Over the years here at Microkhan, we’ve spilled a lot of digital ink while paying homage to the Sports Illustrated stories that sparked our love for writing. Another one recently bubbled back up to the surface, mostly because it has one haunting line about the link between the physical and the psychological. The piece is about a jockey who was involved in a fatal accident, an event beyond his control that nonetheless shook him to his core. This passage depicts how he started to cope with the realization that he’d rubbed up against the darkness in a most disconcerting way:
Davis was inconsolable, and in a state nearing shock. “He was white,” says his valet, John Mallano, who had opened the closet door. Almost immediately, Davis began to shear himself of his past. After undressing in the jockeys’ room, he told Mallano, “Throw everything away. Throw my boots away, my pants, my T-shirt. Everything I was wearing. I don’t want these clothes around me ever again.”
The next day, after a memorial service for Venezia at Belmont Park—at which Davis fell sobbing to his knees—he quietly told his wife, Marguerite, “Let’s go get my hair cut. Maybe I’ll feel better.” So he had the barber “cut all that old stuff off,” he says. “And I cut all my nails down.”
There’s a mirror-image moment in the final paragraph of Raymond Carver’s The Calm, when the narrator’s decision to break with his past is symbolized by the sensation of his hair growing back while still in the barber’s chair. Two beautiful little observations about humans dealing with those inevitable forks in the road.
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