Cigar Aficionado

Cinematic trips to the horse track often end in high-profile feats: Secretariat wins the Triple Crown; Seabiscuit becomes Horse of the Year; Liz Taylor rides in Britain’s Grand National in National Velvet. But offscreen, thoroughbred racing leaves much more room for the more common Slip Mahoney scenario. In the 1951 short feature Crazy Over Horses, Slip, along with Satch and the rest of the Bowery Boys, hilariously enter an unheralded nag in one of the thousand or so humbler races that go off unnoticed each year. CFC Stables (a.ka. some friends and I who pooled a few thousand dollars each) took a similar route. While buying horses with regal pedigrees or paying …