Page 48 - December 2016

According to Burgart, accuracy
is extremely important for an announcer. He makes a point of remembering little things like the color of the jockey silks, the riders’ style of riding, and distinguishable horse leg wraps and blinkers to help identify the horses as they run down the track.
Back To The Future
Burgart and his wife Marsha, have been married twice – that’s twice together.
“We got married in ’85, separated in ’86, remarried in ’91, and we’re still together,” he says. “She already had children, and now we’ve got enough grandchildren and great- grandchildren to fill five races.”
Speaking of children, Burgart got his start with horses as a child.
“When I was four or five years old, my parents took me to a place where you could rent a horse to ride,” he says. “I fell off the horse that first time and I’ve never been on one since.”
That did not quench his love for being around the animals.
“My dad loved to go to the track and he started taking me with him when I was about four years old,” he says. “The first track, at least that I recall, was Santa Anita. I’d go out with him and I just got hooked on it. When I was going
to grade school, he told me, ‘Now if you get a B average, I’ll take you to the track every Saturday.’ So I always managed to get good grades.”
Burgart grew up in Sherman Oaks, California, and went to UCLA with the goal of becoming a sports writer.
“I was the sports editor of the Daily Bruin,” he says, referring to the university’s student newspaper. “But, I was sneaking out to the track all the time because I loved the horses so much. Then, I started doing stories on some
of the trainers and jockeys when I got my first job out of UCLA at the Orange Coast Daily Pilot in Costa Mesa. When I was at the Daily Pilot, I came out to Los Alamitos a few times and had written some stories, and I met Bruce Rimbo, the publicity and PR director, who apparently thought my writing was pretty good. Bruce introduced me to Ted Dale, who was doing the results for KNX radio and a bunch
of other radio stations. I was still working as a sports writer and Bruce called me one day, said, ‘Hey, I’ve got a job for you. Ted’s quitting’ – I think this was 1977 – ‘and we’ve got this job where you can do the results for KNX, do some interviews down in the winner’s circle...’ That’s how it all worked out.”
So now, a couple years later, Burgart is standing in the announcer’s booth at Bay Meadows, mic in hand, trying to memorize what horse is who for his first-ever call.
“I was a little nervous when I first went up there,” he recalls. “I wasn’t sure exactly how it was going to work out. When you do something on a tape recording, it’s a lot different than doing it live. When you’re on live, if you make one mistake, the whole world hears it. But everything went smooth. I don’t remember the horse that won, but I walked out thinking this is what I want to do the rest of my life. After that one race I was convinced that this is what I was fit to do because everybody said how natural it sounded coming out from me.”
The Good, The Bad and The Ugly
Burgart has called a lot of horses in a lot of races over a lot of years. That’s a lot of talking.
“I drink lots of water through the night,” says Burgart, who was on his high school’s debate team. He took speech classes in college, where for three years he was the announcer for the UCLA baseball team, which also was good experience.
“But it was a different type of announcing,” he says. “I’d done results for the radio stations and interviews down in the winners’ circle, so I was accustomed to public speaking, but I wasn’t accustomed to doing what it takes to call a race.”
Part of that is total recall.
“You pretty much have to have a photographic memory,” Burgart says. “Once the horses come on the track for the next race, I look at the color of the jockey silks, I look at whether a horse has front wraps on or certain types of distinguishable blinkers, certain little things that help me identify the horses when they are going around the track. You can’t really be looking at the saddle cloths – you can’t see the cloths or the numbers when they get bunched up. You look at the riders’ silks, their style of riding, the color of the horse – certain little factors that will help you. And then you memorize the name of the horse with all that when they’re warming up.”
That brings up what Burgart has always thought the most important part of an
announcer’s job: accuracy.
“You don’t want to make mistakes,” he says.
“So, I try not to have a favorite. Obviously, when a horse has won a lot of races in a row and is on a roll, like when Moonist was on his win streak, you’re going to be focusing on him more than on another horse in the race – and you probably should, because that’s the star of the race, that’s who most people are focused on and who most of the money is bet on. You’ll probably be watching a big favorite a little bit more out of the gate, but you don’t want to lose focus on the other horses, either.”
Burgart cites the 2012 Champion of Champions-G1 as an example.
“My first two calls were Rylees Boy first
and Flame N Flash second,” he says, of the
two longshots that went off at 10-1 and 26-1, respectively. “They were my first two calls out of the gate and they hit the wire noses apart. You
try to keep your eyes on every horse in the race because you don’t want to ignore a 30-1 shot that’s beating everybody. You try to watch every horse out of the gate and you always want to call the first two or three horses that break on top, and then you can kind of catch yourself, take a short pause and try to see the other horses that didn’t break well. If a favorite breaks very slow, I’ll say that and by then I’ve picked up the rest of the field.”
Spotting a good or bad break from a quarter- mile away takes practice.
“I think I’ve got a little bit of an advantage there from my background as a handicapper,” Burgart says. “Before I started calling races, Warren Eves and I were partners on a handicapping publication called The Quarter Horse Report. My strategy
then was to watch videotapes at home and make comments on all the horses, so when I watched the videotapes, I was watching all the head-on shots. The pan shots are at an angle and a horse on the inside might look half a length in front, but it’s an optical illusion, and if the outside horse wins, it always looks like he closed as they came by. When you watch enough head-ons, you tend to know the outside horses when they’re in front and the inside horses when they’re not in front.”
Most of the time it works.
“Probably the race that stands out the most
46 SPEEDHORSE, December 2016