Charisma, recalling a horse that had it

If American Pharoah raced Secretariat.
 This is the link to The Wall Street Journal. video

There's a posting going around the Internet the past couple of days in which The Wall Street Journal. combined videos of two Triple Crown winners side by side to show how they would have raced against each other.

Secretariat beat this year's winner, American Pharoah, by just about the same 31 lengths as his lead in the1973 Belmont Stakes.

That's no surprise. To be honest, I don't follow or care much about horse racing, but I do usually watch the Triple Crown races as much for the pageant as for the horses. I mean, who can resist looking at all those outrageous hats at the Kentucky Derby.

But that year, 1973, just about everyone became a fan as Secretariat ran the three races and the outlandish lead in the Belmont, well, amazing. What was different that year was I actually saw Secretariat in person, even stood next to him in the paddock before a race at Arlington Park near Chicago.

What I came away with, was wondering how a horse could be charismatic  Secretariat had it coming off him as an essence that felt almost tangible. I remember standing near him almost in awe of such an animal. He was huge, and the one physical characteristic that has stuck with me over the  years was the size and muscularity of his haunches and how all the muscles in that body narrowed to a waist that looked like your could close your hands around it. The horse was raw power refined, yet calm and stately in demeanor. He was royalty. You felt as much as saw his presence.

Later we hiked out to where we could stand next to the rail in the third and fourth turns. There we watched Secretariat thunder past (I could swear the earth shook) on his way to winning another race against horses that were mere mortals. Somewhere in all the boxes that hold my history there are three or four black-and-white negatives and perhaps a print or two of him running by us as he usually ran, alone and out in front, and in one of them all four hooves are off the  ground, like that famous set of originals the first time a photograph proved a running horse had all four feet off the ground at the same time.

When American Pharoah won this year's Belmont the other day, it had been more than 30 years since any horse had won all three races. Most likely it will be a whole lot longer than that before another horse like Secretariat comes along.