Day at the Races, Night at the Opera : Racing: William Murray, novelist, essayist and classically trained opera singer, calls Del Mar Racetrack home as he watches, writes and resides amid the sport of kings.

There he was, The Great Resider, alertly leaning against a bale of half-eaten hay, watching yet another morning spring to life out beyond the backstretch of the Del Mar Racetrack.

For William Murray, there was much to eyeball on this day before Opening Day at the track--his track, his so-called home away from home during that burst of four-legged fury, the seven-week racing season.

His own horse, Ultra Sass, a 3-year-old dark bay filly he co-owns and unabashedly calls his sweetheart, was being put through the pampered paces of a brisk backside walk by a tall stable hand.

But that wasn’t all that excited him. There was just so much more action--so many smells, sights and sounds--out there where the high-priced thoroughbred flesh meets the hay.

It was like the once-over treatment that Dorothy and the gang got in the Emerald City. Horses being manicured. Horses being hosed down, brushed up. Horses being walked about, talked about, scolded and molded.

Horses, horses, horses. The mere mention of the word makes Murray a little crazy, a little itchy, forces from him the perverse smile of a guy, Daily Racing Form in hand, who knows he just picked a sure thing.

And out here in Stable Land, he just couldn’t help himself. Murray gazed about with the wonderment of a full-time filly fanatic--some poor stiff who had died and gone straight to horse-lover’s heaven.

“This place just puts me into a frenzy,” he later confided while schmoozing with some of his betting boys along the backstretch. “In the world at large, there’s this great secret fraternity of horse degenerates from all walks of life. It’s like a Masonic Lodge. Horse-wild people who would rather be at the track than anywhere else. Those are the people I look for.”

They are also the people he writes about. Since 1976, the year he publishedhis first lyrical ode to the sport of kings--a book called “Horse Fever” about a hair-raising race season at his favorite track--Murray has written a collection of novels exploring the behind-the-scenes relationships among his racing brethren.

But his is more than a one-track mind. His fascination with the track is the roughest edge of the New York-born Italian-American, a renowned novelist, essayist and magazine writer, teacher, translator, classically-trained opera singer and former opera company manager who is by all accounts a modern-day man of letters.

There’s just this thing about the horses. Murray owns them. Bets on them. Writes about them. Worships them.

His racetrack books tell gritty stories about the underworld of gamblers, bookies, heart-breaking handicappers as well as the dreamers, lost souls and oddball racetrack addicts. They are books with insider names like “Tip on a Dead Crab,” “The Hard Knocker’s Luck” and “When the Fat Man Sings,” all featuring a professional magician and amateur detective named Shifty Lou Anderson.

Now, the 65-year-old author is at work on a sixth horse-racing book, tentatively titled “The Wrong Horse,” which he calls an autobiographical journey through the American racing scene. The title comes from a statistic on career betting that holds you can, at best, win only one of three races. In the other races, you’ve picked the wrong horse.

For the 43-day race season, Murray’s schedule will vary by a nose, if at all. Rising before dawn at his suburban tract house in Del Mar Heights that, by his own reckoning, lies 3.2 miles from the finish line at the track, Murray will write about the horse life, using only a couple of No. 2 pencils and a yellow legal pad. Then, come post-time each day, he’s bound for the track.

And, frankly, he looks most at home there. With his balding pate and horse-track tan from spending days under the sun, he gives the image of the rough-cut type who might lean in real close, invading your personal space, and solicit a tip moments after you’ve walked away from the winner’s window.

On this day, he wears a tan Members Only jacket with khaki pants and a thick patch of gray chest hairs poking through his unbuttoned shirt collar.

“The guy’s horse-crazy,” said Nick Giovinazzo, a retired college professor and Del Mar gambling pal Murray calls “Nicky.” “Out here at the track, you’ve got to be able to distinguish between the dreamers and the people who know. Bill Murray knows.”

Then there’s the other side of William Murray.

The side that authored two well-regarded collections of essays on Italy and Italian life, casually etched accounts of the people he has met during his travels around the boot-shaped peninsula--the “terrorists, policemen, actors, politicians, bureaucrats, opera singers, peasants, businessmen, journalists, artists, grifters, criminals, students, priests, and even simple law-abiding citizens.”

Murray lived in Italy for much of his first eight years and then returned to Rome as a young man to receive operatic voice training. Since the mid-1960s, he has returned now and then to his homeland to write his engaging “Letter From Italy” as a staff writer for the New Yorker magazine.

His most recent collection of essays, “The Last Italian,” has been compared by the New York Times to the writings of famed travel-essayist A.J. Liebling. The newspaper called Murray’s book a “love affair with Italy . . . filled with pangs of dismay but also with great pleasures, fondly and eloquently recorded for our benefit.”

Fluent in Italian, Murray characterizes himself first a Roman. But shades of other lives and experiences surface in the man, whose flat accent reveals the time he has lived in New York.

He comes from a long line of artists and writers. His maternal grandmother was a noted Italian journalist. His mother was an author and his Scottish-Irish father was an American scholar and agent who worked in entertainment and journalism.

And Murray has carried on the tradition. He has translated into English a number of Italian plays and has directed off-Broadway. While living in New York, he once ran a small opera company. During a 10-year stay in Los Angeles, he wrote several screenplays and saw some of his own novels transformed for film and television.

Since moving to San Diego a few years ago, he has taught creative writing at UC San Diego. And he’s always casting about for an opera part for which to audition.

In an interview at a Del Mar bookstore, Murray moves easily from one passion to the next. He talks of the power of holding the right operatic note before a live audience--about the quality of the human voice. And the loneliness of producing the written word.

He talks about the freedom of writing for the New Yorker, a magazine that attracts some of the nation’s best writers to extol on the subjects they know best, but also of the frustration of seeing a submitted piece collect dust for two years.

And he worries about the direction of the book publishing world, which he says has adopted the bad Hollywood habit of lusting for the blockbuster. His publisher, he says, recently offered $7 million for rights to a book on Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf--money he thinks could be better spent on developing younger writers.

“With the Schwarzeneggers and the Schwarzkopfs--it’s the era of the Schwarzes,” he says. “I’m thinking of changing my name to Schwarzmurray.”

After all the time he has spent in Rome, where it’s considered a crime to destroy anything old, Murray cannot understand what he sees as California’s obsession with replacing the not-so-old with the spanking new.

And he cannot fathom the distaste he sees among San Diegans for Mexican culture. He reveres the zest of Tijuana street life, finding San Diego pale in comparison.

“Tijuana is like Naples,” said Murray, who has written for the New Yorker on the commercial ties between San Diego and its southern neighbor. “But the people there have a special mixed-blood quality. They’re not like other Latinos. They’re part Indian. There’s just a great sweetness of Mexican life we don’t appreciate on this side of the border.”

Despite his varied disciplines and strong opinions, Murray refuses to categorize himself except in one way. The horses, of course.

“Some people play bridge, others play chess. Well, I play the horses. And gambling is part of the trip.”

At the track, he says, gamblers compete with those around them. “In Vegas, by contrast, you’re in competition with the casino. I’d cut off my hand before I’d put a quarter in a slot. But, at the track, every race is like a great big crossword puzzle. And that aspect of it is relaxing.

And when he gambles, Murray hangs out. That’s what years of writing have taught him, the art of watching and listening, like some big, hazel-eyed wallflower with a notebook.

Whether he’s researching a magazine piece about the life of a Roman piazza or the murder of a prominent Tijuana journalist, Murray sticks around, reads the local newspapers, and he listens. He resides. He calls it hang-around journalism.

What strikes writer Paul Brodeur about Murray is not just his keen eye but his booming, contagious laugh.

“When Bill Murray is at the New Yorker, at the track, or on a story, he’s always looking beneath the surface and questioning the orthodox, stodgy behavior,” said Brodeur, who first met Murray at the New Yorker in the late 1950s. “This is no long-faced guy. He’s out to enjoy life, and he writes about people in that mood of celebration.”

The beauty of his job as novelist-essayist, Murray says, is that he gets to hang out at the places he likes. The theater. The opera. The baseball diamond. The track.

For Murray, the Del Mar track is like a one-stoplight town with one diner, where everybody knows everyone else’s business. He discovered it back in 1966, when he fell for the pristine beaches, the cozy little town and the racetrack where things ran so simply, where the trainers even used to run their horses out in the ocean surf.

“Actually, it’s a seedy little racetrack,” he says. “It’s a fairgrounds, really. But look at the location. And it’s more informal, more relaxed here than at tracks in the big city. Everyone’s in one small place.”

It was also the Del Mar track that first introduced him to the sometimes seamy world beyond the backstretch, a place the average track-goer never gets to see. For Murray it’s a world of both wonder and sadness, where the greasy cafeteria food is often inedible and where hard-working but often desperate people make their living caring for and training the testy thoroughbreds.

“During the season, it’s a seven-day-a-week job that starts before sunrise and goes all day,” he says. “There’s some bad conditions back there, people living in boxes, stuff out of the 19th Century. You can’t get anyone to work there unless they’re people who desperately need the work or those who have no where else to go, people who are trying to lose themselves at the track, flee a disaster from some other part of their life.”

Murray has come a long way since the first day he went to the track. That would have been with Harry Woodard, a wealthy playboy and horse “degenerate” who married Murray’s older cousin.

He was an impressionable 16 then, and Harry had swooshed into New York for a whirlwind visit. His dad, he recalls, let him tag along with Harry as a lesson--let him see the guy lose a wad of money.

“Well, we came home rolling in loot,” Murray recalls. “It was one of those unbelievable days. Harry won $14,000, and I took home $400, a lot of money for a kid in those days.

“My dad was sitting up in bed when I ran into his room to tell him about it. I remember the disappointment on his face. I told him ‘Geez dad, I don’t know why we don’t do this all the time.’ My father never spoke to Harry again.”

Win or lose, the track has been good to Murray. He even met his second wife, Alice, at the track a few years ago, sitting in the next box.

“So, with all my worldly savoir-faire, I leaned over with a very smooth opening. I said, ‘Who do ya like?’ That day, she picked a couple of winners, and I figured I better marry her.”

When the Del Mar track season draws to a close, Murray will head off to witness another one of his loves--Italian life from his regular seat at a Roman street-side cafe. Or a piazza in Naples. Or Venice. And then, maybe New York.

But, come next year, when the Del Mar Racetrack opens its gates for yet another sweet season, he’ll be back there beyond the backstretch, watching, writing, residing.