Charlie Hustle

“Charlie Hustle”                                                                                                                             

 by Tom Gumbrecht                    Originally published in Horse Directory..

Pete Rose, the original "Charlie Hustle"

DannyBoy takes over the title...

Pete Rose was, and is, of course, a legendary baseball player who spent most of his Major League career at first base for the Cincinnati Reds. He seemed to always give 150%, and his nickname, "Charlie Hustle", could only begin to suggest the immense dedication, intensity, motivation, pure skill, talent and athleticism that makes his name synonymous with all of those character traits. On the field, I can't think of a teammate you'd rather have.

Off the field, of course, was a different story. He seemed unable, perhaps unwilling, to stay out of trouble. From all outward appearances a brash, cocky, self-absorbed man, his questionable choices caused the World Series MVP and Gold Glove winner to be deemed permanently ineligible to participate in his sport. Off the field, he may have been a guy who would have been difficult to be friends with. The self-destructive type. But no matter how much shame he brought upon himself and his sport, I include myself in a sizable group, perhaps even a majority, that still reveres his name as the ultimate go-getter, and his talent and motivation as something to be awed.

Recently, I've been back riding my young eventing horse, DannyBoy, after the usual winter layoff due to frozen footing and other cold-weather obstacles. It takes me a few weeks to shake the cobwebs off of him at this time every year, to get his body and mind back on track to compete in the horse trials.

DannyBoy is a natural athlete. He has saved my hide in so many circumstances I've

Look where you're going, Danny, not always at the camera..

lost count. He gives and gives and gives until he just can't give anymore. In a word: exuberant. He loves to work, loves his job. I'm convinced he would walk through fire for me, for us, for the team...he is just so willing and giving that sometimes I get chills at the responsibility of managing such devotion. That is, in the arena...

Out of the arena, he's our little backyard farm's bad boy. He's into everything. Snatching blankets off the other horses backs, running around the paddock with the sweater you foolishly left on tack trunk streaming out of his teeth..until he tramples it...it's all in a day's work. Removing a bungee-corded fire extinguisher from the wall and hurling it into the paddock, nipping at the jacket of an unsuspecting visitor...biting at the flank of a pasturemate...all just a sampling of his off-field persona. With, of course, the requisite "who, me?" look after he's been discovered. He's a bull in a china shop. A goofball. The vet calls him a "goon".
 

In show season, his little antics lessen as his mind is occupied with other things, and when he thinks up some mischief, he might be just tired enough so as to not carry it out. His wonderful demeanor under saddle more than makes up for his antics, which at once seem almost endearing.

In winter time, however, it seems like we get all the bad with none of the good. His youthful exuberance and his devilish ways of expressing it can grow tiring. Just when I think we can't take another day of it, one morning we hear the song of a single bird, then a few more, then the ring starts thawing, the blankets come off and we're back to doing the things that made me love him in the first place.

Well, he's not really Pete Rose. We're not the Cincinnati Reds, and this isn't the World Series. A better analogy perhaps would be of the little league star who gives his all for the team, and when not on the field drives his parents crazy with blowing up stuff, prank phone calls, schoolyard scrapes and detention.

Charlie Hustle. Everybody knows one. I've got one. An overgrown kid who's impossible to stay mad at.  Truth be told, I love him even when he is being a goon.

The deal: I put up with him, he makes me look good..

Perhaps more....

A Knowledge of Horsemanship?

A Knowledge of Horsemanship ?       

Originally published in Horse Directory,                                                             April 2013

By Tom Gumbrecht

Knowledge is Everything!

No, it isn’t.  Let’s start out with that.

"Circus"- The first horse the author sat.

For a short time, after beginning to learn how to ride at age 45, I believed that I would take a few lessons, maybe a half-dozen or so, and then go off and be a rider. It was such an accident of fate that put me in the saddle that I had no idea how much was involved in becoming what I considered to be a “good rider”. I didn’t even know what that was, but I suspected that it had something to do with attempting crazy stuff on horseback and not falling off in the process.  My innocence and naïveté were probably a good thing then, as a full understanding of what was involved would probably have kept me from even trying.

As I gained a little bit of knowledge and some time in the saddle, I explored different disciplines and found myself gravitating toward jumpers. As I watched from the sidelines I was mystified at how a rider could compel a horse to race around what seemed to be an unbelievably complex course of impossible combinations of fences.  While I thought of, or actually hoped to, one day ride a horse over a single fence, the thought of riding a full course didn’t even make it into my occasionally exciting horsey dreams.

I thought that I would need to find a way to access the secret details of some grand plan, some complex mystery that only the best riders knew and weren’t telling. “They” knew all of the details, but they weren’t sharing them with the likes of me. If only I knew what they knew, I could ride like they rode.

Or, not.

Laura Ruben of Affari Horse Farm taught me that discipline was not a bad word

You see, I was the kid who wanted to learn to play guitar on a music video, but found practicing scales and riffs to be a waste of time. I thought big! Skip the boring parts; let’s get right to the performance!  But then… something interrupted my big thinking. I had the good fortune, through another accident of fate, to have the opportunity to ride with a trainer who brought my big thinking down to earth while keeping my sometimes frail ego intact. A pretty good trick, honestly; it was accomplished by making the little things that I had no time for, fun.  Before I knew it, I was actually looking forward to practicing the very things I had so often shunned: balanced turns, straight lines, low hands, good posture, breathing, counting strides, work without stirrups, eye position, metered canters… basic things that I had been lacking.

Lola knows that jumping the little ones at home makes the big ones easy!

That was the missing element. I thought that I needed knowledge and guts; I wanted to float above the others on knowledge, and then swoop down and overtake them with guts. I was wrong; what was missing was not guts, nor was it knowledge. The missing element was discipline.  That was what “they” had that I didn’t; that was what I needed to find. It turned out that riding a competently executed course of jumps was no more than riding, in turn, a series of competently executed small movements.  Developed and perfected by repeating, observing, feeling, experiencing and improving some of the most simple things in riding. Honing skills as a woodworker sharpens his chisel in readiness for his next job. Put it all together and feel how it feels to experience something with your horse that is much more than the sum of its parts.  Discipline is the bridge between our dreams and our successes.

A point came when I began to understand what my very first trainer had told me once, a bunch of years ago: “Your problem, sir, it that you want to think it, and it will be done. Horses don’t work that way.”

I hate it when people who annoy me are right…

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