One of our customers today presented me with a VHS tape that she wanted to convert to a DVD. It contained footage of a championship horse that she raced back in the day. Harness racing.  My dad always called them “trotters.” And my, how he loved the trotters.

He used to pour over the daily racing form; looking at the past performances of, not only the horses, but also the jockeys. He would calculate the odds, evaluate the cost and the risk, and then decide which race or races he would put his two dollars on. He always kept himself on a firm budget and insisted on the same from us.

As we grew older, an occasional  trip to the track became a family event. And we each got our own two dollars to put on a horse. My sisters couldn’t be bothered with learning my father’s system. They tended to go the route my mother chose. They bet on the horse with the cleverest name. Most of the time, they lost.

Me, I tried to emulate my old man. I studied the racing form, not knowing much about what I was looking at. But I thought that if I looked hard enough, I would see something that no one else did. Following the logic of the racing form gave me inconsistent results so I switched to watching the horses as they were led onto the track. I decided to put my money on the horse that looked like a winner. I bet with my gut.

I soon learned that looks can be deceiving and my gut was often wrong. So I then decided that as long as I was going to throw  two dollars away, I might as well do it with an outside chance that I would hit it big.  I started to search the racing form looking for long shots that had certain stats that showed they might have a chance to win… if the conditions were right.

I certainly lost more than I won. But on those rare occasions when my horse came in the money,  I won big because the odds were long.  Granted, the winnings weren’t big enough to cover all those $2.00 losses but it still made me feel good when it happened.

My fondest memory was the one time, in what was a pure fluke, I hit a trifecta. That’s when you successfully pick the horses that come in first, second and third in a race. A two dollar bet suddenly turned into a hundred dollar payout. I stopped going to the track soon after that. I knew that trying to repeat that success would only lead to greater losses.

Michael Ondrasik and Home Video Studio of Mount Dora specialize in the preservation of family memories through the digitalization of films, videotapes, audio recordings, photos, negatives, and slides. For more information, call 352-735-8550 or visit our website.