Looking for Belmont Color? Esposito’s Is the Place to Go

The morning of the 1980 Belmont Stakes, John Esposito was pacing the duckboards behind the bar in the tavern that bears his family name.

“Who do you like today, John?” a customer asked.

“Anybody but Codex,” Esposito said.

Codex, the Santa Anita Derby and Preakness winner, was favored in that Belmont. The colt was owned by the Tartan Stable, and Esposito dreaded the prospect of painting the tavern’s front picket fence plaid, Tartan’s colors. Codex struggled home seventh, ending John Esposito’s anguish.

“The only other horses I’ve rooted against because of the fence have been from the Phipps stable,” Esposito said. “Their colors are almost all black. There’d be nothing special about having a black fence in front of the place.”

The Phipps family won the 1989 Belmont with Easy Goer and this Saturday, for the 128th running of the race, Ogden Phipps will run My Flag, a daughter of Easy Goer, who will try to become the first filly to win since 1905.

Esposito therefore likes everyone but My Flag, because even though he sold the bar earlier this year, the new owners will not change the name of the establishment, and the painting of the fence with the winning Belmont owner’s colors will continue.

Arguably, the three best racetrack hangouts in the country are Esposito’s, Wagner Pharmacy, not far from the Churchill Downs quarter pole in Louisville, Ky.; and Siro’s, a restaurant that is actually on the grounds at Saratoga, the nation’s oldest track, in upstate New York.

Esposito’s is across the street and about a furlong away from the Plainfield Avenue stable gate at Belmont Park. The location and the name will stay the same, but new management will be hard-pressed to perpetuate the down- home atmosphere the Esposito family nurtured for 60 years. Esposito’s has been Cheers with a touch of manure around the edges, and there will be a period of adjustment for the trainers, jockeys, track employees and turf writers who have paid their lifetime dues there.

For one thing, the two vintage phone booths are gone. These were the kind of booths that Clark Kent could change clothes in--soundproof and well lighted, with a seat, a ledge to take notes and an accordion door. “The phone company took them back,” John Esposito said. “They’re probably going to put them in a museum somewhere.”

Waiting to close escrow on a house near the Long Island shore, about 45 minutes from the bar, the 66-year-old bachelor has been living at the old family apartment at the tavern, and a few days ago he sat at a side table in the tap room, wearing a green-and-white baseball cap that said “Esposito’s Tavern. Est. 1936.” Circumstances brought on the sale of the bar: Junior Esposito, a younger brother, died last year, and John Esposito, who has a blood disease, has been in and out of hospitals for several months.

His parents, Gilda and Arthur Esposito, opened the tavern, and John has lived there since he was 8.

“In those days,” he said, “they only needed one watchman to take care of the entire backstretch. I can remember playing tag around the barns. In the winter time, we used to ice skate on the infield lake. I’m buying a four-bedroom house, and some of my friends have wondered about why a guy like me, all alone, needs four bedrooms. Well, I’ve made a lot of friends in racing over the years--in New York, Florida, California, all over--and my doors will be open to them. I’ve got a big backyard, and we’re going to have a good time, my health permitting.”

Gilda was “Mom” to everybody. She was a soft touch, fixing free meals for horsemen down on their luck and even loaning them money. “Nobody would stiff Mom,” her son told Bill Leggett, the turf writer and a Esposito’s habitue, earlier this year. “Because she was too good to too many people.”

The traditional fence-painting began after Seattle Slew won the Belmont and swept the Triple Crown in 1977. Billy Turner, who trained the colt, was a fixture at Esposito’s many years before that, when he was called Turnpike Turner and rode steeplechase horses at tracks up and down the Eastern seaboard. Owners of jumpers, needing a jockey on short notice, would call Turner on one of the phone-booth lines at Esposito’s, and he’d hop in his car, head for the turnpike and be there. For many years after Seattle Slew’s Belmont, there was a song, called “Seattle Slew Do-dah-day,” on the juke box at Esposito’s.

Starting in 1982, Woody Stephens trained five straight Belmont winners, but Esposito still had to keep repainting the fence, because the same owner never won two in a row. Early on the morning after each win, Stephens, en route to his barn, would stop in front of Esposito’s and honk his horn, to remind the proprietor that the fence hadn’t been repainted yet.

“Woody didn’t know the rule,” Esposito said. “The rule is that I got seven days to paint the fence. Woody and I go way back. Him and Mom used to split $5 parlays. Woody was drinking 100-proof bourbon in here, long before he switched to Scotch.”

Lou DeFichy, the retired jockeys’ agent, captured the mood at Esposito’s best when he said:

“Junior and John made Sigmund Freud look like an amateur. They had what you might call a very candid philosophy. John, in particular, considers himself an expert on all phases of life, and expounds on his theories daily to the delight of anyone within earshot. You don’t necessarily believe him, but you’re compelled to listen just the same.”

One of John Esposito’s frequent plaints is about the so-called good guys.

“How come more of the good guys don’t get lucky?” he said. “The creeps have all the luck. I’d feel better about life if more of the luck rubbed off on the good guys.”

But there was always room at the inn for the ne’er-do-wells as well as the guys in the white hats. Conn Errico, the ex-jockey who was under indictment for race-fixing in New York in the 1970s, came in to forget his troubles. Mark Gerard, the veterinarian who engineered one of the biggest ringer betting coups in racing history, came in when he was still in college, ordering Esposito’s $1.50 breakfast.

“He couldn’t afford a nickel more,” Esposito said. “We’d give him free Cokes to wash it down. I didn’t think he’d ever turn out the way he did.”

After the bar’s resident Doberman pinschers--Bold Ruler and Buckpasser--died, fisticuffs at Esposito’s were not out of the question. John himself pulled an exercise rider off a young David Cross, who would later train Sunny’s Halo to win the Kentucky Derby in 1983, and Cross and Esposito have stayed lifetime friends. One night after a Belmont Stakes, a man and his three sons fought among themselves in a full-scale brawl. Chairs were the weapons and much blood flowed.

“I gave the whole family [a ban of] five years,” Esposito said. “That’s more than what those gutless stewards over at the track would have done.”

The only music that has been heard in Esposito’s other than the juke box came at the grand reopening in April. Showing considerable class, the new management brought in the piano player from Siro’s at Saratoga.

“I think it was a one-shot deal,” John Esposito said. “Hope so. Too noisy.”