Farewell to Sport by Paul Gallico

Farewell to Sport by Paul Gallico

Author:Paul Gallico
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781504009485
Publisher: Open Road Media


XIV

COME ON—MY HORSE!

All I know about the ancient and occasionally honorable sport of horseracing is the excitement of going down to the betting pits and watching money change hands. I probably knew and wrote less about horseracing than any other game. And I suspect that this may have been the case because the ponies always seemed to me inseparable from page upon page of tiny numerals in fine print, figures that smacked unpleasantly of mathematics, a subject that has been distasteful to me ever since I found out, in early youth, that it is true that they cannot and do not lie. I suppose if I set my mind to it I could read the chart of a race and gain a fairly comprehensive idea of how the race was won and the position of the various horses throughout the trial. But the hieroglyphics of the sport have always repelled me and I could never bring myself to study a form chart of a clocker’s tabulation or a solidly massed page of past performances.

Still, when I went to the races occasionally, I liked to bet and, above all, I liked to win, which I rarely did because I was always betting with scared and poor money, a trenchant racetrack phrase. But I always recall vividly the thrill of taking my day’s program to an expert, possibly some veteran turf-writer, or a famous brother sports columnist whose specialty was the ponies, like Bill Corum or Damon Runyon or Joe Williams, or perhaps one of the visiting millionaires or celebrities or politicians, who must surely be in contact with good information, and asking him to mark it for me with his choices. There are a great friendliness and generosity in racing people. They will always share tips, good things, information, hunches, etc., provided you are a gentleman about it and are not inclined to hold them personally responsible if the tips do not mature. There is even an eagerness, almost, to pass these tips along as though they gained strength by having other supporters, or perhaps there is a propitiatory thought behind the kind deed. I do not recall ever having had any hesitancy or conscience about thus picking the brains of the experts—I was perfectly willing to swap hunches on the outcome of prizefights or football games—and I was always as happy as a child with my marked program, especially before the races were run. I always felt that I held a practical fortune in my fingertips. Those penciled check marks, or rings drawn around the exciting and intriguing names of horses, represented vast sums of money for which perhaps I should not have to do any work. Who could tell? A year in Europe and freedom and independence, time to travel and write a book, a new car, a paying up of all debts, the feeling of having for the first time in my life a lot of money that I could spend, if I liked, for new clothes, books, phonograph records for my collection, a lot of new dogs—perhaps a motor boat.



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