yankee doodle dandy

​American authors write books on racing differently to their British counterparts. I am not suggesting the American author is better talented in the words department, just that they come at their subjects from a varying perspective. Dorothy Ours book on the American-owned Grand National winner Battleship is as much a social diary of the upper-class of their time as it is a racing story, and is more distinctive because of it.
British racing books set pre-world war 1 must similarly include the social and political climate of the age, as with Nicholas Clee’s exceptional book on Eclipse and Tony Byles book on the Running Rein affair. Once upon a time, to use a hackneyed phrase, horse racing in this country was very much an upper-class indulgence, as it was in the dear old U.S. in between the two world wars. The fabulously wealthy constructed their own racecourses, so great was their interest in horses and gambling. Apparently there are no less than five racecourses buried beneath modern New York.
John Dizikes biography of Tod Sloan, ‘Yankee Doodle Dandy’, takes a broader brush approach to the zeitgeist of the period when the man who invented ‘the monkey seat’ went from ‘never-has-been’ to the Lester Piggott of his era, to, sadly, a has-been who became a has-been through his own refusal to accept that the rules of racing applied to everyone, including himself.
Sloan was very much an individual. The phrase ‘on your tod’ was coined in his honour, or should that be in his reflection? For better or for worse, he was always determined to plough his own furrow and to say whatever he liked to whomever he liked. Although he did not exactly invent the forward seat, he adopted, popularised and persisted with it despite repeated criticism thrown in his direction. Before him, jockeys rode as their forefathers rode, virtually in the same fashion as was considered correct and traditional in the hunting field. It is arguable that Tod Sloan, as much as he was disliked by so many of his colleagues, changed horse racing, and jockeyship, to a greater respect than anyone who came before him or after. Yet he is better remembered, if you are not aware of it, by George C. Cohan’s ‘I’m a Yankee Doodle Dandy, A Yankee Doodle do or die, A real live nephew of my Uncle Sam’s, Born on the fourth of July’, which I know from the Jimmy Cagney film ‘Yankee Doodle Dandy’, though apparently it was originally coined for the musical play ‘Little Johnny Jones’.
Tod Sloan was the archetypal rags-to-riches character so beloved of writers and thespians. He dressed in the best clothes, often changing his clothes oft-many times during the day, smoked long Havana cigars and craved the company of attractive women. He was a dandy off the racecourse and a dandy on a horse, with his chin close to his mount’s ears, his body arched forward, slip-streaming, lessening wind resistance and allowing the horse to run faster. He rode to percentages unheard-of. If he wasn’t riding to 33% or more, he was having a poor time of it. He was, as even his most fevered critics would have to accept, a truly accomplished rider. Of all his faults, the least excusable was the high opinion he held of himself, believing that being Tod Sloan allowed him privileges not granted to lesser mortals.
Of course, such arrogance brings with it envy and enemies. When he left America to find fortune and greater fame in England, his absence was not mourned. After a stuttering start, he took English racing by storm and Newmarket, the heath and the racecourse (his favourite racecourse in all the world) became his home from home. He was at the forefront of what was termed ‘the American invasion’. American born trainers took up residence in England, who were an asset to Sloan, all of whom seemed to have no remorse at using every kind of dope they could get into a horse. Which, surprisingly, wasn’t against the rules of racing at the time. It took the honourable George Lambton to wake-up the Jockey Club to the problem and get doping made illegal. Then there were the American jockeys who were taking advantage of the less-artful English jockeys of the time – the Reiff brothers, Lester and Johnny, ‘Skeets’ Martin and perhaps the most successful of them, Danny Maher, a jockey Lambton was a great fan of.
Though the Jockey Club were slow to catch on to the doping of horses, what they were hot on, even if every jockey of the day seemed to bet in order to make ends meet, were jockeys who bet regularly and Sloan was a compulsive gambler. He even admitted the charge when the Jockey Club finally had him up before them, warning him off for a year, a sentence that was in effect a life sentence as they had no intention of granting him a second chance to redeem himself.
It was said, doubtless exaggerated, that Sloan had accumulated nearly half-a-million pounds in his relatively short career, yet after many ill-judged business ventures, an attempt at a vaudeville career and several marriages and divorces, he was in quick order penniless.
John Dizikes’ book is well worth reading, and Tod Sloan is well worth remembering, his story worth recounting as a reminder to the young as to how easy it is to think too much of yourself and to throw away both a hard-earned reputation and a fortune.