The Gambler

It all began with a horse called Rhythm Lad. I was in high school, just sixteen, when I bumped into Eddie Gregory at a party. He was a former classmate, older than me and already employed. He worked the lunch counter at a bowling alley near the Roosevelt Raceway harness track. Eddie was short and stubby and grew a pencil moustache to look more mature. It didn’t really help. He looked like a kid trying too hard. Yet he had a puppyish charm. People trusted him not to betray their secrets. He drove a slick car and had a knack with women.

At the party Eddie waltzed in with a knockout blonde on his arm. “A divorcée,” he whispered, drawing out the last syllable. “She’s twenty-two.” I was impressed. Eddie seemed so worldly. He asked, “You want a tip?” I failed to understand. “On the races at Roosevelt,” he clarified. The sulky drivers ate at the bowling alley, and they’d taken a shine to Eddie and touted him on the horses ready to win. “Rhythm Lad in the sixth,” he confided. “It’s a sure thing.”

A sure thing. I’d never heard the expression before. It sounded good, and I wanted in. “How much should I bet?”

“Six bucks. I’ll play it across the board for you.” Two dollars each to win, place, and show.

I knew nothing about racing. I’d never been to a track, not Roosevelt, Belmont Park, or Aqueduct, all near my home on Long Island. But I liked the idea of being a gambler. Guys and Dolls had been our school play, after Our Town and before Oklahoma, so I found it easy to imagine myself as a young Sky Masterson rolling the dice in Broadway’s fast lane. It was my dream to be an outlaw. Racing held a literary appeal too. I’d read that Hemingway had played the horses at Auteuil outside Paris. I’d go there someday. I saw it in my future.

They didn’t simulcast the Roosevelt races on TV. There wasn’t any radio coverage, either, and no off-track betting. To find out if I backed a winner, I had to wait for the paperboy, a shrimpy kid on a bike. Jimmy or Johnny. Or maybe Tommy or Bobby. It was hard to keep the paperboys straight. They were crewcut and rosy-cheeked, Boy Scouts with sixteen merit badges. This one tossed a neatly wrapped copy of Newsday onto our driveway. I flipped to the race results buried in the sports section. Rhythm Lad had won and paid thirty-six dollars across the board.

Easy money, I thought. All you need is a good tip. I was elated, but I didn’t dare tell anyone. My mother hated gambling. She regarded it as the first stop on the road to perdition, with smoking and drinking to follow. She’d done such a good job of steering me clear of sin I felt a little guilty. I didn’t deserve any credit for winning. Eddie had given me the inside dope, and that wasn’t fair. I’d cheated.

The guilt did not last long. Two minutes, at the outside. I drove over to the bowling alley to collect. Eddie looked surprised to see me. “I let it ride,” he said, as if I should’ve known. “I figured that’s what you’d want.” He’d put the money on another sure thing, Uncle Barney in the third that night. I wasn’t happy about it. I doubted there could be two sure things in a row.

But the usual rules don’t apply in harness racing, I discovered. The horses are standardbreds and not as high-strung or valuable as thoroughbreds. The drivers aren’t athletes like jockeys. Some are overweight, others are geriatric. If their horse takes a wrong step, they’re dumped from the sulky, their cart on bicycle wheels. They break bones and get trampled—a fractured skull or worse. But serious accidents are rare. The drivers tend to be cautious. Some races are less than honest. They’re run to a script, and the winner’s determined in advance. A sure thing can really be one.

That was true of Uncle Barney. He won by a wide margin, and I came out seventy bucks to the good. Try as I might, I couldn’t help bragging. I kept my family in the dark, but I lavished cash on everyone else. I treated my pals to an extra dessert on the cafeteria chow line. I picked up the tab for Cokes after baseball practice. For my girlfriend, I bought a new two-piece bathing suit at the mall, sitting in an armchair reserved for generous spouses and boyfriends and watching her turn and preen as she modeled it for me. I had the instincts of a junior mobster.

I fell in love with gambling. It was sexy and made my nerve endings tingle. I’d entered an alternate reality, where the variables of life were reduced to a vital few. If I mastered those variables, untold riches could be mine. I scorned my schoolwork and devoured the racing pages instead, searching for hot trainers and stables. I never missed the handicapper’s picks. Every tabloid had at least one supposed expert like Captain Rory or the Magician, aliases designed to protect the experts against any blowback from irate readers who’d lost a bundle by taking their advice.

The track itself was still abstract to me, no more than a function of charts and statistics, until Eddie wised me up. At Roosevelt they ran the races at night to avoid competing with the flat tracks. As a promotion, they threw open the gates before the last race and let everyone in for free. Nobody checked for IDs, so I became a regular on Saturdays and joined the deadbeats and cheapskates lurking in the dark outside, eager to be admitted and hungry for a bet.

I’d pictured the track as a cozy place, but it was built on a grand scale, the lights so bright it took a few seconds for my eyes to adjust. The grandstand rose to five levels, air-conditioned against the heat and humidity of a Long Island summer. You could buy ballpark food down below, or dine on fine linen at the Cloud Casino up above. The races were broadcast on closed-circuit TVs around the plant, a first at the time. There was even a fourteen-bed hospital with a fully functional operating room. Patrons had suffered heart attacks while they waited out a photo finish.

I got lost in the swarm of fans. They came from all over the island, sharp-dressed blacks from Hempstead and wealthy society types from Old Westbury, busboys from Mr. Wong’s Chinese restaurant, and pizza slingers from Borelli’s of Napoli. Lots of working stiffs too, in T-shirts and khakis, plumbers and carpenters dreaming of hitting the daily double. There might be twenty thousand fans on a Saturday night, more if a high-stakes race was on the card. The record attendance was 54,861 in August 1960, the largest crowd to witness a race in the US that year.

The tote board mesmerized me. The odds seemed to change by the half-second, the apparent destiny of each entry altered as the public’s approval waxed or waned. How could a horse be 80/1? The price was tempting, but could a long shot like that really win? The answer, almost always, was, “Not on your life,” but a few deluded souls wagered their last sawbuck on those doomed nags. I saw the losers shuffling out, stooped and shamefaced, their stride so different from the jaunty peacock strut of a winner.

I kept watching the tote board, but I didn’t make a bet that night. I was too overwhelmed, dizzy from the stimulation. I felt as if I’d spent eight hours trapped inside a pinball machine. Roosevelt often affected me that way. I lacked the thick skin of a racetrack pro, the guys who’re never distracted unless they’ve got smallpox or their wife is giving birth. But I did adapt and toughen up and learn to concentrate in the midst of the commotion.

The next Saturday I was ready for action. I clipped the picks for the last race from Newsday and invested in a pair of cheap binocs. I found a discarded program right away, a perk of late arrivals. If someone had a bad night, the last thing they took home was a reminder. From Eddie I’d received a “suggested bet”—not a sure thing—on a horse of Stanley Dancer, a driver-trainer who liked to send his horse to the front instead of hanging back for a stretch run, as most drivers did. He often won wire-to-wire.

Stanley Dancer was the sport’s Joe DiMaggio, a cut above everyone else. A New Jersey farm boy, he quit school in the eigth grade, and with his prize money from a 4-H contest bought his first horse, an old trotter called Candor—harness horses are either trotters or pacers depending on their gait. He relied on a beat-up trailer for transport and wore borrowed silks in his first race. His aggressive style led to lots of accidents. He’d survived thirty-two spills in his career, including one that broke his back.

It was tough to get a decent price on Dancer’s horses. They were usually favored at short odds. But in the early days I cared less about the potential payoff than I did about being right. I ran into a last-minute crush at the pari-muteul window, though, when the wafflers blocked my way. They were torn between two or three picks and delayed as long as possible, creating road blocks. You had to fight past them, or you’d miss a chance to bet. I saw punches thrown once, a waffler knocked to the floor. There was nothing worse than seeing a window slam shut in your face, a sign your luck had gone sour and might never return.

When I took my place in line, I suffered a panic attack. I looked like what I was, a high school kid—an absolute baby compared to the fully grown adults around me. I wore a polo shirt and madras Bermudas as if I’d been invited to a clambake at Jones Beach. I realized the clerk might ask for my ID and tell me to beat it, or even have me thrown in jail for being underage. That wouldn’t go down well with my folks, who thought I was at the movies. I’d be marked as a liar, and they’d have to bail me out.

But the clerk just accepted my money and passed me a ticket. I’d passed the test and become a man among men. I moved to the track apron to watch the race. Stanley Dancer seldom varied his strategy. He bred his own horses, and they were bred for speed. He left the gate first and grabbed the rail, hanging on to the lead and fending off each challenger in turn. He won by three or four lengths. The horse only paid even money, five for the five I’d bet, but I believed I had the makings of a genius.

When the result was official, I tried to cash out. The lines were much shorter, while the line at the bar was understandably longer. I shoved over my ticket with an air of confidence, as if I’d never tasted defeat. The clerk eyeballed me. “How old are you, son?” I froze. “Eighteen,” I mumbled, flashing on my jail cell again. He said, “No good. You gotta be twenty-one to cash.” I protested, “But I bought the ticket myself.” He shook his head, “Gotta be twenty-one, pal. Move along, there’s people behind you.” Forget about an appeal. The system was rigged, and I’d been had.

Eddie sympathized when I told him. “They always pull that crap,” he sighed. He’d been through it himself. “Eighteen to bet, twenty-one to cash.” I was glad to have an ally. “It’s so unfair,” I complained. “They should put up a sign.” Eddie laughed. “You kidding me? They want it to be unfair. You’re supposed to lose!” That had never occurred to me. “Simplest thing to do? Get an old guy to cash for you. Or a soldier, it’s their duty to help out.”

He was right about the soldiers. If they were in uniform, they were admitted free too, so there was never any shortage. They joked and drank beer, enjoying a good time on their day pass. At first I was shy about asking them, worrying they’d take me for creep or a crook. I invented a sob story about needing the money to pay for my bus fare home to Poughkeepsie, but they couldn’t care less and cashed out for me, no questions asked.

I wish I could end this story less predictably. I’d prefer to say Roosevelt Raceway was a phase, that I tired of it, hit the books, and began studying for my college exams. Instead I sank more deeply into the fantasy that I had a genius for picking winners, the one gambler in a thousand with the brains to beat the races. It wouldn’t have taken much for the fantasy to implode—a costly string of losers would’ve done it—but I had the misfortune to keep winning until I’d stashed two hundred dollars and change in a secret shoebox in my closet.

Winning carries the seed of its own demise. You become habituated and need to raise the stakes if you hope to recapture the thrill you first experienced. If I stuck with Eddie’s advice and the racing pages, I might have earned a slow, steady profit, but I’d gotten bored with nearly risk-free gambling. I decided to up the ante and go for broke.

I had a plan. Of course I did. I’d bet the whole shoebox on one race. No more cowardly across-the-board stuff, either. I’d play to win, two hundred on the nose, and put my faith in Stanley Dancer. He’d entered a heavily favored pacer in the last race, the pick of all the pros, although Eddie pegged the horse as a “suggested bet,” not a sure thing. I began to waffle myself when I checked the tote board, where Dancer’s horse was at 6/5, only a little better than even money.

Billy Haughton had the second favorite, generously priced at 3/1. He was Dancer’s chief rival, and they often locked horns, finishing first and second in a race. Haughton was a farm boy too, from Gloversville, New York, but he was livelier than Dancer and known for partying hard at the clubs on the Sunset Strip when he raced at Hollywood Park. He once made the gossip columns after a night at the Coconut Grove dancing and schmoozing with the actress June Allyson. He’d won almost five thousand races and earned more than forty million dollars in purse money.

I consulted my program again. I couldn’t split the two horses, they were too closely matched. Haughton’s was still 3/1 at post time—a six hundred dollar profit as opposed to the two hundred plus I’d make on Dancer’s horse—so I deviated from my plan and backed Haughton. That proved to be a fatal mistake. It was a close race, as expected, and Dancer won only by a nose, but that nose cost me every cent I’d saved.

Of all the ways a gambler can blow it, I’d chosen greed. True, I felt a thrill during the stretch run and got the adrenaline rush I craved, but my fall from grace was swift and horrifying. A genius, what a joke! I kicked myself and recited a laundry list of stuff I could’ve bought with the money—ten bathing suits, say, or twenty trips to the movies. It was no fun being a loser. I was washed up, a has-been at sixteen.

I never went to Roosevelt Raceway again. I swore off the harness world and took up the more honorable sport of flat racing. I visited Aqueduct, Belmont Park, and Saratoga while in college. In California I hung out at at Santa Anita and Golden Gate Fields. I ate cockles and mussels at Ascot, and pappardelle with rabbit at Ippodromo delle Cascine in Florence. At the Curragh in Ireland, I drank Guinness and hit a trifecta. I stopped at Longchamp once on a trip to Paris and learned Auteuil was a short distance away. I made a note to go there someday. I saw it in my future.