Swaps: The California Comet Book

I'm a bit over a third of the way through reading the "Thoroughbred Legends" series of 24, and this is the best of the lot so far. After reading a couple of these books you realize there is a formula for a short book about a racehorse. You need to cover the pedigree of the horse, the early days as a foal, the training and races, and the stud career and racing legacy. And you need to cover specific people - the breeder, the owner, the trainer, the jockey. Most of these books follow that formula and give details, coming off blandly. While well researched in most cases, these aren't very compelling reads. "Swaps" was very different. Barry Irwin instead wrote a book that describes the east coast versus west coast mentality in horse racing. To do this, he delves into the owner-breeder-farrier of Swaps Rex Ellsworth, especially his cowboy background. Irwin explains the "Arizona method", the cowboy way to choose and breed horses based on conformation, and to care for and train them. Irwin spends most of the book describing how Ellsworth competed with Swaps against traditional east coast racing powers. There are plenty of anecdotes here to add interest, such as Willie Shoemaker losing a race for Swaps as jockey, and a story about Swaps meeting a girl in a wheelchair with Ellsworth using only verbal commands to control the horse in the open. These Legends books do tend to show a horse's personality, and Swaps appears to be one of the most likeable and low-strung of the bunch. I enjoyed the focus on a theme that this book had, instead of being a rote horse biography, and would read more by Irwin if he had any in the series.