Sporting folk know there are two principal modes of handicapping horses, the mathematical and the mystical. 

When numbers fall silent, as they will with Chihuahua-bred maiden two-year-olds, for example, gamblers say that a horse with no recorded past has no form. A handicapper must have the self-discipline to sit out a formless horse race or a willingness to be seen dangling a pin suspended by thread over a racing form, or calculating the horses’ name values in Gematria. All such as may happen when the urge to bet overwhelms the imposture of rationality. Mathematician, mystic, or vigorous hybrid, every gambler needs an Edge.

Beginning in the late 1960s, a Marxist Handicapper from Greenwich Village, Len Ragozin, provided that Edge for many. Ragozin’s “speed number” boiled a horse’s performance down to a single digit. Combined with Ragozin’s acclaimed “bounce” theory, that number provided professional gamblers like the Sasquatch with the Edge, the small advantage that made it possible to make a living at the track.

Christopher Hart, a philanthropist, playwright, and then-resident of Los Angeles, introduced me to the Sasquatch in the same year Gilded Time won the Breeder’s Cup juvenile. The Sasquatch was a 7-foot-tall calculating savant, a touch of the autist, and was possessed of verifiably deep insight into downstream ramifications of shiftless totalizer odds. Sasquatch wore greenish polyester suits, his jacket sagging and pants pockets bulging with cash, IOUs, uncashed betting slips, and high denomination Vegas casino chips, along with his glasses repair kit and other diversified assets of the Sasquatch treasury.

The Sasquatch, for all his strange being, commanded respect. He was the handicapping eminence at the center of a small cadre of professional and semi-pro gamblers who periodically pooled assets on costly tickets like Del Mar’s long-gone 9-horse-parlay: the “Pick 9” which required betters to pick nine winners in a row. This same small group of gamblers circulated around the Southern California tracks in pursuit of the best odds and the biggest handle.

Gamblers at Santa Anita sensed, somehow, that a decades-long era of relative prosperity was ending. Handicappers who’d enjoyed a steady, unspectacular 20 percent more or less untaxed return on betting capital were now pulling out brown envelopes taped under desks. Every reserve was being tapped, as the best professionals struggled to break even. No one wanted to say it of course, but the Edge was thinning, or perhaps it had already gone. 

For the last several years there had been warning signs. Paul “The King of Big Screen TV” was selling Chinese knock-off sneakers to feral ghetto youth from the trunk of his Mercedes in the Clubhouse parking lot. Paul, The King of Big Screen TV, was warned, wouldn’t listen, and in the end, the track stewards waived him off. Repo men were seen cruising the valet parking lots. There was no hiding the signs.

No doubt the Sasquatch knew the Edge had departed before any of the rest of us. Mathematicians, or arithmeticians like Sasquatch, counted infinitesimals on fortune’s downward arc. Sasquatch was certainly the first to say it out loud, to concede it had already happened. The Edge was gone. The Sasquatch announced that he, too, was leaving, before he started using coupons, joined Ralph’s Club, or losing became a habit. He was already supplementing his track earnings with the substantial fees he earned as a professional bridge tournament partner.

What happened to the Edge? The gambler’s consensus was that, in essence, too many people wised up to Len Ragozin’s speed number; too many betters were buying Ragozin’s horse picks known as “The Sheets,” or buying a competing publication published by Ragozin’s estranged former assistant. 

The non-pro gambler, it was felt by pros, was not meant to have access to the Edge. The non-pros, the gamblers believed, bet stupid and their impulsive, deeply irrational bets often wrecked the gambler’s long planned multi-race parleys by flattening the odds.

When the Sasquatch departed for the bridge rooms of Las Vegas, the remaining horseplayers, unwilling to concede to changed circumstances, made cautious adjustments to handicapping systems and sought the Edge elsewhere. One of the less-reliable ways of gaining an edge is barn gossip. Barn gossip will tell you there are many ways to win a horse race. A gambler may handicap a winner, or profit equally by knowing in advance which horses are not going to win. Among the non-winners, gamblers might hear in advance, would be “the chalk” — the odds-on favorite. Every time the chalk wins, it lowers the payout of combination bets, which are the lifeblood of professional gamblers. 

There are as many ways to slow a horse down as to speed one up. Jockeys can “pull” a horse to run out of the money, or use a battery-powered “buzzer” to speed one up. A trainer can slow a horse by partially blocking his windpipe with a sponge, or speed up a veteran campaigner with an extensive arsenal of pharmaceuticals. Horses are licitly and illicitly medicated with an ever-changing list of forbidden and permissible or sometimes permissible “performance-enhancing substances.” Hormones, growth factors, stimulants, painkillers — the same substances and tactics to disguise those substances as are found in human athletic competition. Periodically, the medications change and the threatened penalties for violators grow more menacing, but horse racing will not prosecute horse racing lest it bring horse racing into disrepute.

Before the winnings can be split between gamblers who are party to a pool, the cash must be collected from the track’s “tax window.” This is the big payout window where someone must sign for the winnings, provide a picture ID, a social security number, and accept full responsibility for taxes due, under penalty of law. In such circumstances, gamblers often call on the services of a surrogate winner to represent them all. “Foxy,” a “stooper” at Santa Anita, was often of service in this way to gamblers of that vanished era. (A “stooper” is a track denizen who shuffles humpbacked, like a human roomba between the stands and back and forth by the rail, kicking piles of discarded betting slips hopping, squinting, and peering, hoping to find an overlooked winner. It happens.) Cashing high value tickets for IRS adverse gamblers reliably pays well, or pays modestly, if you’re a walking brainstem like Foxy negotiating with a human supercomputer like Sasquatch.

Let me be clear: I refer not to a specific occasion here, but to a typical gambler’s predicament. Persons who file returns with the IRS as professional gamblers are often reluctant to do business with Foxy and his ilk. Feeling themselves to be likely candidates for IRS entrapment they may nix an arrangement with Foxy, returning the now warmed-up gamblers to step 1, the problem of who takes the tax hit. “I’ll do it for 20%” offers a larcenous plastic surgeon and hope-to-die gambler known as “the dick doctor.” Again, readers are advised, this is a generalized example of the type of aggravation certain to arise in the aftermath of a winning bet and not a specific instance or legally actionable account of a particular incident, necessarily.

A wily trainer might, with a word, turn on the taps for hard-pressed gamblers. One trainer who did so occasionally was Jorge. We’ll call him Jorge. Jorge was born in Colombia, one of 137 brothers and sisters by 20 or 30 some mothers, maybe more. Jorge’s father was a Colombian coke baron, a national celebrity who hobnobbed with TV actors, and was pictured in gossip magazines and society columns often at racetracks, escorting glamorous-looking women that Jorge’s mother said were whores. It was his father’s custom to present each of his male children with ten thousand dollars on their 15th birthday.

Jorge’s older brother had received a paternal visit and bounty the year before, and Jorge told me he thought about that money and what he would do with it every single day. Jorge dreamt of buying a racehorse with the money and training it himself, caring for it, making it the greatest champion that ever ran. It would have made a great movie, but it was not to be. Two weeks before Jorge’s birthday his father was arrested and incarcerated. While his father was permitted to leave prison on weekends and holidays and was again a feature in the gossip mags and in self-published romance photo-novellas, he never came to see his son. He never called, sent a message, or acknowledged his birthday, and he failed to deliver the promised $10,000.

Jorge gave up on his patrimony, but not on horses. Instead, he emigrated to the US, joining his mother in Los Angeles at the age of 16. He got his start in racing by selling bags of carrots outside the Hollywood Park barn entrance, where he was seen daily by every trainer, owner, jockey, shit-raker, and bookie at the track. The reproachful gaze of the ragged waif waving bags of carrots had a cumulative, progressive effect. The hardest horse owners eventually found Jorge’s determined presence impossible to ignore and Jorge went from independent carrot-hustler to barn gofer, to hot walker and groom. Before too long, an owner offered Jorge a beat-up claiming horse to train. Just like in the story books, Jorge nursed the ailing animal back to health, and ultimately turned that beater horse into a stakes-race winner, throwing professional gamblers off the scent and pulling off multiple betting coups along the way.

All kinds of rumors purported to account for the utter unpredictability of Jorge’s horses. One of these horses, rested, ready to run, inexplicably runs at a walk. The same horse, the implied cripple horse, comes back from injury and runs poorly in few cheap claiming races. Jorge tells curious gamblers that the crazy horse owner is now making him enter the sick horse in a stakes race. Jorge shakes his head. “Stay away,” he advises, “the horse has no chance.” 

And so, the invalid horse goes off at 38 to 1, miraculously recovers, kicks off the shin bandages and blows away a better class of competition. One guy, down by the rail, who bet his kid’s birthday present, whoops, ‘cause he had a $2.00 show bet on the horse. None of the gamblers have it, and they blame Jorge for keeping a good thing to himself.

Jorge had a well-deserved reputation as one of the wiliest trainers in horse racing, and a fabled “juicer,” Jorge’s equine pharmacotherapies were beyond the capacity of pitiful 1990s ELISA blood and urine tests to detect. “Pity the poor racing steward who pits his feeble wits against Jorge,” was common wisdom of the track. “Nobody could anticipate Jorge’s moves. The consensus made Jorge for a sophisticated doper and seasoned nobbler, who deliberately sent a barrage of mixed signals to gamblers regarding his competitive intentions. Gamblers like to feel more opaque than the trainers they (presume to) see through, and Jorge’s tactical unpredictability fed a festering collective resentment. “We can’t guess his moves in advance because Jorge has no form and he has no form, not because he’s clever, but because he’s an actual idiot who doesn’t know what he’s doing.” In other words, Jorge was unreadable. 

Despite his candor about his childhood, Jorge was a private, not to say secretive man. He won 3 million dollars in purses in the year 2000, (I looked it up), and while purses are split, the $3 million approximates Jorge’s annual income, from, as the IRS says, all sources. Jorge loved horses, and he was a canny man, cunning, or “cute” as they say in Ireland, and perhaps ruthless as well; he discussed his tactics with no one. When Jorge got married, he told no one. When his wife filed for divorce, seeking a vast settlement, he said nothing and, when his wife was killed by a hit and run driver shortly before their divorce was to be adjudicated, he said nothing again. Which led to considerable speculation Jorge might have killed her.

Jorge will say nothing. He got dementia and died in 2021.