Most of us have “a type.” Some go goo-goo over the 1940s Hollywood glamour of George Clooney. Others for the aristocratic English looks of Benedict Cumberbatch.
Me? I love draft horses. The bigger, the better. I can’t explain it, I guess I, too, have “a type.”
I found “the one” later in life, buying my first and only horse at 37, about a year after I began jumping. My leading man is Rocky (show name Plymouth Rock, but lately I’ve been thinking “Fifty Shades of Bay” would suit him well, because he is my kind of porn).
Rocky is a 17-hand, dark bay Belgian Draft and Thoroughbred cross with a white star on his handsome, kissable forehead and a tiny white snip on his nose. He is also strong, and dependable, and he thinks nothing of a five-foot oxer. Oh, he is just getting warmed up.
But more than that, he is kind and forgiving. When I screw up a distance (which is often) and lose my balance in the middle of a three-jump gymnastic, he says, “It’s OK, Mom, I’ve got this,” and he adds a step, adjusts his balance to pop me back into position and carries me like a newborn baby over the jump.
The co-owner of the barn that trained Rocky says, “That is a horse I would take into war.” And he is right. But Rocky and I are a peace-loving pair, and we both love the hunter ring.
“Just tell everyone he’s an American Warmblood,” says one lifelong show rider. “When he’s all braided up, no one will know he is a draft.”
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But I don’t want to deny Rocky’s race or his heritage. He is a draft and I am proud of it. As I look over at the ladies with thighs half the width of mine and their beautiful slender warmbloods and Thoroughbreds, it doesn’t bother me one bit. Rocky and I are quite comfortable in our own skins.
“You do realize you will be competing against $300,000 horses if you show in Westchester, don’t you?” says another friend whose parents bought her a fancy chestnut Thoroughbred when she was a teenager. What she really means is: You will be competing against a different kind of horse—because drafts do not belong in the hunter ring.
“What about the jumpers?” says another, for, apparently, breedism doesn’t exist in the jumper ring.
But my trainer won at the Hampton Classic in 1999 on her Appaloosa-Quarter Horse cross, with a dappled bottom and long white socks. That year, a perfect-looking Thoroughbred bucked her rider off, bolted, and began eating the privet hedges decorating the ring whilst her rider dusted herself off. No one at my trainer’s barn had wanted to ride the odd-looking “Appy,” but I think a point was made that day.
So Rocky, my beautiful, high-stepping plow horse, and I intend to show this spring and summer season with abandon. Together, we believe we can improve breed relations in the hunter ring. As one now-famous political slogan goes: “Yes, we can!”
Melissa Whitworth is a British writer, based in Ithaca, N.Y., by way of New York City.
Melissa is one of the winners of the Chronicle’s second writing contest. Read entries from the other winners here.
