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Funny Cide’s owners are from Sackets Harbor, a small village near Watertown on Lake Ontario. The only other time this town made history was when a battle was fought there during the War of 1812.

Photo: Martha Cooper Varick A. Chittenden is professor emeritus of English, SUNY Canton College of Technology, and executive director of Traditional Arts in Upstate New York (TAUNY). Photo: Martha Cooper

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It was spring 2003 when the world came to know about Funny Cide, the previously undistinguished three-year-old colt who rushed from behind to win the Kentucky Derby in mid-May. Two weeks later, he pulled out all the stops and won the Preakness, going away. Then he was two-thirds of the way to the pinnacle of racing, the Triple Crown. I usually don’t pay much attention to horse racing, especially the thoroughbreds at the flat tracks. It’s a bias I have from my boyhood, when my favorite uncle, Lyndon Miller, raised and trained and drove harness horses at county fairs, for a hobby. These were trotters and pacers, and their drivers—not jockeys—would ride two-wheeled "bikes," or sulkies, behind them, for Sunday entertainment. Harness races were small-town sport; the thoroughbreds were for millionaires and city swells. Uncle Lyndon was great with animals. Dairy farming was his living but horses were his passion. He would keep one or two in his stable at a time, mostly has-beens or also-rans to the truly serious competitors, but I didn’t know that at the time. I remember my fascination with Billy Song and Kay Ensign and how Uncle Lyndon would care for them. Time in the barn or at the little country tracks is indelibly etched in my memory. The pleasantly sharp smell of liniment, the glisten of sweat, the neatly wrapped leg bandages, and insistent whinnying from box stalls are with to me to this day. Billy or Kay would occasionally win a heat, maybe even beat their own time record, and that would be exciting, but being around the horses was pleasure enough to my uncle...and to me. I myself never became a horseman (or much of a participant in any sport, for that matter). Instead, I became a fan. I learned that from Aunt Charlotte. As loyal as any political spouse, she would devote her summer weekends to going to the races. Since I lived next door and had few kids my own age to spend time with, she would invite me to go along. Nearly every Sunday of my summer vacations and every day during fair week, she’d pack a picnic of sandwiches, iced tea, and ginger or sugar cookies fresh from her kitchen, and we’d follow Uncle Lyndon to the track. There we’d watch him and his fellow-traveler hobby horsemen discuss their horses, the track, the weather. Aunt Charlotte handed him bridles or sponges or other things he needed and chatted with other racetrack wives (not "widows," I stress). I helped when I could, mostly by staying out of the way. By the time the first races began, we’d eaten our lunch and were ready to be serious spectators. No grandstand for us. We staked out our positions at the rail, in the paddock, along the backstretch. From such favored spots we cheered on Uncle Lyndon in his homemade blue-and-white silk jacket, with the large letter M on his back, and shouted to Kay or Billy at the top of our lungs. It was a scene from a nineteenth-century Currier & Ives print. Although most racing fans like the excitement of gambling at least as much as they like horses, I never got into the betting spirit. It may have been my puritanical grandmother or my post-Depression childhood that held me back. After my early teen days, my interest in horses waned. The little racetracks of my youth are now gone, and most county fairs have replaced the afternoon programs of trotters with roaring, smoking demolition derbies or mud bog races. Like many other Americans, I’d follow the news when a Secretariat or a Seattle Slew or a Native Dancer was making headlines. Otherwise, I paid little attention. Then came Funny Cide. Why did I suddenly care? It was his story that caught my attention, and the attention of many others around me. This underdog gelding will never be part of the high-stakes, high-priced breeding world. He had been sold as a yearling for $22,000 and ended up owned by six men who had been high school buddies; he was trained by a horse-whisperer eccentric and ridden to victory by a Chilean immigrant with few major victories. It was a Horatio Alger story in the twenty-first century, appealing to all red-blooded Americans. But for us in the North Country, the story had a special twist. Funny Cide’s owners are from Sackets Harbor, a small village near Watertown on Lake Ontario. The only other time this town made history was when a battle was fought there during the War of 1812. Suddenly a four-legged creature who had never set hoof in town was the local hero. The six men, middle-aged and in careers as ordinary as teaching and optometry, who had invested $5,000 each to buy Funny Cide as a colt, were featured in newspapers and television appearances around the world. In a place where sports heroes—or celebrities of any kind—are rather rare, here was a chance to brag. And brag we did! In early June there was hardly a North Country household that wasn’t tuned to the broadcast of the Belmont Stakes, the final leg of the Triple Crown. Though disappointed at our hero’s third-place finish, we were thrilled to have a "hometown kid" do so well. And as everyone around here says, "You can’t take that away from us." Yes, I know Funny Cide wasn’t born in the North Country. And I know that Churchill Downs, Belmont Park, and Saratoga are hardly the small-time tracks I frequented with Uncle Lyndon. But if I stretch my imagination, this story was a little like Billy Song’s. Is that horse liniment I smell? I guess you’re never too old for heroes.

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