If you are looking for a good read and insight into the culture of horseplayers, Horseplayers: Life at the Track, offers both. We turned the tables on the book’s author, Ted McClelland, by making him the subject of our recent interview.
Case The Race: Your book was a great read. Was that what you were shooting for?
TM: I wanted it to be something that someone who didn’t know anything about handicapping could read and enjoy and also learn something from.
Case The Race: In many ways, your book is a study of horseplayers. What did you learn about horseplayers as a population?
TM: My definition of a horseplayer is someone who will spend $200 on a bet but won’t spend $20 on a pair of pants. They’re very much like starving artists that way.
Case the Race: In your observation, are there any common traits that horseplayers share, other than an affection for horse racing?
TM: Bachelors, for sure. It’s not something people are going to do if they are going to have to worry about supporting a family…. Most of them weren’t really in it for the money. They were in it to be right or to solve the puzzle. Money was just a way to keep score.
Case The Race: Your characters and descriptions are very colorful. For example, “The blind man had been begging outside Hawthorne for decades. The track was open in the chilly months of spring and fall, and he sat outside the doors in the hour before post time, clattering his tin cup like a Salvation Army bell, crying, “Please help the bliiiiind” in a woodwind alto. In his plain-black sunglasses, he looked like a Maxwell Street bluesman.” What would you write about yourself if you were the observer?
TM: When a writer reads something in a book they tend to rely on that. I started out relying on other people’s books. …. I don’t think it helps to have a formula or a system...you need to able to adapt to any situation.
Case The Race: What drew you to handicapping in the first place?
TM: I used to play Strat-O-Matic Baseball, which is based on Statistics. This was like that, but REAL – real money, real flesh and blood animals.
Case The Race: What tracks have you visited other than Hawthorne?
TM: I’ve been to Saratoga, Belmont, Churchill Downs, Golden Gate Fields, Great Lakes Downs, Fort Eire…
Case The Race: Are the horseplayers the same at other tracks?
TM: Oh yeah. I can read books by Andrew Beyer and William Murray and recognize the same characters. But there are fewer people going to the tracks because of the internet, off track betting, TV and simucasting. This book would be harder to write now. It would have been a lot easier to write 30 years ago.
Case The Race: You wrote, “The day I didn’t bet was the day I stopped being a gambler and became a horseplayer.” What does it mean to have graduated to that status?
TM: I guess it meant that… you can read all you want but you have to learn by doing it. I had a lot more equanimity. Getting my emotions under control was part of the process and that only happens by experience. Also, what I found was that it wasn’t about the horses. It was about predicting the behavior of the other gamblers and exploiting their mistakes.
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Ted McClelland is the author of Horseplayers: Life at the Track, a memoir of a year spent at the races, and The Third Coast, a Great Lakes travelogue to be published in February by Chicago Review Press. He was formerly a staff writer for the Chicago Reader, where he wrote a column called “At the Track”. His stories and essays have been published in Salon, Utne, Mother Jones, the Chicago Tribune, and Potomac.
