Nobody who knew Gordon Jones was surprised he made it big. But many were amazed at how he made it big.
I think of the words of admiration I heard once from Allan Malamud, who’d been a student of Gordon’s at USC and then a colleague of his on a legendary sports staff at the Los Angeles Herald Examiner.
“He’s really smart. He’s a tremendous speaker. He’s got a great personality. He’s good-looking,” Allan said of his old friend. “He could have been … he could have been a state senator or something.”
State senator? Others might have suggested U.S. senator — or even higher office.
Gordon Jones had many career options as the son of a Whittier College president, the holder of a bachelor’s degree from Whittier and a master’s from the University of Oregon, a popular journalism professor at USC, Arizona State and Oregon, and a math wiz who rated third among 250,000 men from the West Coast on a Korea War-era Army intelligence test.
But instead of choosing a life in government service, or writing about “serious” subjects, or staying on the academic track, Gordon devoted the better part of his life to picking winning horses at the racetrack.
It’s an old story, but one day in 1976, a phone rang in the Herald Examiner sports office, and the caller was former president Richard Nixon, reaching out to praise Gordon for something nice he’d written about football coach George Allen. Jones, Nixon and Allen all had Whittier College ties. At some point the conversation turned to the newspaperman himself.
Nixon told Gordon: “What I want to know is why a nice Whittier College graduate like you is covering the horses. I think you might want to move up from horse races to political races.” Nixon concluded: “It’s all right to cover the horse races, but don’t bet on them, because you can’t beat them.”
Said a United Press International report about the conversation: “After Nixon hung up, Jones said, he briefly pondered Nixon’s advice but decided to bet on the next race. He cashed a $263 exacta.”
Gordon didn’t become just any public handicapper after a group of Herald Examiner sportswriters, well aware of their old USC professor’s fascination with the races, invited him to give up the classroom and fill the newspaper’s vacant handicapping and turf-writing job.
“Professor Gordon Jones,” as he was known in print, became California’s leading advocate of speed-figure handicapping, shaking up racing in ways similar to how analytics changed other sports years later. He parlayed his newsprint acclaim and teaching skills into hosting pre-race handicapping seminars, delivering analysis on TV and radio, and publishing two books, “Gordon Jones to Win!: The Professional Method of Speed Handicapping” (1976) and “Smart Money: The Art and Science of Money Management at the Track” (1977).
In certain circles in the 1970s, the Professor was the toast of the town, like at the nightclub frequented by celebrities and athletes near the Herald’s headquarters at 11th and Broadway.
It’s hard to imagine this happening now, with neither newspapers nor racing at the top of young people’s minds: In a magazine-writing class at UCLA, an assignment was to profile a prominent person. Other students sought interviews with athletes, artists and public officials. I called the Santa Anita press box and asked for Gordon. We ended up spending an afternoon talking at Hollywood Park. So began 40 years of conversations about journalism, handicapping and the joys of the track.
“It was good to be Gordon Jones,” he said, reminiscing about his heyday, the last time I visited him in February.
I was part of the generations of fans drawn to horse racing in part by reading Gordon’s stories from Hollywood Park, Santa Anita, Del Mar and Pomona, and those books.
There are the principles he taught about speed figures and pace analysis, the Prof’s Projection Play and “innocent until proven guilty” theory that most sprinters can go a distance, and his Eleventh Commandment that “thou shalt reverse” (box your exactas).
More important, there’s the example he set for the proposition that playing the races can be a fulfilling pursuit for sharp, logical, inventive minds.
Andrew Beyer, the Harvard-educated inventor of Beyer speed figures, expressed his occasional misgivings about his obsession in the opening lines of his book “Picking Winners: A Horseplayer’s Guide” (1975): “From time to time, every confirmed horseplayer is racked by doubts about what he is doing with his life. He is playing the toughest game in the world, one that demands a passionate, all-consuming dedication from anyone who seriously wants to be a winner. Even a winner will necessarily experience more frustrations than triumphs, and when the frustrations come in rapid succession he may wonder if the struggle is worth it. … And even if the game can ultimately be beaten, is it worth spending years of effort to reach a goal that most members of society would view as a trivial achievement?”
Gordon Jones expressed few such misgivings, though he certainly recognized gambling’s pitfalls. “Gordon Jones to Win!” begins: “There are those who mourn the closing of the frontier and wail that life has lost some of its meaning or challenge. Yet if the South Sea islands have been discovered already and Mt. Everest climbed – even metropolitan freeways negotiated safely – there are still areas of adventure and untamed terrain where man may cast himself upon the waters and sink or swim. And nowhere in these urban-centered, semi-civilized times does man have a better chance to test himself and come away with psychic as well as real income than at the racetrack.”
One of the ex-students who lured the Professor to the Herald Examiner was heard to worry later that he’d ruined Gordon’s life. Gordon reassured the man that he’d been ready to leave teaching anyway, and racing was his true passion. To Gordon, it was a step up, not a step down, to go from the university campus to the racetrack mezzanine.
Gordon’s life of adventure ended last Friday, April 18, four days after his 95th birthday.
Of all the longshot picks the great handicapper ever made, his boldest was choosing the racetrack over the rat race.
The Senate’s loss was racing fans’ gain.
Follow horse racing correspondent Kevin Modesti at X.com/KevinModesti.
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