EARS : PSST, BUDDY, HERE’S A SURE THING ON PLAYING THE PONIES. YOU LISTEN, YOU LOSE

THE TROUBLE WITH MY FRIEND BENDER IS THAT HE CAN’T STOP LISTENing to tips. He’s been going to the racetrack for more than 40 years and still can’t keep his ears shut. It’s a weakness that has degenerated into a major hazard, because Bender would rather bet his money on a horse race than do anything else, except possibly breathe.

In the mornings Bender hustles insurance for a living and in the evenings he’s a devoted husband and father, but in the afternoons he’s at the track. This has kept him in a permanent state of financial disarray and periodically puts a strain on his marriage, but it also provides him with those occasional golden days no one who goes to the races can ever forget: a handful of winners, some long shot coming in from out of the clouds, a giant daily double. And someday, Bender knows, just as surely as he knows the moon will wax and wane, he’ll hit the ultimate Pick Six, a parlay wager in which the bettor tries to pick the winners of six consecutive races. It’s about as easy as hitting the lottery, but the pots can be huge, up to a million dollars, and Bender is convinced he’ll do it and be wafted above the herd into the ranks of the leisure class. If only the people he meets at the track, all those touts and hard knockers he knows, would stop telling him things.

It isn’t as if Bender doesn’t understand the game. He has few illusions left about it; he knows what the percentages are and that almost everyone who bets on horses loses. He likes to quote that old adage about being able to beat a particular race, but not the races. Betting into the house vigorish, the minimum of 15% that is cut out of every wager, is like putting your money into a meat grinder; folding green goes in and shredded parimutuel tickets come out. Bender knows this, but he doesn’t let it discourage him. Like most horseplayers, he’s the kind of person who believes he could fly, if he’d just flap his arms hard enough.

Bender likes to get to the track early, at least an hour before the first post. This gives him time to pick up the late scratches and jockey changes and make last-minute adjustments to his calculations in the Daily Racing Form. Not too long ago he showed up at Hollywood Park and allowed me to tag along with him, on the promise that I wouldn’t use his real name in anything I might write. He seemed confident and was feeling lucky, mainly because he’d sold a couple of medical policies that morning to a pair of ancients anxious to supplement their Medicare cards.

After parking his 1982 Toyota, a battered survivor of the L.A. freeways, in the lot reserved for trainers and owners, he swept into the premises by flashing a borrowed pass. (By the beginning of every race meet Bender has inevitably accumulated enough passes and parking stickers from his friends and touts in the grandstand to admit him into any part of the track, except possibly the Directors’ Room.) Bender likes to start out in the Turf Club, which is for members only, partly because he likes to be right over the finish line so he can separate the noses in a photo finish without having to wait for the official picture. He wears a large pair of cheap binoculars like a yoke around his neck and reading glasses are readily available in his left breast pocket. After all the years he has spent hunched over the tiny print of the Daily Racing Form, the horseplayer’s Torah, Bender’s eyes are not what they used to be.

The Turf Club is a beautiful scene, and it always warms Bender’s heart to be there. Inside there’s a comfortable dining area, a large bar and plenty of servile attendants. Glamour, style, chic, entrenched wealth, all conditions of life that Bender aspires to and one day expects to achieve. Outside, the seats are directly over the track, one level above the grandstand boxes where most of the owners and trainers hang out. There are rows of tables where members can eat lunch and drink as they watch the action, but Bender never lingers there. It is customary to grease the headwaiter for a decent table, and Bender’s whole style is to avoid all expenses not directly connected to the business at hand, which is the selection of winners.

He began, as usual, by checking the scratches and jockey changes with the information in his program, then studied his Racing Form closely for about 10 minutes. He glanced at the tote board to bring himself up to date on the odds, and then he went outside to watch the horses in the first race come out onto the track. It was now about 12 minutes to post time and he’d been unable to make a firm selection in the first, so he decided to sniff around for what he calls “the edge,” a useful tidbit of information from some person he respects that might enable him to come up with the winner.

He walked down a flight of stairs into the grandstand area and almost immediately bumped into his friend Sid, another regular. Sid is fat, about 50, wears brightly colored Hawaiian sports shirts and crepe-soled shoes. “The first is a bunch of broken-down, cheap speed horses which you don’t know whose turn it is,” he told Bender, “but I heard that the four horse in the second is gonna go wire to wire.”

Bender checked his form and liked what he saw. The four horse in the second was a 7-year-old named Exotic Eagle, a veteran who had won 11 of 50 races lifetime and had plenty of speed to get the lead. The only question was whether he was in form to do so now. But he had won his most recent effort against similar competition, so Bender allowed himself to believe he would repeat, even though these old campaigners at the lower levels of the sport tend to be inconsistent. Bender went to a betting window and wheeled the six horses in the first race in $10 doubles to Exotic Eagle in the second, then went outside to watch the first race.

One of his wheel horses won at odds of 9 to 2, so now he had a pretty good double going, as Exotic Eagle figured to be a good price. Bender went back downstairs and permitted himself a sandwich and a cup of coffee, but then he began to worry because the odds on Exotic Eagle remained pegged at 5 to 2. Bender reasoned that if his horse were hot his odds would have come down significantly. But then he told himself that he was indulging in bettor’s paranoia. Just because the crowd seemed to be betting heavily on an outsider called Jogarob didn’t mean his horse wouldn’t win. Bender hadn’t ever considered Jogarob, who had drawn an unfavorable outside post position, was being ridden by an unsung apprentice and was trained by somebody he’d never heard of. He told himself that his double was all but banked, and he estimated he’d be $200 ahead after cashing his winning ticket.

He was wrong. When the gate opened, Exotic Eagle showed brief speed, then disappeared. Jogarob bounced home first, at half his morning-line odds. Somebody had hit and hit big. Why had he listened to Sid? Having seen the action on the winner, Bender figured he should have bet a saver on him. The mustard on Bender’s sandwich had begun to taste of bitter almonds. He was out $60 and there was no way he could salvage it, either from the televised running of the New England Classic at Rockingham Park, a five-horse field dominated by two heavy favorites, or the third at Hollywood, a sprint for 3-year-old maiden fillies with another obvious favorite. He went back to the Turf Club bar to admire the wealthy at play.

The so-called Merry Widows were all there, seated just beyond the edge of the bar, gigglers all. They are women in their middle years whose husbands have died or faded in the stretch, and they come to the track once a week, every Saturday, to bet tiny bits and pieces of their inherited loot on horses with cute names or on jockeys whose looks are darling. They also work variations on complicated betting systems based on astrological forecasts. Bender always knows when they’ve backed a winner, because they shriek like banshees. They did some screaming that afternoon, after the third race, when a 10-to-1 shot named Northrops Bid ran second, thus providing the group with a nice exacta payoff. Northrops Bid had been the first horse Bender had eliminated from his calculations as a possible contender.

Bender now went back to scanning the form. He decided to put in a small Pick Six, going three horses deep in the fourth so as to be reasonably sure of staying in action for a while. As he was sitting at the bar, making out his ticket, Goat passed him on his way to the windows to make some bets for a group of ancients too arthritic to heave themselves out of their chairs. Goat got his nickname because he looks and smells like one. He likes to run errands for people because he usually picks up tips that way. Now, on his way back from a teller and just as Bender was preparing to make his own bet, he stopped by to confide in us. “They’re playing the Robbins colt,” he murmured, with a wink.

Bender again consulted his form. The Robbins colt, Duke’s Cup, was not one of his three horses. He had used the favorite, Silver Circus, a gelding named Green’s Leader and a long shot named Broke the Mold. He had decided against Duke’s Cup because he suspected the horse was unsound; it had once raced against much better animals but was in here for a claiming tag. Nevertheless, Bender decided Goat might be on to something, so he revised his Pick Six ticket by substituting Duke’s Cup for Green’s Leader, who was trained by a man Bender considered “a needle guy,” someone who liked to inject sore horses with cortisone and other drugs, some legal, some not.

Duke’s Cup ran out of the money and Green’s Leader won the race, which meant that Bender was now out $84 and dead in the Pick Six. He no longer felt quite so lucky, but there were still five races to go, and he informed me that he had never been a whiz in the early races anyway. He stuck his rolled-up form into his pocket and wandered back into the grandstand area. He was soon joined by Beverly, a cocktail waitress at a poker club in Gardena; Harris, another insurance salesman; Wally, a pensioned high-school administrator, and Hugh, the former owner of a failed savings and loan who lived with his mother in a Pasadena mansion.

The friends did not greet each other with an excess of joy because there wasn’t a winner in the group. To make conversation, Bender asked Beverly why she had failed to put in an appearance all week. “I was in Vegas,” Beverly explained, “with Willie.” Everybody nodded. Willie, a real-estate tycoon, had been Beverly’s boyfriend for several years, ever since he’d picked her up one afternoon in the Santa Anita clubhouse. Willie was married to a woman who looked, according to Harris, like someone who’d “been hit in the mouth with a mashie.” But he had no intention of getting a divorce, so he and Beverly got together once or twice a week and took occasional “business” trips. Nobody liked Willie, who was arrogant and considered Beverly’s track pals a bunch of losers, but he was tolerated because everyone liked Beverly. She had wonderful legs and a great laugh, like the whoop of an amorous loon.

Silence reigned momentarily as the comrades studied their tout sheets. It was broken by the arrival of Morris, a rich doctor who specializes in treating the ailments of elderly housewives who are even wealthier than he is. He informed the group that he had so far won every race. Furthermore, he couldn’t understand how Bender and his friends could have failed to pick each race as accurately as he had. “That last one was easy,” he said. “With McCarron up, how could he lose? And 3 to 1 was a great price on that horse.”

He was swept away on a backwash of loathing. “Someday I’m going to kick him very hard in the shins,” Bender said, but Wally soothed him. “Don’t let Morris get to you,” he said. “He hasn’t had a loser since 1966.” That’s because Morris never bets less than five or six horses in every race, which means that he can come out of a day with six winners and a net loss. Still, it was aggravating to have to listen to him.

Bender decided to pass on the fifth race, a sprint for 2-year-old maiden fillies that figured to be won by an odds-on favorite. The last time Bender bet on a green 2-year-old going off at that kind of price was back in the Nixon era, and he was not going to make that mistake again. He watched the favorite romp home on a TV monitor, then turned his attention to the sixth, another distance race on the turf. And now, at last, he came up with a winner.

Seattle Symphony, Bender’s selection, scored for him at $19.20 for every $2 of the $10 he wagered, making Bender a tiny winner on the day. Best of all, Bender had picked the horse himself, without asking for or listening to anyone else’s opinion. From the statistics in his form, he had guessed that the horse would run well on the grass. I suggested that he might consider sticking to his own picks in the future, and Bender agreed with me, but no sooner had he begun to look at the seventh than he was accosted by Snaps, one of the more aggressive of the grandstand touts.

Snaps makes a living by acquiring information he then passes on to players who presumably will reward him if his tips win. He’s a jumpy little man who wears garish sports jackets with ballpoints and odd bits of paper stuffed into his pockets. He has thin gray hair, watery brown eyes and seems to be in motion even when he’s standing still, as if afraid someone may be gaining on him. He leaned in toward Bender and glanced quickly around, then whispered, “Big Wheels Rollin is money in the bank. I got that from a friend of the owner not 10 minutes ago!” And he scurried away after another potential client.

“You know, I was going to bet that horse,” Bender said, “but now I wouldn’t touch him with a 10-foot pole.” He went to the window and bet $20 to win on Dark Ice, the favorite.

Big Wheels Rollin won, paying $13.40, while Dark Ice finished third. Bender was beside himself. “How could that be?” he said. “I was gonna bet him and then, just because Snaps liked him too, I backed off him. There’s no justice, none, in horse racing or anything else. How do you like that?”

I didn’t like it much either, because I had also bet on Dark Ice, but I had to agree with Bender on the subject of justice. As we were standing there, commiserating with each other, Harris appeared beside us, frothing with rage. “Did you see that?” he said. “That f---in’ Gary Stevens pulled the favorite, wouldn’t let him run a step, the little crook!”

I had seen no evidence of foul play and neither had Bender, but Harris, who has a low paranoia threshold, knew better. “These little gangsters!” he said. “These little Shakespearean actors! You ever see anything like it? That was a boat race out there! They ought to call it a regatta, and they should equip the jockeys with paddles instead of whips! You ever see anything like that? Did you? It’s horrible to look at, the little crooks!” Matters did not improve in the eighth race. Bender’s horse, Apollo, finished second, which made him a loser again on the day, to the tune of about $70. Bender’s dream of a big day had faded, and now his sole concern was finding a winner in the ninth to bail him out.

Bender’s horse in the ninth, a cheap sprint for California-bred maidens, the worst horses on the grounds, was Northern Bounty, who had drawn the extreme outside post, a liability, but had already shown some talent and was being ridden by Bender’s favorite jockey, Patrick Valenzuela. Bender intended to bet the horse straight and box him in exactas with the morning-line favorite, George’s Buster, and a six-to-one shot named Stanley Dard. All Northern Bounty would have to do is finish first or second to either of these two horses, and Bender would cash in a nice ticket.

As he headed for a betting window, Bender’s confidence in his selection soared and he determined not only to get out of his losing day but to make some real money doing it. He was going to bet $50 to win on his horse and an additional $40 in the exactas.

As he was standing in line, waiting to make his bet, Bender was accosted again by the ubiquitous Snaps. “I told you,” the tout declared. “Did you bet the eight horse in the seventh?”

“No,” Bender answered. “I didn’t like him.”

Snaps shook his head. “Boy, it’s hard to help you guys,” he said.

“What are you doing here?”

Bender told him.

“Northern Bounty?” Snaps said, looking distressed. “I hear he’s real sore. But I got a big push on the eight horse.” And he flitted away to peddle his information elsewhere.

Bender again consulted his form. The stats told him that the eight horse, Beyond Success, had no chance, but he also noted that the odds on the horse had dropped from 12 to 1 down to 4 to 1. Somebody knew something, and in these cheap maiden races inside information sometimes paid off. So Bender decided to vary his action. Instead of backing up his straight bets on Northern Bounty in the place hole, as he had planned to do, he now added Beyond Success to his exacta play, boxing him with his selection.

“Your problem, Bender, is you’ve got rabbit ears,” I said. “You listen to everyone.”

“Well, he was right about that other horse, wasn’t he?” my friend answered. “Besides, backing up horses in the place hole is basically a dumb thing to do. If my horse finishes at least second to any of the three others in this race, I stand to make some money.”

On his way out to watch the race, Bender encountered Beverly, who looked distressed and needed a winner as badly as he did. Bender told her about Northern Bounty. “I’m going to box him with Jake the Red,” Beverly said, indicating a 19-to-1 shot Bender had long ago dismissed from his mind.

“Jake the Red has no chance,” he informed Beverly.

“The bartender told me he’d run good,” she said.

“That’s why the guy is a bartender,” Bender explained.

Bender and I went out into the grandstand to watch the race just as the horses were being loaded into the starting gate. Bender was feeling very confident. “No way this horse runs worse than second,” he said.

He was right. Northern Bounty did have to go wide on the turn, but Valenzuela brought him in a strong second. The only trouble was that of Bender’s three exacta horses, only Stanley Dard did any running, finishing third. The winner was Jake the Red.

Without a word, Bender turned away and headed for the exits. As he passed the corner of the clubhouse bar, Beverly came running up to him and threw her arms around his neck. “Oh, my God, I’m rich!” she said. “Thanks for giving me that horse!”

“That’s OK,” Bender mumbled, his tongue apparently encased in some sort of fuzzy sweater. Beverly looked at him in alarm. “Jeez, Benny,” she said, “you didn’t play my horse? You know, you really should cool it for a while. You look terrible.”

“I’m about to kill myself,” Bender said, “but otherwise I’m all right.”

So I watched Bender walk alone out of Hollywood Park that day through the usual sea of losing tickets, crumpled programs and soiled newspapers. After descending the stairs toward the parking lots, he stopped long enough to buy the next day’s form. He snapped the paper open as he walked and began to study the next day’s entries. And suddenly, like all of us who go to the races regularly, he began to feel lucky all over again.