One-Track Minds
After wasting years and money at the racetrack, I finally realized I needed help. So I sought counseling from a professional gambler.
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June 13, 1997
There is no more mind-bending task than trying to make money at the track. Becoming a chess grand master is easy in comparison. Earning a medical degree is a cinch. Getting into Harvard is easier than making your living at the track: Harvard rejects 91 percent of all applicants each year, while the average American racetrack makes losers out of 98 percent of the gamblers who walk through its gates. At the end of the year, only one out of every 50 horseplayers can total up his bets and say, "Yeah, I beat the track."
I've never been able to say it. Last summer, Arlington International Racecourse kicked my ass to the tune of $700. I did better at Hawthorne, which holds its races in the fall. I went to the track diligently, at least three times a week, and after two and a half months showed a balance of...minus $13. Not a bloodbath, but I had to ask myself if it was worth spending all my afternoons at the track--a cesspool of cigarette smoke, surly ticket clerks, horse manure, shredded tickets, hot dogs vile enough to burn an inch off your stomach lining, and losing gamblers screaming rabid obscenities at horses and jockeys--if I was just going to lose money. Some days I would spend two or three hours hunting for winners in the Daily Racing Form and still leave the track with an empty wallet. I was beginning to question the horseplayer's maxim that "the best thing in the world is to win money at the track, and the second best thing is to lose money at the track."
If I was going to win, I decided, I would need a mentor, someone who treated the track as his own personal automatic teller machine and would pass his genius on to me. After several months of searching, of sidling up to racetrack regulars and asking, "So, you make a living at this?," I found one.
His name was John Goritz, and I ran into him on the second floor of the grandstand at Sportsman's Park. I was sitting under one of the banks of TV sets that broadcast races from around the country, waiting to watch the Fountain of Youth Stakes from Gulfstream Park in Florida. A three-year-old phenom named Pulpit was running, and the horseplayers at Gulfstream had bet him down to even money, despite the fact that the colt had only run two races in his life. I thought only a sucker would bet on a horse that green, and I planned to put my money on one of his rivals, Arthur L. I figured Arthur L. would get the lead and hold it all the way to the wire. And I was panting at his odds: 7-1.
Then I heard a loud voice from the table behind me declare, "Pulpit can't lose this one."
Everyone at the track has an opinion, and I turned around to see who this one belonged to. The seer was 30-ish, a short, pudgy guy with thinning red hair and the tough-looking face of an extra from On the Waterfront. He wore a dingy Raiders jacket, an old purple T-shirt, and jeans as baggy as a rhino's skin. Propped up on the table in front of him was an enormous blue backpack, a frayed, nylon collegiate model so stuffed it looked like a tortoise shell.
"I just don't see anyone in the race who can beat Pulpit," he was telling a friend, his voice rapid, nervous (imagine Danny Bonaduce with some of the gravel smoothed over). He looked up at the TV monitor just as Pulpit emerged from the tunnel. The glossy black colt stood for a moment on the grass apron alongside the track, preening like an equine prince, then pranced out onto the dirt.
"Look at him," John sputtered. "He's dancing! That's how Cigar used to look before a race! Oh, he looks great! He looks like a great bet! He's sweating a little, but his mother used to sweat a lot, too."
I knew nothing about the perspiratory tendencies of Pulpit's mother, and I wasn't going to back a horse just because he high-stepped in front of a crowd. The Budweiser Clydesdales did that, and I doubted if any of them could outrun a fast mule. Ignoring John, I ran to the betting windows and laid down five dollars on Arthur L.
Just as I'd predicted, Arthur L. immediately took the lead. Pulpit came out quickly, too, but a quarter of a mile into the race he had dropped back to fourth.
He can't handle a challenge, I thought. As Pulpit disappeared from the TV screen, I congratulated myself on my handicapping and prepared to collect $35.
But Arthur L. began to tire. After three-quarters of a mile his head was bobbing up and down, and his eyeballs popped out as though a devil were prodding his flanks with a pitchfork. After a mile he was through, burned out, and Pulpit was charging out of the pack to take the lead. "Pulpit is the real deal!" the announcer hollered as the colt crossed the finish line, too young and talented to realize there was anyplace to finish but first.
The Fountain of Youth was the last race of the day for me--Sportsman's had canceled its card due to a dangerously muddy racing surface, and all the east-coast tracks were winding down. I stuffed the Arthur L. ticket into a pocket of my satchel, where it joined all the other worthless slips of paper I'd bought that afternoon, and walked over to John's table to congratulate him.
At the end of the day most horseplayers chuck their programs into the trash and slump out to the parking lot. But John was working. With a pair of gleaming scissors he was dismembering a copy of the Daily Racing Form, cutting out results charts for tracks all over the country. He worked like a tailor at a bolt of cloth, paring away the edges of each page with sharp snips, then laying it atop a stack of sheets on the table. He had emptied the backpack, and I could see several cellophane bags filled with neatly trimmed newspaper clippings: the Sun-Times horse racing results for every day since 1993. An age-softened Coca-Cola folder contained charts from all the local harness tracks.
"You've got a ton of shit here," I said, impressed. Half the horseplayers at Sportsman's Park couldn't even read the Racing Form. They relied on dollar-fifty tip sheets or newspaper touts for their picks. But this man was a scholar. He had spread out in front of him the most thorough horse racing archive I'd ever seen.
"I've been making my living out here for eight years," he told me as he continued to work his scissors.
Eight years seemed like a long time for him; his quick and anxious manner made him seem boyish. And the longshoreman quality of his face was balanced by a look of innocence: imagine Ernest Borgnine crossed with Beaver Cleaver.
"Eight years?" I said. "This is all you do? You don't have another job? You survive just by playing the horses?"
"I hit the twin trifecta at Hawthorne for $24,000 last year. That's the only thing that's keeping me going. I don't make a lot of money at this. A lot of times I starve."
He cut out the last chart and began loading papers into his backpack.
"Are you going to be out here tomorrow?" he asked.
I was. As a freelance writer I had pretty flexible hours, and I went to the track every chance I got. Sundays were prime days.
"Come out here tomorrow and I'll teach you how to look at the horses. That's the key to this whole game. I used to work with horses, and if you know how to look at them, you'll own this fucking place."
I couldn't meet John at the track that Sunday; the cops towed my car and I had to go downtown to bail it out. But I found him the next day, after the second race. He was sitting up on the second floor not far from one of the gangways that lead out to the bleachers. His handicapping archive was spread out in front of him, and he was making notations on his Form with a red pen. He looked exhausted.
"I was up until five in the morning handicapping the Fair Grounds," he said, referring to a racetrack in New Orleans. I looked down at his Form. Every horse's record had been marked up with a private code of ovals, lines, numerals, and letters. "I got home at six o'clock last night, and I spent 11 hours on this. The weather report said it was gonna rain, so I handicapped for slop, and it's not even raining there. Jesus. It better start raining soon."
I looked up at the TV broadcasting from the Fair Grounds. The track was still dry, but the sky was the color of a bruise, and the wind was billowing the jockeys' silks and making the horses' manes wave like pennants.
"As soon as it starts raining, I'm gonna kick ass there," he said. "I've got a horse later on who's gonna do great in the slop."
Despite the handicapping god's refusal to empty the clouds over New Orleans, John was winning. In fact he was beating up on three tracks at once: the Fair Grounds, Gulfstream, and Sportsman's. I, meanwhile, was already down $34, having lost the daily double and then bet $30 to win on Sally's Hero, a bum colt who ran out of the money in the second race.
As the third race approached John insisted we go out to the bleachers to watch the horses in the post parade. It was time, he said, to start my tutorial. As soon as the bugle sounded, heralding the horses' arrival on the track, he yanked on his Raiders jacket and we hustled outside. I trained my binoculars on the cavalcade of horseflesh while John told me what to look for.
"Do you see any horses that look really straight, that their legs are lined up really straight?" he asked.
"The two looks good," I said. The horse I was looking at, Danzig's Design, walked as though his spine were an iron rod. No Civil War general's horse had ever looked so controlled, I thought.
"OK, now watch him when he turns around, and then tell me what you see," John instructed. "You want a horse whose head doesn't move at all when it turns around."
John ran inside to bet on a race at Gulfstream, but I stayed out in the bleachers, studying the horses as they jogged around the clubhouse turn and then cantered down the backstretch, warming up for their three-quarter-mile sprint. When I had handicapped the race the night before, I'd tabbed the number-three horse, Fast Phone, as the likely winner. I examined him through my binoculars. He had no apparent problems--he wasn't sweating excessively, his coat looked shiny, and there was no hitch in his stride--but his gait wasn't quite as true as Danzig's Design's was. At the top of the backstretch the horses turned around: Danzig's Design rotated like a ship on the water.
"Two looked fantastic," I reported to John when I got back to the grandstand.
"Are you going to bet him?"
"I'm not going to bet this race."
"How come?" John seemed incredulous, almost offended that I'd waste the lesson he was trying to give me.
"I still like Fast Phone, but he's only even money, so I don't want to bet on him."
"So bet on the two," John insisted.
"Look at his record in the Form." I spread my paper out on the table. "He hasn't been close in his last three races."
I ran back out to the bleachers to watch the race, still convinced that Fast Phone was going to clobber this field. On paper he appeared to have no real rivals. The rest of the bettors agreed with me: Fast Phone's odds were still 1-1, meaning more than half the money on this race had been bet on him.