NTWA | National Turf Writers Association

NTWA HONOREES

Joe Palmer Award - For Meritorious Service to Racing

Remembering Joe Palmer
by Red Smith

Joe Palmer took, publicly, no serious view of the world he loved. Flinching under the resounding titles of “Racing Editor of the New York Herald Tribune” and Columbia Broadcasting System’s “Turf Analyst,” he insisted he was “no noted lover of the horse, but of a way of life of which the horse was once, and in a few favored places still is, a symbol—a way of charm and grace and ease and leisure. Grace and charm should perhaps not be tampered with at this late date, but at whatever risk of boasting, I am as good at ease and leisure as any man alive.”

This was a lie, of course. (Joe was a prodigious liar where truth was not important.) No man who wrote had more grace and charm; few men had less ease and leisure, for he wrote all the time.

And Joe was too prolific—infuriatingly so to those who worked with him in the press boxes and bled at chores which he tossed off without apparent effort.

At any rate, This Was Racing as Joe Palmer saw it: Horses like Man o’ War, “as near to a living flame as horses ever get…” Places like Saratoga, which wears tradition lightly “because it is a graceful, irresponsible, gay tradition, and its ghosts are pleasant ghosts…” People like Lying’ Fitz, whose wooden-legged stable cat could “catch mice with one hand and blackjack’ em with the other;” and like the minister’s son who grew up in a church painted in the racing colors of its irreverent benefactor—so “what chance did a boy have?”

To him racing was fun. Or, rather the life which racing made possible and which revolved around racing, was fun. He looked for fun always, even when he was at the typewriter sketching the outline for a chapter of a book on racing.

It seems hardly necessary to observe that, unlike most other writers in his field, Joe Palmer offered no system for beating the races nor any banal suggestion that “all men are equal on the Turf or under it.” A realist, he recognized the one as nonexistent; a man of discriminating tastes, he rejected the other as undesirable.

Nor did he ever refer to a Sport of Kings. A sport of ladies and gentlemen with cheerful brigands and small, skillful boys was good enough for him.