Hooked on Racing: Jason Beem and Barry Irwin

Over the past week, the TDN has been asking racing personalities with no family involvement in racing what the moment was that got them hooked.

Jason Beem, track announcer and podcast host
I grew up about five miles from Longacres Race Course in the Seattle suburb of Renton, Washington. My dad was a gambler and loved the playing the horses and started taking me from a very early age. I thought jockeys were the coolest thing ever and my dad has photos of me at age three sitting on the back of some horses at Longacres who were trained by a guy he played poker with. My favorite one was a mare named Rascal Rascal.

The street I grew up on was a big oval shape, similar to a track, so after the races at Longacres, we'd come home and I would go out on my bike and get a stick and re-do the days races while riding around the oval street. I'd whip my bike with the stick and do my best impression of track announcer Gary Henson calling them home.

Longacres was a beautiful place and even though I was only 12 when they shut it down in 1992, I still have so many memories from those days. The poplar trees on the turn, the brick flooring, the green wall that we leaned against to watch the races. (side note, parts of that green wall still stand on the old Longacres land, hidden in the now overgrown woods) My dad would get me the Longacres media guide every year and I would study it and memorize who won the stakes races in what year. My favorite jockey was Gary Boulanger and I had a stuffed jockey teddy bear named “Gary Bearlanger” that Gary autographed. I told him I wanted to be a jockey, but unfortunately at age 10, I was almost as tall and probably weighed more than he did.

Once I turned the ripe betting age of 10, my mom would give me $20 to make bets for the card. My dad would take the $20 and he'd make my bets for me and keep track for the day. My favorite horse of all time was the great Captain Condo and in the 1990 Space Needle Handicap he won over another favorite of mine, Grandstand Gabe. The exacta paid $44 and I hit it. It seemed like the most money ever for a ten year-old. Been chasing that $44 ever since.

Barry Irwin, Team Valor International

Barry Irwin (left) | Sarah Andrew photo

Horse racing first came on my radar as a kid growing up in Los Angeles in the early 1950s.

My aunt Bertha, widely known in Beverly Hills as the “perfume lady” from behind her counter at Saks department store on Wilshire Boulevard, had a boyfriend that would take her to the races at Hollywood Park and Santa Anita.

I saw a few racing movies on television, noticed that “selected workouts” were a daily feature in our local newspapers, and I started following the ponies in about 1951, much to the horror of my mother and father. We had an uncle in our family that went broke as an unsuccessful horseplayer and my parental units lived in mortal fear that I would somehow follow in his footsteps if I got hooked on the horses.

The boyfriend allowed me to send $2 bets with him to the races. He marveled at my luck in picking winners and was only too happy to accommodate me, an occurrence that was kept a secret from my disapproving parents and grandparents.

Then came Native Dancer on TV. Followed closely by the advent of Swaps.

It was Swaps that truly got me hooked on racing.

When he won the Kentucky Derby just after my twelfth birthday, I was pretty much both a seasoned race watcher and a degenerate gambler in the making. Along with my best friend Steve Kallman, we made book on weekend feature races at our junior high school and sold tips for 25 cents on the corner of Robertson and National Boulevards where Steve hawked newspapers for years just down the street from Hamilton High School where we would both graduate a few years later.

Swaps not only captured the imagination of local racing fans, he had a Hollywood-style PR machine behind him at Hollywood Park and Santa Anita that knew a thing or two about promotion from the movies. Before and after the Kentucky Derby, the name and image of Swaps was everywhere to be found in and around Los Angeles.

The 76 gas station chain produced a beautiful 4-color photo of Swaps with Willie Shoemaker in the saddle. It was suitable for framing.

When kids and their families went to the Railbird Theatre at the Railbird Club at Hollywood Park, the star of the show was Swaps.

There was something about that chestnut California-bred that grabbed me. His demeanor, his speed when asked to run and his sheer brilliance made me proud to be a Cal-bred myself. When he won the Kentucky Derby it was every bit as exciting as UCLA of USC winning the Rose Bowl.

To this day Swaps remains my favorite horse.