You can't win, Darth. If you strike me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.-Obi-wan Kenobi to Darth Vader, shortly before being struck down and subsequently becoming more powerful than Darth Vader imagined.
It’s been thirty years since Obi-wan dropped that cowardly pearl of wisdom on Darth Vader and while it may have seemed harmless at the time, his clairvoyance has now ruined horse racing. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not blaming Obi-wan for the demise of the sport of kings or saying that ruining horse racing was his ultimate intention when confronted by Vader. But we’re lying to ourselves if we place the blame anywhere else.
This fact became painfully clear to me while I was reading the worst sports column not written by Jay Mariotti ever. The hack involved dedicated his newspaper space to bashing Big Brown for producing the biggest choke job in the history of sport at the Belmont Horse-Racing Event. The point the writer and most of the world misses is that it wouldn’t have mattered if BB won the BH-RE, he still wouldn’t be in the same solar system as Barbaro in terms of popularity. In fact, BB could win every horse race for the next 18 months and people wouldn’t be able to tell Big Brown from Mr. Ed. Those same people, however, would still insist that it was actually Barbaro who died for our sins, not Jesus.
Barbaro’s overwhelming success injury “am I going to die today or not?” drama= an untouchable equation for success. He set the bar so high that no horse in the history of horses will ever be able to surpass him. By allowing himself to be struck down he has become more powerful than I imagined. My imagination for powerful horses is pretty limited though. In fact, this is as powerful as I imagine a dead horse can be. Instead, we get Jesus with hooves pulling off the eternal fame cock-block for the rest of his species.
When is enough enough? Horses can’t be famous unless they win two major races then die. They can’t even go the Paris Hilton route anymore and release a sex tape. There’s never been a worse time to be a horse and we only have on Jedi Master to thank for it.
Big John Studd is one of the writers for StolenLunchMoney.com. His band of merry literati tackles a variety of subjects at StolenLunchMoney.com. You can reach Mr. Studd at
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