In Arcane World of Horses, His Work Is More Than Just a Footnote : Trackman Has Seen, and Run, Last Race

About 10,000 races and 24 years after he started, Warren Williams retired from the Daily Racing Form recently, and for the 62-year-old Williams, there will be no more bad dreams about sleeping through the first race.

Williams was what his newspaper calls a trackman, a race caller who stands in the press box with binoculars, quickly dictating to an assistant with a clipboard the positions of the horses as they move around the course.

The result is a race chart, which is the foundation for all the details that fill the pages of the Form. The nature of their job prevents trackmen from being considered writers, per se, but they account for succinct, picturesque descriptions of races in the footnotes that they hurriedly supply for the tail end of the chart.

Footnotes aren’t literature, but they fill a need. Consider the Churchill Downs trackman’s version of the 1980 Kentucky Derby:

“Genuine Risk settled nicely as the field came away in good order and was reserved behind Plugged Nickle and inside Withholding around the first turn and early backstretch. She was eased back slightly and moved to the outside smoothly approaching the half-mile pole, gradually raced to the leaders outside four rivals, and took command entering the stretch; was hit once with the whip right- handed, increased her advantage under six well placed strokes as (Jacinto) Vasquez switched to the left, and continued resolutely to the end.”

Had one of his associates chosen to footnote the Racing Form career of Warren Williams, it might read like this:

“Williams was not well placed early, finding snow at Bowie and fog at Scarborough Downs soon out of the gate; getting his best stride, he reached Monmouth Park and Oaklawn in good order, circled Saratoga and the Fair Grounds to reach the West with something left, responded to heavy pressure at Santa Anita and Hollywood, was all out to honor any late dinner reservations at Del Mar and finished willingly, despite those two-week stands at Pomona.”

Williams’ connection with horses began in 1934 when he mucked stalls and walked horses in the Midwest. In time, he met Guy Shultz, who in Williams’ estimation was the best horseman never to have made the sport’s Hall of Fame.

“Shultz knew the nature of the animal,” Williams said. “I can see now, after having seen hundreds of horsemen through the years, that he was the greatest there ever was around horses.”

They called Shultz Cocklebur , in honor of his toughness. He had been crushed by a horse in the late 1920s and came back for more. Williams says Shultz was 5 feet 2 inches, weighed 165 pounds, had a 31-inch waist and the shoulders of a well-built man at least a foot taller.

Shultz was so good with horses that at a rodeo in Fort Worth, Tex., he won all the prizes--all 23 of them. He eventually joined the Miller Brothers rodeo and wild-west show, a competitor of Ringling Brothers. Miller Brothers had Tom Mix before Hollywood did, but Shultz was the star attraction. At Yankee Stadium, he bulldogged a wild buffalo off the running board of a car.

“They had to use a car, because the buffalo would have knocked a horse down,” Williams said. “George Miller, one of the Miller brothers, once bet $10,000 that Shultz could ride an especially wild horse from Texas with a mane hold, and Guy did it, too. In racing, though, he was content to be a big man in the bushes--at outlaw tracks in Texas and Oklahoma.”

By 1938, Williams was doing some outlaw riding of his own, later going to recognized tracks near St. Louis and in Canada. Late in ‘38, he suffered multiple injuries in a spill at Fairmount Park and was hospitalized for 2 1/2 months. “I was growing and eating,” Williams said. “It wasn’t long before I was too big to be a jockey.”

After service with the Army Air Corps during World War II, Williams rubbed and galloped horses. As a trainer on his own, Williams was successful but starving. “My youth was a detriment,” Williams said. “I had all the experience, but the owners still treated me like a kid when it came to pay. I quit and went into the insurance business.”

After first selling health and accident insurance in Virginia, Williams eventually became a sales manager in Chicago for W. Clement Stone’s Combined Insurance Companies of America. But he still liked racing and in 1962 joined the Racing Form at Oaklawn Park in Hot Springs, Ark.

Now-defunct Scarborough Downs, in Portland, Me., was Williams’ introduction to the pitfalls of chart-calling. The racing was at night, during a heavy fog. Williams would call part of the race, as much as he could see, then run down to the finish line to try to catch the first four horses across the wire.

“The grandstand stairs had 100 steps,” Williams said. “Do that a few times a night and you know you’re in condition.”

Williams’ recurring dream--oversleeping and missing the races--almost came true at Scarborough.

“I had played golf in the afternoon and came back to my room to take a nap,” he said. “Suddenly I woke up and looked at the clock. It was 7:15, first post was 7:30 and the race track was five miles away and I was still undressed.

“I got in my Ford and drove 90 or 100 miles an hour. Why the police didn’t get me, I’ll never know. It was happening just like in the dream. I got to the track, but I still had those 100 steps to go. I got there in time, but only because they had trouble loading the horses into the gate.”

Asked about the top horses he had seen, Williams mentioned Swaps, Citation and Spectacular Bid. He said that Dr. Fager was one of the most underrated, and added two personal favorites, Lawrin and Whirlaway, because they were around when he galloped horses for trainer Ben Jones. He said Man o’ War was probably the best horse he didn’t see, Secretariat the best that he did.

“Man o’ War had to be a real super horse,” Williams said. “He carried weight and ran over tracks that were more like plowed fields. Yet some of his records stood for 20 or 25 years after he retired, despite the technological improvements that were made in maintaining racing surfaces.”

Despite his admiration for Secretariat, Williams begrudges the horse his first horse-of-the-year title, when he was a 2-year-old in ’72.

“The question you have to ask about a potential horse of the year is whether he would beat all comers going the classic American distance of 1 miles,” Williams said. “No matter how good Secretariat was, no horse, no 2-year-old, would be able to handle that assignment. But the push for him to win the title got started somehow, and it just snowballed.”

After his last day at Hollywood Park, Warren Williams highballed it to his home in Hot Springs, about six miles from Oaklawn Park. It’s one of his favorite tracks and he’ll be there for opening day in the spring. No fog, no steps to climb, and he won’t have to worry about oversleeping.