You Have to Be Lucky

When Middleground and Hill Prince ran one-two in the Kentucky Derby, a big, paunchy, 73-year-old man solemnly rose in his paneled office at New York's Belmont Park and drank a silent toast to himself. Five months before, John Blanks Campbell had closed the office door, sat down with his file of last year's two-year-olds and decided that Middleground would be the three-year-old to beat. In his Experimental Free Handicap weights, he rated Middleground at the top with 126 lbs., about a length better than Hill Prince (124).

Last week, when Jockey Eddie Arcaro and Hill Prince pounded home a length and a half ahead of Middleground in the Withers mile at Belmont, Handicapper Campbell had a word for it: "Luck plays the biggest part. I figure, guess and be damned."

Better than Steamboating. Now the nation's No. 1 handicapper, Jack Campbell has been figuring horses most of his life. The son of a Mississippi steamboat captain, he discovered at an early age that he could make up to $10,000 a year pitting his judgment against the bookies'. It beat steamboating, but no one, he figured, could beat the bookies forever.

In 1905 he got a job as clerk of the scales at New Orleans' City Park. Later he worked as judge, steward, entry clerk, bookkeeper, and finally handicapper at tracks from Agua Caliente to Winnipeg, in 1935 was picked as racing secretary for the New York tracks.

Poring over performance charts some 60 hours a week, Campbell assigns the weights for 40-odd stake races, and about 80 overnight handicaps--in addition to writing the condition books (i.e., the daily racing programs)--for the four New York tracks. On the basic principle that three pounds of weight equals one length in a mile race (with due allowance for individual horses' ability to carry weight) his figures aim to produce dead heats or at least photo-finishes in every handicap race.

Actually, of course, it never works out quite that way. But when luck is with him, Handicapper Campbell has had some spectacular moments. The biggest: in the Carter Handicap at Aqueduct in 1944, when he put 127 pounds on Bossuet, 118 on Wait-a-Bit, 115 on Brownie, saw them finish in a triple dead heat, the first in U.S. handicap racing history.

Waiting Out the Storm. Trainers and owners, who are more interested in winning than in admiring such virtuosity, are often understandably irked by Campbell's weights. But he has an answer for that, too. Whenever a trainer storms-in, protesting that his horse has no chance at the assigned weight, Campbell calmly tunes out his hearing aid and waits for the storm to subside.

Jack Campbell rarely risks his own money any more. There is not much point, he figures, in betting against pari-mutuel machines and the 15% (in New York) tax "take." Besides, says canny Handicapper Campbell with becoming modesty, "if I bet all the time I'd be broke. The longer you're around, the harder it is to beat them. You have real trouble picking winners nowadays."

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