Racing Finds a Place in a Week of Considerable Loss

The idea that bad things come in threes probably comes from the tendency to stop counting at some point when those things start happening in a short period of time. Then, after dealing with those three bad things, the count can start all over again.

So much for my swing at social psychology.

There were at least three bad things that happened this past week, in terms of permanent loss, that hit this typist where I live. Willie Mays died. Donald Sutherland died. And so did Toby Sheets, who probably never thought he’d be mentioned in the same breath, but in his own world deserves nothing less.

Willie Mays died June 18. He was 93, which meant for the last 51 years fans of great baseball were not afforded the deliriously giddy pleasure of watching Mays play the game like no one before or since. At 20, he was the youngest Black player to be called up to the majors, in 1951. His first hit for the New York Giants was a home run, off all-time great Warren Spahn. Mays played for the last time in 1973, at age 42, after hitting 660 home runs.

“When Mays walked into the clubhouse, the waters parted,” said Bob Costas.

“He was as great as there was,” said Ted Williams. “If there was a guy born to play baseball, it was Willie Mays.”

“He was maybe the most gifted player ever,” said Reggie Jackson. “I call him the ‘and/or’ on any list of the all-time greatest. Babe Ruth, Hank Aaron, and/or Willie Mays.”

Growing up, there were only two sports that counted, at least for this young fan, and only two guys who stood tall above the rest. In horse racing it was Willie Shoemaker. In baseball it was Willie Mays, and with Mays it did not matter that he played for the Giants, by then in San Francisco. This hardcore Dodgers fan, scoring at home on the living room couch while listening to Vin Scully and Jerry Doggett call the game, would always set aside his hometown prejudice whenever Mays came to bat. If he beat you, well, what could you do? He was Willie Mays.

I learned later of the impact Mays made on the civil rights movement, and how his steady, insistent journey through a formerly segregated sport made a difference in his every stop along the way. When he came to San Francisco in the late 1950s, he had trouble buying a home in a white neighborhood. Now his statue lords over a street corner that carries his name.

Donald Sutherland, with 200 film and TV credits to his name, died June 20 at the age of 88. Sutherland was was an anti-war activist of the 1960s before he became a universally beloved movie star for successive generations. His eclectic array of characters is unmatched by any contemporary actor, from his wisecracking Hawkeye Pierce in M*A*S*H to his bereaving father in “Ordinary People,” on to his more recent turns for modern audiences in “Pride & Prejudice” and “The Hunger Games.” Assemble a room full of movie buffs and you could go once around with favorite Sutherland performances without repeating a title.

Like Mays, Sutherland was generous with his peers, devoted to his craft, and self-effacing to a fault. In accepting his Academy Award for lifetime achievement in 2017, Sutherland confessed to a deep-seated uncertainty of his worthiness for the honor before coming to terms with the moment.

“In that quandary,” he said, “I finally found peace in the words of the great Benjamin Kubelsky, who is also known as Jack Benny, when he said, as I say to you now, ‘I don’t deserve this. But I have arthritis, and I don’t deserve that either.'”

There is no particular horse racing hook to either Mays or Sutherland, although the actor did time on his share of movie mounts in any number of period dramas. For his part, Mays played ball in a baseball era paranoid about any connection with gambling, even the legal kind.

About the same time Mays began lighting up the Bay Area at Candlestick Park, Sutherland was an aspiring young actor in London, far from his Canadian roots. In a 2005 interview for The Guardian, he recalled of the paper:

“I used to read it in the late ’50s, back when it was still the Manchester Guardian. You know there was a guy—I can’t remember his name—on the sports pages and he used to give out two horses’ names every day. And I made so much money off his tips that in the end my bookie refused to take my bets!”

Talented and lucky. What a guy.

From all I have learned about Toby Sheets, from the circle of his racetrack friends and colleagues in mourning, he was talented, lucky, dedicated, generous in spirit, and the kind of man you’d trust with your best horse or your infant child. He had his own stable in the late 1990s, and more recently made his mark running the Belmont Park division of the Steve Asmussen empire, which put him close to some of the best horses of the era.

On June 16, Sheets was found dead on the shore of a Greek island in the Adriatic. He was there on what was presumed to be a holiday, and drowning was found to be the cause. The news rippled across the sport in waves of confusion and sadness, for at 55 Sheets was a long way from what should have been the whole story.

Assistant trainers are usually seen and not often heard. Without them, however, the game would grind to a halt. There is no use making assumptions of what Sheets would be doing next, or why he was on that beach at that fateful time. It is enough to know he left friends and family whose lives were better when he was alive. And by the end of the week, Willie Mays and Donald Sutherland were gone as well.