Love Affair With Swale Extends Well Beyond His Death In 1984, I was in the seventh grade, and I fell in love with Swale, who looked very much, I thought, like the picture of the Black Stallion on my copies of those books. I read everything Andrew Beyer and Tony Kornheiser wrote about him in The Washington Post. I cut out photographs from the sports section: Swale standing regally, chin raised, wind ruffling his mane; Swale and his trainer, Mike Griffin, regarding each other with affection over a Pimlico stall door, a list of Preakness winners posted above them. Swale possessed the undeniable appeal of the underdog; he was Claiborne's stand-in for their star, Devil's Bag, and he shocked many fans with his Kentucky Derby upset over horses like Althea. Swale's most famous moment, however, was not that Derby win, but his death. Eight days after winning the Belmont, he collapsed. The assistant trainer Philip Gleaves ran to him, but nothing could be done, and he died about four minutes later. I remember those photographs, particularly the one of Swale's body being loaded into an equine ambulance. Bystanders" backs face the camera, and even though they are standing still, many evince the slight swagger of horsemen. I thought about Swale all the rest of that summer, and long after I took the photos down. I was not alone in this, I learned. Swale comes back to me all the time, sometimes in odd places. "Aren't you afraid you'll drop dead like that racehorse, Sam?" someone asks a runner in Bobbie Ann Mason's 1989 novel "In Country." I toured the thoroughbred-centric town of Aiken, S.C., where Swale trained as a 2-year-old, and ended up buying a book by Timothy J. Thompson, "Grit and Valor." Throughout, horses" names are in italics, so the text looks like a Puritan screed of some kind: "The horse racing Gods royally screwed us all on that day. . .They committed a terrible blunder when they took Swale from us," Thompson writes. I felt the same way, down to the emphasis. Swale's groom-turned-writer, Michael Klein, wrote a book, "Track Conditions," published in 1997. "It was love at first sight - or before it - for me," he writes. I had the strange feeling that I had loved Swale before ever setting eyes on him, and every time I passed his stall, it was as though I was looking not so much at a horse but at a place, which made the gaze familiar. Before first sight - how many horses invite that kind of love? Which horses do we, in a lifetime as racing fans, remember? And which do we forget? Swale's death caught the attention of even casual fans, even characters in novels. Even in the most prosaic moments of his life, Klein suggests, he had a special touch: "Swale nuzzled his head into my chest - because he was cold, I suppose, but it was a move that always made me think he was looking for my heart."