The Wrong Horse: An Odyssey Through the American Racing Scene - Hardcover

Murray, William

3.69

26 ratings by Goodreads

9780671767747: The Wrong Horse: An Odyssey Through the American Racing Scene

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0671767747 ISBN 13: 9780671767747

Publisher: Simon & Schuster, 1992

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The highest gambling wisdom is knowing when to quit. El Lobo, however, had scrambled my brains. I was like a man panning for gold in a riverbed who's just found a big nugget and some ass comes along, waving his arms and shouting that the dam upstream is about to burst. Do you get out of the river? Of course not.
William Murray is a man of letters and a horseplayer. As a regular writer for both The New Yorker and the Daily Racing Form, he is a connoisseur of the bon mot and the sweet two-year-old filly that can go long - and both are plentifully evident in this delightful new book.
The Wrong Horse is equal parts memoir and reportage: Here is a portrait of an obsession and of the peculiar world of American Thoroughbred racing, with its unique social mores and colorful characters. Murray, who has been a bettor and an owner, a winner and a loser, at tracks all over America, explores the racing game with the understanding of a savvy insider and the slightly rueful wit of a man who knows it's impossible to find either satisfaction or riches there. But, as one character says, "There's always fresh." That passion for the ponies also runs throughout these pages.
While no sure-fire betting formulas are proffered here, no racetrack regular will fail to profit from this up-close look at who won and how they did it, and who lost and how they accomplished that.
From the betting window to the backside, here are entertaining and spirited stories of trainers and horses, tracks from the upstarts of California to the blue bloods of the East, jockeys who can pull magic from mediocre mounts, the mixed blessing of being in Louisville during the Kentucky Derby, and the smug calm of holding the winning ticket at thirty to one.
The Wrong Horse is William Murray's homage to an oval-shaped path of turf that is sometimes hard and fast. But only sometimes.

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From Kirkus Reviews:

An amiable, anecdotal memoir of a professional writer's perdurable, albeit oft-unrequited, love affair with thoroughbred horses. New Yorker regular Murray, author of the Shifty Anderson racetrack-mystery series (I'm Getting Killed Right Here, 1991, etc.) and other books, recalls how, as a preppy teenager, he contracted an unshakable case of horse fever once he was introduced to the pleasures of the track by a cousin's sporty husband. Having pursued his long-shot avocation while making a solid career for himself as a journalist and author, Murray (a well-born fugitive from Park Avenue) now offers a witty, often rueful account of life as an improver of the breed. A sometime owner, as well as inveterate bettor who appreciates the thrills of victory and agonies of defeat, he provides perceptive assessments of what makes individual punters, jockeys, trainers, handicappers, grooms, and a host of other racing denizens run. Nor does Murray scant the magnificent--if frequently frustrating and heartbreakingly fragile- -beasts on which the track's two-legged animals focus at world- class as well as also-ran courses on the county-fair circuit throughout the US. Covered in addition is the widely ignored reality that gambling underpins the industry that calls itself the sport of kings. An idiosyncratic tour of domestic racing likely to appeal to horseplayers as well as their civilian counterparts. -- Copyright �1992, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

From Publishers Weekly:

New Yorker writer Murray, who also writes racetrack mysteries ( Tip on a Dead Crab ), here looks at offbeat aspects of the sport: competitions at county fairs, where the horses are generally of a fairly low caliber; the races at Agua Caliente in Tijuana, Mexico, where honesty on the part of owners, trainers and jockeys is far from a sine qua non ; and the problems of holding a winnng ticket, which include "breakage" and taxes (the IRS has representatives at the tracks to collect 20% of the big payoffs). Murray, himself a bettor and horse owner, provides such expected coverage as an encomium to jockey Bill Shoemaker, who rode in 40,351 races during his 40-year career. He also, unfortunately, feels constrained to add trite vignettes about the "characters" at the track, mostly seedy, unlettered types who spend their lives barely breaking even, in chapters that dig in ground long since brilliantly excavated by Damon Runyon.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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