The Only Game in Town

by David Remnick

  On the afternoon I met her, Debra and Steve Gardell were preparing Moonlight Cocktail for the third race, a claimer. Debra said Moony had always been a problem horse. She’d run so poorly the year before, once falling twenty lengths behind when she was favored, that everybody had written her off, but Nolan had shipped her to the veterinary school at the University of California at Davis for a last-chance physical before turning her out. The vets took some X-rays and discovered a painful hoof disease, which they corrected. Now Moony was on the comeback trail. During the Pacific meet, she’d raced twice, but she was only beginning to round into shape. She was no longer crippled, just feisty, and Debra bore the scars. Moony had once kicked her in the leg, and another time the filly had brought her head up quickly, smashing Debra in the nose and barely missing the critical space between her eyes. Every groom and almost every trainer told such tales, but I still found them harrowing. There was really nothing to protect you from the horses except a sort of grace conferred by the animals themselves.

  Debra knelt in the straw at the front of the stall and removed packed ice wrapped in towels from Moony’s front legs. The ice kept the legs cool and the muscles tight. When the last ice shavings were brushed away, Gardell began wrapping the legs, applying sheets of cotton first, then Ace bandages, wound in a figure eight around the ankle and then wound around the leg almost to the knee and fastened with a strip of adhesive tape. Taped front legs usually indicate that a horse has problems, but Debra said that in this instance the tape was cosmetic, meant to deceive. Moony was making a slight class drop, from eighty-five hundred to seventy-five hundred, and the bandages were supposed to plant a seed of doubt in the minds of other trainers. “She’s got a real good chance to win,” Debra said. “She was real sharp when she galloped yesterday, and I’ve been holding her off ever since. She’s ready, if she’s in the mood to run.”

  Later, I stood by the paddock fence and watched the third-race entries as their grooms walked them around. Flowering bushes along the perimeter of the paddock gave off a soapy smell from white waxen blooms, and I had the impression that the horses had all been recently bathed. Moony looked splendid. She had green yarn laced into her mane, and her dark-brown coat had a fine sheen. Her quarters were tight and had a sculptural intensity, a focussing of power, and as she walked she kept her ears pricked. Debra was also dressed for the occasion, in a Western shirt, a leather belt decorated with blue flowers, and a pair of new jeans. Her hair was brushed, and she wore sunglasses. She held herself very erect, conscious of her posture, and she whispered constantly to Moony as they circled. Their heads seemed confined to a single plane, and they moved forward as a unit. Seeing Debra so brushed up and shiny made me aware of the plight of less presentable grooms. Some of them hated the paddock—its public nature, the way it accentuated their pimples and boils—and though they did their best to clean up and face it squarely, they always looked like recalcitrant children sent off to school. They had too much oil in their hair, bloody shaving nicks on their cheeks, and creases in shirts and blouses that had been badly folded and stored too long in musty bottom drawers. That the world valued beauty, and rewarded it disproportionately, was never so apparent as in the paddock.

  I went to the windows, still smelling soap, and bet the selection I’d made the night before. Moonlight Cocktail chose to run, and won by a half length, closing fast and paying $14.20.

  Though I hadn’t yet learned to distinguish good tips from bad ones, I was learning other things about handicapping at Golden Gate Fields. On hot days, when the track baked to an unyielding consistency the color of piecrust, I looked for front-runners, because their speed seemed to last and they weren’t so easily caught from behind. On foggy days, the track was moist and deep, and then I looked for horses who had been running in the Northwest—at Longacres, near Seattle, or Oregon’s Portland Meadows—because they were used to heavy strips and often ran better than the Form indicated they might. I stopped betting any exacta race in which the favorite went off at less than eight to five, because, for reasons inexplicable to me, these races almost never ran to form. I quit playing the ninth altogether, because it was another exacta—the fourth of the day, a crazy last chance for bettors to win back what they’d lost—and because the Racing Secretary usually carded a long route, a mile and an eighth or a mile and a quarter, and the jockeys often rode in such a controlled and controlling fashion that the outcome was more than a little suspect.

  Late in April, Headley gave Pichi her first start of the year, in a maiden race to be run at six furlongs for a purse of six thousand dollars. He engaged Jane Driggers to ride. She looked good in the Sandomirs’ colors, yellow and black stripes topped with a black cap. Pichi drew the outermost post, twelve, which wasn’t as disadvantageous as it seemed. She lugged in toward the rail, listing always to the left, so she would at least be as far away as possible from that particular problem. Whether it would influence her performance was unclear. Bettors shied from her in great numbers, depositing their money instead on Sailing Flag, who had been bred in Kentucky and had some Fleet Nasrullah blood, and letting Pichi go off at eighty-five to one. Sentiment overtook me, and I put two dollars on her nose.

  She behaved well in the gate, much to Headley’s relief, and broke well, too, second after the buzzer, but she got into trouble immediately, blocked by other horses, and dropped back into the pack and disappeared. A speedy filly named Hut’s Girl took command and, according to the Form’s subsequent description, “proved much the best under intermittent urging,” winning by eight lengths and leaving Sailing Flag unfurled in the dust. Pichi finished eighth, thirteen lengths behind, but she did make a tiny move in the stretch, expending a minuscule atom of acceleration and gaining a little ground. I saw Headley after the race and expected him to be shattered, his long months of conditioning proved worthless. On the contrary, he seemed pleased, and promised better things from Pichi in the future. “I told you she’d need a race,” he said. “You watch her next time out.” Hope, I thought, that’s what you purchase at eighty-five to one.

  Before the next race, I fell victim to confusion once again. I was torn between the rational order of things and my intuition and what it proposed. A sensible reading of the Form had persuaded me to play Top Delegate, the eight horse, who had been running well against better horses and was dropping down to his proper level, but I kept returning to another horse, Little Shasta, because the name reminded me of Mount Shasta and the fine trout waters around it. Names could be irresistible. I remembered the time my brother and I had rented a boat and tooled across an arm of Shasta Lake and then up into the Pit River, where we camped for the night. We were fresh from Long Island, still unused to the sight of mountains, and our only camping experience was of the backyard pup-tent variety. At dusk, we heard howling in the foothills—a wild, blood-chilling sound that increased after dark. “A killer dog,” I said. “You’re right,” said my brother, and we broke camp immediately and slept in the boat, anchored safely some fifty yards from shore. It had only been a coyote howling, but I didn’t realize this until much later, when the call had become familiar. So Little Shasta spoke to me of innocence, of lakes and wildness and pines and the few things in life I’d finally come to know. On the other hand, Top Delegate reminded me of Henry Kissinger, and I was fighting this associational bias all the way to the windows. Suddenly, I was face-to-face with a ruddy-skinned ticket seller in a black cardigan sweater; intuition gave way to reason. “Eight,” I said, and then I watched in misery as Little Shasta went wire to wire, winning as decidedly as Pichi had lost.

  Every now and then, the structural pattern was broken by instances of pure vision, gifts, and I kept rejecting them. Arnold Walker understood. I bumped into him at the bar at Spenger’s. “You’re not talking about luck,” he said, chewing on a swizzle stick. “That’s when you win because the horse in front of your horse falls down and breaks a leg.”

  “What am I talking about?”

  “What you’re talking about is
magic. When your horse is the only horse in the race.”

  The race was for two-year-olds, a five-furlong sprint, and I looked over the stock in the paddock before making my wager. The horses had run only once or twice before, or not at all, and they were still green and had the alert, playful look of the ranch about them. They weren’t aware of resistances, opposition, the gradual wearing down of tissue and desire, and some of them had a bafflement in their eyes when they surveyed the grandstand and the people by the paddock fence reading their limbs. I liked to bet two-year-olds, because they were so young and guileless. Older horses, the kind handicappers often call “hard-hitting veterans,” were often deceptive before a race, drag-assing around, snuffling, their backs swayed and noses dappling the dust, and more than once I’d lost money when just such an animal rose into himself a hundred yards from the gate, suddenly pumped up on Thoroughbred afflatus, and led the field from wire to wire. Two horses in the present field attracted me—Pass Completion, the favorite, and an outsider, Flight Message. Both looked honest. I was standing in front of a tote board, trying to decide between them, when an old man came up and asked if he could look at my Form. He was very polite, with clean pink cheeks, and he smelled of cologne and a dash of clubhouse whiskey; he wore gold-rimmed specs and a traditional senior citizen’s shirt, white nylon and short-sleeved, with a sleeveless T-shirt beneath it.

  “Haven’t read one of these for years,” he mumbled, running the spine of his comb under lines of type. “Say, this horse has been working well. Raindrop Kid. Raindrop Kid. What’re the odds?” he asked, squinting.

  “Eighteen to one.”

  “Eighteen to one? Eighteen to one?” His eyes were gleaming now, and a bit of froth appeared on his lips. “That’s an overlay if ever I saw one,” he said before vanishing into the six-dollar-combination line.

  Around me, people were suddenly moving, prodded into action by the five-minute-warning buzzer, and I was arrested by the swarming colors and shapes, nests of teased hair, lime-green trousers, dark skin. I wondered if the old man knew what he was talking about or was just another trailer-park baron on holiday. It occurred to me that he might be a manifestation, some emissary from the outposts of my consciousness. I looked around. He wasn’t there. Time was passing, so I stepped into the flow to play Pass Completion, but when I reached for my money I pulled out something else instead—a small antique medal my brother had given me years ago. I’d used it as a key chain until the hook at the top had broken, and now I carried it for sentimental reasons. It pictured a knickered boy in a golf cap rolling up his sleeves and preparing to flick a marble at other marbles, arranged in a cruciform at the center of a circle. Above the boy’s head were the words “United States Marble Shooting Championship Tournament.” His feet rested on laurel leaves. There was no illustration on the other side, only text. “Malden Championship Awarded to Emil Lawrence by The Boston Traveler,” it read. But why had the medal jumped into my hand? The answer, when it struck, seemed obvious—to keep me from putting any cash on Pass Completion. Was the old man hiding behind a pillar somewhere, using his powers of telekinesis? No matter. I knew for certain what I had to do—magic, magic—and went dreamily forward and, feeling absolutely certain, bet Raindrop Kid to win.

  Sometimes a race unfolds exactly as you’ve envisioned it, with the horses cleaving to a pattern in your brain, and this seemed to be happening now. Raindrop Kid broke slowly, as I had thought he would, and was seventh after three-sixteenths of a mile, but I expected him to begin moving soon, and he did, on the outside. By the stretch, he was in striking distance. His legs were fully extended, and he moved along in an effortless coltish glide. He trailed My Golly, whom I hadn’t even considered, and as he drew up to challenge I waited for the next phase of the pattern to develop, horses hooked and matching stride for stride, and then the final phase, the Kid’s slick expenditure of energy he’d held in reserve, his head thrown forward just far enough to nip My Golly at the wire. But it was My Golly who began to accelerate, drawing away, and I watched him pass the finish line and felt the pattern dissolve, soup draining into my shoes.

  Then the “Inquiry” sign appeared on the tote board. The stewards were going to review a videotape of the race, because it appeared that Enrique Muñoz, on My Golly, had bumped into Rogelio Gomez and Raindrop Kid in the stretch. The sign had a strange effect on me. It was one turnaround too many, and I felt unpleasantly suspended. I looked away and saw a sparrow trying to pin a moth against the windbreak of the grandstand. The ongoing business of biology made me aware of the sound of my heart and the blood circulating through my body. I took a deep breath, but the air was warm and settled miasmatically in my lungs. Somebody had spilled popcorn down the steps in front of me, and for a while I counted kernels. The waiting was bad, as it always is, and I tried thinking about other things. A sudden explosion of bulbs, brilliant flashes on the tote board, interrupted my cogitation, and then John Gibson, the track announcer, announced in that grand theatrical manner he had, full of hesitations, that after examining the videotape…the stewards…had decided…to disqualify My Golly and award the race to Raindrop Kid. The Kid paid thirty-eight dollars and twenty cents for every two dollars wagered to win, and when I collected my money I could feel the heat in my hands, all through me, and I knew how hot I was going to get.

  All week long, I kept winning. It had nothing to do with systems, I was just in touch. When I walked through the grandstand, I projected the winner’s aura, blue and enticing. Women smiled openly as I passed. I drank good whiskey and ate well. One night, I went to a Japanese restaurant and sat at a table opposite Country Joe McDonald, the singer who had been a fixture at rallies in the sixties. Joe had a new wife with him, and a new baby, who refused to sit still and instead bawled and threw an order of sushi around the room. A chunk of tuna flew past my ear. Even this seemed revelatory, the domestic roundness of a star’s life, his interrupted meal, carrying the baby crying into the night, and I knew that someday soon Tuna or Seaweed or Riceball would appear on the menu at Golden Gate and I’d play the horse and win. Things fleshed themselves out before my eyes. I bought two bottles of Sapporo Black at a liquor store and went to sit on the Terrace steps and listen to my upstairs neighbor’s piano exercises, the dusky fastnesses of ivory. This tune, I thought, will never end.

  1980

  PART TWO

  IMMORTALS

  “Which one? Great heavens, are you mad?”

  A SENSE OF WHERE YOU ARE

  JOHN MCPHEE

  The basketball locker room in the gymnasium at Princeton has no blackboard, no water fountain, and, in fact, no lockers. Up on the main floor, things go along in the same vein. Collapsible grandstands pull out of the walls and crowd up to the edge of the court. Jolly alumni sometimes wander in just before a game begins, sit down on the players’ bench, and are permitted to stay there. The players themselves are a little slow getting started each year, because if they try to do some practicing on their own during the autumn they find the gymnasium full of graduate students who know their rights and won’t move over. When a fellow does get some action, it can be dangerous. The gym is so poorly designed that a scrimmaging player can be knocked down one of two flights of concrete stairs. It hardly seems possible, but at the moment this scandalous milieu includes William Warren Bradley, who is the best amateur basketball player in the United States and among the best players, amateur or professional, in the history of the sport.

  Bill Bradley is what college students nowadays call a superstar, and the thing that distinguishes him from other such paragons is not so much that he has happened into the Ivy League as that he is a superstar at all. For one thing, he has overcome the disadvantage of wealth. A great basketball player, almost by definition, is someone who has grown up in a constricted world, not for lack of vision or ambition but for lack of money; his environment has been limited to home, gym, and playground, and it has forced upon him, as a developing basketball player, the discipline of having nothing else to
do. Bradley must surely be the only great basketball player who wintered regularly in Palm Beach until he was thirteen years old. His home is in Crystal City, Missouri, a small town on the Mississippi River about thirty miles south of St. Louis, and at Crystal City High School, despite the handicap of those earlier winters, he became one of the highest-scoring players in the records of secondary-school basketball. More than seventy colleges tried to recruit him, nearly all of them offering him scholarships. Instead, Bradley chose a school that offered him no money at all. Scholarships at Princeton are given only where there is financial need, and more than half of Princeton’s undergraduates have them, but Bradley is ineligible for one, because his father, the president of a bank, is a man of more than comfortable means.