Steven Crist, who retired last year as editor of the Daily Racing Form, is the son of the late film critic Judith Crist. He studied English at Harvard, joined the staff of the undergraduate humor publication Harvard Lampoon, and fell in love with racing the summer following his junior year. Several years ago in his alma mater's alumni magazine, Crist talked about going with a friend to a dog track near Boston known as Wonderland. He called it a "charming little place with a festive feeling--the animals, lots of people. ... I felt right at home the first night."
Later that summer, Crist discovered thoroughbred racing at Suffolk Downs and spent every day until the fall either at Wonderland or Suffolk. I love Crist's explanation of why he spent his career writing about thoroughbreds and the people who inhabit the tracks where they run: "The stats and numbers stuff is there, plus the animals, the gambling and the weird subculture. The racetrack is ... well, like people who ran away and joined the circus." I sometimes think about the racetrack subculture in these early days of April as the Racing Festival of the South approaches at Oaklawn Park in Hot Springs.
As a college student, I learned to appreciate thoroughbred racing as much as Crist, though our backgrounds are vastly different. I was the sports editor of Arkadelphia's Daily Siftings Herald in college and that allowed me access to Oaklawn's press box and the fascinating characters who inhabited it. The elevator ride was narrated by Alex Blattner, who grew up in Chicago, spent a career working for Illinois Bell Telephone Co. and then retired to Hot Springs Village. In the press box, I was greeted by the "hi ya" of Racing Form correspondent Don Grisham, a Hot Springs native who had watched races through a fence as a child. Grisham, who died in 2014 at age 84, joined the Racing Form in the late 1950s and spent almost 35 years there. He never tired of reminding me that he too had been a Siftings Herald sports editor when he was a student at what's now Henderson State University.
I finished college in December 1981 and went to work in the sports department of the Arkansas Democrat. Jeff Krupsaw, who has long been this newspaper's deputy sports editor, was covering racing in those days. One of my first assignments was to help Krupsaw put together a special tabloid that would run in advance of the race meet. We spent a glorious week driving to Hot Springs prior to daylight each day, conducting interviews during morning workouts and then having big breakfasts at the track kitchen before returning to Little Rock to write. Just before the race meet began, Krupsaw accepted a job with the New Orleans Times-Picayune. Wally Hall, who was early in his tenure as Democrat sports editor, called me in and informed me that I would be the newspaper's chief Oaklawn writer since I had covered the track on an almost daily basis during my college years. I couldn't have been happier.
The newspaper war with the Arkansas Gazette had heated up by 1982, and because there was so much space in the Democrat sports section, I was encouraged to produce feature stories on things that interested me around the track. I was, of course, writing about the races, but I didn't have the knowledge and contacts that the Gazette's Randy Moss had. So I also wrote about people such as Blattner the elevator operator, the track's veteran shoeshine man, the ladies who worked at the oyster bar, and more. I was convinced that I had found a job I would hold onto for many years.
A couple of days after the 1982 Arkansas Derby, Hall called me into his office. He informed me that the Democrat had lured Moss away from the Gazette. It was the first high-profile Gazette defection of the newspaper war. Moss and I were born the same year. He grew up in Hot Springs, and I grew up about 35 miles down Arkansas 7, though we didn't get to know each other until I began covering Oaklawn in college. Famed thoroughbred trainer Bob Holthus was a neighbor of the Moss family, and Grisham was a family friend. Holthus would sneak Moss into the track, and by age 13, Moss was helping Grisham make picks for the Gazette.
"That sort of morphed into where I was actually doing the picking for the morning line under Don's name when I was in the 11th and 12th grade and then in college at the University of Arkansas," Moss explained in an interview for the Pryor Center's Arkansas Democrat oral history project. "I kept doing the morning line for the Gazette with Don during that time in college. We had sort of an elaborate system devised. Don's secretary would call me in the morning for the picks, and they would mail me copies of the Racing Form. I did that for two years in Fayetteville." After a semester of pharmacy school in Little Rock, Moss decided he would be bored with the work. He had gotten to know Gazette sports editor Orville Henry, and Henry offered him a job in 1979. Moss dropped out of pharmacy school, much to the chagrin of his father, to write sports for the Gazette. He moved to the Democrat three years later, went to the Dallas Morning News in 1989 and now is a lead analyst for NBC Sports coverage of the Triple Crown, the Breeders' Cup and other top races.
Damon Runyon wrote about racetrack figures with nicknames like Harry the Horse and Hot Horse Herbie. The term "Runyonesque character" has, in fact, become a part of the American lexicon. I've been fortunate to know some Runyonesque characters at Oaklawn through the years. May their tribe increase.
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Freelance columnist Rex Nelson is the director of corporate community relations for Simmons First National Corp. He's also the author of the Southern Fried blog at rexnelsonsouthernfried.com.
Editorial on 04/05/2017