Page 47 - December 2016

Ed Burgart is the dean of Quarter Horse race callers
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expect out there.”
Burgart called his first race in 1979. The
following year he was the announcer for the Quarter Horse meet at Bay Meadows, and the year after that he began his career at Los Alamitos Race Course.
“My dad would take me to the track when I was a kid and I just got enamored with horse racing,” he says. “But, I never really had any aspirations to be an announcer.”
That changed on a trip to the Bay Area just south of San Francisco, California.
“I was working in the public relations department at Los Alamitos and Bobby Doyle was the announcer. At the time, Jim Smith was the general manager of the Horsemen’s Quarter Horse Racing Association and Dr. Allred (who now owns Los Alamitos) was part of HQHRA and the Peninsula Quarter Horse Racing Association at Bay Meadows, and they brought me up there to do the morning line and work in the press box. At some point or another, I kind
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are ever alike, and you never know what to
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of expressed an interest in announcing and said I might want to try calling a race one day.”
That was the first year that Doyle did not work Bay Meadows. Todd Creed, who called the Thoroughbred meets at Bay Meadows, was the announcer for that year’s Quarter Horse season at the San Mateo track that would go on to close in 2008.
“Todd let me call the last race one day and everybody said what a great job I did,” Burgart recalls. “I had never called a race in my life before, but it was by the luck of the draw that the next three days Todd got sick, came down ill, so I got to call nine or ten races every day for three consecutive days. Bobby retired in 1981, and then Terry Gilligan, who was like Bobby’s protégé, would call the summer meet at Los Alamitos and I would call the Bay Meadows meet and the winter meet at Los Alamitos.”
That was the arrangement through 1989 when Gilligan moved on. In 1990, Burgart took over as the full-time caller for all the major Quarter Horse meets in the Golden State.
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“And away they go!!!
“A good start here for Snowwonder, it’s Hes A Two Stepper down along the inside, being sent between two horses it’s Sriracha Cat and having to steady back is Eagles Nest Cowboy, Tommy Weaver now is on the move on the extreme outside, Surrealistic running back...”
Ed Burgart is calling the eighth race at
Los Alamitos, a field of Quarter Horses and Thoroughbreds going 870 yards, but not yet
past the first pole by the time Surrealistic gets a mention. It’s October 28, the night before the Bank of America Challenge Championships. The Friday night crowd is listening to Burgart’s call while watching the horses on the track and following the action on the toteboard screen, and some are glued to small monitors throughout the grandstand.
At 65 years of age, Burgart is the dean of Quarter Horse announcers and probably the best known and most widely appreciated voice calling the eye-blink-speed of the fastest horses on earth.
“I enjoy calling every race,” Burgart says. “Each race is a different scenario, no two races
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SPEEDHORSE, December 2016 45