Some of my online biographies note my "checkered" past. I guess that's a reference to the time I spent as a professional gambler. Half a lifetime ago, I supported myself betting on the horses. I've moved on, that's for sure, but the lessons I learned watching those equine athletes stick with me.
This all came to mind when I read that Aqueduct Racetrack permanently ended live horse racing on June 28, closing down after 132 years. Sigh. As late as the 1970s, horse racing was the most popular live spectator sport in the country, followed by auto racing, football and baseball. Back in 1900, there were five racetracks inside the five boroughs of New York. Now there are none.
Aqueduct offered free admission. Its racing dates will be taken over this fall by Long Island's Belmont Park, whose $550 million renovation features swanky suites and fine dining venues. What's happened to horse racing is what's happened to baseball games, Broadway musicals, World Cup matches and visits to Disneyland. Once-affordable entertainment for the masses has become a privilege for the well-to-do.
My fixation with what was once known as "the Sport of Kings" began when I went to a 21st birthday weekend. The afternoon entertainment was steeplechase races run over fences on green hillsides. Scoring on a bet at 23-1 odds piqued my interest. A year or two later, I was meeting a college friend for pizza. He showed up half an hour late, fingers wrapped around a wad of hundred-dollar bills. He explained he'd had to wait at the racetrack to cash his winning tickets.
When I moved to Washington, D.C., I became a real horseplayer. I worked on a committee staff for Sen. Walter Huddleston whose home state of Kentucky dictated unwavering support for tobacco, bourbon and horse racing. On weekends and during congressional recesses, I'd sit in the track grandstand at Pimlico or Bowie with retirees who'd use a few dollars from their Social Security checks to play the exactas and daily doubles.
I set up mathematical models and studied the Daily Racing Form for hours. Each summer I'd go to the races in Saratoga Springs and hang out with the railbirds I'd met around the track. My buddy Marc called the August racing season there "summer camp" for adults. And so it was.
A friend who got a charge from the occasional winning jackpot in Atlantic City could not understand my fascination with the sport. One weekend I convinced her to come along with me to Laurel Race Course. I explained to her how I envisaged the first race being run. When my selection trailed early and passed the leaders yards before the finish line just as I'd foreseen, she looked at me as though I'd fixed the race. When our choice, the French colt Argument, won the Washington D.C. International Stakes, she was jumping up and down. "Now I get it," she screamed. "This is better than the slots!" Not every day was like that, but enough were.
At age 30, I took a shot at a job I craved, but my bid crashed and burned. Left without gainful employment, I turned to betting the ponies full-time. One Thanksgiving I was late, and my grandmother began to chastise me. I fanned out a handful of Benjamins. Her eyes widened. She said nothing more about my tardiness.
This "checkered" period in my career pretty much ended when I started my first job in Silicon Valley. I actually took a pay cut, but, as I liked to say, the tech company paid me even when I had a bad week.
I almost wrote here that a gambler's life is not suited for working at startups, getting married, raising a family, writing a weekly column and authoring novels. Then I realized that was wrong, really wrong.
It's a gamble to do any of those things. Take starting a company. Before doing so, careful study of the marketplace is required. You want to place your bets where the market is inefficient, where the odds are in your favor, where the payoff justifies the wager. Professor Elizabeth Pollman of the University of Pennsylvania estimates 75% of venture capital-backed companies fail. Betting two years on the success of your company is a much bigger wager than I ever made at the track. Betting two years writing a novel and wagering that you will find a market — er, readership, I mean — for your prose is a heckuva gamble as well.
Racetrack gambling taught me to carefully assess the odds. It taught me to be a risk-taker, not a reckless one, but a prudent one. It taught me to assess whether to stick to the plan when I hit a losing streak or to pivot to a new strategy. It gave me the chance to experience the exhilaration of having things play out as predicted.
In life, then, you put your money down and take your chances. When things go against you, as Frank Sinatra used to croon, "I pick myself up and get back in the race." Yep, that's life, and thanks to tracks like Aqueduct for teaching me that.
A renaissance man, Keith Raffel has served as the senior counsel to the Senate Intelligence Committee, started a successful internet software company, and had six books published including five novels and a collection of his columns. He currently spends the academic year as a resident scholar at Harvard. You can learn more about him at keithraffel.com. To read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators website at creators.com.
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