Colins Ghost

“It’s all a joke; it doesn’t amount to anything.”

These were the last words of Riley Grannan as he lay dying of pneumonia in Rawhide, Nevada. Grannan was a gambler and bookmaker, who won and lost his fortune multiple times playing the races.

Image: Sketch of Riley Grannan from an 1895 newspaper article

The name Pittsburg Phil lives on in the lore of racing but, during his day, Grannan’s fame matched and, at times, superseded that of the man known today for his Maxims.

Grannan – the son of a poor tailor – was born in Paris, Kentucky in 1868. While his early history is muddled, according to an article in the San Francisco Call in 1899, he left home when he was 12 years old. While working as a bell boy at a New Orleans hotel, he secured his first position as a spotter and runner for a prominent bookmaker. The 1899 article reported:

“[Grannan's] first regular start toward his present position was when Botay, who is well known, especially in the West, as a man who ‘ran a shoestring up into a bankroll’, gave him a position, and when he was 20 years old [1888], branched out as a full-fledged bookmaker, bent on a mission of enlightening the racing world.”

He didn’t exactly enlighten the racing world but he quickly became a well know character at tracks across the country. His betting activities, during the peak of his fame, were as much a part of race reporting as the races themselves. By 1894, his name appeared frequently next to those of the gambling ring’s biggest “plungers” — the term used to describe gamblers who wagered wild sums on racing during this era.

Image: Headline from San Francisco Call, December 1894

An article in the Salt Lake City Press in 1895, compared Grannan with Pittsburg Phil:

“Physically these two race track sights are much alike and the similarity extends to their mental structures. Both men are usually reticent. They seldom speak and then only a word or two. Each keeps to himself and never indulge in that cheapest of race track privileges – giving tips to his friends…”

“…Smith keeps available cash on hand to the tune of $250,000. That is the sum he invests in the betting business. Everything he makes above that figure he invests in conservative, interest bearing stock and bonds. If a long streak of reverses should wipe out that $250,000, he says he will quit the betting ring and retire to his outside fortune.

“Grannan has no similar anchor to windward. When he goes broke he is broke in dead earnest. Outside of the money he has on hand, the only investment he ever made with the hundreds of thousands he owned, is a $10,000 house in Paris Ky., which he gave to his mother…

“…Smith is the better business man of the two, but Grannan is the biggest plunger. That is the only difference between these two young men.”

Image: Sketch of Pittsburgh Phil and Riley Grannan,”The most famous plungers the world over,” 1895

While most reporting on Grannan during this period documents him placing bets, he continued to book bets as opportunities presented themselves. Taking money on – what he believed to be – vulnerable favorites was a trademark of his bookmaking activities.

It was this method that made him part of the lore connected to the match race between Domino and Henry of Navarre in 1895. His actions in the gambling ring before the great race were described in a number of newspapers over the years. Here is one of those reports from 1896:

“When Henry of Navarre and Domino ran a match race at Gravesend, Grannan, who was very intimate with Byron McClelland, then owner of the former horse, did some of the most phenomenal plunging ever seen in the east.

“Mounting his box he took off his coat and announced that he was going to bet his last dollar on Henry of Navarre. Then he chalked up a point better odds on Domino than was offered by anybody else in the ring and invited the public to come on.

The betting ring at Gravesend in Coney Island, New York. Circa 1895

“Mike Dwyer sent in $10,000 which Grannan took, Ike Thompson handed over $10,000 more, then came another $10,000 from Mr. Dwyer, after which two $5000 bets were handed up by a commissioner said to represent James R Keene, owner of Domino. Thousands of dollars more in small bets came in but Grannan never winced, never once cut the price.

“In all he took in $62,000 and that represented all that the people had to bet, for it was still fifteen minutes before the race when the young plunger took in his last bet. It was the first time that easterners had been bet to a standstill and Grannan did something then that he has never done since. He hurled sarcastic remarks at the crowd and invited them to come and break him. It is the only time that anyone can remember when Grannan lost his temper.

“The race resulted in a dead heat, and though Grannan had to pay half the face value of every ticket he issued, he won some $15,000 on the race after all.”

His daring during the match race brought with it scrutiny from the racing press. An article in the New York Daily Tribune implied something untoward about the way Grannan took action against Domino [read more about press reaction to the result].

Like Pittsburg Phil, Grannan was targeted by racing officials. He was banned from New York tracks in 1896, accused of bribing a jockey. He temporarily relocated to Europe during this period.

In 1898, he returned to the United States but appears to have avoided the New York tracks, visiting mainly the mid-west and California.

A 1901 article declared that the days of big bets had passed and referred to Grannan as one of the last of the great plungers.

Two years later, in 1903, a St. Paul newspaper reported this:

“With the old spirit, to dare all in one plunge. Riley Grannan, in many respects the most spectacular plunger the American turf has known, placed his all—$18,000—on O’Hagen, at the Crescent City track, New Orleans. His judgment, for once, proved at fault. Andes galloped home ahead of O’Hagen. Today Grannan is a wreck, financially and physically. He is confined to his room with an illness so severe that his recovery is doubted. Whether he regains his health is not, the turf will never see his face again, he says.”

In spite of this promise, Grannan did return to the track, starting a bookmaking operation in New Orleans. He also formed the Riley Grannan Co., Ltd., a tout business that advertised in southern newspapers.

It is not clear, what finally drove Grannan from the track once and for all, but it is fairly certain that sometime in 1903 or 1904, he did indeed walk away.

He borrowed money from track acquaintances and opened a saloon in the gold mining town of Rawhide, NV. Like all towns that sprang up in Nevada during the gold and silver boom, it was a rough place.

While not yet 40-years-old, he had already lived many lifetimes, full of wild highs and desperate lows. It finally caught up with him in 1908:

“…after a night at the gaming tables Grannan, a heavy loser and broke again, went forth to a round of dissipation at the resorts of the town and contracted pneumonia which brought an end to his life in the world…”

Before his body was shipped back to his childhood home in Kentucky for final burial, his remains sat on an express wagon at the rear of the saloon he purchased just a few years prior. Surrounded by a “rough, unkempt crew” — his friends bid him a final farewell.

W.W. Knickerbocker, a defrocked minister, delivered a eulogy where he called his friend “…one of the greatest plungers that the continent had ever produced.” He said Grannan was “…as placid and gentle as I have ever seen…absolutely invincible in spirit [and] a ‘dead game sport.”

While Grannan’s death bed proclamation implied a life wasted, most horseplayers can appreciate Grannan’s tale as a life well lived.

SOURCES, NOTES, AND OBSERVATIONS
This post took me much longer then expected. The amount of material that can be found about Riley Grannan is astounding. It is surprising that so much detail can be found about a gambler in a relatively small sample of newspapers. Below are the main sources I used but there is much more at the Library of Congress’s Historic American Newspapers: http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/

“Betting Rings Doomed,” New York Herald Tribune, September 23, 1894
“Grannan in Luck,” San Francisco Morning Call, December 29, 1894
“Career of the Premier Plunger,” Salt Lake Herald Sunday, September 29, 1895
“Smith and Grannan,” Salt Lake Herald, July 19, 1896
“Rilery Grannan Again Wins Fame and Fortune,” San Francisco Call, July 16, 1899
“Days of Big Best Past, St. Paul Globe, April 15, 1901
“Plunger Riley is Broke,” St. Paul Globe, January 20, 1903
“Riley Grannan Dead,” New York Times, April 4, 1908
“A Word of Eulogium of Riley Grannan,” Bourbon News (Paris, KY), April 17, 1908

For a more detail account of the Henry of Navarre and Domino match race, check out this excellent post by Teresa at Brooklyn Backstretch

The photograph of the Gravesend betting ring is from Michael Immerso, Coney Island: The People’s Playground (Rutgers University Press: 2002)

In a final twist in the story of Riley Grannan, the eulogy delivered in Rawhide by his friend W.W. Knickerbocker was published soon after he died. It was digitized as part of UNLV’s digital history project about southern Nevada. Read it here: http://digital.library.unlv.edu/boomtown/dm.php/snv/4593

Nevadaweb.com also has a page about the famous eulogy here: http://www.nevadaweb.com/ghp/riley1.html

Plan to do more about Riley Grannan in the future – this is a pretty long post but it could have been much longer.

The lives of gamblers like Pittsburg Phil, Pack McKenna, and Riley Grannan are fascinating. One of these days, I am going to create a Horseplayer Hall of Fame website. Considering that horseplayers have been the glue that has held the sport together, it seems appropriate that they should have their own Hall of Fame (even if it is virtual). Let me know if you have someone you would like to nominate.

Hope everyone enjoyed Rachel Alexandra and Zenyatta this weekend. It will be great if we ever get to see them head to head. Would love to see one (or both) in the Delaware Handicap (unlikely, I know).

THANKS FOR READING AND GOOD LUCK!

One of the best books you could ever read is Joe Palmer’s This Was Racing. Published in 1953, it is comprised of the author’s racing columns selected by his colleague Red Smith. When Palmer died the year before, Smith wrote this tribute for his friend:

“…Joe Palmer could write better than anybody else in the world whose stuff appeared in newspapers…in the field of racing which he preferred, there never was another in his time or before to compare with him.”

Joe Palmer started his career as a writer in his native Kentucky after earning a PhD in English at the University of Michigan. In 1941, while working for the Bloodhorse, he took over for the famed racing historian John Hervey (aka Salvator) as the author of the American Race Horses series. When Stanley Woodward, the editor for the New York Herald Tribune, was looking for a race writer, he asked people in racing who he should hire. They unanimously backed Joe Palmer.

In 1946, Palmer joined the staff of the Tribune where he became neighbors and friends with Red Smith. He covered racing and wrote a weekly column that, according to Woodward, became one of the Tribune’s most valuable features.

Palmer – well on his way to becoming a race writing legend – died suddenly at the age of 48.

Image: Sketch of Joe Palmer by Willard Mullin from This Was Racing

It is difficult to write about something you love without being sappy about it. Palmer loved racing but wrote about it in a way where he didn’t come off as a Pollyanna. He criticized but avoided cynicism. Much of his critique was wrapped in a light-hearted, playfulness that never allowed you to forget that he was talking about a sport.

The opening piece from This Was Racing is Palmer’s “One Apostle’s Creed.” Palmer’s creed has all the elements of his wonderful style and unapologetic love of racing. While it was written over 50 years ago, much of it still rings true today. Here is a selection:

“Since this spectator will be trying, as well as he knows how, to bring you some of the color and interest and personality of racing, maybe he should begin with a sort of manifesto. A prejudiced witness is all right, if you know what his prejudices are. So this is by way of helping you to make allowances.

“Thoroughbred racing is an unusual sport in that anyone who goes past a racetrack feels privileged to throw a rock or two over the fence. There are quite possibly persons – even persons who work on newspapers – who are not entertained by football or basketball or track meets. But it does not therefore occur to them to oppose these sports, or to say unpleasant things about these sports; the reaction is just to pass by, with the reflection (obtained secondhand from Thoreau) that if a man does not keep step with his fellows it may be because he hears a different drummer.

“Racing, whatever else it inspires, certainly produces no indifference. This is presumably because of the betting, for there is a polite fiction that there is something ignoble about supervised betting as compared with betting over which no one exercises control. To be sure racing has often encouraged attack; it has been frequently found apologizing for itself when there was no one within earshot. It has attempted to play down its popularity while other sports were boasting of their attendance and the volume of their support….

“…Another opinion the writer has held for years, and consequently isn’t prepared to change, is that racing, apart from being big business in itself and an outlet for the good-sized breeding industry, contains a fairly large element of fun, born largely of the fact that people who must daily accept hazards must joke about them or become introverts. And you can hardly find an introvert at a racetrack on Decoration Day. There is a humorous fatalism among professional racing people, best expressed perhaps by the riding instructions given to a steeplechase jockey some years ago, by a stable foreman: ‘Don’t be skeered of dyin’; just let him run!’

“The professional horseman, moreover, is a thorough individualist. He has to be, for his hand is against every man, and every man’s hand against him. He must, on occasion, win at the expense of his best friend, and he must be able amicably to share the trainers’ stand with a man whose horse has beaten him a nose on the post for $50,000. He must keep his own counsel too; just a fragment of knowledge carelessly given away may enable a shrewd jockey to plot a winning race against his best horse. He must stand or fall on his own knowledge and his own judgment.

“Out of the contact and occasionally the clash of such personalities a good many interesting stories emerge, more or less held in solution on the racetracks and not very often tapped for public entertainment. If more of them were told perhaps racing would be understood a little better.

“The contention isn’t that everything is all right in racing. If there is any considerable industry involving millions of dollars and thousands of men in which everything is all right, it ought to be stuffed and put on exhibition. As far as I know racing has never claimed to build character: it does what other business does – it develops what a man has, be it good or ill…”

SOURCES, NOTES, AND OBSERVATIONS

Joe Palmer’s This Was Racing was published in 1953. Used copies can be purchased online for less then $10 at alibris or abebooks — a bargain considering the content.

Details of Palmer’s hiring at the Tribune can be found in Stanley Woodward’s Paper Tiger (University of Nebraska, 2007)

Beleive it or not, this week’s post started as one about Monmouth Park. After reading a piece from This Was Racing on Monmouth, I was a little diverted and ended up here. After the hyper-focus of the Triple Crown season, my mind is now a flutter.

Congrats to Ray Paulick on the one year anniversary of the Paulick Report! In my Chris Farley voice: “That guy is awesome.”

UPDATE (February 2, 2010) Check out this excellent review of This Was Racing from The Second Pass

THANKS FOR READING AND GOOD LUCK!

View of Belmont Park, Section 2v, June 6, 2009

We had a perfect day of racing at Belmont this past Saturday. Summer Bird capped off an intriguing Triple Crown season that included a 50/1 shot in the Derby, a filly in the Preakness, and a couple of previously unknown trainers sharing the spotlight. Add to that, Hall of Famer Kent Desormeaux finally winning the race that brought him more agony then any other.

Racing doesn’t need a Triple Crown, it needs more stories like those of Tim Ice, Chip Wooley, and Calvin Borel. Let’s hope the summer racing season has as much drama as we had over the past five weeks.

I couldn’t have asked for a better day at the races for Belmont Stakes Day. We had excellent seats and perfect weather; I cashed a few tickets; ate some good food (thank you Carolina BBQ); and had one of the cleanest trips out of New York I have ever had (Geno at Equispace would have been proud).

I am putting my summer itinerary together now — looks like trips to Saratoga and Colonial are in the cards for this year. And, of course, many weekends at Delaware Park.

Check out these Belmont Stakes reports and pictures from Green But Game, Equispace, The Bug Boys, Left at the Gate, Brooklyn Backstrectch, and Throughbred Zone. I don’t know about you, but I really love reading the blogs after the big days — especially when so many bloggers were in the house on Saturday. I also thoroughly enjoyed the Belmont Stakes coverage and tweets by Jessica at Raceday360 this year.

And don’t miss this interesting post by Dana at Green But Game featuring Super8 footage of Belmont Stakes past.

Here are a few of my snapshots from the day:

Edgar Prado aboard Benny the Bull

The always game Fabulous Strike before the True North

Post parade for the Manhattan and the Belmont crowd

Mine that Bird checks out the crowd before the big race

Ready to load for the 2009 Belmont Stakes

Back to the history next week!

THANKS FOR READING AND GOOD LUCK