Handicapper at Work

For the first time in his racing career, a handicap of 132 Ibs. had been imposed on Nashua (previous high: 130 Ibs.). It was an honest weight, designed to make a contest out of last week's mile-and-three-sixteenths Brooklyn Handicap. But the doughty businessmen who had paid the $1,250,000 tab to buy Nashua decided that they did not like the weight, refused to enter the great bay colt in the race. The man who decided on the 132-lb. impost: Frank E. ("Jimmy") Kilroe, New York State's racing secretary and handicapper.

Not for a moment had Jimmy Kilroe considered fudging his figures to keep the crowd-pleasing champion in the race. He had pored over his form charts like any careful bettor, studied past performances, and decided that Nashua needed every ounce of 132 Ibs. to bring him back to the field. He doled out his weights so carefully that even with the "big horse" gone, the chalk players had a pretty problem.

They made Mrs. Jan Burke's Dedicate the favorite, watched him try to steal the race in the early going, falter and come on again in the last 100 yds. to catch Mrs. E. E. Robbins' Midafternoon by a head. When it was over, even the losers had seen their money's worth--a close and true race that had the first three horses within a yard of a triple dead heat.

The Lonely Art. Modest, somber-eyed Jimmy Kilroe, 44, has earned the respect of horsemen and horseplayers the hard way. A New Yorker born and bred, he learned the lonely art of handicapping under one of the best handicappers of them all, the late John Blanks Campbell.* Beginning at the job of taking race entries and keeping files, Kilroe was soon making up handicap weights of his own, comparing his judgment with Campbell's. And he learned early that his boss insisted on an aide with opinions of his own. When he returned from the wars in 1945, a veteran of the 11th Armored Division, Jimmy Kilroe was named assistant handicapper.

In 1954. when Campbell died, Kilroe became racing secretary as well as handicapper for all New York tracks. Now his job had a new dimension of worry. For the secretary must write the condition book, the catalogue of races. He. must keep track of all the horses training at the track, watch those rounding into shape, set up races that will seem attractive to owners and trainers. It is no easy job to organize day after day of races that will give bettors a fair shake. Individual owners, naturally, seldom see eye to eye with a man dedicated to the proposition that no horse should ever have an unfair advantage, that no horseman should ever get a fast shuffle. Only recently, one well-heeled habitue of Belmont's Turf and Field Club was heard to mutter: "I used to think I hated Roosevelt; then I saw the Jamaica condition book."

Old Worries. Handicapping is no job for a man trying to make friends. Whenever horsemen gather and the flasks of truth serum circulate, someone is sure to get exercised about harsh treatment at the hands of the racing secretary.

But Jimmy Kilroe's tact and skill are recognized across the country. (For the past three years he has also been racing secretary at California's Santa Anita Park.) And his warm humor is proof against the worries that drove one handicapper to drink. "He used to wake up at night," Kilroe remembers, "to see thoroughbreds racing across the bedclothes. Which wasn't so bad, except that when they wound up in a close race, the poor guy had to get up and have another drink."

* Who earned his right to handicappers' heaven June 10, 1944, when he weighted Brownie, Bossuet and Wait a Bit into a triple dead heat in the Carter Handicap at Aqueduct.

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