AL UNSER
In any sport, only those rise to the top who combine native talent with a willingness to work dauntingly hard. But in some sports, winning also depends on reliable equipment and successful partnership. Especially is this true in car-racing: no driver, however skilled, can win unless he has a powerful machine, well-tuned; and even with such a vehicle, he will get nowhere without an efficient pit-crew. So, while the victor’s laurel goes only to the driver (and properly so, for he is the one risking his life in a highly dangerous setting), some credit should also be given, and usually is, both to the pit-crew and to the vehicle itself.
Show-jumping is equally a sport of partnership and dependency. Horse and rider have to work together in the most intimate way. But even when a gifted rider is paired with a gifted mount, the animal’s potential still needs to have been honed by an expert trainer and consistent workouts. When it comes to the actual event, it is the rider who calls the shots, but the horse that clears the jumps, at a constant challenge to its strength and courage. That fact is implicitly acknowledged when the awards are handed out: the winner’s rosette is not given to the rider, but is attached to the horse’s bridle.
In both sports, there are cases of multiple success within a single family. Equestrian fathers or mothers tend to have equestrian sons or daughters; and while innate talent may have something to do with it, any discussion of nature versus nurture is likely to come down on the side of nurture, at least where the riders are concerned — with the horses, of course, it is another matter: they are thoroughbreds, selectively bred from good blood-lines possessing genetic traits which would be specifically useful in the various equestrian events; in show-jumping, the steeplechase, point-to-point, rodeo, puissance, dressage, harness-racing, and flat-racing. By contrast, there is no such system of eugenics applied to the human animal. So it is a genetic accident, or a genetic co-incidence, when a specialized ability crops up in more than one member of the same family: in the case of the famous Unser family of race-car drivers, talent was undoubtedly present, but it must have been both triggered and nourished by the whole mystique of the Indianapolis 500, and other events, in which the family grew up.
Here are the facts: Al Unser won the Indie 500 four times; his brother Bobby won it three times; his son, Al Junior, won it twice; and another brother, Jerry, never won it, but had a notable driving career, cut short by a fatal crash. This string of successes can probably be better regarded as a clan avocation than as a genetic predisposition.
However, there do seem to be cases of inherited talent in human beings, both in sports and in other fields of endeavour. The three DiMaggio brothers clearly inherited the kind of physique that was to their advantage in baseball. But it is arguable that such a physique could have worked well for them in another sport, if they had been born in another place, into another sporting culture — say, cricket. Physical characteristics, clearly, can be inherited. Whether there exists a gene for talent is open to question. There does not seem, though, to be any other explanation for Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, son of a composer, who was an infant prodigy as a musician: granted, his father recognized his gifts immediately, and nurtured them; but the gifts asserted themselves spontaneously, long before the rather exploitative father could have wished them into being. And it is perhaps significant that Wolfgang’s sister, Nannerl, also turned out to be a highly gifted child musically.
The case of Leopold Mozart and his two children pales beside that of Veit Bach and his line. This German musician, born in the latter part of the sixteenth century, had eighty-five direct descendants who were professional musicians, the last one dying in 1846. All of them were instrumentalists and some of them were also composers, the best known, of course, being Johann Sebastian Bach. Like him, a great many of his relatives were accomplished organists. J.S.B. himself, and he was not alone in this, not only played the organ extremely well, but also knew a lot about the building of organs and their voicing. In a sense, then, there is a parallel here between the Bach organists and the Unser racing-car drivers: in both cases, a virtuoso performer has to rely on a well-made, well-maintained machine. Nor should it seem unduly far-fetched to compare a musical genius in eighteenth-century Leipzig with a sporting genius in twentieth-century Indianapolis. Each, in his way, was a product of the culture prevailing in his time and place.
During his lifetime, Bach was renowned not only as a virtuoso performer, but also as an expert on the organ as instrument. At least eight times, he was called upon to participate in the building of a new organ, or to supervise the rebuilding of one, or to appraise a rebuilt one, or to demonstrate an organ’s capabilities. This thorough grasp of what the instrument can do, and how that can be accomplished, is the sub-soil in which his magnificent organ compositions are rooted. After his death, they fell into temporary neglect. But it did not take long for them to resurface in all their glory. And modern organists, desiring to do them justice, seek out the old instruments, with their tracker action and baroque registrations, to record them on.
Many of these works are, in form, a Prelude and Fugue. By analogy, the form is like the structure of an Indianapolis car-race: first, there are the preliminary laps, on the previous day, to determine the starting positions of all the cars; then, on race-day itself, the drivers roar off from the start in the order assigned, and from there on their constant interweaving resembles the intricate counterpoint of a fugue.
The curious thing, linguistically, is that automobiles, as though expressing a kinship with the stage-coaches of Bach’s own time, are measured in units of horse-power.
