Ghostly Memories
1. How is it that I hadn’t heard of the Holy Ghost or Ecuador betting systems before? After Bill Christine’s latest, I’ll be watching for the double-double:
Pack gave pre-race handicapping seminars called the Paddock Club at the New York tracks. One day at Saratoga he told his audience: “If by some miracle today, in a later race, the same horse qualifies as both the Ghost and the Ecuador, you are permitted to leave the track, go to the Adirondack Trust on Broadway, rob it, and get back in time for this big score.”
2. The summer 2010 issue of Trainer magazine includes a story by Bill Heller on the decline of fair racing. Seeing a Twitter exchange with @sidfernando on the subject, a correspondent emailed with tales of larceny past, like this one:
… the best story I can tell you is one that an old trainer I worked for at Suffolk told me. Summer of 1964, Brockton Fair, a mean old horse named Honest Count. They take him down there to run and the jockey bounces into the paddock and tells them, “Don’t waste your money betting on your horse today — I can’t let him run.”
Bill Finley wrote a marvelous column on the end of Northampton fair racing in 2005: “Thanks for the memories. They were something else.”
