Church of Barbaro: Rallying Behind a Horse's Death

ByABC News
May 4, 2007, 9:52 AM

ELKTON, Md. -- May 3, 2007— -- There's a new horse in Barbaro's stall. He arrived a day ago, and a plaid Baker blanket deflects the last jabs of winter. Spring is here, and in the rolling hills of Maryland where Barbaro grew up, the grass has turned back to brilliant green and the mid-April sky has changed from the color of battleships to baby-boy blue. The Kentucky Derby is around the corner.

Just down the road from the Fair Hill Training Center, at Prizzio's grocery and deli, horsemen gather for bowls of steaming crab soup. Last week, the owners took down the collage of press clippings. They know Michael Matz, the trainer, is coming back from Florida soon, and they want him to eat lunch without staring at the biggest loss of his racing life. They want to help him move on. Indeed, since the Jan. 29 death of Barbaro, all of the horse's connections, the men and women who saw him every day, are beginning to move on. It's time.

"It's not a parable," says Dr. Dean Richardson, who led the eight-month fight to save Barbaro. "It's a real story to me."

The fans aren't there yet. The obsession that made them easy targets of bloggers and lampooners has, improbably, grown. They formed a circle, and even with the horse no longer in the middle, the circle remains. His death only binds this community tighter. They've become apostles in the church of Barbaro.

So far, they've raised more than $250,000 and saved more than 580 horses from slaughter. They've turned their sights on federal horse slaughter laws, burning up the phone lines. Their fervor can be mistaken for the handiwork of professional political operatives. One congressional aide, after yet another call, finally asked: Who is funding you? Who is organizing you? Who are you people?

"We're just Fans of Barbaro," the caller answered.

Well, where do you even start?

The mother ship seems as good a place as any.

Alex Brown, wearing a yellow Fair Hill sweatshirt with holes in it, sits in front of his Toshiba laptop computer. He was drawn into this by happenstance, really. Painfully thin, he's a little too tall to be a jockey. There are scraps of paper and empty coffee cups and dead-soldier wine bottles and books and food wrappers piled high around him.

He lives here, set back from a quiet street, his house decorated in late bachelor, mostly with chess sets and photos of Barbaro.

In the virtual world where he spends five hours a day, he's God. He created this universe. He banishes the disruptive. He offers redemption to the recalcitrant. He's learned he cannot get involved in arguments because his opinion is law. When he does speak, his words manifest themselves in the actions of a fan base desperate for direction. If he mentions a charity, it is supported. If he disses a charity, it is ignored. If he likes a book, it is bought.

Brown logs on to timwoolleyracing.com , which is FOB ground zero. Before he starts monitoring the latest messages, he checks page views. Since he began: 2,469,751, 752, 753, 754, the hits come day and night, 415 in the past hour, 755, 756, 767.

"This is how it works," he says, with a Manchester, England, accent still thick despite decades in the States.

He clicks on a link in the message board. "The four following horses are at a feed lot," he reads.

Turning to explain, he says, "A feed lot is a way station before they go to slaughter."

Pictures have been posted of the four animals, along with a price tag for each. "Basically," Brown says, "they need $3,100, which includes transport."

From PayPal accounts, the money pours in, from out there. Housewives and businessmen, people who have money to spare and people who don't. Someone gives $50. Someone gives $25. In an hour and 27 minutes, they've already raised $425. "Every rescue I've followed," he says, "they've raised the money."

Brown gallops horses in the morning and teaches Internet marketing at the University of Delaware in the afternoon, making him uniquely qualified to play Wizard of Oz, expertly pulling strings to maximize his chances at creating an online following.

For years, all his marketing ideas were theories. To test them in the real world, he asked his friend and boss, Fair Hill trainer Tim Woolley, if he could start a blog. Woolley said sure. The site got six hits a day.

Then Barbaro won the Kentucky Derby.

Brown offered updates as his friend Matz got the horse ready for the Triple Crown shot. The site got maybe 120 hits a day.

Then Barbaro broke down in the Preakness.

Soon, he was in an ambulance, pulling into the back of the University of Pennsylvania's New Bolton Center, probably the best animal hospital in the world. The doctors knew what to do with a sick animal. The pilgrims out front? That was a different story.

People stopped on Street Road outside New Bolton's gate. Fans rushed to hang banners of support from overpasses. Those not close enough to get to the hospital surfed the Web for information. A community was trying to form, a heat-seeking missile searching for a flame.

Sitting down at a friend's house for dinner, Brown had no idea he was the flame. He'd decided to stop the Barbaro blog. As supper was cooking, he checked the web traffic. Watching the numbers, he saw people were frantically clicking for updates.

He made some calls. When Barbaro came out of surgery, Brown typed up a quick update. Within an hour, there were more than 3,000 hits and the server crashed.

The insider updates -- from doctor to owners to Brown to fans within minutes — were the lifeblood of the site, and when the horse died, Brown expected traffic and comments to peter out. For a few weeks they did, the message board dropping from 1,400 posts a day to 1,000, then 800, then 600.

Then he awoke one morning to find a phenomenon he still cannot explain: The numbers were rising.

By March 6, the posts were back to more than 1,000 a day, raising more money, making more YouTube tribute videos, suffering the pains of every fledgling community, dividing into factions, fighting battles, making laws, taking sides, marching out to colonize, an entire universe playing out inside Brown's laptop. He points to the rising numbers. Eleven months and three servers in, his virtual world is humming along.