The Evan Shipman Handicap will be on Friday August 9 at Saratoga Race Course.  Do you know who Evan Shipman was?

 

The Evan Shipman Handicap will be run on August 9 at the Spa.
It is likely that even the most hardened race trackers don’t
recognize the Shipman name. Evan Shipman was a minor poet,
a minor novelist and a major horseracing writer. In the 1950’s he
was referred to as the “dean of turf writers” and covered all the big
races for The Morning Telegraph. He was well known and well
liked at the important tracks around the country. He witnessed
and wrote about many of the great horses of the day, including
Native Dancer, Count Fleet, Swaps, Nashua and Bold Ruler. He
was at his peak as a writer during the 1950’s, the heyday of
American racing when the sport drew crowds of 70,000 and more
on big race days. His first trip to the Spa was in 1927 and he was
a regular participant until his death in 1957. Shipman seemed to
have a special connection to the Saratoga Race Course and wrote
about it with his trademark economy and understatement. His
style as a journalist was influenced by Ernest Hemingway.

Evan Shipman was Ernest Hemingway’s best friend. Hemingway
dedicated his short story collection “Men Without Women” (1927)
to Shipman and devoted a chapter to him in his memoir, “A
Moveable Feast” (1964). The two of them shared a love of
Paris, literature, post-impressionist art, alcohol, cafés and horses.
Shipman and Hemingway went to all the Paris tracks in the
1920’s, Auteuil, Maisons-Laffitte, Enghien, Tremblay and Saint
Cloud. Hemingway wrote about horse racing in an early story “My
Old Man” and in his memoir “A Moveable Feast.” He kept his
racing binoculars with the bar man, Georges, at the Ritz Hotel and
went to the races frequently during his many trips to Paris in the
1930’s, 40’s and 50’s.

In 1935, Scribner’s published Shipman’s novel “Free for All.”
Reviews were good but sales were disappointing. The novel is
about harness racing and the struggles of the downtrodden during
the depression. As a Scribner’s author, Shipman was in good
company as Hemingway, Thomas Wolfe and F. Scott Fitzgerald
were in the Scribner’s stable of writers. Shipman published a
book of poetry, “Mazeppa,” in 1936. An extract from an untitled
Shipman’s poem is below:

There was a house once,

dropt between a factory and a lumber yard,

on a perhaps street,

crossing, with a systematic carelessness,

the dock side of town.
And that street knew

frequent football in the grey of morning,
and frequent football in the grey of evening,
and the taste of all day smoke
and the smell of all day rain;
and low conversations on corners;
and the sound of a Polish dance,
two flights up, four blocks away….

Hemingway was famously masculine. He was burly and
aggressive. Evan Shipman was not. Hemingway was an
amateur boxer and proud of his skill in the ring. Shipman was an
unprepossessing presence, sensitive and mild. Somehow their
differences worked for the two men. In “A Moveable Feast”,
Hemingway’s bittersweet memoir of the Paris years, he
remembered Shipman with great affection and sensitivity. “He
was a fine poet, and he knew and cared about horses, writing and
painting. I saw him tall and pale and thin, his tie carefully knotted,
his worn and wrinkled grey suit, his fingers stained darker than his
hair, his nails dirty and his loving, deprecatory smile that he held
tightly not to show his bad teeth.” In those days, Shipman could
have been described as a lovely man. But he had something of
the “poor soul” about him as well. Hemingway’s affection may
have had to do with the courage that Shipman showed as a
soldier on the Loyalist side during the Spanish Civil War.
Shipman was struck in both legs by machine gun bullets. In
Hemingway’s “Men at War” he referred to a letter from Shipman in
which he said the wounds were “absolutely nothing.” Hemingway,
for whom courage was everything, would have liked that.
Evan Shipman’s health was never very good. He died of cancer
in 1957 at age 53. His Morning Telegraph obituary quoted jockey
Eddie Arcaro: “he gave his readers all he knew about horses and
that was more than any other writer.”

These days, a rickety and dilapidated staircase leads up from the
second floor of the Saratoga clubhouse to the press box. A few
days ago, writers were at their computers typing out stories for
various publications. While the New York Racing Association
(NYRA) has updated and improved the old track in many ways,they apparently have decided to maintain the press box as it has
always been. I would like to think that Red Smith, Joe Palmer,
Frank Graham and Stan Isaacs wrote their stories in that space.
Joe Hirsch too. Evan Shipman must have frequented the room as
well, with his tie impeccably knotted and with his powers of
observation at full attention. I suppose that over the years, NYRA
has been tempted to rename the Evan Shipman Handicap.
Stakes races are renamed all the time. But let’s keep the name
the same, not only for Shipman’s memory but for all the turf
writers who have furnished the old track with their graceful prose.
The most famous of those writers, Red Smith (he of Four
Horsemen fame), wrote the following about horse racing in 1954:
“A pleasant pastime which in a few favored places like Saratoga
retains some traces of its early character as sport. You might feel
that if Saratoga were to pass, something oddly valuable would die
with it.”