“People are strange…”
Especially in racing.
Having lived in Venice Beach, California, and having seen Jim Morrison’s image staring back at me from a wall, I can't help but wonder what Morrison would have thought of horseplayers.
He probably would have understood them.
Strange people, horseplayers.
They see things that aren't there. They hear things nobody said. They turn whispers into information and information into certainty. And when they're strange, who knows if they can remember your name?
Thursday at Churchill Downs was strange.
Everywhere I looked, there was touting on a Baffert horse in the fourth race, Runnin Out of
The talking heads were talking about the horse as if the race had already been run. A cinch. A lock. The kind of horse that apparently only needed to show up.
There were analysts with those fabricated pages, pushing the horse along, dressing up the argument with numbers and percentages and whatever else could be found to make the horse look better than he actually was.
People are strange.
The morning-work videos were right there.
FREE.
Anybody could watch them.
The Workout Report, yawn!
And if you watched Runnin Out of Time, you saw a horse who didn't exactly jump off the screen. His works were poor. He had been beaten in company. Visually, there wasn't much there to make you reach for your wallet.
He went off at 5/2 after opening at below 2-1. That's what Hype does, we told you extensively during the Saratoga meet how entities can manipulate the market. Well, here it is at Churchill Downs.
But strangely, some people were seeing gold in what looked to me like an otherwise poor canvas.
One announcer, after hearing all the hype, was beginning to wonder if he had actually been watching the same horse everyone else was talking about.
That's racing.
Stats can do funny things to people.
Put a number in front of a horseplayer and sometimes the eyes stop working.
Tracking those individuals who are just misinforming the public keeps me from going down rabbit holes.
Bob Baffert trains the horse.
Thirty-percent trainer.
California.
Win percentage.
Whatever number happens to fit the story.
And suddenly the horse becomes something he isn't.
The speculation was rampant.
But that's all it was and its an everyday occurence.
Speculations are for the birds, the colt finished a well-beaten 6th.
There was no real evidence in the horse's recent visual preparation to support the enthusiasm. The works were there for everyone to see, and to my eyes they were not attractive.
Yet players saw what they wanted to see.
Sometimes it's as simple as that.
We have a funny habit in this game of wanting the numbers to tell us what our eyes should be seeing, rather than allowing our eyes to tell us what we are actually seeing.
Maybe that's why Jim Morrison would have understood horseplayers.
People are strange.
And horseplayers?
Well, we're a special breed of strange.
Sometimes the smartest thing you can do is ignore the noise, forget the talking heads, put the percentages aside and simply watch the horse.
Trust your eyes.
The horse doesn't know what the analyst said.
He doesn't know what percentage Baffert has.
He doesn't know what somebody printed on a fabricated sheet.
He only knows what he is.
And sometimes, if you watch closely enough, he'll tell you.
You just have to be willing to listen.
People are strange.
Especially at the racetrack.
Twenty Five Years Ago today ` We never forget....
Twenty-five years ago, after wrapping up another Del Mar meet, Joy and I rented a new house in Huntington Beach, just about a 100-yard kickoff return from the beach.
We were supposed to move in on September 15. Until then, we were staying in Sunset Beach, waiting for our new place to become available. Life was good. The California sun was out, and that faithful morning we turned on the television while getting ready to have breakfast and take our walk along the beach.
And there it was.
The first tower was on fire.
Smoke was pouring from high in the building. At first, nobody seemed to understand what we were looking at. Then, a few minutes later, we saw it with our own eyes—the second plane slammed into the other tower of the World Trade Center.
Joy and I felt frozen in time..
Speechless.
We were across the country, but suddenly distance meant nothing. We had no idea what was happening or what was coming next. We watched the towers come down on television, almost unable to comprehend what we were seeing. It looked like something out of a disaster movie, except it wasn't a movie. It was happening live from New York.
Two days later, sitting on the beach in Huntington Beach, we could see ships, cargo vessels and tankers sitting offshore in the Pacific, apparently awaiting orders. Every fifteen minutes or so, fighter jets patrolled the coastline.
It was surreal.
And we felt helpless.
America's innocence had been ripped away.
There are certain moments in our lives when we remember exactly where we were. No matter how many years pass, those moments remain fixed in our minds.
I remember where I was when I heard that John Lennon had been shot.
I remember being a little boy in Italy when our next-door neighbor came over and told us that Robert Kennedy had been assassinated. I can still hear her voice: “They killed the brother too.”
And I remember September 11, 2001.
More than 3,000 people lost their lives.
Fathers.
Mothers.
Brothers.
Sisters.
Sons and daughters.
Families changed forever.
We were all affected. And, in those first days, we seemed to draw closer to one another. We remember who we were with, who we called, who we hugged, and how suddenly the people around us mattered just a little more.
Our bubble of security had burst.
Twenty-five years later, that may be one of the things I remember most.
Before that morning, there was an assumption—a quiet belief—that somehow, despite everything happening in the world, we were safe inside our own little bubble.
September 11, 2001, shattered that illusion.
I don't know where Joy is now. We lost track of each other, she fell into some very deep issues, and she was never really the same after that day.
For some of us, 9/11 broke something inside.
Maybe we didn't realize it at the time. Maybe we carried on, went back to work, went to the races, raised our families, lived our lives. But something had changed.
Twenty-five years have passed.
It still seems like yesterday.
The images are still there. The smoke. The towers. The planes in the sky. The fighter jets over the Pacific. The ships sitting offshore. The silence.
And the feeling that, for one terrible morning, the world we thought we understood had changed forever.
We remember.
We always will.
