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Steven Crist: At Saratoga, an Ever-Evolving
View from the Press Box
By Steven Crist
Daily Racing Form
Easy Goer wins the 1989 Travers, in between the eras of the electric typewriter and the Internet.
When I climb the ancient, rickety wooden stairs to the ancient, rickety Saratoga press box next
week it will – contrary to the impression of some readers – be for only the 35th year in a row, not
the 150th. It is possible, however, that more has changed in how a racing writer has covered
Saratoga in those 3 1/2 decades than either the racing or Saratoga itself has changed in more than
a century.
The first time I covered a horse race at Saratoga was in August 1979, as a fill-in when the racing
writer for The New York Times fell ill the week of the important Alabama Stakes for 3-year-old
fillies. I took a bus from Manhattan to the parking lot of the Spa City Diner on Broadway,
lugging an electric typewriter. The Sunday Times in those days had an early Saturday deadline of
5 p.m., just minutes after the race would be run. My assigned 800-word story on the Alabama
would consist of 750 words filed early in the day – typed and then dictated over the telephone –
known as “B copy.” I would dictate the lead 50 words by telephone as soon as the result was
official.
At least the Alabama would be an easy story for writing B copy. Davona Dale was a cinch, so 50
words about her Alabama margin of victory and time would flow nicely into a 750-word canned
account of her achievements to date. I watched the Alabama with my hand on the telephone,
mentally composing clever ways to describe Davona Dale’s inevitable victory. A California
import named It’s in the Air went to the front, and only in deep stretch did it finally dawn on me
that Davona Dale wasn’t going to catch her.
The next morning, Times readers outside the city, including those in Saratoga, read a rather
curious account of the 1979 Alabama: 50 words about how It’s in the Air, had scored a historic
upset victory over Davona Dale, followed by a 750-word tribute to the invincibility of Davona
Dale.
By the time I was covering Easy Goer’s Whitney and Travers victories a decade later, I was still
writing B copy for Saturday stakes races, but the days of electric typewriters and dictation were
over. I now had a newfangled writing device called a Portabubble, which looked like a keyboard
attached to a black picnic basket, with two big holes in its top where you jammed in a telephone
receiver. I could now push a button and my lead paragraph would magically appear on an
editor’s screen down in the big city. I could now pound out 100 words of legitimate news rather
than 50, cutting the B copy down to a mere 700 words.
By 1999, the year of Lemon Drop Kid’s Travers, I had moved on to Daily Racing Form and a
laptop computer, and the dissemination of racing news and information was changing radically.
Simulcasting had made Saratoga’s (and everyone else’s) racing available to fans at their local
track or OTB, and nobody was going out to a newsstand late Saturday night or Sunday morning
to find out who had won the races. Also, this thing that people were still calling the World Wide
Web, including a fairly primitive website at drf.com, was effectively putting an all-night
newsstand into everyone’s home.
A decade later, when Rachel Alexandra was winning the 2009 Woodward, the Internet had
changed everything and was the horse pulling the newspaper cart. For a writer, the new medium
was liberating: Instead of writing a scheduled news article or column at a fixed length with a
deadline dictated by the mechanics of printing-press schedules, you could post directly to the
website at whatever length or time of day you liked.
Such freedom also encouraged a less formal and more personal approach in a setting like the
Saratoga blog I was now writing every racing day. I was skeptical of the format at first but then
pleasantly surprised to find that readers really enjoyed following along with my days at the races
through a real-time diary.
There was (and still is) a need for formal and detached racing journalism, especially when it
comes to news reporting, which is best done by trained professionals backed up by editors with
standards of fairness and accuracy. The new instant access of electronic publishing, however,
allows for other kinds of interaction with readers who can receive more timely information
instead of waiting until it’s all over.
Maybe someday I’ll be able to write my blogs and columns on a tablet or even on something that
fits into a shirt pocket, but I’m not there yet. So when I lug that laptop up those press box stairs
next week, I’ll be getting a twinge in both my memory and my shoulder of that very first trip up
the stairs with an electric typewriter.