Fran Jurga over at Hoof Blog recently posted a short vid examining a SoCal horseshoer's journey in the profession. Further, she offers me a perfect segue to recycle more previously created content. Enjoy this brief vid of NorCal shoer Denny plying his trade from 3 years ago.
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Thursday, December 31, 2009
Tuesday, December 29, 2009
The draw
The manner in which horses are entered in a particular race and assigned post positions has gone largely unchanged for generations. Above, horsemen & racing officials huddle around the racing office counter while entry cards, each representing a horse, are pulled from the box (right) and numbered pills are pulled from a shake bottle (held by pill-puller, left). Which ever pill number is pulled for a given entry card will be that horse's post position. Each pill is then placed in the corresponding numbered divot on the makeshift board as seen here on the counter. The purpose of the board is to allow everyone to see which number was pulled instead of the puller announcing it and dumping it into a less circumspect vessel. This reduces the ease, and possibly the likelihood, of chicanery in the assignment of post positions.
While less common now, given dwindling field sizes, occasionally a race over fills. This means not all horses entered will be assigned a post position or a placing on the also eligible list. Assuming all horses have equal preference, those not pulled, and thus not assigned a post position number or placing on the also eligible list, will not have a chance to run in the race. Such horses are said to have been "left in the box."
The same type of bottle and pills are used to determine which party claims a horse when more than one claim is dropped for a particular horse. On TVG or HRTV, when you hear "trainer Hai Bute took Cheap Speed out of the fourth in a three-way shake" that merely means three claims were dropped and Cheap Speed will now be in the care of Mr. Bute.
*pic circa 1950, Cumberland Racetrack
Monday, December 28, 2009
Racetrack card game
Every race day an unorganized card game breaks out in the kitchen by mid morning. Sometimes there are two games. They mostly play Gin, but pert' near always it's gonna be some conception of a meld game. Oh, you wanna know which track? Doesn't matter. They played Gin at Fairmount Park in the 80s. I dropped a couple Lincolns to some eager grooms in a three handed pinochle game at Pimlico better than a decade ago, but only because they were playing for lower stakes than the horsemen at the rummy tables.
Gin was by far the dominate game at every track in Chile and Argentina. I did catch some riders playing hearts at the track in Rio. Euchre was popular with the jocks in northern England and I've seen a hand or two of point-trick games played on at least one backstretch in every hemisphere. Even so, I've never seen so much as one game of bridge. Rio or Saigon or Berkeley, Calif, you have to remember: These are hard men living hard lives. They know the risks, they want action, and have no use for a rubber.
Fav new dev tool
Racing folk don't give a leaking flap barb about this, and if you maintain a site, you probably already use it, but googlelabs browser size is pretty effing useful.
Sunday, December 27, 2009
Thursday, December 24, 2009
Thursday, December 17, 2009
Legendary d-bag, Jerry Hollendorfer, still not in the hall of fame
nonetheless, this jackass should be in the hall
To say Jerry Hollendorfer is a fierce competitor is to employ a euphemism suited for respectable print publications and has no place here. He's an enormous asshole. Of course he's competitive, like most that attain his level of success in any endeavor. Often, in sports or business or what have you, the rules of polite discourse require one to refer to highly successful people that discard accepted behavioral norms as they scratch and claw to the top as "fierce competitors". They're really assholes. Jerry Hollendorfer is no different, he's just perfected being an asshole.
He'd fuck over his own grandmother and sell tickets to it if it lopped another win into his column. While at another track when he had the favorite in a graded stakes race, he has been known to call norcal to rip into anyone he felt was responsible for the maiden 8 he just lost by a nose with, and barring that, he'll have his tantrum for anyone that will listen. Whether the genisis of his motivation is classic small man's syndrome, or that his mother never hugged him, I know not. But make no mistake, he wants to win.
Even though he is completely classless, He's made himself a world class trainer through hard work. He didn't grow up in a racing family and never had a barn turned over to him. He drove a truck to pay the bills when training didn't cover the feed bill. He did it with hard work and an insatiable drive to win. Not to make money or be popular, mind you. No. To win.
Recently this asshole called Portland Meadows--YES PORTLAND FUCKING MEADOWS--while in socal saddling a stakes horse to listen to the call of his $2500 maiden running for peanuts. I believe he finished 3rd and called the jockey's mother a whore.
You know his stats: he's chipping away at 6,000 wins, won the Kentucky Oaks acoupla times, a shitload of graded stakes including two million dollar races last year alone, trained Hysterical Lady, Heatseeker, Chocolate Candy (finished 4th in the Derby this year), and.....whatevs, I wrote about it last year.
The point is, sure, he's a d-bag of biblical proportions (probably even uses some leeching horse betting system), but this motherfucker should still be in the horse racing hall of fame, and the fact that he isn't is just further proof that the turf writers that vote are even more stupid than he is an asshole.
To say Jerry Hollendorfer is a fierce competitor is to employ a euphemism suited for respectable print publications and has no place here. He's an enormous asshole. Of course he's competitive, like most that attain his level of success in any endeavor. Often, in sports or business or what have you, the rules of polite discourse require one to refer to highly successful people that discard accepted behavioral norms as they scratch and claw to the top as "fierce competitors". They're really assholes. Jerry Hollendorfer is no different, he's just perfected being an asshole.
He'd fuck over his own grandmother and sell tickets to it if it lopped another win into his column. While at another track when he had the favorite in a graded stakes race, he has been known to call norcal to rip into anyone he felt was responsible for the maiden 8 he just lost by a nose with, and barring that, he'll have his tantrum for anyone that will listen. Whether the genisis of his motivation is classic small man's syndrome, or that his mother never hugged him, I know not. But make no mistake, he wants to win.
Even though he is completely classless, He's made himself a world class trainer through hard work. He didn't grow up in a racing family and never had a barn turned over to him. He drove a truck to pay the bills when training didn't cover the feed bill. He did it with hard work and an insatiable drive to win. Not to make money or be popular, mind you. No. To win.
Recently this asshole called Portland Meadows--YES PORTLAND FUCKING MEADOWS--while in socal saddling a stakes horse to listen to the call of his $2500 maiden running for peanuts. I believe he finished 3rd and called the jockey's mother a whore.
You know his stats: he's chipping away at 6,000 wins, won the Kentucky Oaks acoupla times, a shitload of graded stakes including two million dollar races last year alone, trained Hysterical Lady, Heatseeker, Chocolate Candy (finished 4th in the Derby this year), and.....whatevs, I wrote about it last year.
The point is, sure, he's a d-bag of biblical proportions (probably even uses some leeching horse betting system), but this motherfucker should still be in the horse racing hall of fame, and the fact that he isn't is just further proof that the turf writers that vote are even more stupid than he is an asshole.
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