:: Edgeliving: Master Jim and slave marsha ::

:: Sunday, August 03, 2003 ::

The Look of a Champion – The Heart of a Champion

In her recent blog post, “Running,” slave marsha says she wants to be a racehorse but that one could not imagine a human less like a racehorse than her. My interest in horse racing and thoroughbreds goes back a long time. And for many years, I have compared slaves to thoroughbred racehorses.

In the book “Seabiscuit,” that great champion horse is described as follows: “He had a sad little tail, barely long enough to brush his hocks. His stubby legs were a study in unsound construction, with squarish, asymmetrical ‘baseball glove’ knees that didn’t quite straighten out all the way, leaving him in a permanent semi-crouch.” Seabiscuit did not have the tall, sleek, well-muscled tapered lines that most owners and trainers look for when looking for champions. So if it wasn’t his appearance that made the horse into the champion he was, what was it? After Seabiscuit became a winner, one observer said that he was a horse whose quality was “mostly in his heart.” But the trainer, Tom Smith, who turned Seabiscuit into a champion recognized something intangible in the horse the first time he saw him. Seabiscuit was being led to the post along with a field of low-level horses at a minor track when something about him caught Smith’s eye. It wasn’t the horse’s looks. It wasn’t even the way the horse ran, although he won that day. Something in the horse’s eyes and the way he reacted to running and winning spoke to Smith. As the horse was being led away, Smith said, “I’ll see you again.”

There is no telling how many potential winning, if not champion, racehorses are written off because they do not “look” like a quality thoroughbred. They may toil under the hands of inept trainers at small, bullring tracks across the country, never to realize their potential, never to tap their championship hearts. The same is true of people who have slave hearts. Slaves come in all shapes, all sizes, all genders and sexual orientations. They are tall, they are short, they are well muscled – or not, they are young, they are old, they are men, they are women, they are transgendered people. The key is to be able to recognize what is inside, what these people carry in their heart and soul. Potential Owners must train themselves to look beyond the exterior of a person, to find out what is inside, to find out what motivates the person, to find out if the person has a slave heart. With that, we have the foundation to develop champions.

Is slave marsha a racehorse? Yes, and she is she is being developed to run for the roses and beyond.

In leather,
Master Jim

:: 11:25 AM [+] ::
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