Flatter: When silence is and is not appropriate after a fall

New Kent, Va.

Six days later, and it still hurts like hell.

I don’t remember how long it took to get over Eight Belles after her tragedy in 2008. Or Go For Wand in 1990. Or Ruffian in 1975. Not that we ever did completely.

Maple Leaf Mel. Another 3-year-old filly. What more is there to say?

We have tried to find the words, but instead, it was more comfortable to hit the self-mute button Saturday at Saratoga.

The New York Racing Association telecast on Fox went right to a commercial after the unthinkable happened at the end of the Test Stakes. That break lasted nearly seven minutes. Live content took up only three of the next 22 minutes. Maggie Wolfendale used 59 seconds to tell us Maple Leaf Mel had been euthanized. Her words were concise. And honest. Her emotion was raw. And elegant.

That live silence was not wrong. On the contrary, there is no hard and fast set of rules for how to handle these things. Sometimes a retreat from verbosity is prudent. When I first worked at WFAN radio eight years ago, the instruction handed down from the late Don Imus to update anchor John Minko to old newcomers like me was, “Say what you’ve got to say, and then shut up.”

Others rise to the occasion swiftly the way Jim McKay did when he got news of the terrorist attack on the Israel delegation at the 1972 Munich Olympics. He was swimming at the time at his hotel. He rushed to the studio and stayed on the air for 17 hours. The whole time underneath his TV clothes, he still wore his wet swim trunks.

Sean Clancy from The Saratoga Special followed that lead. Without any time to blink or think about it, he worked the backside after Maple Leaf Mel’s fall. He sensitively followed the shuffle of reluctant activity around the barn of Melanie Giddings, the trainer who survived cancer but now must endure the pain of a horse who will not return to the barn.

“An empty stall. A lost star. A shattered dream.”

Those were the last nine of 1,503 perfectly chosen words authored by Clancy. I cried Sunday through that last paragraph the way I did 51 years ago, when McKay said “they’re all gone.”

Six days later we are left to wonder how to move forward, especially since racing’s biggest stages this year have been haunted by the misfortune of high-profile breakdowns. Churchill Downs had its 13 confirmed deaths before and after the Kentucky Derby – and yes, one was added that had not been widely reported before. There was the one on the Preakness undercard and two more in the first 24 hours after the Belmont Stakes. Now Saratoga has its own tragedy and six other fatalities since the summer season started.

This is when live silence is wrong. NYRA boss David O’Rourke took time at the start of Wednesday’s “Talking Horses” telecast to acknowledge the specter of the on-track breakdowns. That lasted all of a minute. Then it was an exercise in self-flagellation over the warning that horseplayers got about races being moved off the grass not even two minutes before the start of Sunday’s late Pick 5.

In the time he was on first with boilerplate insistence that safety comes first and then his “we dropped the ball” admission about screwing bettors, O’Rourke did not say a word about the condition of the turf course from where 13 consecutive races have been moved or canceled, all since Ever Summer’s tragic breakdown Sunday. Sure, speak privately with jockeys concerned about their safety, but send the other adults and kids out of the room when we bring up the S word.

Proper or not, all the silence since Maple Leaf Mel has been uneasy. Even the verbal beads we clutch offer little solace. They are certain statistics we lean on, if only to strengthen our resolve to carry on. There is the encouraging one from The Jockey Club that says in the past 14 years, the racetrack death rate has dropped 37 percent. As much as we properly throw that in the face of animal-rights extremists who drive by only for big events, we also use it as a mantra to salve our own grief.

For a while we will have feelings of trepidation. They are the same that we experience when we try to resume a normal life after, say, a heart attack or a mugging or a car accident. I have had multiple experiences with two of the three.

The old saying about getting back on the horse feels trite and tacky, but deep down it also feels appropriate. The more we get back to normal, the more it feels normal. It does not happen overnight. It did not after COVID, right? Eventually, we get there.

That does not mean we ever should forget the example set by trainer Brendan Walsh. The compassion he showed Giddings last weekend by bringing her the Test wreath that Pretty Mischievous won by default underscored the kind soul he is. That was another bawl-our-eyes-out moment.

On Saturday, Walsh will be at the Arlington Million, the Grade 1 race that has been worth at least $1 million for all but one of its runnings. Colonial Downs, a gem of a track in this verdant setting between Richmond and Williamsburg, makes Virginia the fourth state, province or fiefdom to host the race.

When I texted Walsh this week to ask if and when he might arrive, I mistakenly asked, “Will you be at Arlington this weekend?”

With the reply, “Arlington is closed, Ron,” I detected a bit of playful impishness from Walsh.

“I’m kidding,” he wrote after I confessed to my Freudian slip.

One small step back toward normal.