by Bill Barich
Dancing on the brink of the world
Dancing on the brink of the world
Dancing on the brink of the world
II
In 1879 the Giant Powder Company, manufacturers and suppliers of dynamite, nitroglycerine, and blasting powder to gold miners, relocated to Point Fleming after an accident at their San Francisco plant had nearly leveled that city. Six months later their new plant exploded for the first time, killing eleven whites and twelve Chinese, but it was rebuilt immediately “due to the large number of orders on hand.” Giant exploded next in 1883, terminating Superintendent Ferdinand Kampf and thirty-seven Chinese; then it merged with the Judson and Sheppard Chemical Works, only to explode twice more in 1892, blowing a boy through the roof, a man into the Bay, and three whites and two Chinese to Kingdom Come. Shock waves from the blast were felt a hundred miles away in Sacramento. The plant, left in ashes and rubble, turned into a tourist attraction, and special sheriff’s deputies were appointed to keep the crowds under control.
III
The Point, with one red brick remnant at its tip, became a popular spot for swimming, picnicking, fishing, and boating. There were still a few clams and mussels to be dug in the shoals, and a Chinaman paid cash on the line for every shark delivered to his shack. A caretaker lived in a house near the old powder works bridge and grew corn and potatoes near the marshes. He hauled his produce to market in a dray wagon pulled by two gray horses. When his wife died, he was left alone on the Point, an antiquated hermit, and committed suicide by sticking his head into a barrel of drinking water and swimming upstream into memory.
In 1908 the township east of the Point, numbering about two hundred people, voted to incorporate as Ocean View. A year later the residents had second thoughts, and in a special election changed Ocean View to Albany, honoring their mayor, Frank Roberts, a native of Albany, New York. Albany’s subsequent growth was rapid: 1,500 by 1913, 2,350 by 1918, progressing by stucco and plaster spurts until the area was packed densely with bungalows, cottages, and two-story apartments. Now the city has a population of roughly fifteen thousand and exists as a kind of buffer zone between working-class Richmond and the congestive liberalism of Berkeley. Shiny new police cars cruise the boulevards, suggesting a state of siege; forty-eight cents of every city dollar are budgeted for public safety, none for public health. In 1978 the central civic phenomenon seemed to be the Battle of the Burgers. It was occurring everywhere, but the skirmishes were concentrated most heavily along San Pablo Avenue. Franchises had fired the opening salvo, quarter-pound hamburgers, into the market economy, and now the owners of older independent drive-ins were massing a counterattack. Their windows were covered with hastily lettered signs taped up among fading photos of milkshakes, happy tots, and corndogs fully erect. OUR BURGERS GUARANTEED ONE-THIRD POUND, the signs declared, and the effect was devastating.
IV
In 1940 a group of investors decided to build a racetrack, The Albany Turf Club, on Point Fleming. Maury Diggs, architect, and Jack Casson, general contractor, were in charge of the project. Their plant design had many virtues, not the least of which was a grandstand located on a hill above the Bay, but the racing strip itself, so central to the scheme of things, proved to be their downfall. Racing strips are always difficult to construct, requiring a specialized knowledge of agronomy, and in Albany the job was further complicated by coastal fog, punishing seasonal rains, and the softening effects of Bay tides on the subsoil. Unfortunately for Diggs and Casson, the winter of 1940–41 was a particularly rough one. The Turf Club was scheduled to open on New Year’s Day, but the strip was so muddy and potholed by then that management kept postponing the date, hoping for a break in the weather. It never came. Rain fell through most of January, and finally, with creditors pressuring them, the group was forced to open early in February. The strip had partially dissolved, rivulets cracked its surface everywhere, and it was not uncommon for horses in the starting gate to sink up to their knees in the muck. The abbreviated meet ended four days later when a horse went down so horribly, breaking a leg in half, that the track was obliged to close. Bankruptcy proceedings followed. The Santa Fe Railroad, from whom the land on the Point had been leased, acquired the plant and subsequently loaned it to the U.S. Navy for use as a training base after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. Barns were fitted with plywood panels and turned into barracks, the infield was stacked high with amphibious gear and LST boats, and tight-lipped boys from the Midwest learned to read a radar screen while cruising the Bay just off the backstretch.
V
The Turf Club, under new management and now named Golden Gate Fields, opened again in 1947 with a considerably improved racing strip. The principal component was sandy loam from Antioch, which held together well even under downpours and tidal fluctuations. When the sun shone and the wind blew, the reconstituted strip became so hard, dry, and fast that even knob-kneed platers looked good. Six world records were set in just a few years, two on the same afternoon, October 4, 1947, when Fair Truckle went six furlongs in 1:08⅖ and Count Speed covered a mile and a sixteenth in 1:41. Bill Shoemaker broke his maiden at Golden Gate in 1949 aboard Shafter V, and Johnny Longden made frequent appearances, winning nine of the first twenty Golden Gate Handicaps, including the inaugural on Fred Astaire’s Triplicate. The Calumet Special used to roll into the Albany rail-road station direct from Kentucky and debouch a priceless cargo of thoroughbreds, who were then led to the barns via an old slaughterhouse tunnel that ran beneath the freeway. In 1950 Citation, Calumet’s pride, established a new world record for the mile, 1:33⅗, and later in the meeting confronted Charles Howard’s Noor in two classic races. Noor had beaten Citation twice at Santa Anita, and he did it twice more up north despite carrying heavy weight in the last outing.
In 1957 Silky Sullivan made his debut at Golden Gate and introduced his penchant for late-breaking finishes. Silky became a national hero, the underdog in apotheosis, by lagging far behind the field until the stretch, looking uninterested, then shifting into overdrive and passing other horses as though they were mired in the recollected muck of Turf Club days. He boosted attendance at the track, but he wasn’t bred for superstardom. His bloodlines unraveled in the Kentucky Derby—he finished out of the money, distanced—and things were never quite the same again. Silky’s voluminous mail, from kids, teachers, innocents, and a few other gentle souls who thought he could read as well as run, was forwarded to a farm in Napa where he stood at stud. Every year on St. Patrick’s Day, he was vanned to the track and paraded past the grandstand, often pausing to kick up his heels, until he died in his sleep of a heart attack in 1978 at the age of twenty-two. He was buried in the infield, his grave marked by a white picket fence, its borders enlivened by multicolored violas.
Shortly after Silky’s retirement, the California Horse Racing Board, the body that governs racing in the state, precipitated the demise of first-class racing in northern California by discontinuing its practice of assigning exclusive dates for racing meetings. Before 1964 the Board had permitted only one major thoroughbred track in the state to be open at any given time; Santa Anita and Hollywood Park were dark while Golden Gate was running. But racing associations, the corporate bodies that operate and sometimes own racetracks, were lobbying for a more liberal arrangement—simultaneous meetings and overlapping dates—in hopes of increasing profits, and the Board finally acquiesced. Soon thereafter the southern California tracks, wealthier than their northern counterparts and drawing on a larger population, began offering bigger purses and better facilities and soon cornered the market on prime thoroughbred flesh. The quality of stock performing in the north declined steadily, and Golden Gate devolved to its present state of repair, an elegantly situated, slightly rundown plant featuring indifferent and often curious racing early in the week and more bettable affairs toward the weekend.
Today, Golden Gate encompasses 225 acres, with stalls for 1,425 horses, seats for 13,004 humans, and enough space overall to cram in a crowd of 30
,000, although no such crowd has materialized of late. In 1978 the daily attendance averaged 9,429, down eight percent from the previous year, while the handle remained firm at about $1,450,000. The average fan wagered $160 every firm at about $1,450,000. The average fan wagered $160 every time through the turnstiles. Two separate racing associations, Pacific and Tanforan, sponsor meetings at the track. The Pacific meet usually begins in late January and runs through mid-April; Tanforan, always of shorter duration, ends early in June. Between them, the associations distribute purses totaling $7,000,000 over 98 racing days. The grandstand at Golden Gate, like grandstands everywhere, is divided into levels connotative of social class: General Admission, Clubhouse, Turf Club, and the exclusive Directors’ Club, a glassed-in box right over the finish line where the track’s directors and their guests can eat, drink, and wager without plebeian interference. To the left of the Club, just beyond the executive offices, is a penthouse apartment reserved for special friends of the management. Rumor has it that Jimmy Durante once spent a honeymoon there, but nobody seems to know whether he won or lost. Looking up from the paddock where the horses are saddled you can see the penthouse curtains just above the wide tinted windows of the press box. Fans sitting in the grandstand proper miss the sight of curtains but are treated on windy days to something equally mysterious, the smell of salt borne inland from unseen waters.
VI
The night before the meet began, I sat at my unconventionally four-legged Terrace desk and prepared to handicap the following day’s races. I had no system or standard approach, but there were a few things I always took into account before making a tentative selection: speed, which could be gauged in general fashion from a horse’s recent running times; class, which was a function both of breeding and the level (races were ranked by the size of the purse offered, handicap first, then stakes, allowance, and claiming) at which a horse had been competing; and condition, which meant fitness and was expressed by a horse’s recent finishes (if they were good or improving, the horse was said to be “on form”) and its showing during the daily exercise period, morning workouts (recent workout times were given at the bottom of each horse’s chart). The trainer and jockey associated with a horse also affected my decision. Certain trainers were downright inept and never won a race regardless of their stock, and not a few riders at Golden Gate were incapable of handling their mounts.
I also considered post position as a potential factor in the outcome of a race. Before leaving home I’d compiled a post-position survey of races run during the Pacific meeting that was just ending. I’d done this to see if there was an advantage to be gained by breaking from a particular post (the slot a horse is assigned in the starting gate; there are rarely more than twelve horses entered in a race), and to determine whether front-runners, horses who broke quickly, took the lead, and tried to hold it throughout (going wire-to-wire) fared better at Golden Gate than one would expect. The survey proved instructive. In races over a mile, called routes, the outside posts, seven through twelve, were as disadvantageous as usual; horses stuck out there had more ground to cover. In races under a mile, called sprints, the survey turned up a surprise. Ordinarily, the best posts in a short race are those closest to the rail, but during the Pacific meet horses starting near the middle of the track, posts four and five, had won more often than horses inside them. Furthermore, horses breaking from the seven slot had won almost as often as those breaking from the one slot. The survey indicated as well that front-runners won over thirty percent of all sprints at Golden Gate. Facts like these were invaluable when trying to choose between two otherwise closely matched thoroughbreds.
As an additional edge I’d brought along three books on handicapping technique: Tom Ainslie’s Complete Guide to Thoroughbred Racing, Andy Beyer’s Picking Winners, and Steve Davidowitz’s Betting Thoroughbreds. These books were not typical of the genre; most handicapping tracts are lurid affairs that sucker readers into parting with a few dollars in exchange for an easy-to-follow system guaranteed to produce eight million dollars in just three short weeks. Ainslie, Beyer, and Davidowitz were serious, intelligent men who never underestimated the complexity of the sport. Ainslie was the dean of the company. His book was the most informative about all aspects of racing and is still the best primer around. He favored a balanced approach to making a selection, weighing all the factors much as I had been doing.
Beyer was more dogmatic. As an undergraduate at Harvard he’d gotten hooked on racing and had since “perfected” a system based on the digital-computer research of Sheldon Kovitz, a fellow student and doctoral candidate in mathematics. Apparently, Kovitz was too busy feeding numbers into his IBM 360 Model 40 to succeed himself, but Beyer saw in his calculations the seed of Something Big, a way to incorporate relativity into speed ratings. Most ratings, like those given in the Form, were suspect because they were derived from nonexistent absolutes. A horse who’d earned an 80 on Tuesday was not exactly as fast as a horse who’d earned an 80 on Wednesday because the track surface changed every day (or even from moment to moment), and Tuesday’s conditions were always different from Wednesday’s—faster or slower by critical fractions. Beyer adopted Kovitz’s method, improved it, and parlayed the results into a complicated mathematical system. It was the best in the world, he claimed.
“Speed figures are the way, the truth and the light,” wrote Beyer. “And my method of speed handicapping is, I believe, without equal.”
I found Davidowitz’s book the most pithy and available. He seemed a little tougher than the other men, more hard-nosed, and it showed in his jacket photo. While Ainslie looked like a businessman and Beyer like a computer programmer with a side interest in recreational drugs, Davidowitz looked mean. His face had a demonic cast; an eyebrow was arched in perpetual scrutiny. I liked the knack he had for making direct, incontrovertible statements: When a three-year-old is assigned actual top weight in a race for horses three years and up, the three-year-old has little or no chance of winning. Such gems were inlaid throughout the text, always supported by statistics. Davidowitz further endeared himself by being quick to point a finger at the criminal element in racing whenever he encountered it. Most turf writers were unwilling to print anything but bland idealizations of the sport.
After skimming through the books, I put all the materials aside and reached into my pocket, as I’d been doing every hour or so since leaving home. Again I counted my money—five hundred dollars in twenty-dollar bills. It looked pitiful stacked on the desk, the smallest stake any would-be gambler ever started with. I felt embarrassed. I thought the stake was correlated directly with my life: impoverished spirit, empty wallet. Such stupid flashes of guilt often overtook me after midnight. I tried to ignore this one, though, and took a shower and went to bed.
VII
Early the next morning, April 19, the first morning of Tanforan, I went to Golden Gate Fields ready to win. The grandstand was empty and quiet, with the cool feel of an aluminum mixing bowl waiting for ingredients. The sun climbed slowly over the eucalyptus trees on Albany Hill, huge blue gums planted there a century ago to shield the town from the reports of Industry on the Point. From the clubhouse rail I could see the backstretch and the neat rows of wooden barns and the soiled straw piled high at the corners of the rows. The hotwalking machines were turning. They were a recent addition to the track and had made obsolete a job grooms used to do, walking horses until they’d cooled down after exercising. There was a power pack at the base of each machine, and from it rose a thin shaft with four metal arms arranged in the shape of a cross. The arms were about six feet long and resembled in their positioning the blades of a propeller. When the power was on, the shaft revolved slowly and the horses, hitched by their halters to insulated cords dangling from the arms, were forced to circle until their pulse rates dropped and their breathing was not so labored. As they circled they looked like flywheels turning within the greater geometry of the backstretch, suggesting an intricate timepiece thrown open to bits of biology.
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br /> I took the escalator to the ground floor and walked through the paddock area. The green wear-forever carpet was worn thin, the railings were chipped and needed paint, and the saddling stalls, green and white, were scarred with half-moons incised by hoofs. The Par Three course laid out on the infield grass was soon to be closed for lack of patronage, but an OPEN sign hung in the pro shop window. I saw my face reflected among irons sticking out of a plaid bag. House sparrows pecked at seeds the harrow had uncovered, hopping around among the horse apples. The turf course surprised me. It was rough and stubby, spiked with crabgrass and not nearly as smooth as it looked from above. Two redwing blackbirds were mating in the caked mud of a drainage ditch. The male’s epaulets were scarlet, brilliantly exposed as he drew his lover into a caped embrace.
Near the winner’s circle I found a monument to Silky Sullivan. It was built of bricks and mortar and looked like the chimney of a backyard barbecue pit. A bronze plaque was set into the center of the chimney, and on it was inscribed a celebratory poem written by Elaine Marfoglia of Pasadena.
