A Race to Remember

When I was a kid, my parents used to take me to the Preakness Stakes in Baltimore every year. Buckpasser was my favorite horse. The Buck”  did not win a Triple Crown race  – he did not run in any of those races because of an injury – but he was named Horse of the Year several times in his career. And he became one of the most successful sires in racing. I even went to Kentucky one year after a conference in Cincinnati to see where he and a number of other champions, including Secretariat, are buried.

Watching Secretariat run in the Triple Crown is one of my oh-my-goodness memories of horseracing (along with being at the rail at the Belmont Stakes when Seattle Slew won the Triple Crown), especially his mind-boggling win in the Belmont States. The other happened a few weeks ago in a marvelous stretch run in the Preakness by a horse named Journalism.

This is a long way around for me to talk about an op-ed in the Friday, June 6, 2025, edition of the New York Times – an article by Mark Robichaux entitled, “The Racehorse Who Waited.” Unlike Secretariat’s win in the Belmont, Journalism came from behind, boxed in for part of the race and jostled before breaking free to win the race.

It’s a wonderful essay about the state of our society as always rushing, always running, looking for ways to be faster and quicker. Not so with Journalism at the Preakness. He was all about patience. And that’s not bad. As Robichaux writes, “Some people peak early; we all remember the kids who seemed to have it all figured out at 17. But time has a way of revealing what matters. Some of us come from behind.”

That resonated with me in terms of applying to college. Not everyone gets into his or her first choice – there are just too many applicants for that to happen – and I firmly believe that students’ futures are not set in stone by where they go to college. Warren Buffet and Michael Dell can certainly talk to you about that!

As in the final words of the essay: “… winning doesn’t always mean being fastest to first. The deeper reward comes from staying in the race long enough to become who you were meant to be.”

No matter where you go to college, you can be successful – and happy – just by staying in the race.