Night and Day at the Races

Note: I’ve long enjoyed horse racing, but not without mixed feelings. Recent years have seen more humane treatment of the horses, but improvements are still needed.

By the time I was 16 and our family visited friends in Colorado, I considered myself (naively) a veteran horse-player. My brothers Brad and Brian, our friend Sharon and I drove to the Denver racetrack to bet on the horses. The night before, I pored over the Denver Post and The Rocky Mountain News racing data, on a mission to prove my acumen as a thoroughbred handicapper and shrewd racing tout. I considered the records of the horses, jockeys and trainers, as well as their histories in races of various lengths, and of course, the odds. My research pointed to one horse in particular, a strong finisher named New Deed. He was rated “Best Bet” by one paper and picked second by the other, despite his 5-1 odds.

We had fun through nine races, winning and losing a few $2 bets. When the final race came, we pooled our money into one $10 bet (that’s 1970 dollars) and settled into the first row a few feet from the track. When they led New Deed to the starting gate, you could see he was a big, broad horse. He looked like he should be pulling a plow. The race was a mile and a quarter, the longest of the night.

Tension and expectation built as the gates noisily sprang open. But we were soon disappointed, as New Deed gradually fell back into the pack. We grew silent as, approaching the final turn, he now ran dead last. As he rounded the turn, his jockey swung him all the way to the outside, and that’s when he made his move. “Down the stretch they come!” shouted the announcer, “and it’s New Deed on the outside!” Hooves thundering and turf flying, he passed horse after horse after horse. Did he have time to take the lead? The finish line loomed.

“And it’s NEW DEED, the WINNER by a head!” We all shared the $52 from that $10 bet, and to this day, New Deed remains my personal favorite race horse.

Five years later, I’m taking a semester off before my senior year, renting half of a shotgun duplex in New Orleans with three friends, finding various jobs and keeping adulthood away for one last spring before graduation. I devise a system for the four of us to win at the track. It is simple: bet the four longest shots to win, every race. We spend hours at the public library researching race results going back years, and the data shows we will make money.

We went to the track several times and tried our system. Since the New Orleans buses and streetcars were on strike, we walked, enjoying the scented, warm Gulf breezes and the gently waving palm trees shading us on the way. (I think our legs were in better shape than some of the horses’ — probably the ones we bet on.) Well, we ran out of money before we could get a large enough sample for our experiment. Our long shots didn’t come in often enough. Or, as my friend Allen McKee put it, “I felt like I was feeding my money into a furnace.”

A day of betting at the races can seem like a metaphor for life. You start with hopes and big plans, and the horses are sleek and handsome and spirited. You do your homework and make choices, or you just wing it. You decide which horses in the nine or 10 races to invest in. If your horses finish the way you hoped, you take your winning tickets back to the betting window for your reward.

The races have a rhythm. New horses burst from the starting gates every 25 minutes or so. You see and hear a couple of minutes of intense action, then another 25 minutes of quiet, growing tension — then resolution again. And so on into the night.

There’s always the next race. Until there isn’t. Come back another day, and try again.