Caliente: Horse Race Heaven : ‘Man, This Isn’t a Race Track,’ My Friend Said. ‘It’s an Orgy.’

Several Saturdays ago, I met this fellow I call Dan the Man at the Agua Caliente Race Track, a few miles south of the Mexican border in Tijuana.

He was sitting at the end of the bar in La Cupula, an indoor area from which he had a bird’s-eye view of the closed-circuit TV screens in the room. When I asked him how he was doing at the races generally, he told me that he had embarked on a program that would yield him a minimum of $100,000 a year; he was going to bet $200 to show on fast horses in sprint races. He didn’t need to buy a Racing Form or even a program, because he could glance at other people’s copies. “It only takes me about five minutes,� he explained. “I only need to look at a horse’s last three races and total up the speed ratings.� He had tested the system for 2 1/2 years on a computer and it worked. “Remember, only to show and on sprint races,� he reminded me, as the bugler called us to the post. “Money in the bank.�

Dan the Man is in his mid-30s, and he sported a mustache and wore blue polyester slacks, a white short-sleeve sports shirt with scarlet flamingos cavorting across his chest, and a red baseball cap tilted high up off his face. Between races he told Polish jokes. He himself is Polish and lives in the San Diego area, where he owns a hardware store. He was planning to come to Caliente every Friday night and spend the weekend at the motel across the street. That would be a little hard on his wife and two kids, he conceded, but they’d understand, once the money started to roll in. I had caught up with him during his third trip to the track. “I’m only ahead $180 so far,� he told me. “I got a couple of dumb rides last week, but it’s just a matter of time. I have to win. And this is money you can hide from the tax man.�

Dan the Man came to Tijuana the night before his weekend betting started because things get under way briskly at Caliente. You can play up to half a dozen tracks across the United States here, and the action from the East sometimes begins as early as 9 a.m. The races, including all of those from Southern California, are beamed in live by satellite and can be seen on strategi-

cally positioned TV monitors. The hub of the action is the Foreign Book, a rectangular stone pavilion in front of the two main entrances to the grandstand, where the punters can see an average of 50 races a day. They can also wager on tracks in Northern California and bet on such future events as the Kentucky Derby and the other Triple Crown races. The entries and results are posted

on a huge blackboard that runs the length of the back wall. The bettors sit at tables facing the wall or simply mill about on the floor under the monitors, and around a bar and refreshment stand at one end. The scene is not reminiscent of the royal enclosure at Ascot. In fact, by the end of each racing day, it has achieved a truly Hogarthian level of sordidness, with the losers shuffling out glumly over a toxic dump of losing tickets, on their way back to the San Ysidro border crossing. The Foreign Book is open every day except Christmas and there are about 500 regulars, mostly Americans, who come every day and who haven’t seen a live horse race in 20 years.

This depraved spectacle was not for Dan the Man, who preferred the more gracious surroundings of La Cupula, a large sunken area inside the main emporium that is bathed in comforting gloom and has padded seats and hordes of accommodating waiters. From the outside, La Cupula looks like a miniature cathedral dome tucked up against an Aztec temple. The original grandstand, a much homier affair, was destroyed by fire in 1971 and has been rebuilt as a paean to grandiosity--a massive four-story structure that could easily handle 30,000 fans. The average attendance on weekends, when Caliente puts on its own racing program, is about 4,500.

This is fine for those of us who like to go racing and wager in comfort, a tradition that the new owner, a dashing young Mexican entrepreneur named Jorge Hank Rhon, seems determined to respect, despite some eyepopping embellishments. The entrance to the Turf Club is now graced by floor-to-ceiling, glass-enclosed cages containing about 100 exotic birds, installed there because Senor Hank Rhon is an animal lover. Almost a year ago, some enterprising macaws chewed their way to freedom through the ceiling and roosted in the rafters until caught by an imported team of professional bird catchers. (Senor Hank Rhon reportedly also keeps boa constrictors in his office. “You hope everything’s locked up when you go in there,� one of his employees told me.)

Upstairs there is a luxuriously appointed new Jockey Club that actually costs money to join, but admittance is free to every other area of the premises, even to the Turf Club on the floor below, from which you can watch in air-conditioned ease from behind glass while being served inexpensive but excellent food and drink. Out in the open, in the grandstand or the clubhouse, there are plenty of seats, and you can also risk a Mexican hot dog, a spicy sausage tucked under a mound of onion slices and chile peppers. It is absolutely guaranteed to make a man of you, regardless of your sex.

At Caliente, the betting is easy. You can play any track at any window and the minimum ticket is still only $2, with every race offering exotic combinations, such as quinellas, trifectas and exactas. You can also wager in pesos, in which the minimum bet is the equivalent of about 40 cents at the current rate of exchange. There is also the Pick Six, which originated in Tijuana and is still called the 5-10 here, because it begins with the fifth contest and runs through the 10th on the normal 12-race card. You have to pick the winners of six races in a row, which is about as easy as pogo-sticking across the Mojave. An acquaintance of mine, however, hit it a few weeks ago with an $8 entry for a payoff of more than $5,000. Like Dan the Man, he has no immediate plans to alert the IRS to his good fortune.

Racing in Tijuana has a colorful history. The first track was built in 1916 by a plunger named Sunny Jim Coffroth from San Francisco, who gave his name to a handicap offering a $50,000 purse back in the 1920s, when that kind of money was unheard of in racing. In 1932, a great Australian horse named Phar Lap won the $100,000 Caliente Handicap, then the largest prize in racing history. In 1941, women jockeys got their first chance here, and Caliente was also the first track to have an announcer call the races, to build fireproof stables, to develop helmets and goggles for jockeys, and to offer daily doubles and other forms of combination bets.

Those glory days, alas, are clearly over. The proliferation of racing in the richer economies north of the border has reduced Caliente to the status of a bush track. The purses are generally small, and the quality of the racing is mediocre at best, although some California trainers have developed promising young horses here. (Snow Chief and Melair, two of our top 4-year-olds, were trained at Caliente before moving north.) What hasn’t changed is the relaxed, congenial atmosphere and the dazzling variety of wagering offered every racing day. (There is also weekday and evening dog racing, but I’d rather play the lottery.) Not long ago I invited a hard-knocking friend of mine down for a weekend from Los Angeles, where he had been limited to nine races a day, with half-hour waits in between. After a couple of hours of more action than even he could handle, with his binoculars alternately glued to a race in progress on the Caliente track and another being run simultaneously at Santa Anita on a distant TV screen, he was drenched in sweat, like a decathlon contestant. “Man, this isn’t a race track,� he murmured, beaming. “It’s an orgy.�

The orgy is not always good for you. When I caught up with Dan the Man again toward the end of the day, he was humming tunelessly to himself, and his eyes had a stunned, faraway look. Three of his first four bets had run out of the money and he was down $540, an almost impossible hole to climb out of with show bets. “I don’t understand it,� he said. “It always worked on paper.� I haven’t seen him since; I suspect he’s keeping the store open Sundays.