The Great Match Race: When North Met South in America’s First Sports Spectacle

Product Description

The Great Match Race is a captivating account of America’s first sports spectacle, a horse race that pitted North against South in three grueling heats. On a bright afternoon in May 1823, an unprecedented sixty thousand people showed up to watch two horses run the equivalent of nine Kentucky Derbys in a few hours’ time. Eclipse was the majestic champion representing the North, and Henry, an equine arriviste, was the pride of the South. Their match race would come to represent a watershed moment in American history, crystallizing the differences that so fundamentally divided the country. The renowned sportswriter John Eisenberg captures all the pulse-pounding drama and behind-the-scenes tensions in a page-turning mix of history, horse racing, and pure entertainment.

Review

…”surely the most entertaining book of sports history ever written…It’s a grand and glorious story…” — Frank Deford

“An extraordinary account of America’s first major sports spectacle…” — Joe Hirsch, Daily Racing Form

“Eisenberg expertly captures the passions in his telling of the contest. . .the pages flip by faster than jockey colors.”

“Eisenberg succeeds in creating a gripping yarn of sporting contest…”

“Eisenberg tells the stories of the two great horses and their human connection with a novelist’s dramatic flair…”

“Let’s get right to the point: This is a lead-pipe cinch, mortal lock, lay-your money-down sure thing of a book.”

“Now the definitive account of a stupendous event that was a preview of modern American sports…” — Ed Hotaling, author of Wink, The Great Black Jockeys, and They’re Off! Horse Racing at Saratoga

“Eisenberg’s masterfully woven narrative…is as important today as it was two centuries ago.” Mim Eichler-Rivas, author of Beautiful Jim Key: The Lost History of a Horse and a Man Who Changed the World

About the Author

JOHN EISENBERG was an award-winning sports columnist for the
Baltimore Sun for two decades and is the author of
Ten-Gallon War,
That First Season,
My Guy Barbaro (cowritten with jockey Edgar Prado), and
The Great Match Race. He has written for
Smithsonian,
Sports Illustrated, and
Details, among other publications, and currently contributes columns to BaltimoreRavens.com. He lives in Baltimore, Maryland.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Prologue It was a new sound for American ears: the lusty, clattering, sports-stadium roar—sixty thousand people shouting, whistling, stomping, and rattling cowbells, raising a din so forceful it shook the wooden beams supporting the grandstands. The noise was audible for miles, rolling across the countryside like booming thunderclaps in a boot-soaking rainstorm. It would become a familiar sound in the distant future, an archetype of autumn football weekends and summer baseball nights. But in 1823 it was a new phenomenon, a startling sensory assault never heard before.
A horse race, of all things, was the occasion, luring a tumultuous horde of sports fanatics that was almost larger than the combined populations of Illinois and Delaware. Before this time, political rallies, prayer revivals, and holiday parades had brought together the largest crowds of Americans, but a ballyhooed duel between the fastest thoroughbred in the North and the fastest in the South had improbably attracted a mob that dwarfed all earlier crowds. Suddenly, on a sunny spring afternoon, a racetrack on Long Island was the nation’s fourth-largest city.
The country came to a standstill, sweating the outcome of the race between Eclipse, the North’s dark, snorting, undefeated champion, and Henry, the South’s precocious, brilliantly fast darling. Congress shut down because so many politicians had tickets to see them run. The New York Stock Exchange was closed. Andrew Jackson interrupted his presidential campaign to attend.
Public support was evenly divided, and as the animals circled the all-dirt track at the Union Course in Jamaica that day