Column: I’ve got the horse right here

This is the time of the year when horse racing enjoys its all-too-brief moment of glory.

From the running of the Kentucky Derby on the first Saturday in May through the endurance test of the Belmont Stakes in early June, the hallowed Triple Crown races attract multitudes of casual fans who otherwise pay no attention to what used to be called the Sport of Kings.

But some of us remember a time when racing was much more than a spring fling. During the middle decades of the 20th Century, it was one of America’s most popular sports and its broad appeal extended through other seasons.

Yet even in its heyday, there was always something slightly disreputable about the racing scene that set it apart from the atmosphere found at mainstream sports events like baseball and football. And that’s mainly because race tracks are havens for gambling.

I became an avid horseplayer in the 1960s. When I began going to the New York tracks with some regularity, I was struck by the presence of so many raffish characters interspersed among the crowd. Some of them looked and acted as if they were hustlers from the street-smart world of Damon Runyon.

While walking around Aqueduct or Belmont and taking in the sights and sounds of bettors urgently defending their choices, I half-expected to run into Stubby Kaye singing, “I’ve got the horse right here, the name is Paul Revere …” the opening line of the opening song in “Guys and Dolls,” the great musical-comedy tribute to Runyon.

When I was a budding “railbird” (ardent fan), I had a few friends who shared my enthusiasm.

One of them was the writer Joe Flaherty, whose sparkling features and opinion pieces lit up the pages of the Village Voice from the mid-60s to the late-70s.

At the time, the two of us were writing a lot about politics and other aberrations in human behavior. So, whenever we met for drinks at our favorite pub, the Lion’s Head, we almost always launched our verbal swordplay with tales of blunders gleaned from the political arena.

But expressions of disdain can keep a conversation going only so long, and so inevitably, we would switch to more congenial subjects — like horse racing.

Like me, Flaherty was amused by the sight of all the Runyon types at the track. Also ranking high on his list of quirky horseplayers were those marvelous screwballs who, in placing their bets, were guided by goofy superstitions. Joe loved to talk about the nutjob who had convinced himself that Chinese men had an uncanny knack for picking winners.  When he arrived at the track, one of the first things he did was scan the crowd in search of one.

Once he found a man who seemed to fit the bill, he would follow him around in a persistent effort to get a handle on his betting choices.  Invariably, by the third or fourth race, the poor fellow would be terrified his stalker was either a creepy perv who had a yen for Asian men or — worse — a gumshoe who had mistakenly assumed that he was tailing a Chinatown drug lord.

But Flaherty’s favorite shtick was a ritual performed by a longshoreman friend from Brooklyn. In all the other aspects of his life, this man was utterly sane, but when he was at the track he would temporarily lose his marbles — to this extent: At the start of every race, he would position himself at the rail in mid-stretch, and when the horse he bet on reached that point the overwrought stevedore would race to the wire with his steed, slapping himself on the butt along the way, a railbird’s version of going to the whip.

Another race-track comrade in those days was John Merriman, one of my colleagues at CBS. In his day job, Merriman was the editor of the Walter Cronkite evening news broadcast, but his primary off-duty passion was playing the ponies. And it was from John that I heard my favorite yarn about racing addiction.

Before I pass it on to you, a bit of historical background might be helpful. Winter racing at Aqueduct did not begin until 1975. Before then, thoroughbreds in action could not be found anywhere in New York or its environs from early December to early March. Needless to say, this long stretch of deprivation did not sit well with Gotham’s hard-core racing aficionados.

“Just think, three months of this torment!” Flaherty exclaimed over drinks one winter night at the Lion’s Head. “That’s twice as long as Lent and I’m sure you remember what misery that was when we were kids.” (Both Joe and I were reared in the stern bosom of Irish-Catholicism. Enough said.)

Among those who suffered during the months of no New York racing was a railbird whose nickname was “Parlay Pat,” so called because of his fondness for daily doubles, exactas and other combination bets. One winter his pangs of withdrawal became so severe that he decided, against his better judgment, to make the long trek to a track in Charles Town, West Virginia.

The considerate folks who ran the winter meet in Charles Town provided daily, round-trip bus service to their facility from the Port Authority Terminal in Manhattan.

When the day of departure came, Parlay Pat got up at 5 a.m. and hustled over to Port Authority to catch the 6:30 bus to Charles Town.  Boarding the bus, he took an aisle seat next to a well-groomed gentleman in his 50s or thereabouts.

As the journey began, Parlay Pat was suddenly struck by the enormity of his folly. He had committed himself to a bus ride of five hours or more, then another five hours or so at the Charles Town track, and after that, the return trip to New York. “What have I done?” he muttered to himself and followed that up with a deep and mournful sigh.

In response, the dapper gent in the adjoining seat turned to him and asked with a sympathetic smile: “Oh dear, did you have a bad day yesterday, too?”

As the implication of that startling question began to sink in, Parlay Pat glanced around at the other passengers and that alarmed him even more.

My God, he thought, I’m on a bus with a bunch of lunatics who do this every day!