Big Brown, No Triple Crown

Not all Triple Crown winners get postage stamps, but the legendary Secretariat did.

Secretariat won the Derby, the Preakness and the Belmont Stakes in 1973, but, like everyone else, he didn't get his commemorative stamp until after his death. (If Secretariat had gotten his first class stamp in 1973, it would have been an 8-cent stamp. Stamps cost 29 cents between 1991 and 1994.)

Secretariat was a more legendary horse than his TC successors, Seattle Slew and Affirmed. Or so it seemed to me, hanging around with a best friend who was a horse nut.

Dee Dee plastered posters of Secretariat all over her bedroom. She also had a collection of plastic horses that sat on a sacred shelf. We lived across the street from the Laurel Race Track in Maryland and sometimes you could hear the track announcers from our apartment building.

By 1978 when Affirmed won, the Triple Crown may have lost some cachet. After all, the Triple Crown saw three winners in five years. But only eight other horses took the Triple Crown since the first winner in 1919.

Odds were a drought was ahead.

Thirty years later, Big Brown seemed destined to take the Crown. The media positioned it as a foregone conclusion. Yet, something was awry and Big Brown came in last. The drought continues.