Horse racing was my calling from a young age. I vividly recall one of my first racetrack visits: On A Roll, Mike Smith, $2 to place and he was hooked.
While growing-up it was not uncommon for me to rattle off race results and star horses quicker than the Presidents of the United States or other key historical facts. Statistic projects in school were horse racing related. My fourth grade teacher once inquired why every writing assignment had a racing focus.
I grew-up in Schroon Lake, New York – about one hour north of Saratoga – and my passion for the game grew with dozens of trips to the Spa every season, along with obsessive viewing of Thoroughbred Action and Inside Racing the rest of the year.
My passion for the sport grew each and every year. It was Coronado’s Quest hanging-on by a diminishing nose. It was Cigar driving towards perfection. It was Tiznow out-gaming Sakhee. It was Corporate Report holding-off Hansel. It was Awesome Again, Dehere, Favorite Trick and Hidden Lake.
I was also mesmerized by Tom Durkin (as in watched him call the race rather than the races themselves) and started calling races myself using toy horses, marbles, Matchbox Cars and my bike. Around the age of 10 I knew for sure I would grow-up and be a race caller…
- …and now I am the track announcer at Louisiana Downs. I started here shortly after college in 2006. In 2010, I took a brief hiatus from the quarter horse meet and worked at Gulfstream Park in their Media/Marketing department.
- I worked for the Saratoga Special during college, one of the best publications in horse racing. Every year I miss Saratoga more and more, but this newspaper brings me back. Sean and Joe Clancy do tremendous work.
- I have a big inner entrepreneurial drive. I love reading books on marketing and business and really admire those who build business empires from the ground up.
- I’m co-founder of Horse Racing Nation, a web site driven by a massive wiki-database of racing information compiled by racing fans and enthusiasts. It launched just before the 2009 Kentucky Derby and we had our biggest day yet this year when 40,000 people came to the site. Pretty cool, huh?
- If I’m not watching horse racing, you can usually catch me playing golf, listening to music, reading or conjuring-up new and exciting ideas for the web.
- A lot of spare time though is spent taking care of Bowman, my crazy dog, and his pal Harley, the far more subdued version of Bowman. In 2011 we added a part-deaf (or selectively deaf) rescue dog named Lucy to the mix as well. The four of us are kept in line by my girlfriend Dickie and her energetic and dynamic children Hayden, Sage and Lane.