On a summer weekend afternoon, about a dozen bespectacled Baltimore men in their 60s and 70s leaf through large books with tiny print in a faintly air-conditioned room. In that text they search for patterns, lessons and answers to impossible questions. They pore over the pages like scholars. After a thorough analysis, they rise and are ordained by their fates.
These men have gathered every weekend for decades to do this together. Some have known one another since grammar school, others are newer companions, but they all share an important bond that nearly no one else in their lives understands: an almost religious devotion to horse racing. Their sacred sanctuary of choice: Pimlico Race Course.
For the nine men, many veterans nearing 80, the racetrack is the birthplace of their friendship. It’s been the site of their most lucrative moments and devastating losses, breakups and thrills, and payouts and debts. It’s brought ecstasy, and it’s certainly brought agony.
And pretty soon, it’s all going to change.
Pimlico is weeks away from closing on Sept. 1, before the complex is demolished and undergoes a $400 million rebuilding/renovation project.
Gone will be the rickety elevators, old-fashioned banquet chairs and faded red stands. The track, which saw the likes of Secretariat and Seabiscuit making history, will become a pile of dust in the coming months and be reborn as a sleeker, cleaner and more modern sporting establishment.
Before the facility transforms, the nine eccentrically dressed guys accompanied by partners and friends gathered around a bucket of KFC and a store-bought strawberry shortcake in early August to say goodbye to the facility that has in many ways defined their adulthoods.
The gang comes to the track to win money, but each feels fairly confident he’s lost more than he’s gained over the decades. Despite mounting personal evidence that horse betting is a losing game and the fact that it’s cost many of them relationships, apartments and jobs, they keep coming back for more. The reason is complex. For one, it instills in them a sense of subject matter authority. They may not speak Latin or Greek, but horse racing is a language in which they are all fluent.
Of course, there’s the pure sensation of making the correct bets.
“It’s a thing that come over you just picking the winner,” said Gene Bell, 77. “You’re hooked.”
And winning, as elusive as it may be, signifies something more than cash in their pockets and new bedazzled cowboy boots on their feet. For the nine men who have done mostly tedious, unrelenting physical labor their entire lives, it’s a shot at equality: their opportunity to kick back and just maybe make it big with little to no effort as those born into better circumstances have done for generations.
“It’s the only place where you can come with $2 and be among the rich and famous and you can get rich and they can get broke. It’s an even playing field. The only even playing field in the world is the racetrack,” said Andre Green, 74.
Though it was now decades ago for each of them, most of the men still vividly remember their first experience at Pimlico back in an era when food and drink flowed through the venue, widespread Simulcast was an evolution still off in the future, and the primary way to find out which horse was leading was to sit in the stands and watch the thoroughbreds run.
In the men’s early days of visiting the track, it catered to the entire family, they said, hosting pony rides for children and legendary parties for the non-betting types. Now, not even the bettors have to be at the facility to turn a profit on a wager and it shows in the complex’s upkeep.
Bell estimates he was about 21 when he first visited the track in the late 1960s. A friend invited him along.
He made a cautious initial bet of $2, won and made $91. Working at the time for Western Electric manufacturing telephone cords and earning $2.20 an hour, that momentary payout at the track surpassed what he’d made all week laboring in the factory. But, for this, he didn’t need to produce a certain yield, possess a particular degree or even break a sweat — just have a little bit of luck.
Richard Hannah, 78, still remembers going to Pimlico for the first time when he was 13 with his mother. She told him to choose a horse and if his pick won, he could keep the earnings.
“It was thrilling,” Hannah said.
Soon, he was at the track every day. Hannah and Bell even went on to work at Pimlico, Hannah as a waiter and Bell as a maintenance supervisor. Bell quit soon after getting pushback for extending his free meal benefit to all his friends and being accused of “feeding the racetrack.”
That’s an attitude the guys all share. Winning doesn’t mean much without sharing it. Every big payout, every meal, every available job or extra living space, they all share.
Horse betting became their shared religion and Pimlico their cathedral, but within its walls they each adopted different relationships with the practice of gambling. For most of their lives, the habit teetered between a passion and a vice. One day, it dipped a little too far into the latter for Hannah.
Rock bottom came on an ordinary racing day around the 1980s after Hannah had gotten his paycheck from his railroad job. He spent it all throughout the afternoon on bets. The last race of the day arrived. He gambled on a combination. The horses finished in the order he anticipated. He had won $8,000.
Then a dreaded alert appeared on the screen: “inquiry.” One of the horses was taken out of the running. Just like that, the promise of $8,000 was gone and Hannah would be going home to his wife flat broke.
“I thought I was going to have a heart attack,” he said. “I was laying on the rail, holding on, tears running down my eyes.”
His previously lighthearted pastime had hijacked his life, his happiness, his relationship with his family and his health.
“Believe it or not, I kind of felt suicidal,” Hannah said. “After that, I went to Gamblers Anonymous.”
He left the track for a year. It’s a period the men call “Richard’s hiatus.”
Once he returned to Pimlico, he made a few critical changes. He bet only with the cash in his pocket, opened a bank account separate from his wife’s and, most importantly, joined a new group of racetrack friends, a set more trustworthy and invested in his well-being than his prior crew — this was Gene Bell’s gang.
As the guys saved him then, he saved them later down the line: availing his furnished apartments to them when they were down on their luck and offering most of them jobs at his home improvement company. He said the hiatus was one of the best decisions he ever made. If he kept going in the direction he was headed, “I wouldn’t have anything,” he said.
Hannah put all three of his kids through college and recently celebrated his 54th anniversary with his wife.
Bell is sometimes envious of that lifestyle. He’s never been married, nor had children.
“In my lifetime I’ve lost about three good women, I don’t know how many apartments and cars, messing with the horses,” he said. “If I could go back, when the young lady says to me, ‘Me or the horses,’ instead of me saying, ‘When are you leaving?’ I would have made a different scenario.”
Though he hasn’t left the track with much cash to his name, he’s rich with a currency he considers much more valuable: memories. Whether it’s a rollicking moment in the clubhouse, a Preakness day dressed to the nines and feeling like a mini-celebrity or an eye-rolling encounter with Tipsheet Tony or other racetrack characters, moments at Pimlico have filled his pockets with an overflowing stack of good times, he said.
Green is content with the lifestyle he’s chosen. Not one big on “Christmas trees,” “Easter baskets” and other trappings of domestic life, his home is where the action is and the most special female in his life very well might be Safely Kept, the filly who defeated a male horse, Dayjur, who was favored to finish first at the 1990 Breeders’ Cup Sprint at Belmont Park. The upset generated a wad of green for Green and some major bragging rights.
Horse betting has led Green to seeing the world, having unforgettable adventures at racetracks across the country, and finding a family in his buddies at his hometown track of Pimlico. Every day is different and that’s just how he likes it.
“I’m right where I want to be,” Green said.
Near the conclusion of the afternoon, Green recalled a poignant conversation with an old girlfriend.
“She said, ‘You know, you need to get in touch with God and get the good book,‘” he said.
Green pointed to the pages on the table compiling each horse’s statistics.
“That’s my good book,” he said.
