“TRUE GRIT” A character trait closely related to courage is summed up by the old fashioned phrase “true grit”. Also called “heart”, it refers to a mental and spiritual toughness that somehow propels its possessor through all manner of hardships and disappointments. True grit defies logic and keeps going when logic would declare, “Whoa, stop, enough already!” Most really great competitors have it, and it’s an especially key ingredient in the horse world, because there’s almost always something going wrong! The horse’s big and powerful appearance conceals the sad reality that much about him is fragile. It’s those tiny legs and little hooves supporting that thousand-pound body that so often lets him down. And as the horses we ride go lame, our dreams come crashing down with them. If you don’t have what it takes to clamber out of the ashes of your burned-out dreams, time and again, you’d better take up golf. Mary Alice Brown, a friend of fifty years, was staying in a bed-and-breakfast while in England to watch the Badminton Three-Day Event. When Mary Alice told her landlady the purpose of her visit, the elderly woman replied, “Osses! I know all about ‘osses! Me ‘usband ‘ad ‘osses! ‘Osses is always lame. And when they hain’t lame, they cough”! And they do one or the other, usually, about two days before the biggest day of your life. That happened to me just the day before the vet check at the Montreal Olympics in 1976. We had our last gallop on Tuesday morning, and when I told Victor Dakin out of his stall that same afternoon, he was lame on his left foreleg. Mildly lame, from who knows what, and sound three days later-but we didn’t get to ride on the team that won the Olympic gold. If you can’t bounce back from that kind of disappointment, you don’t have what it takes. The same can be said of coming back from personal injuries. If you ride enough horses, over enough years, it’s not a question of whether you are going to get injured, but when, and how badly. I’ve had seven broken ribs, a separated shoulder, a collapsed lung, two broken hips (one of which required a partial replacement), a fractured eye socket, and God knows how many bumps and bruises. Lots of riders have been hurt much more permanently than I have, and, of course, sometimes you die. These are the realities of horse sports, and not only in racing and eventing-the fast-paced sports filled with violent action. Some of the worst injuries happen in the most apparently innocuous circumstances, while mounting or dismounting, or while happily gazing in to the middle distance on a Sunday trail ride in June: A bird darts up, your horse does a 180-degree spin, and you slam into the gravel road. Yes, you can wear a helmet, and be reasonably smart, but horses are big, quick, and unpredictable. Can you bounce back from failure, disappointment, injury, and loss? That’s the sort of tough resilience that can be called “true grit”, and in horse sports, you have to have it. - Denny Emerson
Posted on: Wed, 01 Oct 2014 05:28:57 +0000