Jack Kerouac's fantasy horse-racing circuit · 10.07.09

“No way!” I hear you say. “Yes, way!” I respond. The New York Public Library has published Kerouac at Bat: Fantasy Sports and the King of the Beats. The book, by NYPL’s Isaac Gewirtz, Curator of the Library’s Berg Collection of English and American Literature, features more than fifty reproductions of Jack Kerouac’s horse-racing and baseball “publications”. The book, the exhibition that inspired it, and related commentary concentrate, perhaps not surprisingly, on Kerouac’s fantasy baseball league, but there’s also much love for the racing side.

Kerouac invented his own games to simulate baseball and racing results, obsessively tracked the resulting statistics, wrote articles for imaginary sporting publications, and even designed a series of baseball trading cards. His racing game used marbles and ball bearings rolled down a tilted Parcheesi board; the “starting gate” was made of toothpicks. The ball bearing, being heavier, rolled faster, so it came to represent the equine hero Repulsion. Newsletters entitled “Turf Authority” and “Stake Special” documented Repulsion’s career and that of his rival, Gunwale, and often included actual photographs of race horses clipped from newspapers.

I’m sure many racing fans have fantasized about imaginary horses (I know I have), but I don’t think anybody ever went into such detail, and wrote everything down so obsessively, as Kerouac did.

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