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ABOVE THE clubhouse entrance to Pimlico Race Course, a huge wall sculpture, serving as a logo for the track, shows three mounted jockeys. But they're in silhouette, so the tens of thousands of...

The jockey was Austin Curtis -- a slave, except in his own mind. Curtis was helping Willie Jones turn his Roanoke stable into the winningest, most profitable racing power in the American colonies. As a modern quarter-racing authority, poring over ancient records, would put it, \"Willie Jones was the fortunate owner of Austin Curtis, the best quarter horse jockey, trainer and groom in the country.\" As that statement indicates, those first American jockeys did much more than ride. They were often grooms as well, responsible for the feeding, stabling and exercising of one or more horses. As was the case with Curtis, they sometimes rose to the exalted level of trainer, supervising the conditions of the horses, directing other jockeys, devising racing strategies, assisting in the purchase of horses -- in other words, co-managing the business with the stable owner. Up to and beyond the Civil War, countless African American trainers managed, or helped manage, racing stables, which were the country's earlier major sports organizations. As one early authority noted, \"Training in the South was for the most part in colored hands.\" A few of the white stable owners were themselves great trainers, however, and a number of them hired white professional trainers. Their relationship may have been imbalanced -- to put it mildly -- but Willie Jones, in his early thirties, and Austin Curtis, in his early teens, were the first famous manager-athlete combination in America. However, when Colonel Delony {a planter from Mecklenburg County, Va.} bumped into Jones . . . in about 1773, he reminded him that their sport was fast going out of style. The pioneers were taking quarter racing deeper in to the woods (Kentucky would get its first quarter-mile strip in 1780) as proper oval courses opened outside one American town after another. So the colonel suggested that they make this final fling for a stake so big that neither of them would ever forget it. For anybody but Jones and Curtis, that might have been intimidating, since the Race Horse Region was prime gambling as well as prime tobacco country. Austin Curtis was getting ready to ride Paoli, a gelding of \"uncommon beauty\" but \"apparently light for a quarter horse, his muscles finely developed but not very heavy.\" He was a fine horse, but their rival, Colonel Delony, had pulled one of the oldest scams in sports: he had entered a borrowed nag, in this case an undefeated champion known as the Big Filly, \"much heavier in all her parts; evidently possessing great strength\" -- which would be a considerable advantage since each horse was required to carry 160 pounds. Curtis and the other jockey, a Delony slave named Ned, probably each weighed under 100 pounds, so extra weight would have been added to make 160: clearly, the going would be a lot easier for the Big Filly. Furious, Jones accused the horse's owner, Colonel Jeptha Atherton, of breaking his earlier word that he wouldn't loan the filly to Delony. But it was too late: Curtis and Ned were at the poles on either side of the starting line, two black athletes at the center of the biggest showdown in 18th-century American sports. All thoughts of hemp and tobacco prices, of the next day's work, of the long trip back home, of the revolutionary stirrings up north . . . were put aside as thousands of American stretched both sides of the quarter mile, several deep.

The jockey was Austin Curtis--a slave, except in his own mind. Curtis was helping Willie Jones turn his Roanoke stable into the winningest, most profitable racing power in the American colonies. As a modem quarter-racing authority, poring over ancient records, would put it. \"Willie Jones was the fortunate...

at my door, \"Just says, `No!' and nothing more.\" Ah, distinctly I remember 'twas the month before Pearl Harbor, And each separate vying Member cast his boast upon the floor. Eagerly cried my pal Simpson: \"Vainly would they call us wimps then! I'd make Donaldson turn crimson! Win one for the Gipper, George!\" For my rare and radiant angel, the Gipper, Duke, you're dead, for Here with mien of Robert Redford, perched right here's the Perfect Two, Perched upon my bust of Gipper. Breakfast clubber, say adieu. So? You're qualified? He's cute! Then this ivory bird beguiling my Advanceman into smiling By its Hollywood decorum and the vote count it could score, \"With thy crest so clean and clipped,\" he said, \"thou, in days of yore, he . . . O, never mind, it's been covered. But my quayle there, biting harder, 'top that bust, remained on Guard-er, Lowercase-then moved the hunt to Huntington, where they got gored. Little further piped our piper; crouching, he drew fewer snipers. Thus my eagleton was diapered. 'Stead of quayle droppings galore, From yon Baja to sweet Mahwah, 'twas Dukakis

Once upon a midnight dreary, my brain wandered, bleak and bleary, Over many a vain vicarious veep with one foot in the door. If I nodded...What's that tapping? Hey, it's New York's center snapping--Kemp has got it. Time! O'erlapping quarterbacking? Who's he for?

PARIS (HTNS)--While the Russians and Americans loss men into orbit and machines onto the moon. France stands out among other countries tempted by the adventure of outer space.