all in Legends

What defines a champion?

Is it talent; the raw ability that gives an athlete the ability to excel in their sport? Is it accomplishments; the record of achievements that their talent enables them to compile? Or is it something else entirely; an innate desire to perform as well as possible and give your all every time you compete?

Ron McAnally remembers one element above all others from the formative years he spent at the Covington Protestant Children’s Home, an orphanage in northern Kentucky. He will never forget the view.

“They tell me I used to sit at the window and stare for hours,” he said. “I wouldn’t talk to anybody.”

McAnally was at the tender age of 5 when he and his four siblings were sent to the home following the death of their mother. He sought comfort wherever he could find it, even at a window.

Hall of Fame jockey Bobby Ussery, a Kentucky Derby winner who was ranked fifth in career earnings when he retired in 1974, has died in South Florida, according to a Nov. 17 Gulfstream Park release.

Ussery, a native of Vian, Okla., was 88.

Allen E. Paulson and his family are no doubt best known in Thoroughbred racing for owning the great champion Cigar, one of the sport’s most brilliant males.

Back in the day when a truck stacked with hay rumbled into Windfields Farm, Northern Dancer never paid it a lick of attention from his stall across the lane from the breeding shed. But if he laid eyes on an approaching van with a mare aboard, all hell broke loose.

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