Jim Dandy might be the racehorse most famous for losing. The story isn’t heartwarming enough for a folksy biopic or a Laura Hillenbrand book, but his out-of-nowhere victory at the 1930 Travers Stakes is nonetheless cemented in American equestrian lore. At the historic Saratoga Race Course—where the Travers is still held—legend has it that bookies offered odds as long as 500–1 and went bust in the upset. The horse was allegedly born with “eggshell hooves,” painful to run on in most conditions, yet on that fateful, muddy afternoon, Jim Dandy had the cushion he needed to secure the win. The two favorites going into the Stakes, Gallant Fox (1–2) and Whichone (8–5), went on to have fruitful, lucrative racing careers. Jim Dandy would not. He “retired”—whatever that looked like for a losing racehorse during the Great Depression—nine years later, at age twelve. Out of 141 career starts, he won seven. Yet it’s because of his historic losing streak that Jim Dandy became a patron saint to track bums (an affectionate title, I promise) in Saratoga and beyond. Proof, even if it’s nearly a century old, that even the biggest loser could be just one race away from a jackpot.
Jim Dandy, the present-day bar named after the horse, isn’t the same sort of lovable underdog. Located in what used to be Saratoga Race Course’s clubhouse—a roped-off area requiring a second, more expensive ticket designed to keep the riffraff out—the bar is recently renovated: there are glossy marble countertops, matte black cabinets, and iPad sales registers that spin around to ask if you want to leave a tip. It stocks $16 cans of Stella and individually packaged prosecco bottles. The bar is just over 150 feet from the finish line, though any line of sight is either obstructed by a giant concrete staircase or the craned necks of people who paid even more money for a trackside lunch table. Most customers at the Jim Dandy are resigned to watching the action on one of the two dozen TVs mounted opposite the bar, conspicuously above the betting kiosks. It’s the sort of place frequented by shrill, middle-aged couples wearing garish jewelry and floppy brimmed hats who were recommended a swanky track hangout twenty years ago and haven’t shopped around since.
It’s also where, for just under six weeks last summer, I worked as a seasonal barback. Three weeks after graduation, living in my parents’ house in the suburbs of Albany and down to the last thousand of my neurotically rationed graduate assistantship stipend, I decided that I needed income more than I needed a career. Service industry work ($22 an hour, plus overtime and tips) seemed far more lucrative than any prospects from my recently completed master’s. The Saratoga Race Course, forty minutes up the Northway, was hiring. It was always hiring. I showed up to their job fair with twenty photocopies of my resume in a manila folder, laughably overprepared. They hired me on the spot, presumably for being either eight years older or forty years younger than everyone else. Orientation was the day before the racecourse officially opened. I piled into the board room where I had interviewed with a group of other “non-premium” concessions workers. Together, we filled out our scantrons for a New York State-mandated food and alcohol safety test, answers fed to us by an HR rep clicking through PowerPoint slides. In a breakout group, the middle manager in charge of the bars had us install an iPhone timeclock app that didn’t work and told us our uniforms hadn’t come in yet. It would take a week for the outfits to show, consisting of T-shirts with the racecourse’s Saratoga logo on the chest and our staffing agency’s name on the sleeve. Until then, any black shirts we had at home would do.
Opening day was a blur. Though the racecourse’s season starts on a Wednesday, when I showed up at 9 a.m. for my first shift, the grounds were already swamped with people. After a crash course on barbacking etiquette—“don’t disappear during peak hours”—I was assigned a bar to report to and told “good luck.” For close to seven straight hours, I ferried ice between the clubhouse’s kitchen and the Jim Dandy’s speed racks, a few times ramming into an unfortunate pedestrian on the betting room floor. The other barback introduced herself as a “senior,” and only later did I realize that she’d meant in high school; she hovered back by the storage closet, smacking on gum, tapping through Snapchat. My feet, crammed into slip-resistant knockoff Skechers, throbbed. Much of the stock we were supposed to have—fresh fruit, rags, dish soap—had never been delivered. We made do with paper towels and canned Brisk lemonade. At 6 p.m., with the last race over, countertops wiped down with sink water, inventory counted and recounted because I hadn’t distinguished the two flavors of Surfside, we were finally done. While our manager signed off on my made-up bottle counts, two bartenders grabbed Miller Lites out of the beer fridge and sucked them down in seconds. They left, I mopped. By then, the only people remaining were the groundskeepers and the beaten-down shift managers. Frank Sinatra, the track’s unofficial closing music, sang me out. It’s up to you, Neeew Yoorrrkkk, Neeewwww Yoooorrrkkk! The brass band’s cymbals clanked in my head like bottles of mid-tier tequila.
Track Changes
For anyone who grew up in the suburbs of New York’s Capital Region, Saratoga looms large. Its downtown full of boutiques and well-kept Victorian mansions gave the city an air of sophistication that other small upstate cities (Schenectady, pregentrification Hudson and Troy) lacked. You could see classical music at the Performing Arts Center! That my friends and I only ever made the trip for Wiz Khalifa is beside the point. To us, Saratoga was part of a lineage, a connection to a different America where tradition was still glamorous. And the racecourse was at the core of Saratoga’s mythology.
NYRA spent the early 2000s on probation following a money-laundering scheme committed by clerks at Aqueduct.
As a child, I spent dozens of afternoons at family reunions hosted there, my cousins and I corralled in a dinky plastic playground while our parents drank at picnic tables. Off-season, we took tours of the owners-only backstretch and the small horseracing museum a few blocks away. The racecourse was old when our parents were kids, and it was old when their parents were kids. Its history was comforting. For generations, Saratoga was the sort of place where behaving badly—drinking, gambling, letting your kids run loose like free-range chickens—wasn’t just allowed but encouraged. It made you feel like part of something bigger than yourself.
This stretches back over 150 years. Horses have been a staple of Saratoga since 1863, when the racecourse opened. Though today the grounds are elaborately dressed up to evoke those Victorian roots—big top tents, manicured hedges, teenaged ushers in dress pants and starched white caps—the modern-day notion of Saratoga as an upscale gambling resort, the WASPy Vegas of the Northeast, can be traced to the 1950s. Still reeling from the first half of the twentieth century’s flip-flopping gambling laws that alternatingly propped up and crippled the industry, the Greater New York Racing Association was founded in 1955 as a centralized coordinator of New York’s four historic tracks: Saratoga, Belmont, Aqueduct, and Jamaica. Still extant today, the organization has evolved into a not-for-profit (ha!) corporation which, through a tenuous partnership with public agencies, administers the action in Saratoga and beyond.
Under NYRA’s stewardship, New York’s racecourses fell in line with visionary industries like video games and porn, ushering in the twenty-first century well ahead of the technological curve. Offtrack betting was established in the 1970s, first with simulcasts at designated locations, eventually expanding into over-the-phone betting. In 2016, predating the proliferation of sportsbooks like DraftKings and FanDuel, NYRA launched its own NYRA Bets apps. Today, NYRA handles its own law enforcement (“NYRA Peace Officers” trained at their own in-house academy) and runs a media operation complete with locally famous TV personalities and a Fire Stick-compatible streaming service.
It probably doesn’t come as a surprise that NYRA is frequently in the news for its legal issues. The organization spent the early 2000s on probation following a money-laundering scheme committed by clerks at Aqueduct. More recently, NYRA turned heads for the massive $455 million “loan” it was granted by the state to renovate Belmont Park. PETA is among those filing suit for this “half-billion-dollar handout to a private racing business with an abysmal record of financial mismanagement—and a mounting death toll.” And that’s not even mentioning the decades of organized crime affiliated with Saratoga and neighboring Adirondack resort towns—though compared to the $220 billion behemoth legal gambling has become, the racecourse’s Prohibition-era roots seem almost quaint.
Though really, the magic and the madness of NYRA lie less in its bureaucracy than its boots-on-the-ground management. Or lack thereof. Each of New York’s three remaining horse tracks (Jamaica was closed by the summer of 1960) is only open for a fraction of the year, presumably to avoid splitting their audience. Saratoga, while not the most competitive in racing (that’s Belmont), is certainly the crown jewel in presentation. The summer meet, as the annual season is called, only runs from mid-July to Labor Day. Not a sleepy city by any means but certainly a small one, Saratoga transforms overnight. NYRA and other staffing contractors have to fill thousands of seasonal roles with only a few months’ notice. Many jobs, mostly half-day ones like selling programs or manning the box office, fall to local high school kids and retirees. But for service and hospitality roles—that is, the ones that actually pay—people flock from all over. Levy, the agency that hired me, handles concessions and shift managers. A half-dozen other temp agencies and the year-round NYRA employees that function as their supervisors fill the rest of the vacancies, manning the entirety of the three-story, quarter-mile stretch of stands and snack bars, as well as the “backyard” BYOB-picnic area, not to mention the semicircle of off-grounds restaurants dependent on adjacent foot traffic. There are also hundreds of young, mostly Mexican and Central American men (many of whom bring their families up for the summer) hired by individual owners and trainers to take care of the horses. You can work a day at Saratoga and talk to ten different employees, each on the payroll of a different company. Nobody, managers included, has any idea of what is or isn’t anybody else’s job. It’s a beautiful, decentralized mess. An amorphous blob of hospitality-adjacent worker bees organized solely to keep the grounds clean, booze flowing, and walkways to the betting kiosks clear.
Ol’ Money, Ol’ Problems
Days at Saratoga had a tempo. From Wednesday to Sunday, I came in two hours before opening and stayed well past last call. Once I’d proved myself competent (not particularly difficult), I worked alone. The bulk of my responsibility as a barback fell before and after serving hours: unloading cases of beer dropped off on pallets, doling out already-opened bottles of liquor and mixers to each bartender’s station, and wiping every glossy surface down twice. At closing time, I mopped, reloaded fridges, and ensured the inventory counts I made up were plausible. My business-hours responsibilities were mainly scooping ice. Mostly, I lingered in the far corner of the bar, out of sight, playing Magic: The Gathering or reading magazine articles on my phone. Other than that, I people-watched.
The bartenders I worked under were all teachers. I’d gathered as much my first day, eavesdropping. But once I’d been around a few days, they warmed up to me. Between the four of them, they’d worked over a hundred summers at the track, mostly at the Jim Dandy bar. Stories were hashed and rehashed about how the Jim Dandy used to be: a rickety old room tucked inside the clubhouse, where regulars would puff cigars inside and tip 120 percent. Those were the days. I got the impression their take-home from eight weeks at the racecourse was comparable to their school-year salaries. Still, each complained about how the track’s conversion to cash-free had made tipping shit—but then teaching had gone to shit too, between all the kids with “accommodations” (scare quotes theirs) and parents so insane you couldn’t discipline their kids. I told them I had a master’s and no job locked in past September, and they said to keep barbacking. One of them knew my high school track coach and insisted on snapping a photo of me—unshaven, wearing a lanyard and T-shirt stained with sweet-and-sour mix—to send to him. Another of the bartenders was a locally famous baseball coach at a tiny Catholic school. All summer long, a steady stream of twentysomethings and their parents came up to the bar to shake his hand. Despite the bartenders’ nostalgic grumbling, business was good.
Really, I studied the customers. There’s a dumb joke my dad repeats every summer to the effect that the track bums in T-shirts and shorts at Aqueduct will be wearing button-downs by Belmont. Come Saratoga season, you can tell who’s winning by who’s wearing pants, their cigarettes swapped out for supposedly Cuban cigars. Saratoga’s culture of faux classiness is half the fun: middle-class Yankees cosplaying as Southern gentry. And while there certainly is money being moved at Saratoga—horse owners can take home hundreds of thousands—the old-money fashion sense is an in-joke. The Jim Dandy bar, angling itself as upscale by selling the same drinks as the beer shacks for three dollars more, was the perfect place to watch the campy phenomenon in action. We’d have teenagers with braces and Sperrys order virgin Shirley Temples, then pour their own White Claws on top. One owner, a Trump-tan, three-hundred-pound man wearing a Gucci T-shirt and a rapper-sized chain, lingered around the bar for a week and, by Friday, tipped the bartenders close to five hundred bucks (of which I, a lowly barback, only saw maybe fifty). Around closing time, we’d have jockeys, distinguishable for being the only Latinos (and five-foot-tall men) in the clubhouse, flock to the bar, still reeking of the barn, buying rounds for the crowd with their day-of winnings. One customer closer to my age sat at a corner stool with his iPad every day for a week. Eventually, when he saw the bartenders and I watching him, he turned the screen around to show us his setup. He live-bet on the horses, watching odds change mid-race before putting down money. He’d taken a week off work to be in Saratoga; you had to be in-person to bet like that. The simulcasts on TV and nyra.com both broadcast on a delay.
Clop Art
An upper-crusty, government-underwritten, migrant-labor-powered gambling destination with a backyard abutting the artist residencies at Yaddo? This doesn’t exactly sound like the sort of thing the well-thinking, bourgeois reader could in good conscience condone. But for all of NYRA’s sketchy maneuvering and its customers’ antics, the racecourse is historic for a reason. There’s no better place to experience horse racing, both as a sport and as a subculture, than Saratoga. I challenge even the most skeptical critic (with some money to lose) to spend a Saturday on the grounds and not to have fun.
I challenge even the most skeptical critic to spend a Saturday on the grounds and try not to have fun.
In July and August at the racecourse, almost every day looks like this: a bugle call is amplified over loudspeakers so the entire grounds can hear it. Fifteen minutes to post. Across Union Avenue, a procession of jockeys and trainers walk the next race’s horses by their leads. They pass a gathering crowd, entering the white-picketed perimeter of the track. A NYRA peace officer stands off to the side, arms crossed, supposedly to deter foot traffic. Next to him, a child pulls herself up on one of the fence’s crossbeams, entranced by the horses. Her father kneels and tells her to pay attention to which horse seems the feistiest—that’s the one he’s going to bet on. Further down the line, a picnicker on his third Michelob tallboy hoots at the horses. A Mexican teenager follows the line with a shovel and dustpan, scooping up the shit the horses leave in their wake.
In the paddock, the horses are tied up and led in tight circles around posts decorated with their racing numbers. In suits and loafers despite the nearly ninety-degree heat, the owners drag their children and nieces and nephews over for photo ops. On one end of the pen, NYRA-employed announcers banter about the odds. Above them is a two-story bar open for the first time this season, a velvet rope keeping the crowd from the stairs. On the other side of the paddock stands a massive pavilion with mostly computerized betting windows. At any given moment, several hundred people are lingering in line. An impatient girlfriend taps her toe in the direction of one of the kiosks where her boyfriend disappeared five minutes ago. Walking past her, a regular tucks the receipts for the bets he’s just placed into a zippered, waterproof coin purse. He sees the horse he’s bet on—mellow, in blinders, eyes on the ground—and smiles.
Another bugle sounds. Jockeys on top this time, the horses are led out of another gate. They pass through the racecourse’s main concourse: past the ragtime band with the sixteen-year-old on standup bass, past the cute tents peddling kettle corn and framed art prints of Saratoga’s famous mansions, past the sort-of-secret cash-only breakfast counter that a few jockeys’ wives run out of the locker room’s back window. The best seats in the clubhouse are the ones wedged between the trackside rail and the pathway from the paddock. If the smell of the barn doesn’t spoil your appetite, you get to see the horses step out of the crushed-gravel pathway and canter out into open track.
The forest-green starting gate is hitched to a pickup truck and driven out to the starting line. The horses follow, as does a lone ambulance. Now, the backyard picnic area is out of sight. The real crowd is in the grandstand; a rickety wooden half-bowl stadium stretching half a mile end-to-end. A jumbotron with a special panel for betting odds is in clear view. A last call for bets is announced via bugle, but nobody really listens. People who didn’t pay for seats flood to the thin patch of dirt along the homestretch rail. Wide-brimmed hats are fanned in a futile attempt to get some air.
Instead of a starting gun, an alarm bell rings, as if announcing a prison break. The gates swing open. Aaaannnnddd . . . they’re off. The horses explode off the line, their bodies blurring together into a mass of pure muscle. The trainers that had been holding them in place jump backwards. The jockeys, somehow, are along for the ride.
None of this is visible for the spectators on the far side of the track. Instead, they watch the action magnified on the big screen, camera panning along with the lead pack’s surge. The particularly savvy just watch the numbers—the horses abstracted into colored rectangles jostling on a digital plane. As the horses disappear into the far turn, the rectangles do too. Then, as the horses come back around into view, so do the numbers. The crowd screams at the new order.
On the homestretch, the trampling hooves shake the ground. The horses pass the cheap seats first. The track is fast, and there’s still a race to be had. By the time they approach the clubhouse, not even two hundred feet from the finish line, the race-long leader fades behind. Two longshots approach fast. In the stands, a seventy-year-old woman in pearls and heels screams. A baby, who really ought to be wearing noise-cancelling headphones, cries. In a kitchen nestled below the seats, a dishwasher hits his vape and checks the time. The wooden beams above him creak from the commotion of a thousand spectators. The horses fly through the finish line.
A minute later, results are projected onto the big screen. Most of the crowd groans. There are a few high fives. Paper bets are thumbed through, losers ripped up and dropped to the ground. Lucky patrons are making a beeline to the betting kiosks. In the winner circle, a wreath is handed to the mud-splattered jockey, and he smiles wide as he takes a photo with the horse’s owner. He’s just made close to 10 percent of the race’s purse, but he’s preoccupied, thinking about how he needs to race again in less than an hour.
All around the grounds, people’s attention shifts away from the race and back to each other. Over the chatter, another bugle call: thirty minutes to the next race. Behind the bar, I rub my eyes and brace myself for the approaching crowd. Winners and losers alike are going to need another drink.
Horse Code
My barbacking career ended abruptly: a full-time job offer led me to put in a two-week notice at the racecourse, which got me “accidentally” reassigned to a worse bar for fewer hours, so I no-called/no-showed for my last few shifts. I spent Travers weekend, during which even the barbacks supposedly get tipped a week’s salary in an afternoon, sleeping in. My first free Saturday in two months. I didn’t feel bad about it.
Labor Day weekend, the last of Saratoga’s season, there was a Dolan family function at the track. My cousin who’d just bought a house in Saratoga proper promised to show up at six in the morning to reserve a whole section of picnic tables. I told myself I wasn’t going to go back so soon after quitting. But my dad offered to be the designated driver, so there I was, packed in the backseat of my parents’ car, knees smushed against a cooler full of spiked seltzers and deli sandwiches. I stayed as far away from the clubhouse as possible, turned twenty dollars into fifty into zero, and remembered exactly why I loved Saratoga in the first place.
With the summer over, Saratoga changed back. The horses went downstate for Belmont and Aqueduct’s fall seasons, their stable staff following. The teachers and students filling most of the remaining part-time roles went back to school. In their place were the Skidmore undergrads with intentionally ugly haircuts. Staffing contractors jostled for the best college football stadium assignments. The city breathed a collective sigh of relief.
Despite having seen the proverbial sausage, a summer behind the bar didn’t make me think about Saratoga much differently. Obligatory concerns about the gambling industry aside, it was reassuring to be somewhere like the racecourse where the fact that money talks isn’t something to apologize for. Here, scruples came second to history. There’d been horse racing at Saratoga for 160 years, and it’s not unreasonable to expect that there’ll be horse racing for a 160 more. That’s a beautiful, ugly thing.