While mainstream sports is no stranger to tragic scandal, the stakes are just different.
The first vibe you get from him, of cool and insolence, is soon succeeded by a second, truer sense that he is a man trying to save magic not by making it more intellectual, or more raffish, but by making it potentially tragic, a high-stakes and risky endeavor that might end in grief.
The Grade 3 $100,000 Astra Stakes turned tragic when Amboseli, the second favorite, suffered a catastrophic injury coming down the hill and was pulled up by jockey Kent Desormeaux in the 1 ½-mile turf race.
Two years before the Eight Belles tragedy, I was at Pimlico when Barbaro made the tragic misstep in the Preakness Stakes that eventually cost him his life.
There are profound, and potentially competing, interests at stake in these tragic cases, which mandate careful consideration and militate against a rush to judgment.
In "Molly's Game," Jessica is a hyper-educated, Olympic-calibre athlete who, after a tragic injury, begins running high-stakes poker games in hotel suites in L.A. and Manhattan, which is just how I'd process any similar trauma, with the addition of a huge vat of chocolate-covered almonds from Costco.
The U.S. had few measurable interests at stake in that tragic nation's civil war, but sought to strengthen the nominal national government, in truth but one of some 25 armed factions, and support Israel, which had invaded its northern neighbor.
Two weeks later, after he shattered his right hind leg just yards out of the starting gate at the Preakness Stakes, Barbaro became a tragic hero whose injury reports were given like presidential health updates.
One survivor called the incident an "extremely tragic example of what is at stake each and every time a gun falls — or is placed — in the wrong hands".
"They know gun violence as well as we do and should have the same kind of stake in preventing needless, tragic, horrific shootings as [they] occur on the streets of both our nations every day.
