Book description
His winning percentage was well above Jordan's shooting average or
Woods's domination of golf tournaments. And he sold products and drew
spectators like no one had ever done. He was hands-down the most
famous athlete in America's most popular spectator sport, and exactly
one hundred years ago you would have been hard pressed to find anybody
in the country who didn't know his name. He was Dan Patch, and he was
a racehorse.
At the turn of the last century, harness racing
drew larger crowds and offered bigger paychecks than any other sport.
Its stars were household names, and Dan Patch was both the most
celebrated and the richest. As successful as he was on the track, Dan
Patch was also America's first marketing machine”: the horse who
could sell cigars, washing machines, stoves, automobiles, and animal
feed, just by the presence of his name and photograph. The Best There
Ever Was examines the evolution of sports marketing through the lives
of Dan Patch and the three men who owned him: an Indiana breeder, Dan
Messner; M. E. Sturgis, who sold the horse for ,000 (a fortune in
those days) and spent the rest of his life trying to buy him back; and
Marion W. Savage of Minneapolis, whose entrepreneurial skills presaged
today's sports marketing geniuses.
Any athlete who can draw a 90,000-person crowd, offer up world
records, and then sell a coal stove with his name on it may well be
the best by anybody's standards. A fun and fascinating read for sports lovers.
