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A DAY AT THE RACES

You want exactas? Perfectas? Trisuperfectas? Here’s a railbird’s-eye view of Trinity Meadows, our new pony palace on the prairie.
By GLENN MITCHELL |

TWO FRIENDS IN LINE TO MAKE BETS compare notes. “So,” says one, “spent 16 dollars, made 17. All profit.”

Just before post time, with the horses loaded in the gate, the track announcer says that the number three horse has been scratched. “I don’t lose,” a guy yells with delight. “I don’t lose.”

The woman walking back from the finish line is all smiles. ’”Gimme five, darlin’,” she says to her grinning companion. Then she high-fives the 2-year-old she’s carrying on her hip and goes off to cash her ticket. There’s nothing like winning the first race and playing all day with the track’s money.

Welcome to Trinity Meadows, off 1-20 at Ranch House Road in Parker County’s Willow Park. Right now, and for the foreseeable future, it’s the only place in North Texas where you can legally bet on horses. Trinity Meadows is a 75- to 90-minute drive west from downtown Dallas, depending on traffic. Nobody complains about the drive, however-not when the alternative is Shreveport or Oklahoma City.

That isn’t to say that things at Trinity Meadows are as slick as they are at major-league tracks like Louisiana Downs or Remington Park. A few adjustments are in order for fans used to the older, more established tracks. But if you want to be present at the creation of horse racing in this area, make the pilgrimage now (the season runs through December 29) before the crowds get cocky and blase. It ain’t Bel-mont, but it’s a start.

In late August the aisle numbers in the grandstands were still done in chalk, a fact I had plenty of time to notice because the pari-mutuel lines were moving so slowly. The pari-mutuel clerks at Trinity aren’t all experienced, unlike the lightning-fingered automatons you tend to get at other tracks. Before one race, I had to walk a clerk through some exacta pairings to get the numbers right. “Thanks for repeating it,” she said, “sometimes I get lost.” Later, I fidgeted while a mutuel clerk patiently explained to a bettor why he couldn’t get a win, place, and show ticket-all three bets-for $2.

Trinity has information specialists at windows next to the clerks to handle questions from novice bettors, but for some reason these newcomers prefer to wait until they’re at the betting window to try to nail down the basics of pari-mutuel wagering, leaving those in the line behind them to do a characteristic little dance number called The Betting Line Shuffle: Shift back and forth on your feet; turn to look at the “Minutes to Post” on the tote board; crane your neck to see what’s taking the goofball at the head of the line so long (“Probably doesn’t speak English,” muttered the guy behind me); exchange knowing looks with fellow sufferers; shift back and forth some more.

Still, if you get shut out here it’s probably your own fault. Behind the green, pur-ple, and pink motif windows are enough clerks to handle anybody who doesn’t put off wagering until the last minute. That leads us to Mitchell’s Track Axiom #213: If you’re up to the window and still don’t know which horse to bet on, you should invest the two bucks in a hot dog instead.

At Trinity, however, the delays could also mean that you’re still trying to decide which bet to make. If you thought there were lots of ways to win and lose money at other tracks, just wait until you see all the high roads and dark alleys Trinity has waiting for you. Along with the traditional win, place, and show, and the daily double (picking the winners of the first and second races before the first race), each race offers the exacta (picking the first two horses in order) and the quinella (picking the first two horses in whichever order they finish). After that, all races have either the trifec-ta (picking the first three finishes in order) or the superfecta (picking the first four in order). Finally, there’s the trisuper-fecta, which calls for picking the first three horses in order for the fifth and then placing a second bet. picking the first four horses for the sixth. If you are making a minimum $2 bet on all the exotics, plus $2 across the board on win, place and show, you’ll spend $130 on an 11-race card-I think. This drives the win-place-and-show purists nuts.

After a slightly anxiety-provoking wait to get a small bet down on a lightly raced 3-year-old that I was fairly certain would break my string of four straight near misses, I headed for my favorite place at any track: the rail. The biggest talkers, if not the biggest bettors, usually hang out there. “HelI, this is like pickin’ money up off the ground,” one guy bragged. A moment later, his partner came back from cashing the tickets, held out his hand and said, “Here’s your 20 cents.”

Unlike a good number of racing fans, railbirds aren’t content to sit inside the grandstand watching the races on the TV monitors. They want the action. They want to yell at their horses, as if yelling at an antmal a few hundred yards away on the hackstretch will actually do some good. It doesn’t matter. You get yelling rights when you put your money down. When the gates open on the fifth race, the man beside me wastes no time.

“Come on eight! Come on EIGHT!” The numbers go up on the board showing the order the horses are running in.

“Come on SIX eight!”

Now I get it. He’s playing an exacta and two of his horses are among the first four.

“Six eight six eight six EIGHT!”

The rankings change as the horses come down the stretch. “Come on SEVEN, let’s go SEVEN!”

How many horses has this guy bet on?

“TWO TWO TWO TWO!”

The horses hit the wire, The two horse wins, but the five horse slips in for the place, dropping the seven back to third. The yeller slaps his hand in disgust. Standing in back of him. a man with an unlit cigar, his foot propped on a trash can, stares at the finish line long after the horses have run past, not a muscle moving, with a stare that could freeze a jockey’s blood. I know how they feel. My three-year-old just missed the money, running fourth.

Close by, Darien Boult is tearing up his ticket, too. He’s made two mistakes. He picked the wrong horse, and he failed to get a backup bet on the winner. Miss Barbara Jean, which pays $12.80, $6, and $5. It was more than an error in handicapping judgment. “My girlfriend’s name is Barbara.” he says, shaking his head. “She’s gonna kick my ass.”

More often than not, Boult says, he’s the one who kicks butt at the track. A produce man at a North Dallas grocery store. Boult has come three or four times a week since Trinity opened in late May. He yells at the jockeys in the post parade like somebody who knows them. Some yell back. Boult is from Shreveport and was a daily communicant at Louisiana Downs. He likes Trinity and especially likes the exotics such as the trifecta. His advice to newcomers? Don’t overhandicap.

’”They come out here the first time and win a bet because they like the horse’s name or something,” he says. “’They don’t change their minds about it. People start reading the form, they talk themselves out of betting on a winner because they think too much.”

Of course, that’s an anathema to serious handicappers who rank the Daily Racing Form somewhere just below the New Testament and above the Bill of Rights, But upstairs, near the mutuel windows, Rick Bryant would agree with Boult. He’s telling people who are nose-deep in the Form that they’re about to make a big mistake by dropping a horse that has made money for him. Seeing he isn’t going to convince them of their impending doom, he asks me if I want to know the system that he says has been making him an average of $300 a day since the track opened.

You bet I do. Anybody who goes to the track, from the high roller at the $50-min-imum window to the grizzled, three-toothed, $2 bettor in dirty overalls, is looking for a system, all the while certain that if there really was one the tracks would all have gone broke by now. In search of a system, handi-cappers figure speed ratings, pore over the way races are run to catalogue the kind of trip each horse had, watch the odds board for evidence of where the big money is going, and inspect the horses in the post parade for signs of wear and tear.

So what’s the magic formula for Bryant, a Dallas chemical salesman who grew up betting at Arlington Park outside Chicago? He buys the newspapers.

“Why should I do all the work when these guys do it for me?” he asks. Bryant culls the four top favorites in each race from the The Dallas Morning News and the Dallas Times Herald picks, makes a $1 exacta box (a total of 24 $1 bets covering every possible order of finish among the four), and hopes to average hitting one trifecta a day. Today he’s well into his $240 stake with nothing to show for it. Yesterday, though, he hit one that paid almost $1,000. The “serious” handicapper might argue that he’s putting inordinate faith in somebody else’s handicapping. Bryant would rather cash tickets than stroke his ego.

Like many track veterans, Bryant sees, or thinks he sees, skullduggery on the part of some riders. What else is new? It’s a safe bet that anybody who’s ever lost a tight race has had a few choice words for the jockey the next time he comes out in the post parade. Betty Hunter, on the other hand, is pleased with the quality of the jockeys at Trinity. She and her husband raise horses, and her sister, a trainer, races both quarter horses and thoroughbreds at Trinity. She has business as well as personal reasons for wanting to see lacing in Texas: “We wore that road to Oklahoma out. I don’t see how they can lose here. There have been so many owners who have had to go out of state to race.” Now, she says. Trinity needs to grow by putting in more barns so owners and trainers can keep more horses on the grounds at once. Some of the temporary barns (nicknamed “the ghetto,” she says) don’t have electricity yet.

One of her sister’s horses, Viking Rocket, is running in the eighth today. We look at the Form, trying to figure out where the 6-year-old mare’s competition will come from in the fairly evenly matched field in the six furlong (three-quarters of a mile) race. I hope some of her inside knowledge will rub off on me, because so far, studying the past performances in the Racing Form has led me up a blind alley. I like handicapping. It’s one of the few intellectual exercises that can pay off in cash. But it’s a fact of life that new tracks draw cheaper horses and cheaper horses tend to be less predictable. Its a challenge that those used to somewhat higher quality horses elsewhere will have to accept.

So how do people pick winners at Trinity? For one thing, fewer people in the stands seem to be reading the Form than at more established tracks. An informal survey reveals that along with commercial tip sheets. the track writers of the three daily newspapers carry considerable weight. So do such old reliable methods as betting on the gray horse, betting the horse’s name (how many humbled handicappers put some money on Let Go of My Ego in the last race one recent Sunday?), and betting on favorite jockeys. Railbirds at Trinity carry on lively one-way conversations with riders as they head out onto the track for the post parade.

“You got it, Dave? You got the horse?”

“I got $2,000 bucks on your butt, buddy.”

“No holdin’ back, Bo, we need you on this one. Come on, baby.”

“That thing gonna run, Bo?”

A chat with some more serious-looking handicappers down around the finish line doesn’t turn up much useful information. One man, buried in deep contemplation of a Form covered with esoteric signs, symbols, and calculations, is asked who he likes in the seventh. He looks up long enough to say, “Beats the hell out of me.” I ask Rodney Huffman of nearby Cresson how he makes his selections. Huffman and his friend Anthony Poteet both train cutting horses and have been around horses all their lives. “I watch the odds,” he says, smiling, “and talk to a lot of people.” Then he’s off to cash a ticket on his first bet of the day. Both agree that bigger money would be the key to drawing better horses to the track. “It’ll happen when they get the kind of money Louisiana Downs and Oklahoma City have added,” Poteet says. “If they put more money in added purses and build better facilities, they’ll have everybody here.”

I don’t have Huffman’s contacts, so I take a flyer on Dr. Billy B., an 11-year-old gelding who had raced only 22 times in his long life, finishing first or second 12 times. But he’s coming off a race (his first since 1984) where he ran dead last, and the Form indicates he’d had trouble in that one.

1 was willing to put up with a little rust to watch a race that was going to last longer than 18 seconds. At least half of the races at Trinity are run by quarter horses, and those who are used to betting on thoroughbreds will have to make an adjustment if they plan to make any money. Watching a quarter horse race is a little like watching a drag race or a 100-yard dash for horses. Thoroughbred fans are accustomed to races that usually last at least three-quarters of a mile, giving bettors time to get revved up, flex their vocal chords, and urge their money home. A race that’s over in 350 yards hardly gives them time to get a good lungful of air.

I give Dr. Billy B. several good lungsful, and under my urging (and the jockey’s whip), he romps home second, paying $8.60 to place. I go with Viking Rocket in the eighth, but not even one of the track’s top jockeys, Bo White, can bring her home in the money. The ninth is equally dispiriting, with my fifth fourth-place finish of the day. I sit down outside with Larry Redmond of Lake Worth and Doug Huey from Annetta, just down the road from Trinity, twx guys who look as if their luck is running in the same direction. It is, but that hasn’t stopped them from coming to the track two or three times a week. Redmond and Huey, who both own auto-wrecking yards, say they’ve never been to another track before coming to Trinity, where they’ve been enjoying some beginner’s luck.

“The first time I came out here I brought 75 bucks and I broke even,” Huey says. “The second time I won $400.”

“I won $200.” adds Redmond, “then we started reading the Racing Form and the tip sheets, and it all went downhill from there.”

By me 11th and final race of the day, I’m bordering on desperation. Anybody who says he looks at the Form exactly the same way on the last race of a losing day as he did on the first either has unyielding faith in a fixed set of handicapping rules and ice water in his veins or is a liar. Long shots start to look all too plausible-and I think I’ve found one, the nine horse, Manymorechances, whose only win this year has been in a cheap claiming race. I decide to put him in an ex-acta with the favorite, Bossy Ruler. Just then a man walks by and asks what I’ve got for a sleeper. I tell him mine is so asleep it’s probably dead. He laughs and says. “I don’t want to talk to you then.”

I decide to watch the last race from the finish line, probably the only one at an American track that’s good for a laugh. It’s marked with a white, four-sided column. The side facing the stands reads, in black letters, “Finish Line.” The side facing down the track, which the jockeys see as they complete each race, reads, “Whoa.” The long shot pays off; I get the place, win the exac-ta. and come out $5 ahead on the day. On the way out, I notice that the bugler who blows the “Call to Post” before each race is serenading (he patrons as they walk to their cars. It only takes a second to place the tune: “Happy Trails.”

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