Originally published June 25, 1986

ALTON, Ky. — Buddy Ryan detests athletes that are dumb, fragile, easily distracted.

Thoroughbred race horses, inbred to their eyeballs, are dumb, fragile, easily distracted.

Yet Buddy Ryan loves thoroughbred race horses.

"Been queer for horses since I was a kid growing up in Oklahoma," Ryan confessed last week. "My wife says I've got suicidal tendencies. I go from coaching football to raising horses."

Risky businesses, both of them. The road to wrist-slashing madness is paved with good-intentioned but slow football players. Or well-bred but slow horses.

When he's not coaching football, Ryan raises horses on 176 slanty acres near Lawrenceburg. Bought the place 10 years ago, when it was a scraggly dairy farm. Will someday build a three-bedroom house on the crest of a hill and retire here.

In mid-June, the sweet Kentucky bluegrass glistens in the afternoon sun. The newly mown hay smells like oak, like vanilla, like butter, carpeting the hillside.

Rex and Rob, Ryan's twin sons, lug rocks from the pasture. Matthew Russo, a nephew, plucks thistles from the blond ribbons of hay. Ryan's wife, Joan, hangs wash from a single strand of rope near the house trailer perched precariously on bumper jacks, where they all live together until the summer chores get done and the hay is in the barn.

The hell of his first Eagles training camp can wait. This is Ryan's view of heaven on earth, working from sunup 'til sundown, doing what he can, and what he can afford, to keep his race horses healthy and happy.

To know Buddy Ryan you must visit him here. Watch him work the farm with a grease-smeared, pale orange "Ryan Farm" baseball cap jammed on his head, wearing a tattered yellow shirt crammed inside wrinkled blue pants, the pants tucked into gray boots Walter Payton gave him, his hands smudged with dirt, his arms littered with healing cuts.

Football players who have earned his wrath would discover the true Ryan. They would find that inside that stubby, gruff, sarcastic body lurks a stubby, gruff, sarcastic person who goads family, friends and feeble sports writers with his fresh mouth.

And then, just when you think he's all pith and vinegar, you see him planting wet, noisy, slobbery kisses on Mollie Plumb, a weanling filly he named for assistant coach Ted Plumb's lovely daughter because the filly was born on her birthday.

You see him stroking the broodmares, talking gently to them. You hear him talking about the horses he has sent to the race track, how he searched for a compassionate trainer who would be patient, and if, hey, they didn't get to run at 2, that's OK, because maybe they would still be sound at 5.

The mailman in Deerfield, Ill., forwards The Thoroughbred Times and Ryan chuckles because the mailman, whose father-in-law once owned a stakes horse, knows what's important mail and what's junk.

"I read 'The Blood Horse,' " he said. "I read stud books. It's the only reading I do outside of football. I see [Jersey Derby winner] Snow Chief, and I know my horses are all bred better than he is.

"You've gotta be lucky. I've always been lucky. I breed the best I've got to the best I can afford. I'm looking for that one big horse."

The search for that one big horse has bankrupted richer men than Ryan, humbled haughtier men than Ryan, but you wouldn't want to bet against the Eagles' coach.

He owns 17 thooroughbreds. Didn't intend to have that many. Fell in love with the foals and couldn't bear to sell them.

"I owned five quarter horses when I graduated from high school," he said. "Roped off 'em, played cowboy with 'em.