For those who have asked me what I do with my personal money (or some of it), I’m ready to come clean. I deposit it at the $2 window of any handy thoroughbred racetrack. Not the president himself could tear me away from my Kentucky Derby fix. For my future, I hold mutual funds. For a running verdict on my reasoning power, rendered in 90 seconds flat, I bet on equine athletes to win.
I’m a handicapper, which means I read the Daily Racing Form, study the horses’ past performances and try to puzzle out the winners. In my case, the motive isn’t money. Even when a long shot comes home, you don’t get rich on a $2 bet. But choosing that horse on justifiable grounds, then watching the race succumb to your skill-that is the player’s unbeatable high. In dollars wagered, lotteries are now America’s bet of choice; nearly $21 billion was dropped on them last year compared with about $11 billion on the races. But the lottery mind is all magic and luck. Handicappers stand on knowledge and judgment, sure in their faith that reason will improve their odds.
I came to the romance of racing the right way: not through the Ogden Phippses and other society swells but in company with a round and ribald railbird, Falstaffian in his humor and appetites, widely known at New York’s Aqueduct racetrack as Aqueduct Fats. His friends called him Victor, An unstoppable jokester, Victor was grandmaster of the Brooklyn insult gag and, when he was winning, a spritzer of racing’s choicest one-liners:
" When I went to the track it was closed. So I tore up a $20 bill and went home."
“My horse was so slow the jockey kept a diary of the trip.
“I had a great day at the track. I broke even and I really needed the money.”
Victor compulsively bet every race, even the unintelligible ones. So his winning percentage wasn’t great. Like any horseplayer, he lived and died in the conditional–I could have, I should have, I would have. Contests that look so predietable on paper ultimately dissolve before the mysteries of jockey and horse and the chaos just behind the scrim.
Every thoroughbred in the world traces its lineage back to three foundation sires imported into England around the turn of the 18th century. The Byerley Turk was a warhorse, captured at Buda (now Budapest) by a Capt. Robert Byerley and ridden again in battle before settling down to stud. The Godolphin Barb, acquired by the second Earl of Godolphin, was shipped from the Barbary Coast and reputedly found between the shafts of a Paris water cart–a story that the excellent Roger Longrigg, author of “The History of Horse Racing,” doesn’t credit for a moment. Through the Barb came Seabiscuit and Man O’War.
Racing owes the most, however, to the Darley Arabian, property of Yorkshire merchant Thomas Darley who bought him in Aleppo, now in Syria, in 1704. Through his great-great-grandson Eclipse, the descendants of the Darley Arabian read like an honor roll of winners: Affirmed, Citation, Count Fleet, Kelso, Nashua, Native Dancer, Secretariat and Seattle Slew, to mention just a few.
Now the youngest stars of the “bred horses” or “blood horses,” as the 18th-century English would have had it, are tuning up for the famous Derby at Churchill Downs. At Aqueduct on a recent Saturday, damp and chill, I turned out to watch some Derby contenders meet in the prestigious Wood Memorial. The race, as it happened, ran by the book-my book being the classic “Ainslie’s Complete Guide to Thoroughbred Racing.” The crowd, unfailingly sentimental, rooted stoutly for an unbeaten filly named Meadow Star who was racing for the first time against boy horses. But fillies running on dirt tracks rarely win against colts, Tom Ainslie says, and indeed, she finished a tired fourth. Ainslie’s own money, and mine, lay on Cahill Road, a big, strapping horse and strong Derby choice who damaged a ligament near the top of the stretch and still won by three lengths, running entirely on heart.
The limping Cahill Road won’t make the Derby now. Ainslie leans toward Hansel, a bay colt who ran away with the Lexington Stakes at Kentucky’s lovely Keeneland track. No jokes from Tom. He’s all business at the track.
Lately, the crapehangers have been out, diagnosing horse racing as terminally ill. Sports Illustrated says that tracks are “Fading Fast” and demonstrates its case with a mournful photo of Florida’s abandoned Hialeah, the raceway gone to weed and seed; capacity: 20,000 ghosts.
Even horsemen are showing a certain grimness around the mouth. Their fan base is aging. Yuppies prefer tennis. An aura of lowlife hangs over many of the older grandstands. The regulars, too, are disaffected. Racing overexpanded in the 1980s and now can’t field enough good horses to fill the cards. Even worse, racing’s overseers–state governments and track owners and managers–take too much money off the top. Some 19 percent is siphoned out of the betting pools for taxes and overhead, lowering the payouts to winners. Consultant Maury Wolff, of the Racing Resource Group in Alexandria, Va., has proved conclusively that, when more money is left in the pools, betting and attendance rise. But the overseers have blinkers on.
Some tracks are making a serious bid for the young and the chic. At newer racing palaces, you’ll find good restaurants, plush chairs, chandeliers, marble betting counters, even–at Calder Race Course in Miami–a petting zoo for the kids. Santa Anita and Remington Park offer visitors’ centers that orient novices and give betting tips. Even some of the old-time tracks now bristle with technology. At Aqueduct, while lunching at a table on the finish line, you can punch in a bet on a computer, watch the race on a tabletop TV, then run replays to see if your horse still lost.
The crapehangers are out too soon. Like many another American industry, racing is slowly reinventing itself. Most trackmen agree with Lonny Powell, head of Longacres Park in Renton, Wash., whose crystal ball shows fewer, smaller tracks, elegantly appointed, televising live races to other tracks and betting parlors everywhere. Mindless as lotteries may be, their wide public acceptance is making wagering respectable. If he could hear that, the incorrigible Aqueduct Fats wouldn’t mind being dead.
