ESPN Horse Racing

Updated: November 6, 2009, 9:20 PM ET

Born fast

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By Jay Cronley
Special to ESPN.com
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Here's the Breeders' Cup schedule for the week. Picks will be made public Wednesday. The post position draw for all the races is Tuesday afternoon and will be televised on HRTV. Ask 100 people what HRTV is and 95 might say the House and Room channel.

As for the Cup itself, general admission ticket prices have been reduced by half. You don't have to cover both days when buying a ticket. Food and drink tabs are predicted to be reasonable. Just think. A little more sweet treatment of this nature, and we'll be all the way up to the level of respect attained by slot machine regulars.

Europeans owners and trainers have counted and have had their chickens long ago and are ordering dessert. Whereas some BC favorites look easy as a SoCal sunrise, picking second, and beyond, promises to be tortuous, as usual.

Since for most, the Breeders' Cup turns into a wagering frenzy of exotics and savers and transgender Doubles, it's sometimes nice to take a moment beforehand and refocus on the subject.

There's a place near where I live called Osage County that challenges description. It's a gigantic spread that is bigger than numerous small states, and it inspired the Pulitzer Prize-winning play that carries its name. Within his great expanse is the Tallgrass Prairie Preserve, owned and managed by the Nature Conservancy, some 39,000 acres of living earth art, of wild prairie so far removed from the usual stuff as to seem endlessly mysterious: Look at those gorgeous wildflowers just beyond the five-foot rattler.

Willa Cather described the wind-blown tall-grain Nebraska rural countryside as resembling a herd of buffalo running. Osage County doesn't appear to be quite so contemporary. Toward the middle of the Tallgrass Preserve, that's where visitors from space could have set up shop in the fifties. It's where animals are more easily observed and tracked by chopper. It's where buzzards go to get away from it all.

Mustangs race across this area.

Mustangs are wild horses of no specific type.

Talk about something to see.

Locating wild horses among dozens of thousands of acres requires good luck. Access is limited. Snack joints are non-existent. Pack a lunch. Bring binoculars and a camera. Spend a day looking, and you're more likely to see mirages than wild horses. But I got lucky one afternoon and observed a row of mustangs coming over a rise in as dramatic a fashion as did the glorious warriors in the fine movie "Zulu Dawn."

What transpired was the mustangs took off running and twisting and bucking and kicking, sprinting as fast as was inhumanly possible, scattering rocks, U-turning on a hoof-mark, exercising their genes over some of the most inhospitable ground imaginable.

Here's the point. Given total freedom and the choice to eat, to mate, to sight-see, to walk, to trot, to lounge, to stroll, or to mate some more, the wild horses chose to run. They ran into view, and across a panorama whose distance was hard to judge. When there's nothing besides prairie and the horizon, what's to frame a block? The wild horses ran surely a mile, flat-out, then back to the rise and out of sight.

As another Breeders' Cup world championship comes due on the super-scenic substitute earth near LA, it's good to keep in mind horses were born to run.

Write to Jay at jaycronley@yahoo.com.