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 Throughout history, it's always been about shoes. Some shoes bring nothing but bad luck, like this one, which Maury Allen left outside his hotel room door to be shined, but came back in this rather menacing condition. |
Even with horses, it's always about the shoes
of TheColumnists.com
Big Brown has become
the Imelda Marcos of horse racing. Now it is all about the shoes.
The latest theory about the thoroughbred after his wins in the
Kentucky Derby and the Preakness and his last place finish at
Belmont as he tried to become the first Triple Crown winner in
30 years is about the shoes.
Owner Michael Iavarone has received a photograph showing Big
Brown running with a dislodged shoe on his right hind hoof.
That explains it all. Forget all the other theories about steroid
withdrawal, extreme heat on that Belmont day (like the other
horses ran with AC in their reins), a bad ride by the jockey,
a push coming out of the gate or a mushy track.
The only one who knows is Big Brown and he ain’t talking.
Mr. Ed won’t translate, either.
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to the exclusive shoe salon in Kentucky for horses expected to be future Triple Crown contenders. |
I buy the shoe tale. Colleague Jerry Nachman will explain in his book about Ed Sullivan why the former New York Daily News columnist always described his television program as a really big show which always sounded like “A really big shoe.”
It is always about the shoes.
It was about the shoes for Cinderella and for Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz. It was about the shoes for Paul Revere’s horse. It was about the shoes or the lack thereof for Shoeless Joe Jackson and Casey Stengel when he ran his inside the park home run home in the 1923 World Series.
It was about the shoes, mostly, and the gloves and the hat (“If it does not fit you must acquit,” said Johnny Cochran) at O. J. Simpson’s trial for murdering his wife.
It is always about the shoes.
Actress Shelley Winters, once a roommate of another young actress named Marilyn Monroe, described in her autobiography how she seduced men in her younger, slimmer days.
“I would put on my (sleep with me) shoes,” she said in print, not using the expression sleep-with-me. It usually worked as she bedded down such Hollywood luminaries as Wiliam Holden, Burt Lancaster and Marlon Brando after the glitzy high-heeled shoes were thrown off. It earned her four husbands and one of the longest, most productive careers in Hollywood history.
Winters also gained much fame from a television appearance on an early "Tonight" show with Johnny Carson when she poured a glass of water over the head of a needling fellow-actor, Laurence Harvey, star of "The Manchurian Candidate."I don’t recall if she was wearing the shoes. Harvey was dead a few years later at the age of 45. Winters made it to 85.
It was all about the shoes.
Some 50 years ago I wrote a biography of a survivor of the infamous Bataan Death March in the Philippines called, “Reprieve From Hell.” Sergeant Samuel B. Moody told his tale of those horrors after he had been a witness at the Japanese war crimes trials in Tokyo which condemned World War II leader Hideki Tojo to death. Tojo was executed in 1948.
“After we surrendered we were rounded up and put in a marching file,” Moody recalled. “You know what one of the first things the Japanese did? They stole our Army boots. They gave us little slippers or had us march in bare feet.”
The survivors marched without shoes, food or water for seven days over 90 miles. More than 75,000 American and Filipino troops, who had battled the huge odds against the Japanese on Corregidor island and Bataan Peninsula, started the March in April of 1942. Less than 65,000 arrived at the internment camps.
Of the 12,000 Americans in the march less than 1,000 still survive. The final meeting of their organization called The Survivors of Bataan and Corregidor was held earlier this year. Samuel Moody passed away in 2003 at the age of 80.
He always said it was about the shoes.
One of the most touching, emotional, dramatic parts of the famed Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C. is the side room filled with hundreds upon hundreds of shoes, of all sizes, all colors, all shapes, all styles. These are shoes that were taken from Holocaust victims, so many of them children, before they were executed in the gas chambers and destroyed in the crematoriums.
It is all about the shoes.
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of the Maxwell Smart Shoe Phone, which now can receive streaming video, text messages, MP3 downloads and pick up hidden camera surveillance of Agent 99 in her shower. |
When I served in the Army in Japan just 55 years ago, I visited often at the home of new Japanese friends. The first thing I learned was to remove my shoes before entering. I still do that in my own home.
How did Professor Henry Higgins in "My Fair Lady" know that he finally had it made with Eliza Doolittle? He took off his shoes and she brought him his slippers.
When I became a sportswriter I was told by the older writers I could leave my shoes outside my compartment. I would awake to shined shoes the next morning.
Sometimes in the hotels we stayed in with the teams I was told to leave my shoes outside my room door. That worked well on my first few trips when I awakened to shined shoes.
One time I awakened to only one shoe outside my door. It wasn’t shined. It was filled with gum and gook.
It was always about the shoes.
So I’m going to buy the new Big Brown theory. The shoes did him in. Better shoes and a Triple Crown. It is always about the shoes.
©2008 by Maury Allen. The Maury Allen caricature is ©2001 by Jim Hummel. The cartoons are from IMSI's Master Clips Collection, 1895 Francisco Blvd. E., San Rafael, CA, 94901-5506, USA. This column first posted June 30, 2008.
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