Sports in America Read online

  ‘What kind of situation is best for you?’

  ‘The race ends, a losing jockey claims foul against the winner. Confusion. A lot of people have already thrown away their tickets. If it’s the last race, some of them are already on the bus. On a good day, maybe three objections.’

  ‘On an average day, why might I throw away one of my tickets?’

  He looked at me as if to calculate the level of my stupidity, then said, ‘You get three different tickets, to win, to place, to show. Your horse wins, so you throw the other two away.’

  ‘Are people that dumb?’

  ‘You could be. Easy.’

  ‘You ever bet on a race yourself?’

  He gave me the stare and resumed his endless search for the big winning ticket that some stupid customer had thrown away. The Italian told me that each week the Super Stooper would find himself quite a few $3.60 and $4.20 winners.

  But the bettor who won my heart was Frank the Tank. (At the tracks they really did use such names. One bettor I got to know very well who went by the monicker Nobbles was squiring a married lady to whom he referred invariably as Yamma, so if the name were overheard in the wrong places, the sex wouldn’t be apparent.)

  Frank the Tank was a muscular, barrel-like specimen who appeared every afternoon only at the end of the eighth race, for it is the custom at eastern race tracks to throw open the gates at the conclusion of that race, giving anyone who wished to enter free access to the betting windows for the ninth and final race. That late in the day a bettor could park free in the track lot and have little trouble finding a discarded program and Racing Form. Frank the Tank bet only the ninth race, for which, through the years, he had acquired a special proficiency.

  From the moment he walked in, he would position himself on the outside apron overlooking the finish line. This allowed him both a clear view of the place and show pools on the tote board and quick access to the betting windows. He was unbelievably sensitive to any changes in odds which might give him an edge, and he watched right down to the last second before placing his own bet, which I judged to be considerable, say $50 or $75.

  Once he explained his system. ‘In the ninth race everything is different. The big winners have gone home. The big losers are still here, tryin’ to make a recovery. They throw a lot of money into the pool on horses that ain’t got a chance of winnin’. To get even, the big loser has to bet on long shots, which means the bad horses are drawing lots of money. If a good horse wins, he will pay better odds than normal for place or show. Also, the really stupid bettors are puttin’ all their money on the Trifecta moon shot, so they ain’t clutterin’ up the place and show lines, ’cause this late they can’t get even with place and show. Also, in the ninth race lotsa times they run broken-down horses at strange distances, so it’s a real grab bag and form don’t mean that much. The money can be seen right there on the board if you got a keen eye.’

  Frank the Tank spent his entire life waiting outside Philadelphia-area race tracks for his free ninth race. On those days when he judged the ninth to be totally banal, with no edge to the knowing bettor, he was quite content to stand pat and watch other people bet. But whenever he had a slight edge in knowledge, and when it was confirmed by the Daily Racing Form, he would plunge.

  I liked Frank and was with him one day when he hit a big winner in the ninth at Delaware Park. From somewhere he had picked up a tip that one of the trainers was trying to slip a very speedy horse into a cheap race, but had not given winning instructions to the jockey. This meant that another horse, on whom the odds were rather long, had a good chance maybe to win, but at least to either place or show. So Frank bet his bundle on this second horse, and whether the trainer was trying to win with the favorite or not, the jockey was, and the first horse came home a winner … at very short odds, something like $3.80. But Frank’s horse came in at $10.60 to place and $6.60 to show.

  I had two superb moments at the race tracks. On the last morning the four of us were together, I had my own Racing Form, and by diligently applying the lessons I’d learned, I actually picked a filly in the first race who was destined to win. I was tipped off by various facts: she was dropping from a $10,000 race to $5,000, which was helpful. She ran much better in wet weather than dry, and today was going to be dry but at the end of a wet spell. And she had finished her last three races in fourth position but against better opposition. She was a maiden, meaning that she—or it could be a he—had not yet won a race, but her times were consistent and she was being ridden on this day by a jockey who was among the leaders at the meet but hadn’t been winning lately. I judged that horse and jockey alike were about due, and as we ate I outlined my thinking to my three mentors.

  ‘He’s catchin’ on,’ the German said approvingly, but none of the three liked my selection, mainly because the first race was for maiden fillies, and in such a race anything is likely to happen, since none of the competitors has ever won and since fillies are more unpredictable than colts. But when we reached the track and I bet my $5 across the board on number nine and she won by three lengths at $10.40 for $2, a good win price, I was touted through the professional fraternity as a comer. The Italian, who never missed a trick, had, against his own better judgment, decided to crank my selection into his Daily Double bets—a fact which he told me much later—and made himself $166.

  The second good moment came at Atlantic City some three months after I had spent my apprenticeship with the bettors. I was that day a guest of the management and the eighth race had been named in my honor, which meant that I was to hand out the trophy in the winner’s circle. After I did so, and after the flash bulbs had subsided and I was walking back to the plush clubhouse from where I was watching the races, I heard a loud ‘Pssst!’ and I looked into the grandstand area and there were my mentors, the Pole, the Italian, the German.

  ‘Hey, Jim!’ the latter yelled as I went to the fence separating the wealthy customers from the rabble. ‘Look who we got with us!’

  It was the Super Stooper, his eyes bleary from the unaccustomed sunlight. ‘You have any luck?’ I asked him.

  ‘He’s makin’ expenses,’ the Italian interjected.

  And then, shuffling in past the open entrances loomed Frank the Tank on his way to master the ninth race. He was wearing sneakers that day, lest he have to hurry to the windows in the last few seconds. He did not see me, for his eyes were glued to the tote board; he had probably picked up inside information which would give him an edge.

  I am always surprised when I hear that horse racing is the principal public sporting event in America. In a typical year it collects over seventy million paid admissions. Next is the forty-five million at auto racing, thirty million at college football. Having attended a good many races in the course of my study, and at a rather intense level, I can understand the popularity. The nine races go off on time. Each produces a known winner and a certain bunch of losers. The race tracks tend to be handsome, well-run places, with posh restaurants for those who can afford them and rather good beef sandwiches for the hoi polloi. And for people like me, who love the printed word and the calculation of possibilities, there is the Daily Racing Form with its multitude of ascertainable facts and its delicious implication that picking the winner is a science. Also, there are the handsome horses, the keen-witted little jockeys, the canny old trainers, and in harness racing the amazingly complex drivers, who can continue racing well past the age of sixty. Racing is indeed ‘The Sport of Kings,’ but I suspect that a good four-fifths of its appeal is the organized gambling that accompanies it, which may be sadly true of other sports also, like football, where the gambling is just as well organized but wholly illegal.

  Few spectators of any sport derive the joy that my three gamblers do from racing: the camaraderie of getting to the track, the close association with other gamblers, the intense excitement repeated nine times, and the general graciousness that governs the track. I learned about this when I occupied a folding chair which I thought had been provide
d by the management. The Italian, horrified by this breach, whispered, ‘That belongs to somebody! Get off, quick, before they come back.’

  My three gamblers derived few if any health benefits from their hobby. They rarely saw the outdoors, or the sun, or the race-track gardens. They got little fresh air. They rarely moved about, and the idea of exercise would have stunned them. They were unusually tense, but the episodic emotional release at either victory or defeat undoubtedly helped them discharge both their aggressions and their tensions.

  The Vigorous Participant

  Artemius Crandall grew up in the black section of a small Texas town. He had no father, but lived with his mother and her four other children in a mean house on a mean street. From his earliest days he could run and wrestle, and his obvious skill at games attracted much favorable attention from the black men who watched the boys at play.

  One of them advised a white carpenter for whom he worked that ‘there’s this here Crandall kid at the edge of town who’s faster than a deer.’ The white man, an enthusiastic supporter of the high school football team, took it upon himself to scout the Crandall boy, and what he saw he liked.

  He went to the high school coach and said, ‘Vernor, I’ve spotted you an all-time winner, but we got to keep him under cover before one of the other schools hears about him.’

  So the carpenter and the coach went to see Mrs. Crandall and gave her some money to help with the other children, and they told her that they felt sure her son Artemius could be a real star on the local team, if he kept his nose clean.

  ‘He’s a good boy,’ she assured the two men, and she was right.

  Artemius was then thirteen years old, a slim-hipped, broad-shouldered boy five-feet-ten and with every indication he would grow another six inches. He had a short neck, the kind that doesn’t injure easily, and extremely quick reactions, including a remarkable peripheral vision, so that he could both see an oncoming object and adjust to it quickly.

  And he behaved himself. He had broken into no stores, stolen nothing, molested no girls. Had he been a white boy in a town like Waco or Lubbock he could have been an honor student. In his little town his teachers taught him practically nothing, and even without the intervention of the carpenter and the coach, he knew that unless he excelled in football he was doomed to the nothingness he saw among the black men of his community.

  The white men now faced a difficult decision. They had been insisting for some years that their town have a big-time football team, one they could be proud of, and they saw in Artemius Crandall and some other boys of promise a chance to achieve greatness. But to field a winner required some nice tactical decisions, and they discussed what age to make Artemius, who was thirteen. If they made him twelve, he could play when he was more mature, but if he was fourteen, he could start a year earlier. They decided on twelve, so that he would be coming along with two other very good prospects, and his birth papers, fragmentary at best, were reissued to make him seem a year younger than he really was.

  They also looked after his grades, convincing his teachers to give him all A’s and B’s, even though his schooling up to then had left him largely illiterate. He wanted to play basketball and baseball too, but they convinced him that he might damage his football chances if he did that, so they kept him working winter, spring and summer on football until he became a phenomenon.

  Unfortunately, he became so good at breaking tackles and cutting either left or right that it was impossible to keep his existence secret. Scouts from a neighboring city of some size heard from a traveling salesman, whom they paid to bring them such news, that ‘a kid named Artemius Crandall is tearin’ things up out on the prairie,’ and they slipped a couple of experts into the crowd one afternoon when Artemius was playing, and these men saw immediately that this kid was an all-time winner.

  What to do? To waste such talent in a hick town was disgraceful when the boy might have a chance to play for the state championship. So it was decided to look into the matter. The men from the city decided that it would be too costly to relocate the whole Crandall family. However, Mrs. Crandall had a bachelor brother, and the men persuaded him to move into the city and to bring his nephew Artemius along.

  When the rural high school coach heard about the proposed hijacking, he raised the devil, but the coach from the city appeared in a black Chrysler and talked sensibly with the boy’s mother. ‘What do you desire for your son?’ he asked with extreme politeness. ‘If he comes with us … front page coverage … state-wide television … a sure scholarship to the University of Texas … maybe a doctor or a lawyer.’

  He painted such a glowing vision of the boy’s future that Mrs. Crandall could not resist. Her son would move to the city with his uncle.

  ‘I’ll go to court if they try to steal him that way,’ the rural coach shouted, but he knew he was licked. The city coach had affidavits proving that Mrs. Crandall was too poor to support all her children, whereas provision would be made so that the boy’s uncle could do so. The latter was true, since businessmen who were determined to bring the state championship to the city had found jobs for both uncle and nephew, so that each was making four times as much money as Mrs. Crandall had ever made in her life.

  As a high school player, Artemius Crandall was a sensation, a running back of speed and skill. Of course, because of his spurious birth date he was playing against boys a year younger than himself, except that some of their certificates had been shifted too. His team went 11–1, 11–0, and 11–1 while he played on it, and two years out of three it won the Texas championship. The only thing that might have marred his record was the fact that late in his senior year the disgruntled carpenter from his hometown told the coach of another team that was battling Crandall’s for the championship that the star halfback’s true age was nineteen, and that his birth certificate had been jimmied. This created a temporary scandal, but since Crandall’s hometown was proud of the boy’s accomplishments, the officials repulsed the rumor, and his career was saved.

  He had no trouble academically. Although he could barely read or write, teachers in his new school gave him the same high marks he had been receiving in the country town, and he was able to graduate with a B-plus average. In deportment he remained an almost ideal young man, and his coach said of him, ‘Probably the finest football player in the State of Texas, all things considered. I’d be proud to have him as my son.’

  Crandall’s real trouble started in the latter weeks of his junior year, when he already held most of the state records for rushing. Informal scouts, representing numerous universities, began running into Crandall accidentally. He would be entering a supermarket to buy a quart of orange juice and a stranger would ask, ‘Aren’t you Artemius Crandall, the famous halfback?’ Such a question was flattering, and Crandall would nod, whereupon the man would say, ‘I’m Ed Garver. Went to Baylor myself, and if you ever want to go to a real great school, get in touch with me.’

  In this way he met alumni from Texas, TCU, Rice, Arkansas and Oklahoma. No one made any specific promises, because that was illegal, but hints were dropped and two different men stopped by to see Artemius’ uncle, to see if he would like to move to this university town or that to a much better job. His uncle said he liked it where he was.

  Things might have gone badly for Artemius had not his uncle proved to be a man of character. From the first he had known what these white men were up to, for he had early on spotted the unusual ability of his nephew. He knew that Artemius was a marketable item and had agreed to move to the city only because such a setting would enable his nephew to command a higher price.

  As soon as the scouts began to converge, he laid the facts on the table for Artemius to study. ‘What we’re after,’ he said forcefully, ‘is for you to get yourself a big-time contract like O. J. Simpson or John Brockington. They did it, Artemius, so can you. What university you go to don’t matter, Artemius. So long as you get a coach like Bear Bryant or Woody Hayes who can land you that contract. So you listen, boy
, listen to all of them, but in the back of your mind you keep askin’ just one question, “Can this dude get me a big-time contract?” What he can do for you in the next four years ain’t much. But what he can do for you at the end of four years, that’s everything.’

  Most of the scouts who visited the uncle considered him a lout, a big, hulking black man who stayed in the shadows. They suspected he had been moved into the city with his nephew so that the boy could play football there, and they laid plans to bring both of them to their campuses. That the uncle would come along they did not doubt and were prepared to pay him handsomely for doing so.

  One coach was different. Honest John Taggart, from the University of Jefferson* flew into the city in a Lear jet owned by Western United, a food processing chain. At the airport two large black Cadillacs, also owned by Western United, were waiting, and when they pulled up before the modest house in which Artemius and his uncle lived, children in the street started yelling, ‘They comin’ to see the football hero!’ And Honest John stopped, bent over, talked with the children, and said ‘You’re right. We’re coming to see the finest football player in the nation.’ He knew the children would repeat this through the neighborhood.

  Once inside the house. Coach Taggart saw that this whole arrangement was dominated by the stubborn integrity of the uncle, so before he even spoke of football, or what his university could do for Artemius, he said to the uncle, ‘Mr. Carter, they told me back in Jefferson you were the man who had held this fine boy together. Mr. Carter, I know of no finer service a man can perform than to look after the children of his widowed sister.’

  ‘She ain’t widowed,’ Carter said. ‘Her husband left her.’

  ‘With five children,’ Coach Taggart said sadly. It was his business to know everything possible about a prospect, because if he could land only two or three boys like Artemius Crandall, his reputation, his income and indeed his job would be secure for another two or three years, and since he earned more than $125,000 a year, it was vital that he land Artemius.