Learning my journalism at the feet of Larry Quille at Anaheim High School and Don Ferrell at Arizona State, I was trained to avoid the “I” word at all costs. “It’s not about you,” said Quille, whose early newspaper career was cut short by captivity in a Japanese prison camp during World War II. “What you think is not as important as what you discover in your reporting. Your job is to write it down with accuracy and clarity.” In that spirit, I will not have much to say about the fact that this is my last entry in these pages as executive columnist for Daily Racing Form, other than to hope out loud that the time I have spent at the job has brought a respectable amount of enlightenment and entertainment to the patient readers. Writers have egos, some larger than others, but if we think we’re any good at all we like the sound of our own voices. Losing access to the pages of this publication drove me selfishly to the archives, where I wallowed in a few yellowed entries before coming up for air. It was doing no one any good, and then I found the thing I wrote about the retirement of Joe Hirsch, in November of 2003. “I’m packing it in,” Hirsch said from his Manhattan apartment. “I have to do it. I can’t do any more work.” Fortunately, I don’t feel that way (it’s not about you, knucklehead!). But Joe had it right. At the time, Hirsch was just shy of his 50th year writing for the Form. As such, he should have qualified as a relic in amber, but even the youngest racing journalists of the early 2000s were nourished in his presence. Despite his aura of historical weight, they could recognize that when it came to Thoroughbred racing Hirsch embodied Kurt Vonnegut’s attitude of, “Anything can make me stop and look and wonder, and sometimes learn.” I wrote: “More than a journalist, Hirsch has borne witness to an age and left its tales etched in stone. His tireless chronicling has captured both the shifting winds of a restless industry and the bedrock values that give Thoroughbred racing its permanent place in the heart.” That permanence is being eroded now because horse racing has let its fate slip from its own tenuous grasp into hands that have the best interests of neither the horse nor the racing at heart. More than one person has offered a recent variation of, “Sure glad Joe isn’t around,” although, if he were, he would have words of realistic encouragement, while echoing what he once said in an interview with Spur magazine: “Racing involves a levelling process,” Hirsch said. “It’s probably the only sport where if you’re in it a long time, you have to lose more than you win. And that’s a very humbling experience for people who can’t stand to lose, so you’ll find those people getting out of it very quickly.” In his final column for Daily Racing Form, Hirsch proclaimed, “I feel I’m the luckiest feller in the world. I fell in love with racing 50 years ago and have had the glorious opportunity of making it my life’s work.” Joe then went on to list many of the moments that enhanced his devotion to the game, all of them reported by him in real time, as the dust was only just settling – Sunday Silence and Easy Goer in the Preakness. Jaipur and Ridan in the Travers. John Henry and The Bart in the Arlington Million. Affirmed and Alydar in the Belmont Stakes. And another, at the very threshold of his retirement: “I never saw two horses try any harder than You and Carson Hollow in Saratoga’s Test Stakes of 2002, with You the winner by a nose,” Hirsch wrote. “The effort was so demanding that both were off form the remainder of the year. But the effort was extraordinary, and humbling in retrospect.” Joe did not live long enough to witness Blame and Zenyatta, or Beholder and Songbird. There’s two for the all-time wall. But as far as that goes, I never saw two horses try any harder than Battle of Midway and McKinzie just a few months ago in the San Pasqual at Santa Anita. Since I will be pounding the keys for many years to come, I feel obligated to keep the heart and mind open to the possibility that the greatest racing experience is just over the horizon, and that I might be there to get it down. In that sense, my only real regret in leaving these pages is that readers will discover I no longer look like the tiny, 20-year-old photo that has accompanied my column for so long.