By Chris McGrath
TDN is proud to partner with the Keeneland Library and the Nunn Center for Oral History at the University of Kentucky Libraries in a very special new collaboration: the Keeneland 'Life's Work' Oral History Project, a series of filmed interviews by TDN columnist Chris McGrath with significant figures in the Thoroughbred industry. The third of these, with Ted Bassett of Keeneland, appears here.
Anyone privileged to know this gentleman will very soon know where I'm going with this.
The Eclipse Awards, 1984. He has been invited to announce the winner of a Horse of the Year duel between Slew o' Gold and the venerable gelding John Henry, who has just turned 10. He finds that the envelope is stuck fast, and spends a few awkward seconds trying to tear it open. As the tension rises, he finally produces the card. And he doesn't even announce the horse's name. He simply says: “Like old wine…” and everyone is on their feet, applauding the horse who just gets better every year.
Ron McAnally, the trainer of John Henry and a good friend, bounds up there and reproaches him: “For goodness sake, I nearly had a heart attack waiting for you to open that thing.”
But just as there was no need to name John Henry that day, 35 years ago, nor can anyone really need to be told which pillar of the American Turf, in meanwhile advancing to the age of 98, has himself only been fortified, and never eroded, by the passing of the years–both in the vigour of his character, and the esteem of an industry.
It barely seems a figure of speech, in fact, to describe James E. Bassett III as a pillar of the American Turf. His whole bearing remains so upright that it condenses not only the indelible stamp of his wartime service, with the U.S. Marines, but also the authority and integrity he seamlessly transferred to civilian life.
And that's why the scope of his reflections falls far beyond the customary remit of this series. Yes, there were always horses lurking in the background. His mother's grandfather was a Confederate general who bred trotters when he returned to Kentucky after the Civil War–with a daughter of the governor of Mississippi which, as Bassett says wryly, “did not impede his progress.” And Bassett's own father, having lost a banking job after the Crash, found work helping to run Jock Whitney's Bluegrass farms; ending up, in fact, on the original board of directors at Keeneland. But that was never any kind of clue to Bassett's eventual destiny, which would summon him to the world of Thoroughbreds only by the most circuitous of paths.
“My career has been rather nomadic,” Bassett muses. “I've been very fortunate that people have tolerated me, but I was beneficiary of a strange series of coincidences and happenstances. I would be among the list of missing persons if the Kentucky State Police, Keeneland and the Breeders' Cup hadn't all had some innate problem.”
To read the rest of this story in the TDN Look, click here. To hear it as a podcast, click here.
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