How I Got Hooked On Racing: Rocco Landesman

How did we get hooked on this sport? We all have stories about how our love affair developed and blossomed. The TDN reached 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.

Rocco Landesman, Broadway Producer and former chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts

I've always been an excitement junkie. I love the risk, love the adrenaline you get from that. I've had a career in the Broadway Theater and there's nothing riskier than that.

I was in high school in St. Louis. There was no pari-mutuel wagering in Missouri, but there was in Illinois. East St. Louis had two tracks, Cahokia Downs and Fairmount Park. A friend of mine in high school loved going over there and playing the horses. I guess when you're 16, 17, they can't call you a degenerate horseplayer. You're not old enough. He brought me one day. Of course, the worst thing that could happen, happened. I won.

I'm sure everybody begins with the same story. They go to the track for the first time and win money and you think to yourself 'they're giving away money here, this is the greatest.'

We started going to Cahokia Downs fairly regularly. The racetrack is an ecosystem of its own; it's a world unto itself. The colorful silks, the backstretch life, the characters. You enter a whole world when you go to the racetrack and the whole thing was magical for me. I later became a horse owner and have had a lifelong love affair with horse racing.

I never lost that when I went to college in Madison, Wisconsin. Very often I would drive down to Chicago to go to Arlington, Sportsman's or Hawthorne. I went to a conference for writers once in Vermont, so I would drive to Pownal to go to Green Mountain.

Wherever I was, I'd find a racetrack and we would go. I love not only the excitement of it, but the entire world of racing, a world unto itself. I've always been entranced and seduced by that world and I still am.

One of the down sides of having digital access is that I don't go to the track nearly as much as I used to. Today, I am going to play the Fair Grounds on my computer. With the advent of slots and with places like Gulfstream being part of retail developments, a lot has changed, but not for the better. I still enjoy it. I still enjoy going to Saratoga, Monmouth, the racetracks that have kept a lot of their character. I'm doing to it more casually now. It's hard to find the time to do the handicapping work and following all the trips and all the details of the past performances.

I use the Ragozin sheets, which are useful, but so many people use Ragozin and Thoro-Graph now that it's hard to find much of an advantage in that. When the Ragozin sheets first came out, I had friends who were early adopters of the sheets and they had an advantage. Now with everybody having the same data, it's much harder to have an edge. So these days, I do it much more as a recreation without much expectation of it being any kind of a business.

I should add that contributing to the excitement of those early days at Cahokia was that there was a fantastic race caller there who added a lot of excitement. His name is Dave Johnson. I feel like I've spent my whole life with Dave Johnson because when I moved east to New York I feel like Dave came with me. That's when he became the race caller at the NYRA tracks. I feel like my life at the races has been pretty much parallel to Dave. That's's been a fun part of it. We've had a lifelong friendship and he's been an investor in some of my shows. It's been a great friendship.