He forbids any venture into it by his only son, Henry, who both hates his domineering father and resembles him. In the 1950s, their plantation is in the hands of John Henry Forge, a corn grower, who finds horse breeding showy and vulgar. The Forges are the “kings” of the title - Bluegrass aristocrats of apparently limitless wealth. Three Kentucky lineages converge in the novel: one white, one black, one equine. Reuben knows all there is to know and flashes it with the hypnotic razzmatazz of a carnival barker, for nobody’s benefit but his own. Faust, you will recall, was the most learned doctor of his age, but learning only made him restless for more, so he made a pact with the Devil. This riverine, gorgeously textured novel is highly ambivalent about the encyclopedic knowledge that it delivers. Morgan, of a boundless breadth of knowledge on the darker history of humans and horses in Kentucky, including the fact that African-American jockeys, though nowadays as rare as fair play, once dominated the sport. Reuben Bedford Walker III is black (a “noble Ebon,” in his own characteristically purple phraseology), “the best rider you’ll ever see on the skin of a horse,” and the possessor, like the author C. The Mephistopheles figure in “The Sport of Kings,” a novel that abounds with Faustian characters and dangerous learning, is a jockey himself. It was my introduction to the widespread delusion that jockeys, with their compact bodies and wizened and secretive faces, are in league with the Devil in this most devilish of games. I was new to the track and was startled by the horseplayer’s choice of words. “I hope the sweatbox pops you like a chili bean and refries you to hell, you Cuban devil,” someone yelled. The jockey who had lost on the favorite was named Delgado.

The first time I saw a horse trainer “steal” a race - by shipping a horse more talented than it looked in its past performance chart to a track far from home and cashing a bet on it - I was standing at the rail when a crowd of angry bettors turned not on the trainer but on the (this time) blameless jockeys.

The sport of kings by ce morgan