happened to huff and puff past?

Horse and pony walk halfway around the track, then move into an easy jog for the rest of the circuit. When they start around again, their riders let them gallop. They continue to gallop toward the seven-eighths pole, where the workout will begin. Honest Pleasure is giving his exercise boy no trouble. He seems to have no thought at all about running. The scheme has worked.

Or has it? Pinky starts to give Honest Pleasure his head. Just a little relaxation on the reins. Pinky wants to sneak off before his horse realizes what is happening, just as Jolley instructed. John Nazareth, on the pony, drops back as unobtrusively as possible. But despite all the deception, Honest Pleasure catches on. And the instant he knows he has a chance to start running, he wants to run. All of a sudden Pinky has his hands full. Those tree-trunk arms are strained to the utmost. The easy stroll has turned into a bitter battle—between a horse who wants to go as fast as he can and a rider who must not let him.

Up in the stands, Jolley has moved away from his friends; he wants to watch this struggle alone. What he sees turns the back of his neck a bright red. Pinky, in his effort to keep the horse from going too fast, has him going too slow. For the first half mile of the workout, Honest Pleasure is showing no more speed than a plow horse—the four furlongs in 51[2/5].

Jolley leaps into the air and cries out as if stabbed. He waves his left arm frantically forward, beckoning Pinky to move the horse. He shouts, "Let him do something! For gosh sake, let him do something!"

Pinky, of course, is too busy to see the waving arm. Over the hoofbeats of his horse he cannot hear. But now he has the horse going the way he would like, and the last part of the work is much better than the first part. Honest Pleasure finishes the seven furlongs in 1:28, exactly a second slower than Jolley wanted.

Jolley, a perfectionist, is outraged. He excuses himself from his friends and goes down to the track to talk to Pinky. Nobody but Jolley and Pinky will ever know what he said, and what he said probably could not be printed anyway. In Jolley's mind, the morning has been a total loss.

He walks back to the barn in despondency, bemoaning the trainer's lot. "What can you do?" he asks his friends. "If you've got a horse like this that loves to work, you've got to worry that he'll run away or that the boy will be so worried about holding him back that the horse doesn't get any benefit. But if you've got a horse that doesn't want to work, then you've got to send another horse alongside him to get up his interest—and now you've got two boys that have to work together and one or the other of them is liable to mess up."

At the moment, of course, LeRoy Jolley is very down on all exercise boys—even his own profession. It has been a tough morning.

Honest Pleasure has caused a lot of consternation this fine Florida day. He is just too much horse. He is so good that he is a holy terror to the people around him.