TDN Weekend December 2016 Issue 9
Issue link: https://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/1066556
H e remembers sitting alone outside the little house, swinging to and fro, gaz- ing over the 100 leased acres that had become his sanctuary. Late on the first warm afternoon of the year. And thinking of his late father, and everything that had happened since his sudden death the previous September. The high fives, the backslapping at the November Sale. "Hey Arthur, how you doing man?" Angling for seasons to Round Ta- ble or Sir Ivor or Nijinsky. He remembered Benjamin Franklin: "Now I have a sheep and a cow, everybody bids me good morrow." Then returning in January, after every- one knew what had happened before Christmas; knew how the executors of Bull Hancock's estate, after a meeting with the family and their advisers, had ended up appointing the younger son, Seth, to run the storied Claiborne Farm instead. There was snow at Keeneland, a bitter wind. But nothing like as cold as the people he had known all his young life, who now walked unseeing past the pariah. As the seat swung at Stone Farm, his thoughts drifted among the birdsong and hum of insects. Arthur Hancock III tried to imagine how his world might look, at 75; tried to imagine what he might achieve, over nearly half a century, to restore his dignity. And the words of the Ricky Nelson song came into his head: "It's all right now, I learned my lesson well. You see, you can't please everyone, so you got to please yourself." And another line, in the same song, "If memories were all I sang, I'd rath- er drive a truck." All these years later, the moment stays with him. "Hell, I'll breed some horses, maybe race some," he re- solved. "And if it doesn't work out, I'll take that guitar and drive a truck. And just live my life, whatever time I've got." What would be best of all, though, would be to get to 75 and finally have a horse good enough to win the Kentucky Derby—the one race his father never managed to nail.