A Slow Day at the Races With the Philosopher of Belmont

The Belmont racetrack is like your local public library in that not very many people show up, and those who do tend to come alone and hide behind their newspapers until the day is over and done with.The fans who watch from the grandstands spread out in a borderline-paranoid arrangement, with several rows of empty seats separating the closest of neighbors. The rest of the enthusiasts stand inside and watch the action overhead on television monitors. Risk of conversation is minimal, as everyone is too engrossed in scribbling calculations on the margins of their betting sheets to notice much else.On an average day, the 430-acre park on the Queens-Nassau border draws about 4,500 visitors. Numbers surge once a year for the Belmont Stakes, being run Saturday for the 137th time. A crowd of more than 120,000 showed up last year to watch Smarty Jones’s unsuccessful attempt to win the 12th Triple Crown in history. There is no chance of a Triple Crown this year, though the race is expected to draw a decent crowd. Giacomo, winner of this year’s Kentucky Derby, and Afleet Alex, this year’s Preakness winner, will both be running.On Sunday, a less star-studded day, the only congested area in the complex was the bank of chairs and booths up on the second floor, near the Budweiser beer stand. That is where the scholars of Belmont convene.Socrates Pantazozolu, a housepainter by trade, has been sitting in the best booth for the past 38 years. He uses a yellow highlighter, a black Sharpie, a blue pen, and a red pen. “It’s like school here,” he said. “Everyone’s very serious. There’s no fooling around.”The Elmhurst resident makes sure to arrive two and a half hours before the first race, to lay claim to his favored booth. In the 1980s he briefly experimented with leaning against a column down on the ground floor. He even scratched his name into the paint. One day he came to the track to discover his name had been painted over. He returned upstairs and hasn’t strayed from the booth since.Everyone seems to have his or her own system of analysis, and Mr. Pantazozolu’s system – call it the Socratic method – involves averaging out each horse’s top speed and the density of the dirt at different tracks. He also studies the horse’s history to determine if its speed has been improving over time – he doesn’t trust horses with erratic speeds. His method doesn’t always work, especially when a horse with no racing history is introduced into the mix.“Somebody’s fixing the race,” he said. “In the old days the good horses had to win. Today they’re fixing everything. They’re running classy horses with low-class horses.” He said the first two races of the day are always predictable, to whet gamblers’ appetites for more wins, and the rest are rigged.He’s lost as much as $5,000 in one day, and he’s made as much as $7,000 on others. Sometimes when he loses he forces himself to steer clear of the racetrack, and he’ll go fishing at Montauk. But he always comes back.“Horses are worse than cocaine,” he said. “You see the same faces every day. We don’t talk. I don’t know their names. But I’ve seen these people every day for years and years.”He used to have friends at the track, a group of other Greeks, one of whom was so obsessed with his favorite jockey that he would run to one end of the concourse and sprint down the floor in time with his hero’s mount.“If he didn’t win he would start screaming,” Mr. Pantazozolu said. “He’s dead now.”The racetrack opened in 1905. Attendance was nearly four times as high as today until 1971. That’s when Governor Rockefeller stepped in and set up Off-Track Betting. Now only 10% of bets legally made on the races are placed at the track. Telephone and computer betting accounts and OTB handle the rest.Mr. Pantazozolu spoke highly of Belmont’s heyday, when, he said, it was run by members of the Mafia. “It used to be open, with windows,” he said, gesturing at a wall. “Everyone was in nice clothes, nice cigars. The Mafia are not bad people like everyone describes it. They got good style. It was always full, full, full, 25,000 people a day. Now it’s not even 2,000.”He used to dress up, but on Sunday he was wearing jeans and a faded and creatively buttoned shirt. Spectators used to buy guide sheets that looked like the disposable place mats at children-friendly restaurants in Florida. All they contained was a few statistics on a horse’s class and speed, and they made sense. These days the literature is pages long, stuffed with more numbers than Mr. Pantazozolu knows what to do with. “Now, forget about it,” he said. “You don’t want to know so many things.”Socrates Pantazozolu came to America from the south of Greece in 1967, at age 19. When his boat pulled into shore, a friend from Greece picked him up, brought him straight to Belmont, and handed him some money. That day he won $100.“It was very exciting,” he said. “I had been dreaming of America. I said, ‘Oh, there is money in America.'”He started to look melancholy.“I don’t want to remember those years,” he said. “They were very nice years.”Last Sunday, Mr. Pantazozolu bet on only two races, the second and the seventh, and he lost $6 each time. “If they didn’t fix the race I’d make money,” he said.The Sands Point, the biggest race of the day, was the eighth. Odds were 4-5 that Melhor Ainda would come in first, but Mr. Pantazozolu didn’t buy it, as his calculations pointed to another horse.The trumpets blared and the horses powered ahead. Several of the spectators outside rushed to the fence by the track. When Melhor Ainda was seconds away from the finish line, a few spectators yelled out its number: “Eight! Eight!” A woman in a fluorescent yellow suit jumped onto her seat and stood on her tiptoes until Melhor Ainda’s win was confirmed on the electronic scoreboard.Back inside, Mr. Pantazozolu’s booth was empty, and his newspapers and empty coffee cup were gone. All that was left of him were a few racing slips on the floor.

A Slow Day at the Races With the Philosopher of Belmont

A Slow Day at the Races With the Philosopher of Belmont

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