Bold Ruler: Thoroughbred Legends

Thoroughbred Legends #24

by Edward L. Bowen

A champion racehorse, Bold Ruler thrilled fans with his speed and courage. But as a sire of runners, Bold Ruler truly reigned. He was America's leading sire a record eight years, with his best offspring being the immortal Secretariat.

Genres: Horses, Horse Racing, History

176 pages, Hardcover

First published November 1, 2005

About the author

Edward L. Bowen was an American Thoroughbred horse racing historian and author, and the president of the Grayson-Jockey Club Research Foundation, an institution involved in funding equine research.

Reviews

[Wendy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Like all of the Thoroughbred Legends series, this is little more than a summary of the horse's life--better and more detailed than a Wikipedia article, but constrained by space/length limitations. Even so, this book does a slightly better job of helping you know the horse and his connections personally, through many, many quotes from interviewing the children and grandchildren of the owner, Mrs. Henry Carnegie (Gladys) Phipps, and the trainer, 'Sunny Jim' Fitzsimmons. That was nice to find in this installment--a personal touch.

Another thing I liked about it was the absence of bashing the horses Bold Ruler ran against. The Thoroughbred Legends series doesn't generally do that anyway, but occasionally you'll find a dry comment here and there about the quality of an opposing horse. Those are absent here, as each horse's ability and class is accurately assessed and non-judgmental, and Bold Ruler's best opponents--Dedicate, Round Table, Gallant Man, the tragic Gen. Duke, Clem--are each accorded the respect due to them. As a person who loves all of the horses I just named (even though they were way before my time), I didn't want to take sides at all, so I appreciated the author's respect for them.

I think this is one of the better installments in the series, and a good book all on its own. Highly recommend.

[Mom · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is very statistical which can be very confusing at times but it is interesting to read how all the great racehorses are related. This is a book that you should have plenty of time to read so you can absorb all the information.

[Jay French · Rating 4 out of 5]

After having read about half of the Thoroughbred Legends series, I decided I’d go right to the end and read the last book in the series. I wanted to see if I could notice a trailing off of the quality of writing. I did not find this. Instead, I found one of the more interestingly written volumes in the series. Part of the reason for this is the author, Edward Bowan, who has written some of the other volumes in the series that I thought were well done. Part is because of the subject, Bold Ruler, a horse with a somewhat spotty record at racing but a golden record at stud. This is quite different than most of the other subjects in this series, and allowed the author to tell the story in a different way. The typical way these stories are told are to cover in order the breeders, owners, horse lineage, trainers, racing record, and stud record. This one adjusted this a bit, covering more of the history of the owners/breeders than most. Much of this tilt might well be because the owners/breeders were of the thoroughbred “royalty”, old money owners with a long and well documented history. There was a lot of story here. The racing story was also interesting in that, unlike many of the other horses in the series, Bold Ruler had some difficulties along the way and was inconsistent. That helped make the story more interesting. The final chapters, on the results of the many, many breedings Bold Ruler took part in, began to read like those parts of the Bible where you see a long line of “begats”. You read about dozens of off-spring in this last chapter, and it runs together. Overall, this was one of the better books in the series.