June 08, 2008
By: Jim
Category: Uncategorized
When I was taking flying lessons, my instructor had two sayings that he loved to repeat. The first was, “There are old pilots, and there are bold pilots. But there are no old, bold pilots.” I suspected he liked this saying because he, himself, was an old pilot. He had been flying since the 40’s.
His second saying I found to be much more profound. “Any landing you walk away from is a good landing,” he’d say. “A landing you walk away from and the plane can fly again is a GREAT landing.”
I am desperately disappointed that Big Brown did not win the Belmont and therefore the Triple Crown. However, any race where the horses walk back to the barns with their health is a good race. A race where a Triple Crown winner walks back to the barn is a GREAT race.
There is another saying, the author of which is unknown, that I like to repeat now and again. “A bad day at the races is better than a good day at work.”
We have good days at the track and we have bad days at the track. Sometimes we have horribly tragic heartbreaking days at the track. Thank God, though, that we have the track. And someday, maybe next year, maybe a long way off, we will have a GREAT day at the track.