Jason Beem's Thursday Column for Oct. 6, 2022

A good Thursday to you all. Taping my weekend preview episode of the podcast today made me realize what a crazy good and busy weekend of racing we have coming up. Big stakes at Santa Anita, Belmont at Aqueduct, and Woodbine. Plus opening weekend at Keeneland, and I would argue the Coolmore Mile is the best race of the entire weekend.

But there’s enough content here on the TwinSpires Edge to give you previews and the winners of all those races. So I thought we’d do a little Keeneland-related storytime here today on the column.

Now, my memory is a bit foggy on whether this was the spring of 2006 or 2007, but it’s sometime in that region. I was announcing at River Downs, and our season usually started a week or so after Keeneland began. So I’d get into town early and make the 90-minute drive from Cincinnati to Lexington a couple of times to watch racing there.

If you haven’t been to Keeneland for the races, it’s pretty great. It always seemed like it was chilly, but the facility is great, the racing is good, and I remember being so jealous of how good Kurt Becker sounded over the speakers because River Downs was basically like announcing out of some tin cans.

Now, as a younger man, I had a penchant for probably betting a little more than I should have given my modest means. One of the best parts about working at River Downs was they paid us every week, so even if you went bust over the weekend at Keeneland, that next check was just a couple of days away.

So on one of those visits down to Keeneland, I got DQ’d out of a winner early on in the card. As most of you who have been involved in an inquiry know, our lenses of how we think the decision should go tend to be very skewed by how we as bettors need it to go. So, of course, I thought I was robbed by the stewards up in the stand.

For some reason, I seem to remember it costing me a decent-sized bet, maybe a couple hundred bucks. I was never one to stay calm after any kind of tough beat, so I’m sure I ran immediately toward the area showing the simulcast and looked for another race to fire on just to continue my tilt episode.

Later on in the card, it happened again. I don’t remember if it was a DQ or a should-have-been DQ, but I was on the wrong end of the inquiry. Standing out front when Kurt Becker made the announcement, I snapped. I started yelling and screaming up at the stewards stand about how awful they were at their job. Luckily for me, nobody knew who the heck I was. I certainly wasn’t being a very good representative of River Downs... But I screamed up at the roof on my way out and made a spectacle of myself. I’m embarrassed just thinking about what I must have looked like to the patrons sitting around me during my little tirade.

What’s interesting, as the announcer, I’ve been yelled at from people down on the apron because of stewards decisions. Often my window is easy to spot from the apron and at a few tracks I've worked at, the window is also open. One time at Portland Meadows after a disqualification, a trainer yelled up to me in my open window, “Hey, you go get those stewards and tell them to come out and explain that!” Yeah, let me get right on that.

So all that being said, I hope everyone has a good Keeneland meet. And if you take a bad beat, try to handle it better than 27-year-old me did.