The perfect gift
Somebody said he wanted to get me a little something for the holidays.
I said he shouldn't have.
He said he hadn't yet, he was only at the wanting-to stage, and smiled.
The race track or simulcast venue is a great place to be over the holidays. Most decorations make the leg lamp in the great Jean Shepherd Christmas movie seem stylish. There's a very good reason why "A Christmas Story" is such a good movie. The person who wrote the novel also wrote the screenplay. Nothing evokes the holiday spirit like a cardboard turkey with an expandable accordion-like body made of tissue paper, and an tilting artificial tree with empty boxes underneath, bent and busted boxes that had been tried, nonetheless.
A unique sense of camaraderie exists among the regulars at the horse races.
We have numerous things in common, most unpleasantly of all, one of the worst bad beats in the history of gaming. Gaming is gambling to non-believers. Delicate poker players go into shock when a five percent blindside comes due, and they rush to hug their mommies and spouses behind the ropes, husbands and wives who, as the home viewing audience can clearly tell, are only with these clowns for the bread. Horse players located between here and everywhere have experienced numerous bad beats where there was about a zero percent chance of losing going in. I once had the only live pick six ticket working on a nice small-track pot, the money riding around on the favorite. I went to the windows and purchased savers like they were flight insurance policies on the Spruce Goose, non-stop to Heathrow.
A strong biased existed on this track at races contested at a mile. The curves almost required a number of U-turns. Speed couldn't hold its breakfast, to say nothing of its position. I went to first the paddock and then the rail to communicate with the jockey charged with carrying my cash around. I implored him please, for the love of the Good Lord and all things charitable, stay off the stinking lead. It was like he was on the red carpet at a Hollywood movie premier, not on a claimer at Hooterville Downs: He wouldn't even look at me.
As he went to warm up the horse, I jogged along the rail and kept saying, and then yelling, seriously, about staying off the lead. My last messages to him were please, please and please!
He went to the lead like it led to a harem. He went to the lead hard and fast, as though he were running an errand, running four furlongs, not twice that. If he didn't lead by 15, he led by 14; then, 13 and so on down the line. He almost needed to use the rail for support on the final turn for home.
He ran second. The second choice, of course, won the race, reducing my savers chicken feed. I went to the rail and began yelling for answers from the jockey, who shrugged, as though having fallen victim to supernatural forces.
More rewarding than lessons, horse players also share a great deal of hope, which seems to come in handier over the holidays. No matter what's going on outside, this could be a good day at the races, or at the race, singular, we'll take what we can get.
Hope as a last resort seldom works; hope as a supplement might.
Here's what the guy at the races got me as a holiday gift.
He got me what he could afford, something he considered important. He got me a Daily Racing Form on which some handicapping had been done. A black line had been drawn through the last races of all the horses entered at the tracks in this PM Form. The dates of all the races, last included, had been left showing. Black lines had also been drawn through the best and worst races shown on the Form, the point being, even the best handicappers were too impressionable and overreacted to the obvious. This drawing of lines through extreme performances was like a golfer's aid, a device to keep a wrist locked or an arm straight.
I got an angle as a holiday gift.
It was a good place to be.
Write to Jay at jaycronley@yahoo.com.
