The Only Game in Town

by David Remnick

  When I finished handicapping, I went to the OTB office to fill out my betting slips. I liked to watch people come in and slowly erode the antisepsis of the place, jabbing wet cigar butts into polished ashtrays and dragging muddy boots over clean tile floors. They were intent, blind to their surroundings, and they all looked terrific, at least until the first race had gone off. Optimism put a bloom on every cheek. Anything might happen, could happen, probably would happen—that was the notion being entertained at OTB. If you hit the triple, you might walk out the door a millionaire, your pockets crammed with greenbacks. Even the fat man, who was otherwise shrewd, believed this. I met him one afternoon when he squeezed in next to me at the counter. He was so big his trousers had been split at the seam and stretched out by the addition of a panel of unmatching cloth. He had diabetes, he said, and a bum ticker about to burst, and he’d been holed up at his sister’s house in Hempstead since Thanksgiving. His own home was in Des Moines, but he couldn’t bring himself to go back there. “No OTB in Iowa,” he said, and I knew exactly what he meant.

  After my mother’s funeral, I flew back to Northern California, where I was renting a small house overlooking a river. The river had once been a prime steelhead stream, but now, with the gravel necessary for spawning being excavated, and a dam about to be built, the fish were scarce. But I still anticipated a fresh start, some sort of release.

  Early in 1978, I made my escape. I could have chosen a romantic spot—Dubrovnik, Tahiti, or even Florence, where I’d spent many happy hours when I was younger—but I remembered the electricity I’d experienced on Long Island, and decided on a race track: Golden Gate Fields, in Albany, near San Francisco and Oakland. Elegantly situated on Point Fleming, a rocky outcrop that extends into the eastern portion of San Francisco Bay, Golden Gate is a slightly run-down plant featuring indifferent and often curious racing early in the week and more bet-table affairs toward the weekend. The plant encompasses 225 acres, with stalls for 1,425 horses, seats for 13,004 human beings, and enough space over all to cram in a crowd of thirty thousand, although no such crowd has materialized of late. In 1978, the daily attendance averaged 9,317, down 8 percent from the previous year, while the handle remained firm at about $1,450,000. The average fan wagered $155 every time through the turnstiles. Two separate racing associations, Pacific and Tanforan, sponsor meetings at the track. The Pacific meeting usually begins in late January or early February and runs through mid-April; Tanforan, which is always shorter, ends early in June. Between them, the associations distribute purses totaling seven million dollars over ninety-some racing days. The grandstand at Golden Gate, like grandstands everywhere, is divided into levels connotative of social class: General Admission, Clubhouse, Turf Club, and the exclusive Directors’ Room, a glass-fronted enclosure where the track’s directors and their guests can eat, drink, and wager without plebeian interference. To the left of the Turf Club and the press box, just beyond the executive offices, there was until quite recently a penthouse apartment reserved for special friends of the management. Rumor has it that Jimmy Durante once spent a honeymoon there, but nobody seems to know whether he won or lost.

  In Albany, I had difficulty finding a place to stay. There were a few motels near the track, but their managers seemed to live in perpetual fear of guests. One woman spoke to me through a round metal speaker set into a shield of Plexiglas. Her voice had the absolute timbre of creaking hinges. “We’re all full,” she said, but her VACANCY sign was still blinking when I drove off. At the next motel, I rang the bell five times, but nobody answered. When I looked through the office window, I saw an old man reclining in a lounger, his paper open to the racing page. Finally, I settled in at the Terrace Motel, in El Cerrito—a decent place with friendly owners, clean rooms and apartments, three-legged chairs propped against the walls, and a swimming pool. I never saw anybody in that pool, not once. The Terrace’s population was constantly shifting, except for an Indian who wore his hair in braids and a few track employees and elderly people who rented apartments, which were in a building adjacent to the main motel. On warm evenings, just at twilight, somebody there played songs like “The Impossible Dream” on a very percussive piano, reminding me of every cocktail lounge I’d ever been in, and the solace of bourbon over ice.

  On April 18, the night before the Tanforan meeting began, I sat at my imitation-wood-veneer desk and prepared to handicap the following day’s races. I had no system or standard approach, but there were a few things I always took into account before making a tentative selection: speed, which could be gauged in general fashion from a horse’s recent running times; class, which was a function both of breeding and of the level at which a horse had been competing (races were ranked by the size of the purse offered, stakes first, then allowance and handicap, then claiming and maiden); and condition, which meant fitness and was expressed by a horse’s recent finishes (if they were good or improving, the horse was said to be “on form”) and by its showing during the daily exercise period (workout times were given at the bottom of each horse’s past-performance record). The trainer and the jockey associated with a horse also affected my decision. Certain trainers were downright inept and never won a race regardless of their stock, and not a few riders at Golden Gate were incapable of handling their mounts.

  I also considered post position as a potential factor in the outcome of a race. Before leaving home, I had compiled a post-position survey of races run during the Pacific meeting, which was just ending. I’d done this to see if a horse gained an advantage by breaking from a particular post (the slot a horse is assigned in the starting gate; there are rarely more than twelve horses entered in a race). Moreover, I had wanted to determine whether front-runners—horses who break quickly, take the lead, and try to hold it throughout (going wire to wire)—fared better at Golden Gate than one would expect. The results proved instructive. In races over a mile, called routes, the outside posts, seven through twelve, were as disadvantageous as usual; horses stuck out there had more ground to cover. In races under a mile, called sprints, the survey turned up a surprise. Ordinarily, the best posts in a short race are those closest to the rail, but during the Pacific meet horses starting near the middle of the track, at posts four and five, had won more often than horses inside them. Furthermore, horses breaking from the seven slot had won almost as often as those breaking from the one slot. I discovered as well that front-runners won more than 30 percent of all sprints at Golden Gate. Facts like these can be invaluable when you’re trying to choose between two otherwise closely matched Thoroughbreds.

  To give me an additional edge, I’d brought along three books on handicapping technique: Tom Ainslie’s Complete Guide to Thoroughbred Racing, Andrew Beyer’s Picking Winners, and Steven Davidowitz’s Betting Thoroughbreds. These books were not typical of the genre; most handicapping tracts are lurid affairs that sucker readers into parting with a few dollars in exchange for an easy-to-follow system guaranteed to produce eight million dollars in just three short weeks. Ainslie, Beyer, and Davidowitz were serious, intelligent men who never underestimated the complexity of the sport. Ainslie was the dean of the company. His book was the most informative about all aspects of racing and is still the best primer around. He favored a balanced approach to making a selection—weighing all the factors, much as I had been doing. Beyer was more dogmatic. As an undergraduate at Harvard, he’d got hooked on racing, and he had since “perfected” a system based on the digital-computer research of Sheldon Kovitz, a fellow student and a doctoral candidate in mathematics. Apparently, Kovitz was too busy feeding numbers into his IBM 360 Model 40 to succeed at handicapping himself, but Beyer saw in his calculations the seed of Something Big, a way to incorporate relativity into speed ratings. Most ratings, like those given in the Form, were suspect, because they were derived from nonexistent absolutes. A horse who had earned an 80 on Tuesday was not exactly as fast as a horse who had earned an 80 on Wednesday, because the track surface changed every day (or even from moment to moment), an
d Tuesday’s conditions were always different from Wednesday’s—faster or slower by critical fractions. Beyer adopted Kovitz’s method, improved it, and parlayed the results into a complicated mathematical system. It was the best in the world, he claimed. “Speed figures are the way, the truth, and the light,” wrote Beyer. “And my method of speed handicapping is, I believe, without equal.” I found Davidowitz’s book the most pithy and accessible. He seemed a little tougher than the other men, more hard-nosed, and it showed in his jacket photo. While Ainslie looked like a businessman and Beyer like a computer programmer with a side interest in recreational drugs, Davidowitz looked mean. His face had a demonic cast; an eyebrow was arched in perpetual scrutiny. I liked the knack he had for making direct, incontrovertible statements: When a three-year-old is assigned actual top weight in a race for horses three years and up, the three-year-old has little or no chance of winning. Such gems were inlaid throughout the text, always supported by statistics. Davidowitz further endeared himself to me by being quick to point a finger at the criminal element in racing whenever he encountered it. Most turf writers were unwilling to print anything but bland idealizations of the sport.

  After skimming through the books, I put all the materials aside and reached into my pocket, as I’d been doing every hour or so since leaving home. Again I counted my money—five hundred dollars in twenty-dollar bills. It looked pitiful stacked on the desk, the smallest stake any would-be gambler ever started with. I felt embarrassed. I thought that the stake was correlated directly with my life: empty wallet, impoverished spirit. Such stupid flashes of guilt often overtook me after midnight. I tried to ignore this one, though, and took a shower and went to bed.

  Early the next morning, I went to Golden Gate Fields ready to win. The grandstand was empty and quiet, with the cool feel of a stainless-steel mixing bowl waiting for ingredients. The sun climbed slowly over the eucalyptus trees on Albany Hill—huge blue gums, planted there a century ago to shield the town from the booming of the dynamite factory that had once occupied the point. From the clubhouse railing, I could see the backstretch and the neat rows of wooden barns and the soiled straw piled high at the corners of the rows. The hot-walking machines were turning. They were a recent addition to the track and had made obsolete a job that grooms used to do—walking horses until they’d cooled down after exercising. Each machine consisted of a power pack from which rose a thin shaft with four metal arms at the top forming a horizontal cross. The arms were about six feet long and were about eight feet above the ground. When the power was on, the shaft rotated slowly, and the horses, hitched by their halters to insulated cords dangling from the arms, were forced to circle until their pulse rates dropped and their breathing was not so labored. As they circled, they looked like flywheels turning within the greater geometry of the backstretch, suggesting an intricate timepiece thrown open to bits of biology.

  I took the escalator down to the ground floor and toured the vacant paddock. The green wear-forever carpet was worn thin, the railings were chipped and needed paint, and the saddling stalls, green and white, were scarred with half-moons and incised by hooves. I walked over to the infield, crossing the track and then the turf course, which was not nearly as lush and smooth as it had looked from above—weeds and crabgrass gave it a stubbly texture. The par-three course on the infield green was soon to be closed for lack of patronage, but an OPEN sign hung in the pro-shop window. I heard a harrow going by, and turned to watch it work the track. House sparrows followed behind it, pecking at seeds the harrow had uncovered and hopping around among the horse apples. Nearby, two redwing blackbirds were mating in the caked mud of a drainage ditch. The male’s epaulets were scarlet, brilliantly exposed as he drew his lover into a caped embrace.

  About eleven-thirty, fans began arriving in steady streams, and as I watched them come in I had the sense of a form evolving, something entirely apart from horses and jockeys. It was modeled on notions of symmetry and coherence. The electronic devices around the track reinforced the fiction in the warmup patterns they flashed: The infield tote board showed four rows of zeros balanced one on top of another, the smaller totes inside offered odds of five to five at every slot, and the closed-circuit TVs featured tiny dots boxed at perfect intervals within a neatly squared grid. The gift-shop lady displayed her horsehead bookends in a horseshoe-shaped arc, and the popcorn lady, her striped smock in harmony with the trim of her booth, checked to see that the empty cardboard boxes she would later fill were distributed in evenly matched stacks. The fiction was carefully, if unconsciously, projected, and didn’t begin to dissipate until the national anthem had been played and the horses came sauntering up from the barns in single file for the first race. Then order gave way to chaos.

  The moment when horses enter the paddock before a race can be a bad one. Statistics that had earlier seemed so definitive are translated peremptorily into flesh, and flesh is heir to miseries—bandaged legs, a limp, a nervous froth bubbling on a filly’s neck. Many times, I’ve heard people groan when they saw what their figures had led them to—some poor creature with downcast eyes. I was fortunate on the opening day of Tanforan. The horse I’d chosen at the Terrace, Southern Gospel, looked good. He was a rangy chestnut gelding with a polish to his coat. He was breaking from the preferential five hole, too, which should have set my mind at ease, but I was feeling anxious. I’d been away from the track for some time, and my responses to its stimuli were heightened, exaggerated. Every flickering movement made an impression on me, and I tried to take each into account. Suddenly, other horses began looking good. Folklore’s Lite, who’d earned a high Beyer speed rating, was up on his toes. When I opened the Form to compare him with Southern Gospel, I saw instead something I’d missed before—excellent workouts for Top Pass. Was Top Pass ready to make his bid? Davidowitz might think so. The more I read, the more confused I became. The Form kept bursting open, punctured by discoveries, ruining my cartographic efforts.

  Next, I felt the concentrative energy of the bettors around me. They were staring at the paddock just as piercingly as I was, working hard to affect the outcome of the race. It was as though many versions of reality were competing for a chance to obtain. The man next to me was steaming. He wore the intense expression of a monk in his tenth hour of zazen; smoke was about to issue from his ears. I stood there paralyzed, unable to make a choice. I was afraid that if I lost my first bet, a downward trend would be irreversibly established. With three minutes to go, I ran to the windows and bet a horse I hadn’t even considered before, Spicy Gift, because I had noticed that he’d had some bad luck last time out, which indicated, absolutely, that he was bound, perhaps even compelled, to win. When I walked away, I realized I’d just put ten bucks on a twenty-to-one shot. Handicapping overkill, the brain weaving useless webs. Spicy Gift finished somewhere in the middle of the field, beaten by Bargain Hostess, a filly and first-time starter who broke from the outermost post. These factors had eliminated her from contention in my mind; now I saw them for what they were—markers of talent.

  But it was too late, I was locked into a loser’s mind-set and couldn’t shake free of it. All day long, I compounded my mistakes, playing the most improbable nags on the card, hoping to get even, to start over, the slate wiped clean, Hong Kong Flew, Skinny Dink, throwing what little expertise I had out the window, Hey Mister M.A., a toad at fifty-seven to one, giving it away, then Queequeg in the eighth race because of Melville and what they’d found taped to the inside of his desk after he died, a scrap of paper on which he’d written Keep true to the dreams of thy youth, but Queequeg drowned, too, leaving me adrift, not even a coffin for support, and in the ninth, a broken man, I latched on to the favorite, Crazy Wallet, and watched in disgust as he hobbled home fifth. Down I went, spiralling, down and down, done in but good, sixty dollars fed irretrievably into the belly of the beast and still the breeze did blow.

  The whiskey at the Home Stretch bar was soothing, lucid, unstatistical, and I sipped it and stared at the photographs on
the back-bar wall: pictures of horses and people, and a large oil painting of Emmett Kelly, the clown, his bumhat wreathed in losing tickets. About seven o’clock, a skinny man in a new denim leisure suit came in, accompanied by a short, silent Mexican who looked as though he’d just eaten a shoe.

  “Glad you’re alive,” the bartender said to the Mexican, grinning sarcastically. “You want more Cutty and Seven, or’d you get enough last night?”

  “Give him a beer,” the other man said. “He doesn’t need any Cutty. He was sick all over the barn this morning. Somebody else had to rub his horses. Isn’t that right?”

  The Mexican smiled happily and drank his beer.

  A slim blond girl, barely out of her teens, was dancing with a man even smaller than the Mexican. He was jockey-size and had the powerful shoulders and arms that jockeys often develop. The blonde drank a beer as she danced, tipping back the bottle and closing her eyes. When the music ended, she came over to the man in the leisure suit, pushed out her chest, and asked to borrow twenty dollars. “I have three tickets I can cash in tomorrow,” she said. “I’ve been holding on to them. As soon as I cash in, I’ll pay you back.”

  “Honey,” the man said, not unkindly, “that story has a beard.”

  She shrugged, looking unruffled, as though she made this pitch on a daily basis and expected a certain percentage of turndowns, and went back to the jockey-size man and asked him for five dollars. When he delivered, she used part of the money to buy a six-pack, then fed the jukebox and started dancing with another man, also very small, and when the music stopped this time, she left with him, wiggling her compact hips.

  “You ever see anybody who needs money forget to cash in?” the man in the leisure suit asked. “No way. Does not happen. That girl loves jockeys. I think she might be a groupie.”