Yankee Doodle Dandy: The Life and Times of Tod Sloan

by John Dizikes

In the 1890s, feisty Tod Sloan (1874–1933) abandoned the centuries-old jockey tradition of riding in a straight sitting position and instead crouched low on the neck of his horse. The result was not only a string of victories for young Sloan but also a revolution in horse racing. In this entertaining book, award-winning author John Dizikes recounts the remarkable story of the Indiana boy who rose from obscurity to become the most famous jockey in the United States and Great Britain at the turn of the century. Dizikes evokes the turbulent, colorful world of horse racing and gambling in which Tod Sloan rocketed to celebrity—and from which he was just as dramatically ejected.
 
Sloan’s innovative riding style helped to transform horse racing into the first nationally popular spectator sport, drawing huge crowds and vast amounts of betting money. But Sloan’s career was crushingly ended by those who resented and envied him. A dandy, a big spender, a man whose company women loved, Sloan related to horses in an almost magical way yet foundered in his dealings with people. This book is the biography of a diminutive man who lived in large style, and lives on in George M. Cohan’s musical Little Johnny Jones and Ernest Hemingway’s short story “My Old Man.” The book is also much more—a fascinating cultural history that illuminates the history of horse racing and betting, the democratization of sport, changing conceptions of masculinity, the hypocrisy of Victorian morality, the lionizing and demonizing of celebrities, and a variety of other inviting topics.

Genres: Sports, Biography, Horse Racing

240 pages, Hardcover

First published September 1, 2000

Reviews

[John Thorn · Rating 4 out of 5]

I love team sports, but horse racing ... not so much. The author, however, is winning me over with his ostensible biography of innovative jockey Tod Sloan (the model for George M. Cohan's star turn in Little Johnny Jones and Jimmy Cagney's in Yankee Doodle Dandy). In truth the book is less a bio than it is an impressionistic portrait of speculative culture at the track and off, in our first so-called gilded age (the 1980s matched the 1880s in fact). Sloan is interesting enough but the real value of the book for one who would wish to understand the culture in which baseball and football and tennis and golf rose to public favor must set all these against a backdrop of the sport of kings, and the No. 1 sport of Young America. Dizikes is an an avuncular and admirable guide.