Out of the Clouds

Description

In the bestselling tradition ofthe The Eighty-Dollar Champion, the propulsive, inspiring Cinderella story of Stymie, an unwanted Thoroughbred, and Hirsch Jacobs, the once dirt-poor trainer who bought the colt on the cheap and molded him into the most popular horse of his time and the richest racehorse the world had ever seen.

In the wake of World War II, as turmoil and chaos were giving way to aspirit of optimism, Americans were looking for inspiration and rolemodels showing that it was possible to start from the bottom and workyour way up to the top-and they found it in Stymie, the failed racehorseplucked from the discard heap by trainer Hirsch Jacobs. Like Stymie,Jacobs was a commoner in “The Sport of Kings,” a dirt-poor Brooklyn cityslicker who forged an unlikely career as racing’s winningest trainer bybuying cheap, unsound nags and magically transforming them intowinners. The $1,500 pittance Jacobs paid to claim Stymie becamehistory’s biggest bargain as the ultimate iron horse went on to run awhopping 131 races and win 25 stakes, becoming the first Thoroughbredever to earn more than $900,000. The Cinderella champion nicknamed “ThePeople’s Horse” captivated the masses with his rousingcharge-from-behind stretch runs, his gritty blue-collar work ethic, andhis rags-to-riches success story. In a golden age when horse racingrivaled baseball and boxing as America’s most popular pastime, he wasevery bit as inspiring a sports hero as Joe DiMaggio and Joe Louis.

Taking readers on a crowd-pleasing ride with Stymie and Jacobs, Out of the Clouds — the winner of the Dr. Tony Ryan Book Award — unwindsa real-life Horatio Alger tale of a dauntless team and itsworking-class fans who lived vicariously through the stouthearted littlecolt they embraced as their own.