We went to see the film Secretariat yesterday. It was a fairly standard sports story, full of the usual sports story pleasures–a plucky lead character, colorful supporting characters, beautiful pictures of competition. Diane Lane and James Cromwell had some swell scenes involving business dealings. The big let down for me came when they showed Secretariat winning the Belmont Stakes. For some bizarre reason, director Randall Wallace chose to play “Oh Happy Day,” the joyful, uplifting soul spiritual by the Edwin Hawkins Singers, over Secretariat’s triumphant sprint to the finish line. It’s a great song, but it totally diminished the moment in the film, at least in the mind of someone who remembers watching the race on television. Never before or since have I heard a crowd cheer so unreservedly as the crowd at Belmont did that day. They knew they were seeing something that hadn’t been done in 25 years, that five times in the previous decade horses had won the first two legs only to falter in the Belmont, and that they were witnessing Secretariat seize a place in history with an almost mythic display of power. The ever-increasing crescendo of noise was the perfect accompaniment to Secretariat’s unparalleled accomplishment, far better than any song, and I’m sorry Randall Wallace didn’t have the wit to realize it.
