The walking death of pari-mutuel racing in Tennessee, Part 10

by Frank Cotolo

Part 1 is here.

Part 2 is here.

Part 3 is here.

Part 4 ishere.

Part 5 ishere.

Part 6 ishere.

Part 7 ishere.

Part 8 ishere.

Part 9 ishere.

My experiences with off-track betting parlors (or parlours as the British spell it) was to become as wide as the ocean separating the United Kingdom and the United States. I wrote about some of these episodes in the early columns of my Among Ourselves series but when I found out about a British company’s serious intent to invest in Tennessee’s legal pari-mutuel racing bill, I had mixed emotions based on my experiences as a bettor at off-track betting parlors from Brooklyn USA to a punter (British term for bettor) at Yorkshire GB.

First and foremost is the fact that during my residence in Great Britain there was no such thing as pari-mutuel racing. This put me at a disadvantage. I had to learn how the U.K. wagering system worked after being spoiled by the easy tasks demanded for betting on track or as a New York State Off-Track Betting (OTB) client. A learning process began; including some history.

Betting became legal in general and organized on the isles with the Parliament’s passing of the Gaming Act of 1845. Gambling as a service to the public was a private business legal only through licensed bookmakers (also known as turf accountants).

In the beginning of the gambling trade there was only horse race wagering allowed and then only at the racetracks where race meetings took place. Betting on thoroughbreds was the only product. (Later bookies added greyhounds.) The access to wagering became so popular with all classes of the public that becoming a bookmaker would grow into a respected and competitive profession. As it grew the bookmakers expanded their menu; they offered wagering on an endless list of non-racing events. Even international events like U.S. Presidential elections and Olympic sports and Hollywood’s Academy Awards as well as esoteric events that a bettor may suggest to the bookmaker. Unlike pari-mutuel wagers bookmakers presented fixed odds by handicapping an event on their own. Bet anything at 6-1 and if you win you are paid 6-1. And the competition between the individual bookmakers allowed a bettor to shop for the odds he or she accepted. No betting pools that result in lowering the odds of your bet existed. The bettor said, “What odds ya give me, gov’ner, on Prince Edward abdicating the throne for a bride outside the royals, eh?”

Great Britain pioneered legal gambling and the business spread across Europe using the bookmaking-trade method which remained on the isles even after the French developed the pari-mutuel (among ourselves) system and it became popular in various Eastern European countries.

By the time I was sipping gallons of tea in a Yorkshire cafe while reading racing touts and tips in The Sportsman newspaper, the British bookmakers were institutions in the British business atmosphere to the point where the government legalized betting shops (OTBs) to make betting more convenient for the average citizen while still enacting tough measures to be sure the processes remained honest.

And the OTB parlors expanded through the country with the help of major corporations such as William Hill and Ladbrokes and even the Hugh Hefner’s Playboy corporation went into the OTB business by opening betting shops (or shoppes as the Brits spell it).

Independent turf accountants dressed and spoke well to smother the trope images of creepy bookmakers. They ran their businesses out of small and neat offices in every town and village across the country. And they worked outside of their offices; bookies ran race-by-race services with mobile betting stands placed on the aprons of horse racing tracks standing for generations up and down and across the ex-empire’s historic terrain.

I learned to be comfortable doing my own handicapping at a Harrogate cafe after accepting the inability to purchase pancakes or — believe it or not — an English Muffin for breakfast. I had issue only with the fact that there were no printed past performances. The racing pages of the newspapers printed the opinions of how various horses performed (much like the explanations of race action appearing on the bottom of Daily Racing Form race charts).

I did not always go to the track to make my bets. The closest track to me was Ripon and it was a bus ride away. Walking through the village I had access to a few different OTBs and turf-accountant offices. I tried each franchise OTB. Those visits did not go well because they were “crowded and clouded.” I was a smoker in those days but so were the patrons. The parlors wreaked with stale smoke and current exhalations. Their similarities with U.S. OTBs made it simpler for me to adjust since New York OTBs also produced the discomfort of clouds and crowds.