Oliver Stone does horse racing?
 

Mike on one of the Secretariat movie discussions offered the above thought.

It just so happened today that a friend on another sports board shared the first chapter available free online of a book penned by Dan Coughlin, a sportswriter from Northeastern Ohio. It's titled, Crazy, With the Papers to Prove It.

This is not an intentional plug. The first chapter online just really got my attention as I probably saw Junior O'Malley at a Cleveland area track as a kid, and Mike's post made me remember it while visiting here.

Here's an excerpt from the first chapter....available in full online....and I'll follow with the appropriate links:



Book Excerpt:

Crazy, With the Papers to Prove It

by Dan Coughlin

Excerpt from Chapter 1

Junior O'Malley

He Died a Thousand Deaths

My first duties at The Plain Dealer in January 1964 were menial but important. Bookies and gamblers depended on me, especially in the winter when Thistledown Racetrack was dark. That's when horse players turned their attention to out of town tracks such as Aqueduct in New York, Arlington Park in Chicago, Hialeah in Miami, Laurel in Baltimore and the Fairgrounds in New Orleans.

Each afternoon I assembled the race results from all over the country as they rattled out of the Associated Press teletype machine, unfurling from rolls like toilet paper. I pasted them together, rolled them up in plastic vacuum tubes and zoomed them to the composing room to be set in agate type.

A bank of Associated Press printers clattered away in a neat row behind the sports copy desk. There was the Ohio sports wire, the national sports wire, the racing wire and the Western Union printer. They were never turned off. They ran all day and all night. In the morning, teletype copy would be coiled in piles on the floor. The rhythmic clackety-clack of the machines gave the sports department its pulse, even when nobody was there, which was usually the case in mid-afternoon before the copy editors got to work and before the reporters and rewrite men wandered in.

About three o'clock every day a beefy, middle-aged man with The Daily Racing Form poking out of the right pocket of his black cashmere overcoat bustled through the sports department and headed for the race wire, directly under the crudely drawn “No Loitering” sign that hung by a string from the ceiling. He leaned over it, he hugged it, caressing the copy through his hands as it emerged from the teletype machine in starts and stops. He spoke not a word. Then, as abruptly as he had arrived, he hurried away toward the middle of the city room and disappeared up the steps leading to the composing room.

And so began my 30-year adventure with Junior O'Malley, the most degenerate horse player in the Eastern Time zone.


http://www.grayco.com/cleveland/book...le/index.shtml


The entire first chapter with the rest of Junior O'Malley's story as told by Dan Coughlin is above.

Here is one of my fave anecdotes from Chapter One:

He was there for all the great moments in Thistledown history. A man once collapsed of a heart attack while standing in line to make a bet. A crowd gathered around him.

“Is he still alive?” someone asked.

“Only in the double,” said a man looking at the daily double tickets in the dead man's hand.

“We're a hardy breed,” Junior always said. “We die a thousand deaths before the results are official.”