In the last 25 years I have been around some of the finest handicappers this country has ever known. Here’s an absolute lock: The best handicapper available publicly is New Jersey’s Brad Thomas. He is, to me, and always will be, Big Red, and I have no qualms with him sharing the moniker with our beloved 1973 Triple Crown winner. People who worshipped Ray Robinson were totally cool with calling Ray Leonard Sugar. Leonard was that good. Brad is that good. Leonard earned the nickname over two decades, Brad over nearly three.

He is first and foremost a teacher. We’re all lucky he makes his living talking horses, because if he were schooled up somewhere teaching American history, for instance, or English, as he easily could be, it could cost each of us up to forty grand a year to appreciate his talents.

You get smarter just standing near him. I never considered “word choice” a skill until I hung with Big Red. As a teenager I was an idiot savant horse racing fan with specialties in trivia and breeding. I also had an eery ability to “feel” my way to the closest Off Track Betting parlor. This triborough skill amazed my friends until I lost all their money “feeling” my way at the mutuels. I could also read what my father called the Telegraph (the Racing Form) long before I could ride a bike (I still can’t ride a bike—no bikes allowed at Aqueduct), but what my dad taught me in handicapping was rudimentary at best, the Dick and Janes, and it wasn’t until I met Brad that my handicapping skills multiplied beyond what I had ever imagined.

Horse racing is a sport. Living, breathing athletes compete on a track with the same aches and pains and idiosyncratic tendencies as human athletes. Some are tougher than others. Some fight back. Some prefer cooler weather. Some take longer to develop. This was all Brad. This is all Brad. In eight years of college and NYU grad school I never heard a teacher with more authority over a subject than Brad has over horse racing.

You should hear him talk American history. Or boxing. When Brad recalls the most exciting fights of the last century, you think you’re ringside. But he has to be the analyst. Play by play is its own art but not Brad’s. Back up and let him deconstruct and just listen and learn, will you.

Brad could be intimidating if you can’t handle all that brain. And yet he was never afraid to say, Really? I didn’t know that. Learning, learning, infinite absorption. The first day I heard Brad talk, I knew right then and there what I wanted to sound like as a public handicapper. I have way too much Catskill comedian in my blood to ever be as eloquent and professorial as Brad, he’s way more earnest than Ernest (me), but his view of horse racing as a sport, and his polysyllabic description of such, opened my heart and mind like nothing before.

Just who was this Brad Thomas I kept hearing about at Sports Eye (circa 1984), the first newspaper I ever worked for (Brad is correcting me now, saying, For which I ever worked. But Brad, my way sounds less affected. It’s a new English. I’ll argue with you down the road.)? At 18, I came to this racing paper thinking there was no one alive who’d immersed himself in the ponies as I had, who’d studied as I had, who’d read Stallion Registers on lunch breaks. But everywhere I turned at Sports Eye, where Big Red had worked, all I could hear was Brad, Brad, Brad. The stories were, are, legendary. The Monmouth Master. Longshot after longshot after longshot. But even when he’s wrong, you should hear him be wrong! Jockeys, trainers, track bias, trip handicapping, pull ups, speed figures, endless minutia, all interesting, all grub for learning. Was there anything he didn’t know? What the heck is trip handicapping? I read some of Brad’s big race analyses and my knees buckled. I had to meet this man whose knowledge so obviously dwarfed mine.

I found Brad in the paddock at Aqueduct, introduced myself, and for nearly three years trailed his boots around the New York tracks. Brad Thomas University. BTU. I skipped school to hang with him. I skipped family affairs and holiday gatherings to hang with him. I blew off dates to hang with him. His willingness to share, to open his mind to some kid he knew from nowhere, makes me indebted to him for lifetimes. Brad and his former work partner, Marc Siegelaub, himself an extremely smart man and fine writer, let me into their club, a kind of Mensa for handicappers, and my countless hours with them at the track and over meals are some of my most treasured memories.

It’s been a very difficult week for me. For someone so uninformed (by my standards) on the current racing scene, I’ve spent way too much time posting on horses. All the daily hours I devote to the guitar and my hounds are what I used to give to handicapping, so I feel quite the imposter nowadays when I dole out selections on twenty minutes work. Why listen to me when you can tune in to Brad, or Crist, or Beyer, whomever. But I keep this diary for me and me alone, so as always I follow my heart. (Next week, I promise, I’ll level off, music and horses and dogs and sports, equal distribution. But when racing lets the good times roll, it’s hard to stop myself.)

And there’s no stopping now, not with the Cup starting tomorrow. Monmouth Park, the center of the racing universe this weekend, is fortunate enough to have Brad Thomas as its television analyst. Tuition at Brad Thomas University is freakin’ free. Just tune in by TV or computer and watch, listen, learn. No one will be better prepared for the Breeders’ Cup than Brad, trust me. And if you think there’s another racing analyst on any channel—TVG, ESPN, ABC, NBC, IOU–who could inform and instruct on BTU’s intergalactic level, 1) you’re wrong and 2) you’re crazy wrong.

But I’m a smidgeon biased. There is no way, NONE, ZERO, that I could’ve gotten the writing/handicapping job at the New York Daily News, at the age of 21, without my degree at Brad Thomas University. Big Red’s got some pretty thick glasses, but he’s got the best vision I’ve ever seen.

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 25th, 2007 at 7:47 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.