Last Horseman (eBook)

The Fix Was In

Jean Logan’s heart sinks as she watches the last few seconds of the race from her seat in the grandstand, seeing Clancy and her husband falter. Taking a deep breath, she sighs quietly, pushing her bottom jaw forward in a show of frustration. A petite, well-dressed blonde, Jean stands in contrast to most of the people in the grandstand who are dressed casually in jeans and sneakers, the typical attire for standardbred racing, which, unlike thoroughbred racing, the Sport of Kings, is the Everyman sport. Standardbreds aren’t the tall, lanky steeds from May’s Kentucky Derby, where watchers sport coats and ties, dresses, and exotic hats while sipping mint juleps. Standardbreds are stocky, working-class horses that race for the entertainment of working-class people dressed in lettered T-shirts and baseball caps, looking for a good time that includes shouting and cheap beer.

Because she is seated in the horsemen’s section, the portion of the grandstand largely reserved for spouses of drivers and trainers, Jean’s appearance reflects the professionalism of her husband, and so she chooses to dress slightly upscale in a simple dress and comfortable but fashionable shoes. It’s similar to what she wears every weekday during the school year as an algebra and calculus teacher at Miami Trace High School near the small, rural town of Washington Court House, Ohio, where she and Eddie live.

In the winner’s circle, where Eddie should have been standing with Clancy, Coffee Break’s owners gather to have their picture taken alongside their horse and Roberts. A grainy photograph to hang in the office or den, a record of their fleeting celebrity, is most of what they can show for the money they have invested in buying the horse, feeding him, buying his harness and blankets, paying the entry fees for races, transporting him, and paying his veterinary bills. Winning horses share a modest purse with the horses that finish in the top five places, a purse that barely covers the expenses. As important as winning the race are the few seconds of fame for the driver and owners as they stand, smiling proudly, alongside the horse and driver in the winner’s circle. A few of the fans watch, but most are indifferent since they’ve moved on to thinking about their wagers on the next race.

Coffee Break is almost uncontrollable, shaking his head and stepping around in a frenzy, nipping at the groom who is trying to hold his bridle and keep him steady for the few seconds it takes to snap the picture. The crowd in the grandstand sees Coffee Break as feisty and excited, but Jean sees a horse out of control. Roberts puts his arms around the horse’s owners in their moment of glory, beaming widely for the camera. Jean has stood there before. Lots of times. With Eddie and before that with her own father, Harold Cunningham, who was a national champion trainer and driver.

Jean can see, perhaps even better than Eddie, that the fix had been in, as has happened to him three times in the past two weeks—other drivers conspiring to box in his faster horse so they could control the finish of the race and therefore the payout for their gambling. When Roberts, Strong, and others didn’t have better horses, they created better luck. Just as Eddie would move to the front, a horse would slow down in front of him so a designated horse could pass by. Or a horse might break stride in front of Eddie and cause him to move wide to avoid a collision. It made business sense, if not sporting sense. Why settle for a few thousand dollars in purse money when you can place a wager on a horse with long odds and get thirty-five, fifty, or even one hundred times more?

Each fixed race that resulted in a loss for Eddie eroded a little bit of the confidence he once had in himself and the joy he once felt in horse racing. Eddie used to win up to five hundred races a year, and his total winnings would be ten- to twelve million dollars. His fifteen percent share of the winnings would pay the expenses and keep the stable and his family thriving. Now he’s winning fewer and fewer races, but the horses still have to eat twice a day, the grooms still have to be paid, and the university still expects tuition payments for his sons.

Little by little, racing was passing Eddie Logan by, like it did in tonight’s race. Unlike Roberts and his cronies, Eddie stubbornly refuses to participate in manipulating races or illegally drugging his horses to produce the euphoria that masks the horse’s pain so it can go faster.

Watching Eddie and Clancy walk slowly back to the paddock, the future of the inflexible man she loves clouded with uncertainty and self-doubt, Jean is stung by the chides of angry, uninformed betters who feel betrayed by what they see as Eddie’s incompetent driving costing them their wagers and their bragging rights.

“He used to be a better driver,” one says. “At least ya’ could count on him not to stink up the track like he done tonight.”

“Logan doesn’t win like he used to.”

“If I’d had Roberts’ horse, my fifty bucks would have been seventeen hundred fifty dollars.”

She had expected him to win, too. He had the best horse, and he was the best driver—at least, he used to be the best driver.

He’s still a great driver, Jean wants to say to the blustering grandstand know-it-alls. If you knew about racing, you’d see that he was cheated out of a win.

Next to Jean, Tom Parker purses his lips in frustration and lets out a sigh. “Damn,” he says to nobody in particular and to Jean specifically. “Eddie should have won this race. The winning horse,” he says, looking at his program for the name, “Coffee Break went in 2:02. Hell, Clancy beat that time in training.”

“He got boxed in, Tom,” Jean remarks, knowing the painful truth that her words won’t change anything.

Tom Parker is a big man, both in height and girth. His casual shirt and wrinkled khaki pants make him seem like an unsophisticated lout next to the petite, well-dressed Jean. But Tom is unpretentious, not unsophisticated. He grew up the scion of a wealthy family that owns more Ohio land than anybody but the state of Ohio. Raised in the southern Ohio town of Wilmington, where his father made Tom and his brother and sister work on the farm planting crops, bailing hay, and feeding hogs, he went to Stanford, then got his MBA from Northwestern before coming back to Wilmington to take over the family businesses.

Coming from a wealthy family didn’t hurt, but he put his wealth and his wits to good use over time until he owned virtually anything worth owning in southern Ohio. Perhaps his greatest coup was buying an abandoned Air Force base in Wilmington, fifty miles northeast of Cincinnati. The air base was once rural enough to not disturb the civilian population but had become obsolete. When the Air Force donated the airport to the City of Wilmington, Tom saw an opportunity. He convinced the town council to let him buy the abandoned airport for ninety-nine years at one hundred dollars per year and pay for the upkeep of thousands of acres of runways, buildings, and hangars.

Within a few months, Tom convinced UPS and Airborne that Federal Express would be seeking a long-term lease for a mid-continent airport from which to stage their package delivery capabilities. They inked a deal to make the base a regional delivery and maintenance hub, bringing thousands of jobs and hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue to Wilmington. He agreed to lease the hangars, aprons, buildings, and maintenance areas for one-third of what it would have cost in major cities. Further, he offered them a state-of-the-art military-quality installation with long runways in a pleasant, rural setting, but close enough to Cincinnati to make it accessible for shopping and sports. Soon, Tom Parker’s one-hundred-dollars-a-year abandoned airport provided one hundred fifty million dollars in annual revenue and taxes to Wilmington and far more than that to the owner of the airport and surrounding property—Tom Parker and his family.

In only a few years, he parlayed the farm into a spider’s web of successful businesses, expanding the family fortunes into a rural Ohio kingdom. Today, Tom controls over five million acres of rich farmland where he raises corn, wheat, soybeans, and hundreds of thousands of hogs that are sent to the processing plant he owns in trucks that he also owns. He is one of the wealthiest men in the Midwest, but he drives a five-year-old pickup truck that’s seen better days, buys his clothes at Costco, eats at a diner up the road from his house, and lives in the kitchen, family room, and mud room of a six-thousand-square-foot brick home. Along with Eddie, he owns horses, including Clancy, for racing and breeding. Tom buys them. Eddie trains and races them. They split the profits.

But not tonight.

Jean knows she’ll have to console Eddie on their drive home, but her more immediate concern is assuaging Tom’s anger and frustration at watching Clancy’s share of the twenty-five-thousand-dollar purse for the race, and even more in Tom’s wagers, disappear in the flash of lights. For Tom, it was Clancy’s race but Eddie’s loss.

In full view of Jean and with a dramatic gesture, Tom reaches into his pocket and takes out the paper betting stubs of the wagers he’d made on Clancy. The volume of tickets makes it clear he expected Eddie to drive Clancy to a win. Clancy was, in Tom’s mind, that elusive “sure thing.” He rips the worthless tickets in aggravation and allows the pieces to flutter to the ground. Jean...