The Risk Pool

somebody willing to explain its intricacies to a novice. Around noon, Untemeyer, the bookie, came in and sat on the last stool at the counter and took whatever action there was, writing out small slips that disappeared into the baggy pockets of his black alpaca suit. “Don’t mean a goddamn thing,” he said of the racing form and its statistics. According toUntemeyer, the other factors that didn’t mean a goddamn thing were the jockeys, the track conditions, and the horse’s lineage. “What
does
mean something?” I innocently asked one day. “Nothing,” he grumbled. “Nothing means anything.”
    I thought about that. “There’s
no
way to predict?”
    He snorted. “There’s all kinds of ways. That’s the trouble. None of them work. How old do you think I am?”
    I couldn’t tell how old Untemeyer was, but I knew he was pretty old. I said fifty and he snorted again. “Try sixty-six. Guess how much I’ve lost on the horses.”
    “A lot?” I said. If he was that old, it had to be.
    “Not a goddamn dime,” he said. “Guess how much I’ve bet.”
    I was on to him. “Not a goddamn dime?”
    “You’re smarter than your old man,” he said. “Course, you’re younger, too. You got all your dumb years ahead of you.”
    Actually, when it came to the horses, my father was nobody’s fool, and he’d made Untemeyer uncomfortable more than once. Untemeyer was a poor man’s bookie who never took any really heavy action. In fact, most of the book he wrote was under the traditional two-dollar minimum wager. My father, who made good money working on the road, had nailed him with ten-dollar daily doubles on more than one occasion. This made the old bookie grumble pitifully, though my father’s long suit wasn’t sympathy for bookies. “I guess this means you’ll have to go out in the garden and dig up that strongbox,” he said.
    “Footlocker, you mean,” somebody added.
    “Footlocker, your ass. We’re talking about my retirement.”
    “Retire from what?” my father said. “You haven’t worked a day in forty years.”
    “As long as there’s Sam Halls around I don’t figure I’ll ever need to,” Untemeyer said. “And there’s another coming right behind you.”
    That meant me. I was off in a corner studying the form, and suddenly everybody in the place was looking at me, including my father, who nodded knowingly.
    Sometimes we studied the racing form together, and he’d tell me why my selection was wrong. “Class will tell,” was his favorite reason. He had a hell of a time convincing me that the fastest horse wouldn’t necessarily be the winner. In the beginning I just scanned the columns looking for the fastest six-furlong times. “Forget that,” my father advised. “For one thing, this isn’t asix-furlong race. And for another.…” There were about half a dozen “for anothers.” He taught me how to look at how much the horse cost, his sire, and whether he was moving up, and perhaps out, of his class. My father wasn’t a big believer in betting jockeys, because the horses were carrying them, not the other way around. He liked fast, well-bred, expensive horses with a fondness for the rail.
    Betting the horses is not something I advocate, but there is a great deal to be said in defense of handicapping, and I have often thought, and occasionally argued with people who considered themselves educators, that courses in handicapping should be required, like composition and Western civilization, in our universities. For sheer complexity, there’s nothing like a horse race, excepting life itself, and keeping the myriad factors in balanced consideration is fine mental training, provided the student understands that even if he does this perfectly there is no guarantee of success. The scientific handicapper will never beat the horses (Untemeyer was correct, of course), but he
will
learn to be alert for subtleties that escape the less trained eye. To weigh and evaluate a vast grid of information, much of it meaningless, and to arrive at sensible, if erroneous, conclusions, is a skill not to be sneezed at. Since my days in the Mohawk Grill, I have known many great handicappers, and not one has ever preceded an Ayatollah into battle or become a Born Again anything. The handicapper is a man of genuine faith and conviction: There
will
be another race in twenty minutes.
    My father would have been a great handicapper but for one fatal weakness. Where many failed as a result of missing some