THIS JOB TURNS OUT TO BE HIS CALLING : Santa Anita Announcer Trevor Denman Is Just Right Size to Work Behind a Mike

Trevor Denman was nervous to the point of being scared. In a few minutes, he would enter the room where his future was being determined by men he hardly knew.

For as long as he could remember, he wanted to be a jockey.

He lived and dreamed horse racing, reading everything he could on the subject, visiting the race track as often as possible, focusing his attention on becoming one of those diminutive figures in the brightly colored silks who grew in stature, if not in height, with each visit to the winner’s circle.

It was a January day in Durban. The South African summer was at its height, but Denman was cold. Behind those doors, his future was being determined.

He was 14 years old.

“In South Africa, we have a jockey school,” Denman recalled the other day at Santa Anita. “You have to go to this school. It’s an arbitrary thing. They decide whether you’re going to make it or not. You can’t just say, ‘I’m going to be a jockey.’ Even if your father is a trainer, if they don’t accept you, that’s it, you’re out.

“You’ve got to be 14 years old, you have to have passed the eighth grade of school, you have to weigh less than 70 pounds and you have to take a size 3 shoe or smaller. Those are the basic things.

“You’re examined by a panel of doctors. They put you on a scale, they examine your bones, they measure your height, they ask you a lot of questions. Your parents have to be there, preferably your grandparents as well, and any brothers and sisters that you have.

“And the reasoning behind it is very solid because one of the major drawbacks of the whole racing industry are guys that are left over. They start off wanting to be jockeys, they neglect their schooling, they probably give up their schooling altogether when they’re 12, 13 years old. They don’t know if they’re going to grow, nobody does.

“Suddenly you grow. You’re too big to be a jockey. Now what do you do? You can try to turn to training, but not everybody can be a trainer. So that’s what they’re trying to avoid, an overflow of jockeys that can’t make it.

“But if they decide no, you’re not going to do it, that’s it, you just can’t be a jockey.”

The door opened. Denman was called back into the room. The stern-faced men delivered their verdict.

“They told me no, that I wasn’t going to make it,” Denman said. “I only weighed 66 pounds, I think I stood about 4-foot-9. I was ideal at the time. At age 14, I was the perfect jockey.

“But they said I was going to grow and I did. I’m 5-foot-8 now, but I only weigh 110 pounds, so perhaps in my case I could have made it. I was the exception, but they couldn’t predict that. Normally at 5-8, you’re 140, 150 pounds, which would be much too heavy to be a jockey.

“They just said I was getting good results in school, that I wasn’t to feel too bad about it, that I was still a young guy and to turn my attention somewhere else. They felt I was going to get too big to ride and they were acting in my best interest.

“Certainly I was disappointed. To be accepted into that school is a great honor. You live for that day. And to just be told, ‘You can’t do it, that’s it, you’re finished,’ is hard.

“So then I figured if I couldn’t be a jockey, the next-best thing would be to be an announcer.”

The announcer’s booth at Santa Anita commands a sweeping view of the race track, the foothills and the blue-green peaks of the nearby San Gabriel Mountains. Through powerful binoculars mounted on a stand at the window ledge, a viewer can pick up seemingly the smallest detail of life on the backstretch.

From this vantage point, calling a race would seem to be a relatively simple task.

But imagine a day when the weather is poor, when rain and mist drift across the track, when the racing surface is a sea of mud. A tightly bunched field of 10 horses, some of them with almost unpronounceable names, sweeps around the turn into the stretch and heads for the wire.

The binoculars bring them into sharp focus, but because of the conditions, what you see coming almost directly at you at top speed are 10 mud-covered horses ridden by 10 mud-covered riders.

There is no time to spot the identifying characteristics of each horse, and the riders’ racing silks, brightly colored when they left the gate, are now a uniform brown.

Try calling the race now.

Or imagine that the weather is fine, the track fast and the horses all have simple, easy-to-remember names. Nothing to it then, right?

Not if you can remember the names of--on average--90 horses a day, their jockeys, their trainers, the owners’ colors, the horses’ past performances, their tendencies in races, and countless other pieces of information vital to the accurate and successful calling of a thoroughbred race.

Not if you can put one day’s card out of your mind the moment the ninth race is over and begin afresh the next morning with 90 different horses.

Not if you can operate under the pressure of telling the entire story of a race as it is run, which, in the case of a six-furlong affair, means just 70 seconds.

Just how Trevor Denman manages to do this is baffling. At least to the outsider.

To Denman, it’s all a matter of utilizing a good memory and of taking the time to prepare.

That means settling into his booth at least two hours before the first post and carefully going through the Daily Racing Form, making notations in red ink alongside each race chart, identifying the speed horses, those that are dropping in class, and so on, until he has a complete picture of each race.

“In other words, I know where (the horses) should be and what

they should be doing,” he said. “Provided you know that, you can have much more confidence when you make a statement during the race.

“By the time they go to the gate, I should know every horse’s history pretty well. I know what should be happening. I don’t even expect it to set up that way, but if it sets up totally different, then I can be wary of what comments to make.”

It is not a simple matter. The amount of material Denman has to deal with is staggering.

“I have to study much more than your average $2 bettor,” he said “He can look through the program and in a 10-horse field he can take out five of them, no chance. He just ignores those. I can’t. One of those might go to the lead. So I have to know the full field the same way the average fan knows two or three horses. But I get paid for it, so . . .”

At 33, Denman has been calling races for nearly 15 years, the last three in the United States. He estimates that he has called between 10,000 and 15,000 races. Still, he struggles to find an explanation for the apparent ease with which he is able to do his job.

“I think I have two lucky assets,” he said. “One is that I can remember the names relatively easily. It just comes to me. It’s just something I’ve been given. I don’t even have to work at it. It’s like having good eyesight or good teeth.

“Secondly, I enjoy doing it, and if you enjoy doing it you absorb so much more. If I was dealing with nuts and bolts or buttons on a shirt, I might struggle to remember what had been said, but tell me something about racing and it just goes straight in because I want to know about it.”

Denman does far more than just call the races. He paints a picture of the action. With a few verbal brush strokes, he describes exactly what is taking place. Rather than giving a dull repetition of the horses’ names as they round the track, he tells how the race is developing. He comments on the pace, the status of the leaders, the maneuvers being made by the jockeys, anything that will help the race come to life for those listening.

“It is like doing a quick water color,” he said. “You’re not doing a color-by-numbers or joining the dots to make a picture, which is unfortunately what a lot of the guys do. That, to me, is out. You’ve got to do a water color.

“Every single race is different. And you can’t predict what’s going to happen. The race dictates how I call it. I don’t dictate the race. Whatever happens, I try to pick up the action.”

Quality of the field makes no difference to Denman. To him, a lowly claiming race can result in as an exciting a call as, say, the Santa Anita Handicap.

“There’s no difference at all,” he said. “Some of the best calls have been on cheaper horses. You obviously put more punch into the feature races, that’s only natural. But I certainly do not neglect a $10,000 claimer, because there’s an owner out there and to him that’s the Kentucky Derby.”

Having been rebuffed in his efforts to become a jockey, Denman spent the next four years trying to learn how to become a race caller. It is a measure of his determination that by the age of 18 he had succeeded.

When the Durban Turf Club lost its assistant announcer, it pulled the latest of Denman’s frequent queries from the file and contacted him.

“They sent me a letter on a Thursday afternoon and said if I was still interested to come out to the track on Saturday,” Denman recalled. “So I went there and I called six races into a tape recorder.

“Then the publicity director there said, ‘You’re on the seventh race. You’re going to do it live.’ That was great because I never had time to get excited or nervous about it.

“It went very well. In fact they never interviewed anyone else. They just told me I had the job.”

What Durban Turf Club officials did not know was just how prepared Denman was for that opportunity.

“I had a flat (apartment) that overlooked the race course and I used to go up there and call the races into a tape recorder,” he said. “So I pretty much knew I could do it. Because that’s the bottom line in announcing. You might think you can do it, but until you’ve actually done it, you never know.”

Understandably, there is a world of difference between racing in Southern California and racing in South Africa, but Denman managed to make a smooth transition when he came to the United States three years ago to announce the Oak Tree meeting.

“Coming from South Africa with their style of racing, which is the European style--it’s all on the turf, big race tracks, big fields, slow racing, no emphasis on speed at all--that was the ideal apprenticeship for me to have because really it was much tougher than calling races here,” he said.

“Twenty runners is a very common thing over there. Longer races, much bigger race tracks, twice as big as these, they’ve got a lot of twists and bends and they can race far away from you. They can kind of run away from you sometimes.

“But, of course, the other difference here is that you race five days a week. There, you only race two days a week, on Wednesdays and Saturdays. So here there’s much more pressure on you. Having to work two days a week instead of five, there’s much more time to prepare.

“And they don’t have a claiming system over there. America is the only country, as far as I know, that has a claiming system where horses can change (owner) colors regularly. There (in South Africa), horses very, very seldom change colors. Once you know a horse, you’ve got him. Here you might have him, he changes colors, he races three times and he changes colors again.”

In the end, then, the differences balance out. Either way, Denman, a personable, happy-go-lucky sort, would rather be here than there. There, he had reached the top. Here, he can set his sights even higher.

As the voice of Santa Anita and Del Mar, Denman is a high-profile personality. He may not be recognized strolling the Santa Anita grounds, but his voice is unmistakable. His years in America have modified his accent somewhat, but his comments are fresh and original.

He is given a great deal of latitude by management in what he can say.

“I think the management here has confidence in me, which is what you need, because the more confidence they have in me the more confidence I have in myself,” he said. “And I’m a very conservative comment maker. I’ll go right out of my way to avoid saying anything negative. I just don’t agree with that at all.

“If a jockey’s running seven horses wide into the turn, I would prefer to say he’s being carried wide into the turn. If you say he’s racing wide, immediately they’ll say, ‘Well what’s the jockey doing?’

“But if you say he’s being carried wide, which invariably is the case because a jockey will very seldom run wide for no reason, well, then it’s not his fault. He can’t help it if he’s got four or five horses on his inside. He’s stuck out there. There’s nowhere he can go.

“So everything I say is on the positive side. I try to avoid at all costs negativism, and there’s not much negativism at Santa Anita with the caliber of jockeys you’ve got here. And if it pops up every now and again, I just try to turn a blind eye to it. We’re not going to zoom in on the negative side. Anything positive, we like to highlight that for sure.”

Those who find fault with this miss the point. Denman may have a microphone, but he is not a member of the media, electronic or otherwise. He may tend to be overly positive, but he is not paid to be totally objective. He is, after all, an employee of the track.

Still, Denman goes out of his way to avoid even the appearance of conflict of interest. Whereas in South Africa most of his friends were involved with racing, here they are not.

“I don’t know any of these guys,” he said. “I’ve probably spoken to maybe three jockeys since I’ve been here and they’ve been no longer than one-minute conversations. I don’t know them at all.

“In a way, I prefer it that way because what I found in South Africa--and it really did annoy me and it would happen here as well--is that if you get friendly with a guy and then you start passing comments about him (while calling a race), they say, ‘Well, he’s doing it because he’s his buddy, that’s all he’s doing it for.’

“I don’t want that. I want it to be a professional comment, where if I say something I really mean it. I’m not saying it because I went out to dinner with the guy last night.”

Santa Anita’s confidence in Denman is reflected in the comments of Alan Balch, senior vice president in charge of marketing.

“He has turned out, we feel, to be far and away the superior announcer in the United States and maybe the world,” said Balch, who has a fondness for hyperbole.

“Not only is he accurate, not only is he confident, not only is he descriptive, he knows what’s going on. He knows what the pace is without looking at the teletimer. I don’t know of another announcer in the country who really has that clock in his head. That’s his advantage, he’s a horseman.

“The first thing he did when he got here when he got the job at Oak Tree was walk the course. He wanted to see it from the riders’ point of view.

“He’s the first one to praise an excellent ride or a smart ride or an uncanny move or a great training job or a rider on the way up. And yet if someone makes a questionable move in a race or something, I don’t think I’ve ever heard him say anything critical.”

Nor is Denman a gambler.

“I’ve never been a gambler, never, even since I was little,” he said. “And you’d think going into racing that would rub off onto you. But I’ve never been interested in gambling. I’m the type of guy who will go to Las Vegas and watch the shows and never play the poker tables or anything.

“I think that’s pretty good in a way. I don’t think the two blend very well, announcing and betting. And the occasional time if I ever do have a bet it’s so small that it doesn’t bother me at all. I get a greater pleasure out of seeing a great horse win than I do out of winning money on him.”

Of course, giving up an established career in South Africa to take a chance on making it in the United States was a gamble in itself.

But the odds were in his favor.

At 33, Denman would appear to have it made. He and his American wife, Lynda, and their 17-month old daughter, Katrina, have a comfortable home in Glendora; he has plenty of free time between the Oak Tree, Santa Anita and Del Mar meetings, and his job is secure for as long as he wants it. Before too much longer, he will be an American citizen. What more can there be?

For Denman, plenty.

“I’ve still got a couple of goals,” he said. “Obviously, one day I would like to call a Kentucky Derby, whether it’s for radio, television, whatever. That’s one of the goals you have to try to aim for.

“And I would like one day--it’s not very practical at this stage, but international racing is getting very big--if ever an American horse were to go over to race in the Epsom Derby, that’s one race I would also love to call.

“The Epsom Derby is a longshot, but you never know what can happen. You might get a big horse here who loves the turf and he might have been bred in England or something like that and he might go back to race there. . . . For breeding purposes, it’s probably still the race in the whole world I would have to say.”

But Denman has dreams even beyond those goals.

“I can’t call races all my life,” he said. “Twenty years down the road I’m hoping to become a steward. I’d like to start working on that in 15 years’ time and eventually move out of announcing, hopefully while still at the top.

“Too many guys stay too long and go over the top, and it’s a game where they’ll remember your last year, not your first 29. They’ll forget the 29 and say the last year he was just terrible. So before that happens I hope I can move out of it.

“I’m the type of guy who would like to be a referee in any type of game anyway. It’s just in my nature, I guess. And the stewards here are the referees of racing. The two jobs obviously go hand in hand. I’m watching every race, I’m annalyzing every race, and that’s what they’re doing. In 20 years’ time I will have enough experience of the American system that I should be capable of doing it.

“You can’t just live from day to day, you’ve got to have something to aim for.”

Having had one door slammed shut on him at age 14 may have been the best thing that ever happened to Trevor Denman. After all, it opened all sorts of other doors.