How I Got Hooked On Racing: TDN Correspondent T.D. Thornton

[Wandering Eyes]

For the past few weeks, we have been telling you how some of racing's biggest names fell in love with the sport. Now it's our turn. Here are some of the stories behind the bylines you see every day in the TDN.

I grew up in Salem, New Hampshire, which decades ago was the home of Rockingham Park. My parents were schoolteachers, and my dad, Paul, was the high school baseball and basketball coach. Everyone in town seemed to have some sort of connection to the track, and my father started training a handful of Thoroughbreds the same year I was born, in 1968.

My earliest memories are of the small farm (long since razed and redeveloped) where my dad boarded his horses, just down the road from Rock's back stable gate. We'd eat breakfast at the track kitchen, then back at the barn, before I was old enough to do chores, my father would corral me in a stall with a rambunctiously playful goat to keep me occupied and out of trouble.

The spectacle of the “old Rock” on summer afternoons was the allure. I remember being mesmerized by the flashing lights and hypnotic clicking of the tote board. The ritualistic chaos of race days struck me as important and noble, yet also like a swirling, enthralling carnival. The crescendo of the crowd during a stampeding stretch drive left me wanting more, every time.

I recall being five or six and watching my dad–no-nonsense and focused like when he coached sports–saddling racehorses on the other side of the fence in the paddock. Children were not permitted in the enclosure, so I couldn't follow my father there. I didn't have my path figured out, but I knew I wanted to end up on the other side of that fence, where the horses, jockeys and my dad were–the epicenter of action.

The summer I was 12, Rockingham Park burned down. The charred grandstand symbolized the end of an era for many, including my dad, who decided to give up his modest stable rather than make the daily 70-mile round-trip to Boston to train and race at Suffolk Downs.

Suffolk Downs | Bill Finley

A scaled-down version of the “new Rock” opened in 1984, coinciding with the year I got my driver's license. On weekdays, high school would get out at 2:30 p.m., and I'd rush over in time for the seventh race, when the admission gates were left open and you could catch the last few races for free. On Fridays and Saturdays, the Thoroughbreds switched to racing at night. I went nearly every weekend, absorbed in the challenge of handicapping.

In 1986, I went off to college. I loved reading and writing, and began to harbor a fantasy about how great it would be if I could someday con some employer into paying me to write about racehorses. The University of New Hampshire was only 45 miles north of the Rock, so I was endlessly borrowing cars or imploring fraternity brothers to cut classes and drive down to the track with me.

After writing for the school paper, I landed a series of journalism internships and soon found myself reporting from the New Hampshire bureau of the Boston Globe. In the spring of 1990, I talked an editor into letting me do a feature about struggling, low-level trainers at Rockingham.

The very same day Unbridled won the GI Kentucky Derby at Churchill Downs in front of 128,257 fans, I stood under a leaky shedrow on the rainy Rock backstretch, interviewing a down-on-his-luck horseman about a $3,500 claimer named More Fog. I might as well have been in heaven.

That first turf writing assignment led to subsequent brushes with good karma that have kept me immersed in the sport the past 35 years.

The final twist to this tale is that not only did my dad first hook me on racing, but I got to hook him back. After being away from horses for 15 years–but with a son who in the interim had gone to work in the racing industry–my dad returned to training in 1995, campaigning a competitive stable on the New England/Tampa circuit until he retired in 2007.

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