How I Got Hooked on Racing: Frank Mirahmadi

How did we get hooked on this sport? We all have stories about how our love affair developed and blossomed. The TDN will be reaching out to numerous notable people in the industry to get their stories to find out how they got hooked and stayed hooked on the sport.

When I was very young, we would go to the races, my dad, my mom, my brother and I. My dad liked to bet, so he wasn't passionate about racing. But I became passionate very quickly. I started reading the Racing Form at a young age. It became my favorite sport almost instantly. I'm not one of these guys who remembers the first time I was there or the first horse that I watched. I have no idea. I was not in a position to remember because I was so young at the time. We lived in Beverly Hills and would go to Hollywood Park a lot and to Santa Anita. We were there every opening day that I can think of.

I got to see some incredible horses. I remember watching Spectacular Bid run. But when I think about horses, the first memory I strongly recall, for whatever reason, is being at Hollywood Park one day and there was a race with Ancient Title and Crystal Water in it.

I just had a love for it. I was a big Bill Shoemaker fan. He was my favorite jockey. On the weekends, most people wanted to go to the Dodgers games, Rams games, Lakers game. I just wanted to go to the track.

I am going to guess my father first started taking me around the time I turned five. The times I first really remember were when I was about eight. By the time I was nine, I remember being extremely disappointed because my dad wouldn't take me to see Seattle Slew in the Swaps Stakes. He didn't want to fight the big crowd. There were 70,000 people there that day and it was going to be a big headache. I remember vividly listening to that race on the radio. It was on a clock radio we had and I listened to Harry Henson's live call on KNX. When I think of the house we lived in at that the time, that's my most vivid memory, that race, listening on the radio, not eating dinner that night and being very sad because Seattle Slew lost.

By the age of nine, I was completely into it. I would watch the replay shows and would listen to 'Horse and Jockey,' a race recreation show at the end of the day that was highly entertaining. The recreations were done by a guy named Jay Richards. I ended up meeting him after I was on TVG. He sent in an email. I asked if this was the Jay Richards. It was and we became close friends.

For me, I loved the jockeys. I would get so many jockey autographs. I remember so many times meeting those jockeys at a very young age and how cool they were. I didn't really know it at the time, but that was an amazing colony of riders. They were always accommodating. Shoemaker, Chris McCarron, Eddie D., Don Pierce, they were all very nice to me.

It's not that my dad didn't like racing, but he wasn't passionate about it. The reason I know that is that he didn't dig into the Racing Form like I did. He'd rather just play the picks made by the guy in the Los Angeles Times or play numbers. I loved the sport and trying to figure it out. By high school, I was reading the Racing Form regularly. I was very much into it, trying to figure out how to handicap.

Then I became fascinated with the race callers. That's because at a young age I was an impersonator. I would go to the track and imitate the track announcers. Amazingly, that's how my race calling career got started.