{Horseplayers: CHAPTER 8}

The Rebel Enclave

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It wasn't long before Scott McMannis had a new pupil at Arlington. Warren Weaver was another stout, broad-shouldered man -- he'd played fullback for the 1952 Austin High team that competed for the Chicago city championship at Soldier Field -- but above the neck, the two men had nothing in common. All his life, Warren had been a hunch bettor. He'd learned to gamble from his mother, who placed bets at a newsstand in their West Side neighborhood. She never taught him how to handicap, though, so when he went to the track, he hung around trainers, owners and other high-rolling gamblers. Guys who had tips.

"Once I met a guy at bingo who said he won $500 or $600 at the track all the time," Warren related. "Then we went to the track together and he told me about this horse in the second race. The horse broke down in the stretch. There went my money. There went my hopes. Last summer I hung around the paddock at Arlington and relied on trainers for tips. But the best guy I knew was the shoeshine guy, Big Red. He knew everybody. I was winning some money, but it was costing me too much, 'cause I'd have to pay for his bets. I figured there had to be a better way."

A friend told Warren about Scott's newsletter. He subscribed and started attending Scott's classes at Hawthorne, where he learned to use the speed figures.

"The first night I did it, it took me eight hours and I got two headaches," he said. "But sonofabitch, I had a field day. I won three or four hundred dollars! It really paid off, but I couldn't do that every day. It's too hard on my physical being."

Warren didn't exactly match the psychograph of a professional gambler. He was the impulsive type. "When I was younger, I wanted to marry every woman I went out with," he told me.

Eventually, he married three -- each one twice. One of his wives was a Gypsy. After their first divorce, "She put a spell on me to lure me back." His current wife was a Filipina who worked in a beauty shop. Three or four days after they met, Warren asked her to marry him. Warren was sixty-nine and retired from a job at City Hall, but he was as randy as a nineteen-year-old. In the paddock, he speculated on whether the female jockeys enjoyed their mounts. Once, when I mentioned that a passing gray horse was the son of Preakness winner Louis Quatorze, his free-associating mouth blurted, "Louis Clitoris?!" This is a healthy attitude, but as Andrew Beyer learned, women and horses don't mix. Handicapping is a jealous mistress. In the real game of life -- procreation -- Warren was beating Scott (and everyone else in the Rebel Enclave), eight-nil. But at the track, Scott was ahead a few hundred thousand dollars.

"At first, I thought he was one of those guys who shouldn't be out here," Scott said. "Every race, he'd have this huge pile of tickets in front of him. I think he's one of those guys who would have been better off before exotic betting [multiple-horse betting], when you could only bet to win."

A real teacher doesn't give up that easily. Besides, Warren was paying for the speed figures. So one Thursday, they pushed together two tables in the Rebel Enclave and spread out the Racing Form.

"Let me ask you a question," Warren said to Scott. "I knew a guy once, said you could make money if you just doubled your bet after every time you lost. You know, two dollars, four dollars. When you finally got a winner, you'd get all your money back."

(This is a strategy known as "due-column wagering." Suppose your goal is to generate $100 a day at the track. In the first race, you bet fifty dollars on a 2-1 horse. It loses. Now, you need to win $150 to meet your goal. So in the next race, you see another likely 2-1 and bet $75. If that horse loses, the next time you bet a 2-1 shot, you'll need to spend $113. And so on, to the limit of your bank account.)

"Warren." Scott paused.

"Yeah?" Warren asked warily.

"Do you know what happened to the woman who backed into a propellor?"

"What?"

"DISASTER!"

Scott flipped over a sheet of paper and jotted a list of the powers of 2: 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, 512, 1024, 2048.

"Where would you start to get uncomfortable?" Scott asked.

Warren pointed at $128.

"What would happen if you lost ten bets in a row? Then you'd have to bet $2,000. Think you could do that?"

"Uh-uh."

"You'd start affecting the odds then. You wouldn't get the price you needed to get even."

"Ah hah." Warren nodded his head.

Warren was paying fifty dollars a month for Scott's Lookup Service, a daily fax service that spared its subscribers from digging through old newsletters for a speed figure or a trip note. A dozen pages long, it listed two years of races for every horse. Most handicappers set is side by side with the Form, copying Scott's speed figures into the past performances. It took two or three hours a day. Warren seldom found the time.

That Saturday, he trundled into the Rebel Enclave just before the first race, carrying a folder stuffed with papers. A bag of trail mix swung from his hand, and his satchel was packed with Nutter Butters and Cocoa Puffs cereal bars. The day before, he'd taken his daughter to the supermarket. The snack shelf caught his eye, so he bought everything on it.

Scott was already in his seat, under the television screens. He glared at Warren over the top of his reading glasses.

"Warren, did you do your homework?"

"I've done three horses in the first race."

"Three horses!" Scott feigned shock. "What are you even doing here?"

Warren bent over his program, frantically handicapping the race until the bugler blew "Call to Post."

"I don't have time to do this at home," he grumbled. "I got eight kids. Two are still at home, and the rest are a phone call away. I'd rather take a beating than do this stuff. I hate it. It's not for me."

But he finished the task. When he was done, he ran off to bet on Golden Prophecy, who looked like a good thing at 3-1. Golden Prophecy finished third.

Scott had not moved since his arrival.

"That race was too close," he told Warren afterward. "All the horses' speed figures were about the same -- Liberation was a 41, Golden Prophecy was a 40, Wild View was a 39."

Indeed, the field was so closely matched it produced a "flat board." There was no favorite, but four horses were 3-1. That's a sign that there's no standout in the race, no horse you can bet with confidence. Warren wanted to be disciplined. He really did. But he had a hard time staying away from the betting machines, even in situations like that.

"One of the first things Scott noticed about me was I bet every race," he told me. "He'd say, 'You want the number to Gamblers' Anonymous? You can't do that and win money at the racetrack.'"

Warren managed to sit still throughout the second race. (It was easier to resist. The horses were two-year-old maidens. Some of them had never run before.) But just before the third, he popped out of his seat. He had to bet the trifecta. Scott tried to stop him.

"Where you going, Warren?" His voice was half-bemused, half-demanding.

"I got a tip on this race from my friend Babe. He runs Babe's Tavern on Milwaukee. Babe said this was a good race, and when he come to the track, he comes to win!"

Warren spent $12 to box Babe's horses in the tri. His ticket hit -- for $21.80, one of the smallest prices anyone in the Rebel Enclave could remember.

"Warren, you better go cash that ticket before they run out of money," Scott taunted. "You know, the objective of this game is to make a little money do a lot of work, not the other way around."

The rest of that afternoon, Warren fretted over his Racing Form, filling in numbers from the Lookup sheet. Scott was already handicapping Sunday's races.

"Let me copy your charts," Warren entreated. "I gotta spend time with my family!"

Scott waved a sheaf of papers.

"You know when I did this?" Scott said. "Today. You're not with your family when you're at the track."

Warren borrowed his put-upon delivery from Rodney Dangerfield. He loved to imitate the comedian. The sad-sack jokes sounded right coming out of Warren's broad, squashed face, his wide, comic mouth. Like Rodney, Warren was a city boy, born before the Second World War. "My family was so poor," Warren would bray, "that if I hadn't been a boy, I woulda had nothin' to play with." Watching Warren struggle with his handicapping reminded me of Rodney studying for his final exam in the movie Back to School. His character, Thornton Mellon, is an earthy, unlettered tycoon who made his fortune with street smarts. Faced with history, economics, Faulkner and Joyce, he panics. "I can't do it," he moans. His family forces him to study. They hold books in front of his face. They push him through all-nighters with coffee and cold showers. It's a miserable week, but Thornton earns his degree. Scott was trying to force Warren through the same academic labors.

"You know," Warren whispered to me, "he's not really that easy to get close to as a friend."

"Well, no," I said. "He's the teacher."

"I just hope he'll be friendly with me," he muttered. "Just give me the number. Sign language, anything. I'm sixty-nine years old. It's all I can do to be out here every day. I have trouble walking. I got pains in my knees! I wanna get one of my kids to come out here and place the bets for me. I'll give 'em a little cell phone so I can just sit here."

The next day, the professor and the pupil met an hour before post time. Patiently, Scott went over each race, showing Warren how he had used speed figures to predict the winners. Scott was a head taller than Warren, so sitting side by side, they looked like a teacher and schoolboy who'd been at the same lesson so long they'd grown old together.

"OK, who do we like in the fourth race?" Scott asked.

"This one," Warren blurted, stabbing a blunt finger at the name Doughty.

"Well, look at the numbers we wrote off to the side here. What's Doughty's fastest figure?"

Warren's eyes scanned, his mind calculated.

"Forty-one," he said at last.

"OK. Now, look at this one over here. Sweet Baby Jane. What's her best figure?"

"Forty-six."

"So do you think maybe Sweet Baby Jane is the fastest horse?"

Warren agreed that maybe Sweet Baby Jane was. It was a widely held opinion -- Sweet Baby Jane was sent off to victory on a tide of cash, which she returned to her investors. Scott and Warren were not among them.

(I once asked Scott what was wrong with betting a horse at 4-5, if it had the best speed figures. I'd just passed up two short-priced winners, and I was getting blue balls.

"Most people bet on short-priced favorites," I pointed out."

"Most people lose money here!" he bellowed.)

Scott had shown Warren how to pick a winner. They were making progress, but Warren wanted to make money. By the middle of the following week, he still hadn't made a big score. He was getting antsy. He sat across the room from Scott, at a table scattered with programs, Lookups, Nutter Butters, his bag of trail mix, and a copy of the Green Sheet, the tip sheet sold at the gate for $1.50.

"What do you need a Green Sheet for?" Scott asked him.

"It's got this arrow next to the horse's name that tells whether he's going up or down in class," Warren explained.

"Can't you tell from the Racing Form?"

"Yeah, but this is easier."

Double Audit was going to win the eighth race, and everyone knew it. Double Audit was 3-5. The only way to make money was to put him on top of an exacta. But the rest of the field looked evenly matched. Their figures were identical. It was impossible to single out a second-place horse.

"When you've got three horses who look like they can finish second, what do you do?" Scott asked.

Warren jumped at the question.

"Bet a $10 exacta," he shouted.

Scott looked over at me with a slumped expression.

"It's like he didn't hear the question."

The correct answer, according to Scott, was to put Double Audit in the Daily Double. Scott rose to play him with Mount Kilimanjaro, a good-looking long shot in the ninth.

"Oh, you're gonna bet though!" Warren roared. "Do as I say, not as I do."

Warren hustled after Scott. He bet five dollars to win and place on Double Audit, and he bet a two dollar exacta: Double Audit over a challenger named Anyplace Anytime.

Double Audit won, of course. He paid $3.40 to win and $2.20 to place. Anyplace Anytime finished third, wiping out Warren's exacta bet.

"I wanna see if you break even on this one," Scott mumbled.

Warren had wagered twelve dollars. He won fourteen dollars.

"It wasn't a total loss," he shrugged. "I made two dollars."

And twenty minutes later, he got to feel smarter than the teacher. In the ninth race Mount Kilimanjaro finished last, flushing Scott's Daily Double down the drain.

The next day, Scott loved King of Chicago in the ninth. It was a turf race. Warren had done his homework, and he, too, saw that King of Chicago's speed figures towered over the twelve-horse field. At three minutes to post time, King of Chicago was 5-2. The professor and his pupil stood up together and stumped off to the betting machines, two heavy-bellied men with identical rolling gaits. They returned with their tickets and watched King of Chicago spring down the stretch, gathering up rivals with long, grasping strokes until he saw nothing ahead of him but grass. A glint of satisfaction glittered across Scott's eyes. Warren was open-mouthed with exhilaration.

"There you go, Warren. You got your winner. You didn't bet a lot of goofy exactas and trifectas, did you?"

"No."

------------------------------------------------------------------------

This all took place shortly after midsummer. It was the zenith of the year, and the zenith of Scott's tutelage with Warren. After Warren singled out King of Chicago by himself and bet him to win, Scott felt that maybe he'd sharpened that soft, pleasure-loving mind, that maybe Warren would stop mooning about food and sex, stop betting every race, and start playing the horses like a hard-assed investor.

It never happened. In his classes, Scott taunted out-of-control bettors by asking, "Are you here to have fun or are you here to make money?" Warren was there to have fun. Even after his private tutorials, he wanted to bet on every race. As Scott watched Warren piss away his education, two bucks at a time, his attitude soured from frustration to disgust to contempt.

"Warren, where are you going?" he'd call, whenever his student strayed from the Rebel Enclave. After he disappeared behind the escalator, Scott would mutter, "I need to get a bungee cord and tie it to his waist to keep him from betting." When Warren returned, stack of tickets in hand, Scott would shout, "I've given up all hope for you, Warren. Do you have enough tickets there to play canasta?"

Scott finally concluded that Warren hadn't been born to beat the races.

Once, he followed him to a betting machine and stood a few inches behind him, smirking. When Warren turned to see who was crowding him, he looked sheepish. Then he finished punching in his bet.

"I'm beginning to wonder how bright he is," Scott said one day when Warren didn't show up. "From what I can gather about him, he got involved with his local political machine at a young age and sort of rose up through the ranks until he got his job at City Hall."

Warren was a ward-heeler, an organization man. A horseplayer had to be an individualist.

Warren was getting fed up with Scott, too. Looking pained and oppressed, he'd glare at his Lookup and declare, "You know, this shit's no good. This shit isn't helping me at all."

He stopped using the Lookup, and then he stopped coming to the Rebel Enclave altogether. One day, Scott spotted him in the paddock.

"He hid behind a pillar when he saw me," Scott reported.

I went down to the paddock to find Warren. He wasn't hiding behind a pillar. He was sitting on a bench, near the point where the walking ring empties into the tunnel. There was a bottle of water at his feet, and his lap was cluttered with papers. A few yards away, a bookie leaned over the railing, yakking on his cell phone. ("That's Phil Santori," Warren whispered. "He bets big.")

Warren was tired of the homework. He was tired of Scott's lecturing.

"What is it with that guy?" he asked me. "He's always gotta be going after somebody. He was always, 'Where you going?' He never leaves you alone.

In the paddock, Warren felt liberated. In mind, in body, in wallet. He had a new system: he was betting ten dollars to win, twenty dollars to place, and thirty dollars to show on his horses.

"That way, even if the horse comes in third, I get something back," he said.

He was about to use it, too, on the 3-5 favorite. I think our chat distracted him, though. When he checked the Diamond Vision screen that looms over the paddock like the Great Oz, the horses were being led to the gate. Warren scurried to a machine, but he couldn't punch in his bets before the gate opened. His horse won easily.

"Darn it. I coulda won twenty-five bucks there," he cursed. "Now I gotta start all over again."

Three floors up, Scott McMannis sat alone in his nook, patient as a spider, waiting for the next good price.

© 2005 by Ted McClelland

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