The Horse Professor

Ordinarily, the dapper little man in the paddock only had sour scorn for hunch players. But hunch shook him hard that afternoon in Chicago when a horse pulled up in the walking ring and looked him square in the face. "If ever a horse told anyone he was going to win, that horse told me," says Handicapper Hugh Matheson. "I went over and got a bet down on his nose. When I told my wife, she was furious. 'That goat,' she exploded, 'That goat is 80 to 1!' "

The goat, of course, won (otherwise the story would never be told). Even so, says Matheson, no good horse player ever counts on luck. Nor does he listen to his wife. Matheson should know. He spends most of his time traveling about the U.S., lecturing (at $35 per course per student) to would-be horse players on how to win at the races.

This week, with racing at Aqueduct under way, Horse Professor Matheson moved into New York for the fall term, got set to give his usual monthly series of lectures between trips to the track. Average enrollment: 65. "This is the best racing in the world," said Matheson, as he looked at the stone spires of Manhattan. "The town is full of horse players."

You Need Sense. The one and only way to beat the game, says the professor, is to learn how to decipher the fine type in the form charts. From these cryptic figures the patient handicapper may judge a thoroughbred's breeding, consistency and condition, its ability to carry the assigned weight, the skill of the jockey and the ability of the trainer. Then he must learn how to check his judgment in the paddock. Does his horse look nervous? anxious to run? Matheson, says Matheson, can teach the student how to tell.

In the classroom Matheson usually throws in a supply of good, sound horse sense: never bet on anything unless the odds are at least 5 to 2; stay away from the Daily Double ("the Daily Double is loaded with pigs"); wait until the second half of the afternoon's card, when the races include tested and proven animals; keep away from two-year-olds ("no one knows what they can do"). The battle may not always be to the strong, or the race to the swift--but that's the way to bet. "Be satisfied if you find as many as three bets a week," says Matheson. "And if you hit a couple of winners, make sure that you spend at least half of your take away from the track. Let's get some of this money out of the vicious circle of betting."

You Need Love. One essential that Matheson confesses he cannot transmit to a pupil: the love of racing. A man has to be interested in animals as well as mathematics before he can decide what a given horse can do. Matheson himself got the bug early. At twelve he rode his grandfather's horses on scrubby "bull rings" (half-mile tracks) in Idaho and Utah. After the University of Utah and stints as a miner, a newsman and a Hollywood writer, Matheson tried a comeback as a professional rider in World War II (he was a 98-lb. 4-F). At 41 he went down to Mexico to break in. "My God," said the first track manager he talked to. "If you rode in a race, those guys would kill you." He went back to Chicago to try out as an exercise boy, on two successive mornings got up for dawn workouts only to find that it was snowing. He "stood in bed" and turned instead to handicapping for the Racing Form.

In 1945 Matheson was the most successful handicapper in the country: a two-dollar ticket on each of his "best bets" (his top choice at every track on every day of racing) would have earned a grand total of $44.10 by year's end. The sum looked hardly impressive, but it was better than any other handicapper's record. It convinced Matheson that if a man in vested in only the best of the Matheson "best bets," he might earn a living.

Today, Hugh Matheson is a happy man. Between his race bets and his classes, which he handles with the silky self-assurance of a side-show barker, he makes a nice living doing what he likes most to do. He is not even bothered by the inevitable wise guy who asks him why he needs to teach if he can really run up big profits at the track. "This is just an excuse to get horse players together so I can sell the idea of a U.S. Sweepstakes," says the professor glibly. "A sweepstakes is just what this country needs. It would reduce the national debt." And it doesn't take a graduate from Horse Professor Matheson's classes to know what a reduction of the national debt would mean for taxpayers--more money to play the ponies.

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