Re: D.Wayne, Handicapper (374 Views)
Posted by:
Mall (IP Logged)
Date: February 08, 2005 05:11PM
A lot has been written & said about D. Wayne, but there's no denying that from a business standpoint, he revolutionized the training game. This will sound odd but he, & to a lesser degree Tom Amoss, have had a significant impact on how I look at & handicap races. After a beat by a horse which I can't fathom on any level, I'm interested in learning what made the connections think they had a chance, which is why I knew the Musique story. Commendable's Bel had me thinking the same thing, & after the race I read, & then had to reread, a piece D.Wayne did in the B-H explaining why he entered the horse & how he handicapped the race. Very different than the way I was looking at things, to put it mildly.
Fast fwd 3 or 4 yrs & I'm in the paddock at Sar wishing a trainer luck in a bottom level $35k claimer, & along comes D. Wayne, who I exchange opinions with regarding the upcoming contest. The reason he was there, it turned out, was because at one time or another he had trained 5 of the horses, some a number of yrs ago. His dope in a nutshell was that he hadn't had any contact with the horses for a long time, but if the 5 he had trained at one time or another ran to their ability, they would finish in, you guessed it because otherwise why would I be typing this, the exact order in which they did finish. As far as I know, no track offers a quadrafecta, but the incident reminded me of the Commendable article, & is why I was not surprised to read, here I think, that he has been known to sit down & in a matter of minutes fill out a pk6 tix if he thinks the pool is large enough.
In contrast, I never learned anything about handicapping from Woody, which isn't to say he wasn't a great dopester. It was often very difficult for me to understand what Woody was saying in that voice of his during the decades he held court at the Campbell House bar, but looking back it seems entirely possible that the problem was on my end alone.