Fortunately, Headley liked working with cripples. They were puzzles to him, engines in need of tinkering, and it gratified him to watch a jockey boot home a horse who only a month before had been sulky and limping, totally unfit. He would have preferred working with good stakes horses, but such animals were not his current lot, and he was realistic enough not to suffer from their absence. He liked Sandomir, because Sandomir didn’t push. Some owners demanded that their horses run every ten days regardless of condition, even if it meant injecting an unstable joint with cortisone, but Sandomir was willing to accumulate feed and veterinary bills, which could be staggering, until Pichi felt better. So Headley proceeded slowly. He began by having a vet sew up her vulva, to mitigate the air-sucking problem, and gave her Robaxin, a muscle relaxant, for her back. Then he started her exercise program, walking first, followed by some light galloping. Bo worked on her legs, applying poultices, liniment, and bandages, talking to her in his cranky old flatlands voice. “She’s a radical son of a bitch,” he would say, mixing genders freely, but he was pleased when at last he could clean her stall without expecting to catch a hoof in the middle of his forehead.
One morning when she seemed particularly calm, Headley decided to school her in the starting gate. He was a little apprehensive, recalling Fenstermaker’s warning, but Pichi seemed so placid and yielding he thought she might be ready. A special gate for schooling horses was set up away from the track, back in the shade of some live oaks, and Headley led his pupil to it. But as soon as Pichi approached the gate, she went wild. She attacked the machinery, kicking and rearing, and when it failed to collapse she tried to jump over it. This was precisely as feasible as a cow jumping over the moon. Her exercise rider, with the help of a couple of assistant starters, managed to restrain her and lead her away before she injured herself. Headley was incredulous, but he kept schooling her patiently, with tender supervision, until she went into the gate without resisting and stood there moderately still, waiting to be released.
All gamblers look for signs, and I was given an appropriate one the first week of the Tanforan meeting when a filling from one of my molars popped out. The image of emptiness should have been transported to my brain, but it was not, and I kept losing steadily. Naturally, I had alibis, and ample time in which to consider them, but in the end they had no effect on the ledger, which was negative. During one inglorious sixteen-race period, I picked nine consecutive losers. Six of them finished out of the money entirely. Nobody else was doing so poorly, of that I was certain. Scrawny old guys in panama hats and suspenders were cashing in at the fifty-dollar window, and old ladies playing systems based on the sum of their nieces’ birthdays divided by the pills in an Anacin bottle were hitting the daily double daily. They jumped, they howled, they clapped their hands and shed joyful tears, and I wanted to bust their kneecaps with a baseball bat.
Losers form strange partnerships; I formed mine with Arnold Walker. Together, we licked our wounds. I thought Arnold resembled a diplomat, in his elegant pin-striped suits and Cesar Romero locks, fog-gray and fragrant as pastilles. The Turf Club matrons loved him. He looked like an envoy sent from a far country for the express purpose of breaking hearts. If all gamblers are innocents, sharing a nostalgic longing for a condition prior to habituation, then Arnold was a superior gambler, by virtue of his superior innocence. He refused steadfastly to learn anything from experience, and even winning thousands of dollars did not satisfy him for long. What he wanted couldn’t be found at the track, but there was no telling this to him. He’d spent a lifetime avoiding the truth. He was fifty-three, and thrice married, and his face, tanned to a Boca Raton brown even in April, was entirely free of lines. Arnold liked me, because I was a writer. “Writers are class,” he said. He claimed to have seen Ernest Hemingway during the Second World War in the lobby of the Waldorf-Astoria with a gorgeous broad on his arm and a glass of champagne in his hand, and this remained his picture of how writers lived. One night, he insisted on buying me dinner and made me order lobster. Arnold had inherited a chain of drugstores on the peninsula and wanted to show me that money didn’t mean a thing to him, but, of course, it did. Over drinks, he confessed to being down three grand for the year. “Down at Del Mar once,” he said, cracking a lobster claw, “I had the best day of my life. I hit two exactas big and won thirty-eight hundred dollars. Then I went to a party and picked up a movie star and took her back to the motel.” He looked cautiously around before whispering her name. I didn’t believe him for a second.
Beyer and his speed figures were the first thing I threw out of my handicapping-support system, not because Beyer was wrong or inaccurate but because using figures went against my grain. I was learning that to win you had to work within the net of your own perceptions. For me, speed had negative connotations. It was too American a preoccupation, too insistently the grammar of motorcyclists and technologists. Passo a passo si va lontano, I had heard them say in Florence—step by step, one goes a long way—and this accent on the qualitative aspects of a journey was more to my liking. So I decided to concentrate on factors like class and condition, relegating speed to a secondary position except when it appeared to be the single factor separating one horse from all the others. But even after making this adjustment I lost again the next afternoon. The track, it seemed, was exactly like life, unjust and aleatory. Muggers won handily, thieves tripled their bankrolls, and murderers walked whistling to the parking lot, their blades secured in fat green sheaths.
“You’re going to shoot a hundred and fourteen, dear.”
I came to think of the trainers as Renaissance princes who ruled the backstretch. Walking the shed rows, I saw that each trainer’s barn resembled a principality, embodying a unique blend of laws and mores, an individuated style. Bright-colored placards bearing trainers’ names or initials or devices shone in the sun, and it was possible to intuit the flesh of a prince from the sign he displayed. If Eldon Hall’s escutcheon showed a white dollar sign on a green background, then it stood to reason that Hall would be tall and lean and southern, wearing an expensive Stetson and specializing in speedy Kentucky-bred two-year-olds. Jake Battles’s colors of red and optic blue suggested a feisty, raw-faced character who rode his pony belligerently and wore a monumental turquoise ring. Emery Winebrenner, whose temperament was mercurial, ranging from cheeriness to abject depression, offered a simple but evocative design—the letters EW rendered in sunny yellow against a field as black and sunken as night.
Trainers sometimes had difficulty keeping their principalities intact. Grooms got drunk and vanished, bouts of flu made the rounds and always lingered too long, deadly illnesses like founder shot forth from the clouds to skewer stakes-level performers, and crazy owner-kings were always demanding tribute—a table at the Turf Club or lobsters at Spenger’s. Cheap horses were a nuisance. They went easily off form, stopped running the first time they met any opposition, and usually had no heart. The legend of Hirsch Jacobs and his horse Stymie, who was claimed for fifteen hundred and returned almost a million, wasn’t really any consolation. A patient trainer might squeeze one win per season from each baling-wire beauty, but the purses offered in low-level events were small indeed and barely covered costs. Pichi, when she deigned to eat, cost as much to feed as Alydar. Trainers charged owners about twenty dollars a day, plus veterinary bills, to stable a horse, but even the stingiest among them had trouble extracting a living wage from dribs and drabs of double sawbucks.
Temptation, then, was everywhere, in every shed row, and certain darkling princes were known to succumb on occasion. By sending a fit horse to post at high odds, they could recoup at the parimutuel windows what they’d lost in feed. There were several time-honored tactics for influencing the outcome of a race. For example, superior workouts might not be listed in the Form; clockers made mistakes, especially at dawn. Horses could be worked at private training tracks until they were razor sharp, and trainers were under no obligation to make this information public. Sometimes unwary bug boys were g
iven misleading prerace instructions—told to keep a rail-shy horse on the rail, say. Sometimes a trainer rode a bad jockey for a race or two, then switched to a pro. Sometimes a jockey was told that it might be beneficial to make slight errors in judgment coming into the stretch—to hold the mount in check too long or use him up too soon or go to the whip too late or not go to it at all. They made such mistakes genuinely, and it was almost impossible to separate true from false. There were hundreds of ways to make a horse’s past-performance record read like a clinical account of lameness. Masking a horse’s true condition was not considered a capital offense, but sudden form reversals artificially induced, those miraculous wake-up victories that resulted in big payoffs, were punishable by law. They occurred nonetheless. A jockey would slap a battery equipped with wire prongs—the device, held in the palm, was called a joint—to his mount’s rump at the proper instant and hold on as best he could while the poor electrified beast romped home. New drugs were constantly being developed, drugs for which no equine-testing procedures had yet been devised. These were administered in dark stall corners, and soon thereafter sixty-to-one shots zoomed out of the gate like angels hyped on amphetamines. Those nags ran. They ran once, and once only, before slipping back into nagdom forever, but a hundred bucks selectively invested repaid six thousand big ones at any cashier’s window on the grounds. These victories stood out, clearly evident, but stewards were slow to investigate. The unwritten rule around race tracks—not only Golden Gate—seemed to be that you could get away with anything once, but repetition would cost you dear. The penalties for such offenses were supposed to act as deterrents. Princes could be fined or suspended or banished from California, stripped of their licenses and sent packing to distant provinces where the summer county-fair meet was the nonpareil of Thoroughbred racing. Still, there were always a few who were willing to take the risk. Most trainers, though, worked hard and chose to be scrupulous. They’d never have the chance to win a Triple Crown, but their honesty might someday be rewarded with the trainers’ championship of Golden Gate Fields. “In so artificial a world,” Burckhardt wrote of princes, “only a man of consummate address could hope to succeed; each candidate for distinction was forced to make good his claims by personal merit and show himself worthy of the crown he sought.”
I met Bobby Martin, the top trainer at Golden Gate, at his office, a musty tack room furnished with dilapidated armchairs and a vinyl-covered couch that belonged in a bus station. The office felt like Kansas—some inner sanctum on the plains with gas pumps out front and day-old newspapers for sale at the cash register. Martin sat behind a wooden desk and studied a large cardboard chart that listed all thirty-four of his horses and indicated by symbol whether they were scheduled to work (run hard over a specific distance—six furlongs, a mile—usually in preparation for a race), gallop, walk, or rest that morning. I had the impression that the chart wasn’t really necessary, that Martin had long since memorized the data but wanted to give them an outward form and make them official. The chart was businesslike, professional, and so was the black phone on the desk, one of the few private lines I ever saw on the backstretch. These accoutrements suited Martin. He was a quietly confident man. He wore a rust-colored ski jacket and blue jeans with a dry cleaner’s crease in them. His blondish hair was combed, and he didn’t look beaten down, the way many trainers do when they hit forty.
Mike Haversack, a bug boy, sat opposite Martin and stirred the dust with his whip. He had the right face for pumping gas—thin, pale, with that curious race-track hardness creeping in around the mouth. He galloped horses for Martin and sometimes got to ride a maiden. A groom led a big chestnut to the office door, and Haversack stepped out of the office and into the stirrups. The transfer had a surreal quality, especially so early in the morning, but then horses were always showing up in odd places. They filled the available space quite suddenly, and I sometimes had the feeling of being pushed out of frame, like an actor snipped from a key scene. Another rider replaced Haversack on the couch, waiting, in turn, for his mount, and was soon replaced by yet another rider. The men were all dressed just like Martin, in ski jackets and jeans.
Martin bought his first horse, Domingo Kid, when he was nineteen. He paid only seven hundred and fifty dollars, because the horse, who had once run in allowance races, was so broken down and rank that nobody else wanted to deal with him. But Martin was young and ambitious, and gradually conditioned the Kid, and won eleven races with him that first year and twenty-six over all. Martin’s name first appeared in the standings at Golden Gate in 1966, when he saddled ten winners in forty-three tries, and he has dominated them ever since.
Young trainers wanted to be like him when they grew up, and old grooms said that Bobby hadn’t changed since he was a kid. He was honest and polite, and he treated his horses well and his grooms even better, paying them top dollar and refusing to inflict the usual psychic punishments. Even Tumwater Tom, who started early on his daily quota of Olympia beer, and knew more about horses than most trainers, had stuck with Bobby. There was something of the classic Western hero in Martin’s demeanor—the shy, commanding presence of an Alan Ladd. He represented that most estimable race-track quality, class, but his soft jawline and slightly lumpy nose would have kept him from ever playing opposite Maureen O’Hara.
There were two main reasons, beyond intelligence and hard work, for Martin’s success: his expertise as a conditioner and his mastery of the claiming game. Conditioning a horse properly—getting it into shape and then keeping it fit, on form—is a craft little practiced at cheaper race tracks. Because of financial exigencies and near-terminal shortsightedness—some call it stupidity—trainers often push their horses much too hard in morning workouts, cranking them up for a single race, the cliché Big Effort, and then afterward, when the horses return to the barn feeling tired and sore, have to rest them for a month or two before running them again. This tactic makes no sense, but trainers pursue it zestfully, with oblivious devotion. The real key to conditioning is conservation. Energy expended in a race or a workout has to be restored. So Martin kept close tabs on all his horses, checking their energy levels as he might check the water in batteries, and designed for each of them an exercise program—the chart—that took into account individual strengths and weaknesses. He took the time to know his stock, and so he got an optimal performance every race instead of one stellar showing followed by months of eights and nines.
Claiming is a more intricate and cerebral activity—it is called the poker of the backstretch—but, again, success is dependent on knowing your stock. The idea behind claiming races is to create fields of roughly equivalent talent and value. Any horse entered in a claiming race can be claimed, or bought, for a predetermined price, set by the Racing Secretary in the Condition Book. In theory, trainers won’t enter a horse worth twenty thousand in a race in which the horse could be claimed by a rival for sixty-five hundred. But, of course, this happens all the time, because trainers, like their constituency, are gamblers. They are always looking for an edge. Take, for instance, the hypothetical trainer Profit and his horse Lament, a four-year-old gelding who in the past month finished fourth and second in two $12,500 claiming races. After such good performances, Profit might be expected to enter Lament at a higher level—say, $14,000—to protect him (Lament is clearly worth $12,500), but Profit, a sharper, drops the horse in class, and enters him in a race for a price tag of $8,500. This means one of three things: Lament is in bad shape, and Profit wants to get rid of him at a slight loss before his true condition is known; Lament is not in bad shape, but Profit wants others to think he is, and hopes to win a race against inferior opponents; Lament is just beginning to be in bad shape, getting old, with a kink in his step, and Profit is trying to make him look attractive, a bargain, while in fact he wants the horse to be claimed, having figured that the winner’s share of the purse (say, $4,000) plus the claiming price ($8,500) will more than compensate him for the loss. The third tactic is the most difficult to master
, predicated, as it is, on keen judgment, and Martin makes better use of it than anybody else at Golden Gate. Of twenty-three head he’d “lost” since January, only three were worth feeding. Sometimes he got stung—this was inevitable—but more often than not his experiences echoed the early one with Domingo Kid. “I do a lot of speculating,” Martin said. “You can’t get too attached to the horses.”
Glen Nolan had made his money operating a drayage company, but he’d diversified into a less predictable enterprise—a hobby for him, really—and now owned Nolan Farms, Inc., a ranch in Pleasanton where he bred horses to race and sell. Around the track, he had a decent reputation. He spent necessary cash without groaning, and his stock was honest and sometimes fairly good. Smart handicappers gave Nolan’s starters an edge for condition and maybe talent. He employed a trainer, Steve Gardell, at the farm, and during Golden Gate meetings he always requisitioned a few stalls in which to board horses who would be running regularly. This year, he had three stalls, and they were presided over by Debra Thomas, a princess of the backstretch.
Debra’s official title was assistant trainer, but she spent most of her time grooming. The work showed in her body. Her shoulders were broad, her arms were hard and thickly muscled, and her hips were very trim. She had the build of a gymnast, somebody whose specialty was the parallel bars. She wore her blond hair at shoulder length, and her eyes were blue and cool, except when she stepped outside the race-track frame and became a young woman of twenty-two, pretty, a little dreamy, flirtatious, and decidedly feminine. She had three horses in her care: Ali Time, a dumb but honest two-year-old filly; Moonlight Cocktail, a moody four-year-old filly; and Bushel Ruler, a handsome three-year-old gelding who hadn’t raced yet. Of them all, she loved only Bushel. She called him Oly, after his dam, Ohlavarc, and thought he’d fixated on her as a mother substitute. When she walked down the shed row in the morning, he’d stick his head out of the stall and whinny and nicker until she gave him some attention. He had personality and a touch of class, and Debra wished she could change his name to something more suitable than Bushel Ruler. Choosing the right name for a horse wasn’t easy. The Jockey Club rules state that you are limited to eighteen letters, counting spaces and punctuation, and you can’t duplicate names already registered or use those of “famous or notorious people”—no Johnny Rotten, no Richard Nixon—or “trade names, names claimed for advertising purposes, or names with commercial significance.” Copyrighted names are permissible five years after their introduction into the culture, and coined and made-up names are permissible if they are accompanied by an explanation. There are also mystical injunctions to consider, like the Arabs’ belief that a horse should never be named foolishly or in jest, because it will live up to that name. Debra had once worked for a man who had let her name all his horses, and she said that the best names often came to her at night, in dreams. She was proudest of her choice for a colt by Eskimo Prince: Chill Factor, she’d called him, and it fit perfectly.
The Only Game in Town Page 11