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How it happened
When he began riding races in the '60s, Rouse said fences were living hedges or clipped brush. He didn’t so much pine for the old days, he said in a 2016 interview, as much as recognize a looming issue.
“There's nothing like change,” he said. “You know it won't stay the same. When I saw where (the sport was) headed, I knew something had to change.”
In winter of 1973, Rouse met Lord Harrington, master of Ireland’s Limerick Hunt. Amiable conversation quickly revealed a shared passion for steeplechasing – Harrington hosted Limerick’s spring point-to-point, and as Fairfax joint-master, Rouse was in charge of his club’s fall meet. Rouse heard that Harrington had developed a synthetic steeplechase fence because of the difficulty obtaining enough natural birch in Ireland to contruct jumps.
As in America, it was an expensive, relentless, labor-intensive nightmare.
Rouse and NSHA executive secretary Jack Cooper went to the Limerick races to see how the course rode. They liked what they saw, and Rouse – who was a builder, operating a busy construction firm outside Washington, had the resources to modify and tweak it to better suit American racing. They arranged to have several sections of fence to be flown to the U.S. and set to work to make it an original.
“Mr. Rouse had them sitting in his front field, I remember it,” said Kevin Palmer, an amateur jump rider who rode in the very first race over the new jumps, later becoming Fairfax huntsman. Palmer still trains for Rouse’s estate. “He had a lot of ideas. He tried wheels (on the rolls and metal frames) because he was worried about how to move them. That didn’t work. “He was always trying to improve on the design.”
By mid-summer Rouse was at last pleased with the prototype, and he “took the bit in his teeth,” according to the 1973 NSHA yearbook. He had a set of jumps made for his Fairfax fall meet.
Rouse was certain the jumps would standardize racing across the circuit, solving a lot of problems for NSHA and race meet hosts. Association officials inspected the course and gave a thumbs-up for three hurdle races.
There was just one more group to convince, and Rouse knew they’d be the hardest sell of all.
Jockeys.
The big day
The 1973 Fairfax Races were run at “the old Bowman property,” today part of densely developed Reston, a meticulously planned “new urbanism” community started in the late 1960s. The tract was part of an original land grant to England’s Thomas, Lord Fairfax before the Revolutionary War.
Fairfax Hunt was founded by the Bowman distillery family on their 6,000-acre Sunset Hills farm in 1928, in 1933 recognized by the Master of Foxhounds Association. The club’s racecourse was a sweeping oval encircling farm fields, Kevin Palmer recalled, high land overlooking a Difficult Run feeder creek.
The track is long gone, of course, leveled under homes and Reston’s commercial development; only the road names give up its heritage – Steeplechase Drive, Paddock Lane, Stirrup Road, Whip Road, Tack Lane, Canter Lane. Two that nod to the sport’s deeper roots – Birch Place and Cedar Road.
“It was a nice track,” said Palmer, a 10-pound bug at the time, a kid playing with the big boys at that Sept. 22, 1973 Fairfax Races meet. “It was left-handed, pretty level and wide. There was a little hill – down then up – on the backside.”
Rouse was excited and nervous, he said in a 2016 interview, for the fence reveal. “I knew the horsemen would balk at first, but I knew we needed it, and I knew it would work.”
“Balk” was putting it lightly, said Rouse’s widow, Michelle, recalling conversations with Randy as he chuckled at the collective jockey reaction.
“There was complete uproar” at the racecourse that day, Michelle said, saying Randy was ever-diplomatic addressing riders’ concerns. “You know how he was, so smart, so smooth. He told everybody to calm down, ride the first race and see how it went.”
Jerry Fishback remembers. The steeplechase Hall of Famer, five-time leading rider and third-leading jump rider in American history recalls the one win that day at Fairfax that, in essence, pushed him over the 300 mark to 301 lifetime wins.
The ground was firm that day, Fishback said, and the day warm.
“I was already riding for (Jonathan) Sheppard, so I didn’t always go down to the Virginia meets,” Fishback said. “But I’d taken some mounts, including one for J. Arthur Reynolds in the second. It was a maiden over hurdles, over those new jumps.”
Fishback partnered Reynolds’ homebred Gun Gold, a 4-year-old who’d broken his point-to-point maiden that spring under Ted Gregory. It was Fishback’s first time on the horse.
When reminded of the initial protests from the jockey colony, Fishback said he doesn’t recall. “What I do know is that we eventually just went out and rode like it was completely normal.”
Fishback and Skip Brittle on Too Far Gone were stirrup to stirrup headed to the first. Too Far Gone reached it a neck in front, getting the asterisk in history as the first horse to reach the first national fence in the first race.
After that, it was all Gun Gold.
“They rode well,” Fishback said. “The old stuffed cedar jumps could be softer and smaller, but sometimes they were bigger and stiffer. That was the beauty of this new jump – it standardized steeplechasing.”
Fishback and Gun Gold were 2 ½ in front at the wire, the win one of Fishback’s 24-win championship season that year. In all, 19 horses jumped 36 fences in three races that day, with no fallers, no pull-ups. The other two hurdle races were won by Kip Elser and Joe Aitcheson.
“Everybody was so scared of them that morning,” Palmer said. “But, I mean, hell, it was just a jump. It was fine.”
So encouraging was the result, New Jersey’s Far Hills races a month later also used the jumps, and in 1974, Peter Winants wrote in his “Steeplechasing: A Complete History,” “most hunt meets had switched over. Delaware Park was the first track to use that fence the next summer.
“Traditionalists initially … had difficulty accepting the national fence,” Winants wrote. “But steeplechasing would not have survived without the national fence. It’s far and away the most important development of the era. The sport is deeply indebted to the foresight and perseverance of Rouse and Cooper.”
“I think Mr. Rouse was ahead of his time,” Fishback echoed. “He deserves all the accolades.
“It was an excellent idea, a real vision. I think Mr. Rouse’s foresight was amazing thinking we’re talking about this almost 50 years later, the exact fence we’re still using today.”
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