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There's an old saying: Horse races are not run on paper. That afternoon, Danzig's Design proved it. He leaped out of the starting gate ahead of Fast Phone and led all the way around the track, winning by a head. Danzig's Design paid $9.80 for every $2 bet to win.
I got back to the grandstand to find John sitting with his head in his arms.
"You were right about that two," he moaned. "Jesus, we should have bet that two horse. If we had just bet 20 dollars, we could have won 98 bucks."
For a horseplayer the only thing worse than losing money is not winning money you should have, since the sums involved are much larger. I once gave half a thought to betting $2 on a long-shot exacta combination at Arlington, then decided to pass. The exacta requires a bettor to pick the top two finishers, in order. The horses I'd liked came in one-two, paying $973. I felt as if I'd muffed the winning field goal at the Super Bowl.
John whipped open his Form to the Sportsman's entries and pointed to the record for Danzig's Design. "Look at that. It was obvious. Look how good he does at Sportsman's. He loves Sportsman's."
He was right. Danzig's Design had won a third of the races he'd run at Sportsman's Park, and those races had accounted for half his lifetime earnings. In 1996 he had run four times at the track, finishing third, then second, then winning, before finally running a terrible race that suggested he needed a rest. That summer he ran two poor races at Arlington, a track he obviously hated, and then was laid off for eight months until Sportsman's opened again in February. Fast Phone was 1 for 15 (now 1 for 16) at Sportsman's Park. Danzig's Design had been the best horse on paper too, but I hadn't looked deeply enough to see it.
The rest of the afternoon John found insights in the Form that were too subtle for me to notice. He was like a Bible scholar who can read a mundane verse like "She maketh fine linen, and selleth it; and delivereth girdles unto the merchant" and from it extract an important life lesson.
In the eighth race, I burned $30 on Don't Waste Time, who had won in his first race of the year at Sportsman's.
"See, he loves this track," I insisted, trying to apply the lesson I'd learned earlier in the day.
John disagreed. His pick was Notamomenttosoon, who figured to take the early lead, and who was running on the drug Lasix for the first time (Lasix is a diuretic that improves a horse's breathing and stamina by preventing internal bleeding. Almost all racehorses are given it eventually.) Of course he was right. Notamomenttosoon seized the rail and won by a length.
By this point, my wallet needed Lasix: it was bleeding severely. I was down $92 going into the ninth race, and I hadn't cashed a ticket all day. So I proceeded to make a serious amateur's mistake: I tried to get even on the last race. I bet $25 to win and $25 to place on Army Brat, a filly with a fantastic record at Hawthorne the previous autumn: in six races she'd never finished worse than second. Army Brat was 2-1 on the tote board, so at best I could only cut my losses, but I was sure to win something on the bet. The only way I could lose, I told myself as I yoked on my binoculars and headed out to the bleachers, was if some 300-pound goon ran out on the track and whacked Army Brat in the knee with a baton. In figure skating, perhaps, but not in horse racing.
No goon appeared, but Army Brat finished fourth. She tried to rally on the turn, but because she was a come-from-behind horse (a "closer"), she had to run to the outside of three other horses who had gotten there sooner. The outside part of the track was deep and slow that day; no matter how hard Army Brat ran, she couldn't gain any ground. Now I was out $142, my worst beating ever.
I found John at his table, tallying up his booty for the day. He'd beaten all three tracks, to the tune of $272. After a day like that, I'd have been driving home at 95 miles an hour with tin cans tied to the back of my car and a sign reading "I Am the God of Handicapping" propped up in my back window. But John seemed more exhausted than excited. Winning was his business, and the business day wasn't even over yet. He planned to spend the evening at Balmoral Park in Crete, betting on harness races. By the time Balmoral completed its card, he would have spent 29 of the last 34 hours either gambling or handicapping.
"I'm starting to get burned out on this," he admitted as he packed away his charts and notebooks. "I've been doing it for eight years. I don't have a life. I don't even have a girlfriend. All I do is handicap and go to the track. I feel like a bond trader."
His goal, he said, was to win enough money to go back to college and earn a degree in advertising. But he was having the same problem as a lot of other 35-year-olds stuck in wearying jobs: he made just enough cash to keep going but never enough to buy his way into a better life.
"I want to be like Darrin on Bewitched," he said. "You know, write the slogans. This horse racing, a lot of times I starve doing this. I've got a cushion now, because of that twin trifecta, but I've still gotta work my ass off. It's no life doin' this."
Unlike most other gamblers, horseplayers aren't playing against the house but against each other. The odds are set by the amount of money bet on each horse minus the track take, the juice a gambler pays to make a bet. This is known as pari-mutuel wagering, from a French term meaning "among ourselves." The mathematics of the pari-mutuel system make consistently beating the game nearly impossible. For every dollar the track takes in on win, place, and show bets, it pays back 83 cents (for some "exotic" bets, such as the trifecta and the "pick three," the return is a miserly 75 cents). Slot machines, which are much less expensive to maintain than horses, return 93 percent of the money they take in. But because playing the horses can be a game of skill and judgment rather than luck, it can be beaten.
The best horseplayers tend to be obsessive, pathologically disciplined monomaniacs, usually men, who have purged their lives of any distraction that might prevent them from focusing on the one thing that really matters: handicapping horses. In Picking Winners, a 1975 book still considered one of the best on handicapping, Andrew Beyer calls playing the horses "the toughest game in the world, one that demands a passionate, all-consuming dedication from anyone who seriously wants to be a winner." In his younger days Beyer was so devoted to the game that he effectively took a vow of celibacy. Sounding like a 13th-century monk counseling novitiates, he writes, "The most deleterious effects on a horseplayer's concentration are caused by women. When a gambler has had an exceptional day at the track, or is in the midst of a great winning streak, he may exude a sense of self-esteem and confidence to which women respond. If this occurs the horseplayer is dangerously apt to fall in love, and the distraction is sure to wreck him at the track."
It's not a game for dilettantes. As I would learn from hanging out with John, the world offers far more lucrative, far less time-consuming ways of making a living. They're called jobs.
John is a sharp horseplayer, but he admits that over the last four years his income from the racetrack has totaled only about $50,000. He makes a little extra money selling T-shirts in bars and bowling alleys for his father, George, a retired restaurant owner. Father and son also share a house in Burbank, about five miles down Cicero Avenue from Sportsman's Park.
"He brings a decent amount of money home," sighs George, who occasionally accompanies John to the track. "I kind of consider it his job."
George would prefer to see his 35-year-old son work at something more conventional. "But he's hooked on this. He says it's my fault because I used to bring him to the track when he was a baby. He used to have a job working tool-and-die down south, and if there was a racetrack within 300 miles of where they were working, he'd get up early in the morning, drive there, spend the afternoon at the races, then drive back and work at night. I ask him why he can't just place his bets in the morning and go to work, but he says he has to see the horses."
John also worked for a while as a butcher, then as a horse trainer's assistant (he quit after seeing a practice rider get thrown and kicked in the head), but he's not really cut out for a steady job. Like Mordecai Richler's Duddy Kravitz, the young entrepreneur who drives a taxi and produces bar mitzvah movies so he can "get me some land," John is an instinctive hustler, a guy who'd rather make a buck on his own farm than five on someone else's plantation. He'd be perfect as the proprietor of, say, a Greek restaurant. He'd be the kind of restaurateur who treats all his friends to free drinks and poses for pictures whenever an alderman or TV anchorman comes in to eat. Follow him around Sportsman's Park for an afternoon and you'll see that he knows, or claims to know, everybody in the joint: mutuel clerks, jockeys, trainers, stewards, the shoe-shine man, the lunch ladies in the cafeteria, the "juice guys" who lend money to desperate gamblers at 10 percent a week.
"'Ey, Lou, how ya doin'?" he prods, buying a Form from one of the sour-faced men at the program booth.
"You see that guy?" He points to a stringy-haired guy with a slouch who's copying results off a TV monitor. "He makes his living here picking up winning tickets people throw away by accident. If you want to know who won a race anywhere in the country, just ask him."
John also claims an acquaintance with Garrett Gomez, one of the leading jockeys in Chicago. During the post parade, John says, Gomez signals that he's on a live horse by glancing up at the clubhouse, where John usually sits. I was never able to verify this relationship. As far as I could tell, when Gomez was parading a horse he never looked anywhere but straight ahead.
Once I liked a horse Gomez was riding and asked John to "let me know if he's giving the signal here." As Gomez rode past, he cast a few glances toward the clubhouse. They didn't look meaningful to me--he appeared to be bored or stretching his neck--but John reacted like Paul Revere getting the "one if by land, two if by sea" sign.
"He's saying he's got a good horse," John insisted. "Go bet him."
I wagered six dollars, exactly what I'd been planning to bet before I saw the jockey work the kinks out of his neck. The horse broke sluggishly from the gate and was never in contention.
To be fair, though, that was one of the only times John ever gave me a bad tip. John isn't infallible--the best pros pick a winner only about a third of the time--but he sees things that are invisible to most bettors, and his archives contain information that few others are diligent enough to collect.
One afternoon we were sitting in the clubhouse at Sportsman's, and I was having another terrible day. I had just blown $60 on a horse named Appolo Gold, despite John's warning that he looked listless. He was listless. Appolo Gold showed some early speed, then faded to sixth, leaving me down $88 for the day. The last race was coming up, and as usual I wanted to get even (I know, I know, but it's hard to think logically when you're trying to get revenge against a racetrack). As I was stewing, the horses filed down the backstretch toward the starting gate. With the brightly colored number-towels draped over their backs and the escort ponies at their sides they looked like a living carousel.
"Who do you like here?" I asked John, who was already scribbling his symbols on the next day's Form. Winners can afford to think about tomorrow.
He glanced up from his work and pointed out the first horse in the line, Our Endeavor, who was 9-1 on the tote board.
"He's dancing up on his toes," John said. "And he'll probably get the early lead. Horses with the early lead have been winning all day."
Nostradamus had spoken. I ran to the windows and bet ten dollars to win on Our Endeavor. If the horse won I'd go home a slight winner for the day. If he lost, well, it was just another ten bucks on the fire.
As the horses were loaded into the gate I leveled my binoculars at the track. What I saw thrilled me. The moment the doors boomed open, Our Endeavor leaped free like a rabbit and charged to the lead, just as John had predicted. Our Endeavor was never challenged and won by over a length. As the horse crossed the line John and I slapped a high five.
Watching horses gives John a huge edge because, strange as it seems, a horse's appearance is rarely reflected in the odds. Horseplayers, even the most serious ones, usually form their opinions by reading the Form or by running statistics through a computer, and often they're reluctant to give up on a horse who looks good on paper just because its stride is stiff. A lot of casual bettors simply cut out the racing page of the Sun-Times, take it to the track, and bet Dave Feldman's picks. Feldman is sharp, but he doesn't have a post parade walking past his desk when he handicaps. Back in March he and every other tout in town picked Polar Expedition and Recoup the Cash to finish one-two in a six-furlong sprint. It seemed logical. Polar Expedition was the 1996 Illinois Horse of the Year, and Recoup the Cash had won a graded stakes, the most prestigious type of race. But when these two monsters came out onto the track it was obvious that neither was in any shape to run. Polar Expedition's tongue was lolling out of his mouth. Recoup the Cash was rimed with sweat, and his coat looked drab and mangy. A $10-an-hour riding stable would have rejected him as unfit for service, but the bettors didn't seem to notice. He went off at 5-2, and finished next to last. Polar Expedition was 4-5, but he never contended. John spotted the horrific appearance of the two favorites and did the wise thing: he skipped the race. The winner was Bionic Lover, a 37-1 shot that any sane handicapper would have thrown out immediately.
"If I don't get a good look at the horses and see who looks good, I won't bet 'em," John said. "Even though you did all your work on your Form, you're coming to bet the seventh race at Gulfstream, you miss seeing 'em. I did all that work on the Form and didn't look at 'em, I'm not bettin' 'em. That's just the way I am. Or if I see someone warm up real good on the track, I'll bet 'em. If I see someone warmin' up, flyin' by me, that to me looks good on the track, I'll bet 'em. The horses are not like machines. That's my strong point, is looking at the horses."
But watching horses is only half of the equation. The other half is handicapping. John has several tricks for analyzing an animal's record in the Form. First, he keeps a record of the track bias at every track he follows. If he's at Sportsman's and notices that all the races are being won by horses that come from behind and rally down the middle of the track, he'll write "outside and back" in his ledger. When a horse who ran that day returns to the track, John will check to see whether it ran well against the bias. If his notes say "outside and back," and the horse he's considering broke fast, took an early lead, ran along the rail, then faded to third at the finish, he'll put a "T" next to its name, for "tab." Bettors who don't record track biases might be fooled into thinking a horse ran a bad race when actually he ran well, considering he had to struggle along on the slowest part of the track.
"Those are my bet-backs," John says. "If a horse ran great against the bias, a lot of times he'll win the next time he comes back."
(The opposite is also true. Horses aided by a track bias sometimes run like Shetland ponies in their next race. Last November at Hawthorne, there was an outrageous bias toward horses running in the middle of the track. As horseplayers like to say, the rail was dead. Classy horses coming from inside-post positions had no chance to win, while bums who were lucky enough to start from gate ten were scoring big. One rainy afternoon a chronic loser named Unie Buna drew an outside post and nearly won. When he came back, the bettors, impressed by his second-place finish, sent him off at 4-1. But the track had changed since Unie Buna's moment of glory. He got trounced.)
For harness racing John has a folder stuffed with the results charts for every rainy day dating back to 1988. Harness racing programs don't tell how often a horse has won in the mud, so serious bettors have to keep their own records. Whenever the track at Balmoral or Maywood or Hawthorne or Sportsman's is wet ("dead slop," as John gleefully calls it), he memorizes the roster of horses running that day, then pages through his folders to see if any have won in the mud before. The stack of charts is thick, so sometimes this takes hours. It's worth it, though. Paging through the "mud charts" led John to the biggest score of his life: on that rainy night in January 1996, at Hawthorne Race Course, he and his brother Mike won $24,800 on a single race. They had the only winning ticket on that evening's twin trifecta, a nearly impossible wager that requires bettors to pick the top three finishers--in order--of two successive races. The twin tri is so tough that most days nobody hits it, and the money bet accumulates until a sharpie like John sticks his hand in and grabs it.
"It was just lucky," he shrugs when I ask him about the bet that's accounted for a good portion of his income over the last four years.
Lucky? As George Allen once said, "The harder I work, the luckier I get." That $24,800 was the payoff for night after night spent alone at a table in that bungalow in Burbank, paging through piles of charts. Most of us get our paychecks a little at a time, a few hundred dollars dribbled out each week. John got his all at once, and it was far more exhilarating than picking up an envelope on a Friday afternoon.
"It was a sloppy track," he admits. "You know I got the charts, right? These were horses that happened to like the slop that day. It more or less wasn't by accident we caught it. We just went in there and bet like we bet everything else every day. Just something to go at. We just took a stand on it. After we saw how much we won, we went crazy." After paying the tax man John and Mike had $19,000 left, which they split almost equally: John, who had picked the horses, took $9,800, and Mike got most of the rest. They gave a small share of the loot to their father.
John had been gambling for 19 years when he hit that twin trifecta, and, he concedes, he might have to gamble for another 19 years before he sees another $24,800 payoff. Big-time bettors, Vegas-type guys who run with well-financed gambling syndicates, can afford to spend thousands of dollars on a bet. If a twin trifecta or a Pick Six pool climbs into six figures, they'll bet on every combination with even a remote chance of coming in, and usually they'll beat guys with better handicapping skills but leaner bankrolls. For a small-time bettor like John, that twin trifecta may have been a once-in-a-lifetime payoff.
But anyone who wants to make a living at the track has to make a big score more than once in a lifetime. Most days John makes nickel-and-dime profits--$50 here, $75 there--or loses money. If he hadn't hit that $24,800 twin trifecta, he admits, he might not even be gambling anymore. "Nobody makes serious money at this game by grinding it out," handicapping author Barry Meadow once wrote in American Turf Monthly. "You can lose for months, and you never know when your next big hit is going to appear. Maybe not for a very long time. What happens is that occasionally you make a big score. Make enough scores and you win. Make too few and you lose."