As the days pass, Harry realizes that Snowball won't jump over low poles, but he hits the high ones every time. It sticks and soon Snowball becomes part of the family. When he brings the elderly horse home, his daughter thinks of the name Snowball. Not wanting to let it follow that path, Harry offers eighty dollars for it and the seller accepts without hesitation. All the good horses are gone and the only one left is an older one heading to the slaughterhouse. Harry de Leyer pulls up to a horse sale with all intentions to buy a horse, but he's a bit too late. There is something extraordinary in all of us.
Elizabeth Letts’s message is simple: Never give up, even when the obstacles seem sky-high. Their story captured the heart of Cold War–era America-a story of unstoppable hope, inconceivable dreams, and the chance to have it all. Here is the dramatic and inspiring rise to stardom of an unlikely duo, based on the insight and recollections of “the Flying Dutchman” himself. One show at a time, against extraordinary odds and some of the most expensive thoroughbreds alive, the pair climbed to the very top of the sport of show jumping. And so he set about teaching this shaggy, easygoing horse how to fly. When he turned up back at Harry’s barn, dragging an old tire and a broken fence board, Harry knew that he had misjudged the horse. But the recent Dutch immigrant and his growing family needed money, and Harry was always on the lookout for the perfect thoroughbred to train for the show-jumping circuit-so he reluctantly sold Snowman to a farm a few miles down the road.īut Snowman had other ideas about what Harry needed.
On Harry’s modest farm on Long Island, the horse thrived. He recognized the spark in the eye of the beaten-up horse and bought him for eighty dollars. Harry de Leyer first saw the horse he would name Snowman on a bleak winter afternoon between the slats of a rickety truck bound for the slaughterhouse.
They were the longest of all longshots-and their win was the stuff of legend. Into the rarefied atmosphere of wealth and tradition comes the most unlikely of horses-a drab white former plow horse named Snowman-and his rider, Harry de Leyer. November 1958: the National Horse Show at Madison Square Garden in New York City.
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