Q&A: Trevor Denman

[Wandering Eyes]

Trevor Denman burst onto the announcing scene in 1983 when the South African was hired to call the Oak Tree meet at Santa Anita. American racing fans had never heard anyone quite like him. He didn’t just announce a race; he painted a picture. He had a collection of colorful terms and he wasn’t afraid to editorialize if he thought a horse was “moving like a winner.” Now 65, Denman works only the Del Mar meets, but with that meet in full swing, he remains as good as ever.

Denman was this week’s guest on the Thoroughbred Daily News podcast, brought to you by Taylor Made, and excerpts appear below.

TDN: Trevor, when you started calling in the U.S., the way most announcers called a race was pretty routine. They simply told you where the horses were in the race, position by position. You were far more descriptive. Where and when did you develop that sort of style?

TD: It all goes back to geography, I believe. The American announcers basically were an extension of the chart callers. And the chart callers are there just for the Daily Racing Form. Their job is not to be colorful at all, it’s to get the guy who’s writing the call down all the information. So, they were, “Seventh by a head, eighth by a half, ninth by two.” And it meant nothing to the public. It meant a lot to the chart callers. And when they transitioned over to race calling, unfortunately, they just brought the chart caller into the announcer’s booth. And that’s what he thought he had to do was just call a chart. So, there was no description whatsoever. That’s just the way it happened.

In English racing or South African racing, the tracks are huge; they’re normally two miles in circumference. At a track like Goodwood, they actually run away from you into the woods. It’s extremely difficult to call the races, I’ve called a couple of races at Goodwood. And, of course, the people in the grandstands have no idea what’s going on because the horses are a mile away. So you have you have to be more descriptive.

Besides, we had irregular fields in South Africa, we would race twice a week. There would be nine races a day, and six of those races would have a field of at least 20. So you had to be descriptive. If we had gone through, “So-and-so is 17th by a neck, he’s 18th by a head, 19th by two,” it would have been ludicrous. So it was really just a matter of geography of where you were brought up, how descriptive you were.

TDN: The public really embraced you. They loved what you did. Why do you think that is? Is it because of this style? Is there something more to that? Not only are you regarded as a good announcer, you’re, well, very popular.

TD: I would put that all down to one word: “sagacity.” I think what the people like is when you have sagacity. You know, it’s no good just being a voice, or just being loud, or just trying to make false excitement. I think you have to look at it from the point of view of the guy who’s listening. What does he want? Not what do I want. What does he want? I’m an altruistic person, I’m a Libra. Libras are just naturally altruistic. And I think that’s what it was. Don’t worry about yourself, worry about what the fans want to hear. I think one of the biggest things was we threw humor into it. The American announcers back in the 60s and the 70s were extremely stern. They were dour. There was no humor whatsoever. I don’t think the public actually liked that.

In South Africa when we would call when we were younger, you could use a phrase like, “So-and-so’s clear by six, you can head back to the pub and order another one, ’cause this one’s over.” You know, throw some humor in. The people, they loved it. The majority of the people were 20 to 30-year-old males, so they liked that. So, I think sagacity would be my key word, followed by humor.

TDN: One of the things you’re also well-known for is certain catch phrases. “He has to sprout wings to catch so-and-so” or “He’s out there moving like a winner, humming like an express train.” Were those things that just popped into your mind? Were they things that you had to work on or did they sort of naturally come to you?

TD: Let me tell you a story about those. I picked them up gradually and some of them were really in curious ways. I was in England once at a small jump track and I got to meet the announcer. He was a young guy. To this day I can’t remember his name. Of course, you can’t steal from American announcers. That’s a big no-no. I wouldn’t even dream of taking a saying from an American announcer. But it was a small track, I believe it was Bangor-On-Dee in England. It’s late in the race and one horse draws off by 20 and he says “they would need to sprout wings to catch this guy.” And I said, that’s me, I’m in there.

The other one: I was in a taxi cab in New York City. I told the guy to take me to the racetrack and it turned out he knew who I was. He started telling me these racing stories. And he said I bet this horse and it was clear by four lengths and I knew I could ring up the register. I said, “Hello, that’s me, ring up the register.” It came from a cabby in New York City. I knew that people would go for it.

I think “humming like an express train” just developed by itself. I think it’s just descriptive of a horse really flying. You know that express trains, especially the old steam trains back in the ’40s and ’50s, when they built a head of steam, that’s what a racehorse looked like when he was flying down the lane. So it’s a combination of a number of different scenarios.

TDN: In 2015, while still very much at the top of your game, you decided to walk away from what is one of the most prestigious announcing jobs in racing, Santa Anita. Tell us why.

TD: I know there’s been a number of takes on that and I’m telling the absolute truth about this. My wife, Robin and I, we bought a farm in Minnesota in 1996. It’s just on 500 acres and it’s absolutely idyllic. It’s in the middle of nowhere. We can’t see another human being; the closest farmer is just over a mile away and we can just see the top of his silo. It’s just bliss. We decided there’s more to life than horse racing. We loved horse racing, it’s been very good to me, but life is way bigger than horse racing and I always said there will come a day when I just don’t want to do this anymore.

It was building up, and then one day I was sitting in the booth at Santa Anita. The Santa Anita booth is a little claustrophobic. It’s a small booth and it’s on top of the rocks. You can look out, but you can’t see anything behind as opposed to the one in Del Mar when you can see the Pacific Ocean behind you. It’s a magnificent scene, so you feel free at Del Mar. Nothing against the Santa Anita booth, but it was a little claustrophobic and I was sitting there on a Thursday afternoon and there was a 20-minute gap between races and that’s when the snowstorm just hit me. It was like an avalanche. I said, what am I doing? I’m sitting in this booth, my life is ticking away second by second, I’m 64 years old, I’ve probably got another 20-30 years on this planet. I’ve got to dedicate my life to myself. I cannot dedicate it to Santa Anita, so I decided then and there, that was it, I don’t want to do Santa Anita anymore.

That main thing was to live my life. If there was another factor that influenced me, it was the traffic. Oh my goodness, the Los Angeles traffic has just become diabolical. I lived about 20 minutes from Santa Anita and it was taking me an hour and half to get home. You’re tired, you’re irritable at the end of the day, you get in your car and you don’t go anywhere. You average like three miles an hour. So that was really tedious. So I put them all together and I just said my life is more important than this.

TDN: It’s well-known that you are an animal rights activists and one cause you have embraced is the whipping issue. It’s fair to say that racing has made strides when it comes to whipping, but do you believe the real solution is to ban the practice all together?

TD: Oh, yes. Categorically. People say, “Oh, jockeys need to carry a whip for safety.” That is absolute rubbish. When a horse bolts at the three-eighths pole, and he bolts to the outside, he is no longer in his mind. The horse has gone insane, you could hit him with an electric shock, he’s not coming back, he’s going to go off the track, he’s going where he wants to go, You see these guys hit them over the head. I’ve never seen a horse straighten up from that in my life. I say you don’t need whips at all. Without them, there would still be Pick Sixes, there would still be nine winners everyday No one would know if they ran in 1:10 or 1:11 for six furlongs. Racing would not change.

If you want to let them carry a whip, okay, but they should make the South African rules where you just hit them backhanded, or you tap down the neck. I mean, it’s so simple to do, and they’re doing it in other parts of the world. Even in England, you seldom see a jockey pull his stick. There’s a big meeting in South Africa on Saturday morning and just watch the jockeys, what they do. We could do that tomorrow and not only would it save the horses, it would help the image of horse racing.

I have seen so many kids–9, 10, 11 years old–and they watch a horse race and they just say that’s disgusting, I’m not going to the racetrack. Young people are much more sensitive than they were 40, 50 years ago. The fact is that they don’t want animals to be abused. Have you seen circuses closing down? Have you seen zoos closing down? There are still zoos, but animals now have acres and acres of ground to walk on. They’re not in a little steel cage with a cement floor, that’s five-by-five.

The thing that bothers me with horse racing–and I just kind of threw in the towel after 30 years because you can’t keep going hitting your head on the wall–is that this is so easy to change. But it’s arrogance and bigotry that won’t allow it to change. Just change the rules and go on with it. Whips are just so overrated, we could do away with it tomorrow.

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