Sunny Jim

by Breslin, Jimmy;

  It didn’t matter to Johnson that Fitzsimmons was a non-bettor. He was a man who no more would have thought of asking Fitzsimmons to do something than the trainer would think of offering to do it. Johnson also was a man who had a lot of trouble getting his horses to go off at a decent price. He had a habit, it seems, of going around to his friends and making sure they were not risking their money when one of his horses was entered in a race that seemed too tough. When a spot to risk a bet would come up, Johnson would make a big thing of telling it to nobody except the first two or three or four people he would bunk into. As a rule, a word given secretly to the first four people you meet at a race track rarely reaches more than 10,000 others. Johnson continually would walk into the betting ring after advising his few friends and then explode when it would become apparent half of America was betting his horse.

  “Somebody’s talking,” he would howl.

  As for his trainer, Johnson was certain he was getting the best of it. He’d do the betting and let Fitzsimmons do the training. It turned out well.

  The way it worked with the horse Captain Alcock shows this. Johnson bought the horse for $7900, turned him over to Fitzsimmons and then thought about shooting himself when he watched the horse in his first couple of starts in Quincy Stable colors. The race would start and Captain Alcock would come out of the gate in a cute, mincy little stride that would leave him five lengths out of it before things even started.

  Mr. Fitz decided to take the horse to the starting gate one morning for a little schooling in how to break out of there fast and pay a few bills. The exercise boy would yelp, give the Captain a good bang on the fanny to excite him, then start pumping with his arms. Each time, the Captain reacted to all this in identical fashion. He would make a number of delicate movements, which would break anybody who had to feed him or bet on him, then settle into a clean stride which, in a race, would get him a sixth or, if he was extra good, fifth.

  This went on for several days. After his morning workouts, the Captain would return to the barn and eat like a champion. The horse could break Wall Street, Johnson said after catching one such workout and feeding.

  To Mr. Fitz, it was just another case of a horse not doing what he was born to do. This meant there was something physically wrong with the animal. Everybody else said it was orneriness, but this is something Mr. Fitz doesn’t believe exists in people and he got the Captain back in the barn and began to work on him. First the legs. Then the back. Then the throat and mouth. Then the horse would be walked and the moves would be watched carefully. It took time, but there is always time to be spent on a horse that is hurting someplace, and cold winters in New Jersey and the summers of hunger in Maryland paid off now because if there was one thing this man knew it was what to do with an unsound horse. It turned out, after all the probing, to be the Captain’s kidneys. Mr. Fitz piled thick blankets on the Captain until it looked like the horse wouldn’t be able to stand with all the weight on his back. The Captain began to sweat and lather and Mr. Fitz kept piling the blankets on and finally one morning at Aqueduct they broke the Captain from the gate and with no pain causing him to flinch when he started to move, the horse slammed out of the gate.

  Mr. Fitz put him in a race at Saratoga and the charts showed the Captain finishing fifth, but anybody who saw the race knew he broke well. He was beaten only a couple of lengths for all of it and he was the fastest horse on the track at the finish.

  “He needed the race,” Mr. Fitz said after it. “We’ll run him back in New York and he should be right up there. He’s a fine horse now.”

  The horse was put in a race at Belmont Park and the bookmakers listed him as 70-1. “Price is way out of line,” Mr. Fitz was saying in the paddock before the race. “They see he was out of the money last time, but what they don’t know is how well he ran. I think he should be one of the favorites.”

  Nobody believed him and the price stayed there. Which was fine with Johnson. His trainer had done the job for which he was hired. Now Johnson was going to take care of his interests. While his trainer was in the paddock without a nickel riding on the horse and only caring that patience with the Captain had made him a useful animal, Johnson was in the clubhouse moving on the bookmakers. At 70-1, he was going to take a little piece of this. The bookmakers obliged him and then, a few minutes later, they were placing one bill on top of the other to form a bundle of $70,000 to give their client, Mr. Johnson. While they counted, Captain Alcock, with Joe Mooney leaning forward and patting him on the neck, was loping toward the winner’s circle. The horse had run his race, as Mr. Fitz told everybody he would. Johnson was delighted. It was a terrific score. Mr. Fitz was delighted. He had helped a horse.

  The gentleman from the Brooklyn Eagle watched the race from the press stand and he didn’t like it at all.

  “Thief,” he muttered when the Captain took the lead at the eight pole and came down a winner. “Terrible thief,” he muttered when the Captain came to the winner’s circle. “Murderer,” he screamed when he heard about Johnson’s big score.

  That night, the gentleman from the Eagle got to a typewriter in the sports department of his paper and he was so anxious to go to work on Fitzsimmons, he didn’t know which key to hit first. In those days, libel was something papers printed as a matter of policy. It was open house for the kind known as a typewriter tough guy. It is amazing how little in the way of guts it takes to sit down at a typewriter and try to do a job on somebody. You can be the most frightened person on earth, but left alone at a typewriter and with an outlet to print what you’re writing, you can be tougher than Khrushchev. So on this soft September evening, he sat in the Eagle sports department and he was the champ. His typewriter jumped up and down and he wrote with anger.

  The next day’s paper carried an eight-column line on the sports page which read:

  FITZSIMMONS NOTORIOUS IN AND OUTER

  The one-column head reading out from the line said:

  QUINCY STABLE TRAINER

  NOTED AS ONE OF RANKEST

  FORM ADHERENTS

  Horses Invariably Cause Form

  Upsets—Hidden Influences

  Hold Him Up

  Recent Episode Unbearable

  The story, a corker, was filled with such as:

  “The most glaring spectacle of slipping it over on the public … what this Fitzsimmons person does under the watchful eye and protection of the Jockey Club … this brazen perpetration to get the money has been allowed to go unnoticed … it was purely a piece of sharp practice by this form flip-flapper to make a killing …”

  Mr. Fitz felt badly for the gentleman.

  Mr. Fitz was moving to the top now, toward days when the dice would nearly always come up seven. And he was building this career in a period of racing that is always considered the best years the sport ever had. It was a time when they ran only six races a day on a four-day week and winters were spent resting horses and conditioning them properly for the next season, not racing them into the ground in Florida as they do now. It was a sport designed for gracious living—the Sport of Kings, they called it. And during these years the Kentucky Derby emerged as the big single event the sport needed in order to gain identity with people across the country. In 1915, Cornelius Vanderbilt Whitney, Sr., shipped the filly, Regret, to Louisville and with Joe Notter riding, she took the race. Regret was the first Eastern horse to be shipped to the Derby and she was also the only filly ever to win the Derby. In the spring, girl horses usually are more interested in being caught by boy horses than in outrunning them over a mile and a quarter. Which should settle the question of horses being dumb. This natural combination of recognition by a powerful stable such as Whitney’s, plus the natural story surrounding a filly winning the race, was all an ex-tailor named Matt J. Winn needed to put the Kentucky Derby into an American sports classic. Winn, who placed a Colonel in front of his name, was a bourbon-drinking, cigar-smoking, magnificent liar who was president of Churchill Downs. He spoke lovingly of the bluegrass and lor
e of the Kentucky horsebreeding belt, but was cute enough to make his speeches from a suite in the Waldorf-Astoria in New York City, where people who counted would be able to listen to his build-up.

  Everyplace else, this Golden Age of racing was for the rich, unhurried, and unworried, who did things in the grand style. However, despite its trappings of graciousness, these years also were wide open for anybody who wanted to take a shot at a private retirement fund; On Mr. Fitz’s side of the track, it was still a place and always would be a place where horses had sesamoid trouble or split pasterns and anybody working on them properly didn’t have time for anything else. But on the other side of the track, where the people are, a man who could think a little and had some daring to him could take it in big.

  Bookmaker Johnny Walters was one. He had started his life selling programs at Sheepshead Bay. With a mind made for numbers, he became the biggest bet-taker of his time. When he opened shop each day, it was not for the purpose of grinding out a living. He had his eye on big money and would take a chance for it on any given day. It paid off. When he died they needed a couple of key rings to cover the packed safe deposit boxes he owned.

  There was, for example, the afternoon at Aqueduct when George H. Bull, the millionaire owner, came up to Walters in the clubhouse and bet $25 on his horse, Mustard Seed. The $25 was Bull’s limit. A few minutes later, Bull came back, took the cigar out of his mouth and said he wanted to get down for $200 on the horse.

  Jack Goldsboro must like the horse, Walters said. Goldsboro, a crack horseman, trained for Bull. Walters would go along with this kind of an opinion.

  “Mustard Seed right now can beat anything alive,” Bull said.

  Walters nodded. He had the horse at 6-1 on his slate.

  There was action coming on this race, Walters knew, because two of the heaviest gamblers of all time, Harry F. Sinclair and Payne Whitney, had horses entered in the race. Both customers, they would go heavy. And Walters was ready to go against them With Goldsboro’s opinion.

  Sinclair made his move in a few minutes. He put $35,000 down on his horse, Timeless. Payne Whitney followed with a $25,000 bet on his Sir George. Then Walters took in a pair of $10,000 bets on a horse called Replogel. The normal action on the race took place, too. As he grabbed the action, Walters’ eyes narrowed and he started to figure. Normally, a bookmaking operation is a mathematical affair. There are the prices you lay on the horses. You can only take so much action on any one horse. If you are overloaded on a certain horse you must even it off. The normal thing to do is get rid of some of the overload—bet it off with another bookmaker. It is a game of percentages and quick thinking and if you don’t know what you are doing you are a cinch to have your finances maimed or killed off altogether. But on this afternoon, Walters was taking the big shot. He gave orders to get off every dollar taken in on Mustard Seed. He was going to hold the rest. If Whitney’s horse won he could have lost up to $200,000. If Sinclair’s came in, he was going to be hit for $150,000. If Replogel came down on top, he would be out $200,000.

  But taking chances was Walters’ business. He stood like a statue and watched the race. When Mustard Seed started to draw clear in the last sixteenth Walters didn’t even smile. He watched the horse go under the winner, then turned around and started talking with his assistants about the prices for the next race. He had just pocketed $80,000 for himself. But that was the last race. He was looking for the next one now.

  These were years when a big bettor could operate. Under today’s pari-mutuel system, it is insanity to do any heavy betting. The 16 per cent tax on all bets is too much percentage for anybody to give away and there is no chance to get an acceptable price because the mutuel machines have made Communism out of payoff prices. When a horse wins, everybody gets the same payoff. In this pre-mutuel era we’re dealing with now, each bookmaker made his own prices and a man could shop. And if the price on a horse opened at 20-1 and you bet on it, then it subsequently was bet down to 6-1, you still had 20-1 going. But with the mutuels you can bet on it at any time, it doesn’t matter. Bet early. Or bet at the last second. The payoff will be made on the post-time prices only. A big bettor in those times also did not have to face a game where the state and track jumped in and took that 16 per cent.

  They were times where you could bet horses big. And there were men whose names never appear in the record books, but who bet enough to break Russia. One of them was a man named Colonel Samuel James who started out in life as a cotton planter in Louisiana, but in leisure time spent around the Fairgrounds track in New Orleans he came up with an idea which, as far as he was concerned, was six lengths better than the cotton gin. The Colonel, a tall, quiet man who wore a mustache, thought that a thing called time was the only way to rate race horses.

  Most people who bet horses and ran them at this time were of the opinion that comparison was the only way to rate a horse. The class of a horse was determined by whom the horse had beaten and by what distance he had won by. But Colonel James felt time was all that counted. He brought this idea into New York, along with a thick book filled with timetables which had been developed by a Dr. Airth in London. The Colonel then went to work. He refused to accept the official time of a race as given by the track. He clocked races himself, breaking the fractions down to a hundredth of a second instead of the usual fifth of a second used by the tracks.

  As there were no official cameras on the grounds, Colonel James took photos of all finishes himself. When developed, these showed margins and placings of also-rans which were not properly recorded in the newspaper charts. The Colonel began to knock the game apart with his theories.

  Just as James was getting his system to work, a civil engineer named Robert Mensel was working on a road-building project in New Orleans. He was an industrious, homeloving non-drinker or gambler. Then he went to the track on an afternoon off from the job. It was a windy day and as he watched the first races of his life he began to wonder what the wind velocity meant to horses. Presently, he became quite occupied with this theory and a few winners with it changed his opinion of road-building and now he could be found at the New York tracks, placing an anemometer in the infield in order to get a wind reading. This was quickly applied to the intricate timing charts of Colonel James. Now under the wind theory, a head wind can do more to hinder a horse than a tail wind of the same velocity can help. It all sounds like gibberish and the horses still had to run around the track, but Colonel James and Mensel and Claude Kyle and Will Collins and others who went with these speed charts, as they are called, were out there banging away, day after day, and nobody ever had to go to work for a living.

  “Value,” Colonel James always said. “You must get value on your bets. To beat the races you must shop. You can, under ideal circumstances, win one third of your bets. Therefore, you must get 4-1 or better on an average bet in order to show a profit. If you were to take only 3-1, it would leave you even. In short races, where there is more chance for interference, you must get a bit better than 4-1. There must be value at all times. You must get even money on the 1-2 shot, or 5-1 on the horse that should be 8-5. Otherwise, there is no chance of profit.”

  It was a business on which James and the ones like him worked 12 to 14 hours a day, and worked with MIT precision. The 16 per cent takeout faced by today’s players would have left James playing second cornet in a Salvation Army band. But in these days, with his time and wind and figures and value, he made out.

  These were strange men, as are most professional gamblers. The common idea of a big gambler is a man who treats money as if it were confetti, can be found ringside at a night club if he’s a winner and generally turns every day into a Saturday night in Sodom and Gomorrah. Which is exactly the way it is not. Colonel James, for example, made sure to buy straw hats when they were on sale in October in order to save a half dollar or so. Collins walked about with a great motto about the use of his money—“Go to Wall Street only on Sundays, holidays and days of panic.” Otherwise, he wouldn’t invest a do
llar in the White House. But when panic hit the Street, Collins was there and he once got a little thing called Eastman-Kodak when it was rock bottom and when he died they needed three surrogates to cut up the money.

  It was at this time, and over on the other side of the track from Mr. Fitz, that probably the best-known race-track betting maneuver of all time took place. It was at Aqueduct, on July 4, 1921, a 94-degree day that was thick with humidity. At 2:30 P.M. a man named Arnold Rothstein walked over to speak to Max Hirsch, his trainer. Max was heading for the race secretary’s office.

  “I’m scratching the horse, that all right with you?” Hirsch said.

  “What’s the matter with him?” Rothstein said.

  “Nothing. You know the shape he’s in. Perfect. But I’m thinking of dropping him in an overnight later in the week. Although any spot is a good one for him right now.”

  “Why scratch him then?” Rothstein said. “I’m always ready to win a bet.”

  “He’s still in the barn at Belmont,” Hirsch said.

  “Get him here and get him running,” Rothstein said.

  Then Rothstein turned and headed for the clubhouse. He was going to start making bets on the horse, Sidereal, which was entered in the third race. Not just normal bets. But enough bets to satisfy an idea that had grown into an obsession with him. He wanted to win a million dollars on one horse race. And for some reason he just had made a snap judgment and picked this boiling afternoon to satisfy his urge. The horse he was going to try and win his million with was a two-year-old which had not won in the only three starts of his career. Bookmakers had Sidereal listed at 30-1.