现在声色犬马,除了犬之外,我占全了。昨天去Del Mar Race 赌马,跟大家分享一些照片。昨天有9个races,我赌了7场。前面4个race连续全都赌中,后面就失去感觉判断了。赚了一天的零花钱跟饭钱:)我一生的运气都是最糟糕的,所以从来不信彩票、也不那么喜欢las vegas,但赛马是赌博中最精彩,最棒的。昨天的运气是我一生当中最好的运气。
赌马里面有很多学问跟猫腻,大开眼界。星期三下午,依然有超过2.5万人进场。del mar is the most beautiful race site, just next to the ocean, and you can even sit in a nice restaurant to make your bets.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thoroughbred_horse_race
最后胜出的总是一匹黑马。
- posted on 08/07/2009
我也是去年读了报告文学 Seabiscuit 后,对赛马特别感兴趣。那些日子我整天想着去看赛马,还计划了去 Del Mar Race Track。下面是我写的读书笔记:
THURSDAY, JULY 24, 2008
Book: Seabiscuit
I got Laura Hillenbrand's Seabiscuit from the library for $0.50, and since it had top rating at amazon.com, I began reading it. When the movie came out a few years ago, I didn't see it in the theater. Everyone told me that it was a "guy's movie". I only saw part of it on a train (from San Francisco to Los Angeles), and thought it was all fictional.
But it is all real in history. Charles Howard. Tom Smith. Red Pollard. George Woolf. Seabiscuit.
This book is not about a racehorse. It is about a lost era, about those "dear, dead days".
Hillenbrand did a great job digging up lost history, organizing the materials, and telling the life of Seabiscuit and those of everyone around him. Her language is colorful and vivid, and sometimes very sensational. For example:
His (Johnny Pollard) emotions were liquid; his anger was a wild rage, his pleasure jubilation, his humor biting, his sorrow and empathy a bottomless abyss. (p.51)
Below is an interesting "observation" of the depression era:
In the winter of 1937, America was in the seventh year of the most catastrophic decade in its history. The economy had come crashing down, and millions upon millions of people had been torn loose from their jobs, their savings, their homes. A nation that drew its audacity from the quintessentially American belief that success is open to anyone willing to work for it was disillusioned by seemingly intractable poverty. The most brash of peoples was seized by despair, fatalism, and fear. The sweeping devastation was giving rise to powerful new social forces. The first was a burgeoning industry of escapism. America was desperate to lose itself in anything that offered affirmation. The nation's corner theaters hosted 85 million people a week for 25-cent viewings of an endless array of cheery musicals and screwball comedies. On the radio, the idealized world of One Man's Family and the just and reassuring tales of The Lone Ranger were runaway hits. Downtrodden Americans gravitated strongly toward the Horatio Alger protagonist, the lowly bred Everyman who rises from anonymity and hopelessness. They looked for him in spectator sports, which were enjoying explosive growth. With the relegalization of wagering, no sport was growing faster than Thoroughbred racing.
Note the part about "cheery musicals and screwball comedies". See my movie review for the 1930s.
After reading the book, I become fascinated with horse race, and I want to go to racecourses and see real horse racing. I have been to Churchill Downs, Santa Anita, and the Detroit Race Course, but I didn't know anything about horse race before, and I missed the real excitement. I have checked to see the racecourses near us. The Hollywood Park is in our area, and it was where Seabiscuit won the inaugural Hollywood Gold Cup in 1938. Santa Anita is like a home to Seabiscuit, and there is a statue of the horse and the jockey Iceman Woolf. So many stories of Seabiscuit happened there. I really want to go and see it again.
Here's a list of all California horse racing venues from Wikipedia (there are more from other sites):
Santa Anita Park racecourse
Bay Meadows, San Mateo, California
Golden Gate Fields, Albany, California
Del Mar Racetrack, Del Mar, California
Fairplex, Pomona, California
Hollywood Park Racetrack, Inglewood, California
Los Alamitos, Los Alamitos, California
Santa Anita Park, Arcadia, California
I've just signed up for a membership at The Daily Racing Form. I don't know what I am going to do with it....
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