I wonder if Vladimir Shpunt is his real name? He's Russian, and perhaps in Russia there are page after page of Shpunts in the phone book. In the news game, a reporter would have to put a "cq" after his last name, an indication to the copyreader that while the name or word looks misspelled, it isn't. PEB's name is Pierre Bellocq (the letter in the middle stands for nothing), and once I turned in a story with his name in it. A copyreader looked at "Bellocq," figured the "cq" was mine, and in the paper it read "the well-known turf caricaturist, Pierre Bello." I had only known PEB for about 25 years at the time. I think he understood my apology, but it would have worked better if I had been able to say it in French.
Shpunt is not the first practitioner to gain entree to the world of sport with the study of the psyche as a calling card. In 1950, the St. Louis Browns, one of the great sad-sack franchises in the history of baseball, hired Dr. David F. Tracy, a New York psychologist, to work with the players, manager and coaches. It was the kind of thing that might have been expected of Bill Veeck, showman par excellence, but the truth is that Veeck didn't own the Browns yet. Tracy was the brainstorm of the owners who preceded Veeck.
The Browns had lost 101 games in 1949, and 94 the year before that. Tracy went to spring training with the club in 1950 and quickly concluded that the players suffered from a defeatist complex, a shortage of confidence and low morale. Hell, I was a 12-year-old card-carrying member of the Browns' Knothole Gang, and I knew that. "After I teach the players emotional stability," Tracy said early on, "they will automatically climb higher in the league race. With my treatments, the club should finish fifth (out of eight teams), and may even climb to fourth."
The Browns lost 96 games and finished seventh, but Tracy may have said that if he hadn't been dismissed at the end May, the team might have done better. One of Tracy's therapeutic tools was hypnosis, and one day after he had put Fred "Bootnose" Hoffman, one of the Browns' coaches, in a spell, Zack Taylor, the club's manager, said: "I could have done that with a couple of beers."
It was the recollection of Tracy that put me in touch with the panacea for racing's manifold problems: What the game needs is an official psychologist. Scratch that. Pay the extra $125 an hour and hire a psychiatrist. Then send him or her around to fool with the minds of the sport's most esteemed leaders. Like the St. Louis Browns of yore, racing has a defeatist complex, and is badly in need of a top-to-bottom cleansing. Give everybody who makes the major decisions a good old-fashioned brain-pick.
It's better than the national commissioner idea, after all. Because of the roadblocks at the state level, a commissioner is hamstrung from the first day in office. Racing once spent an estimated $5 million on a commissioner, and all they got was poor overmatched Brian McGrath, whose first order of business was to figure out a way to raise enough money to pay his own salary. He couldn't, and he was gone.
I'm not going to recommend anyone to become racing's first national psychiatrist, there are too many smart people out there to make that hire, but whomever they get, these should be the lead questions of industry leaders once they are led to the couch:
Jess Jackson (horse owner)
Did you always get your own way when you were a little boy?
Frank Stronach (Magna tracks)
Do you remember your first dream? Did it have something to do with your seventh birthday, and at the party did your father give you a billyclub?
Bob Evans (Churchill Downs)
Was your mother's favorite flower a rose?
Alex Waldrop (NTRA)
Did the other kids at school make fun of you, and did you periodically write your teachers, defending your position?
Greg Avioli (Breeders' Cup)
Was the first grown-up book you ever read about Sisyphus?
Charlie Hayward (NYRA)
When you were in grammar school, and a teacher asked you what you wanted to be, did you confuse the rest of the class by answering "a punching bag."
Joe Harper (Del Mar)
As a 5-year-old, did you have a fantasy about being the only survivor of a shipwreck?
Ogden Mills "Dinny" Phipps (The Jockey Club)
We've shown this inkblot to thousands of people, and you're the first one to say that it looked like a rainbow. Would you be able to come back for more tests?
Sheik Mohammed (owner of horses and a lot of other things)
This study wouldn't be a true cross-section without international participation. We have an early snapshot of you in an incubator. What is the meaning of those two silver spoons in your mouth?
21 Jun 2010 at 11:07 pm | #
Here are some reccommendations for the shrink job, Vic. Headley or de Seroux for burying wannabees like Stronach and Melynk. Pletcher, who maintains his <10% mastery out of the 48 hour welcome wagons. Any of the public handicappers that once again got suckered on an off amicar fav in the Belmont. Rudy Rodriguez, who wasted all those years riding 40-1 shots. Aidan O’Brien, who has found the fastest horse ever; hope he passes his fertility test. Dr Phil.
22 Jun 2010 at 04:09 am | #
*** HorseRaceInsider will delete any comment that engages in personal attacks directed at anyone, uses foul language, or one made by an imposter using another’s name to express an opinion or comment.
And this article is exactly that… Are you going to delete it, too?
Just so you know, Shpunt is very uncommon name in Russia, as well. It actually of jewish origin…
I have no idea why you all think it is so cool making fun of Vladimir...He is one of the greatest men ever, he IS a healer...do you even know the meaning of the word? I just can’t believe you people…
Was the remark about Boris supposed to be funny?
22 Jun 2010 at 01:53 pm | #
Julie, I appreciate your remarks.
But. . . I have an unusual name, too, a female first name usually. When I was a kid, George Jorgensen was one of the first to disclose that he had had a sex-change operation. He changed his named to Christine Jorgensen. So I became “Jorgy” at school. They might have thought they were laughing at me, but when I started laughing WITH them, it deflected the meanness, if that’s what it was. For a year or two, anybody who didn’t call me “Jorgy” didn’t know me well.
Another one: In the old Dick Tracy strip, the cartoonist, Chester Gould, assigned one of his characters the name of “Ugly Christine.” They used to walk into the sports department at the old Baltimore News American, point to me and say, “There’s Ugly Christine.” “Maybe,” I would say, not getting the joke. “Don’t you read Dick Tracy,” they would say. I laughed as hard as they did when they showed me the strip.
Shoot, I was even a fiendish murderer. Remember the name of Stephen King’s car, the 1958 Plymouth?I called the Washington Square Bar & Grill in San Francisco for a reservation, gave my last name and the hip reservationist said: “We got you. Table for four at 8 o’clock. In the name of the ‘58 Plymouth.”
While you saw it as a cheap shot in poor taste, I was only trying for a few funny lines. Sorry it didn’t work for you, but since you were offended, I apologize.
22 Jun 2010 at 04:30 pm | #
I think that an appropriate question for Frank Stronach and Bob Evans would be---Are you capable of leading a one-horse parade?
29 Jun 2010 at 01:49 am | #
<Charlie Hayward (NYRA)
When you were in grammar school, and a teacher asked you what you wanted to be, did you confuse the rest of the class by answering “a punching bag.">
Are you kidding me???? This guy floats like a butterfly and stings like a bee! BTW, how much does “Poor Charlie” make for taking those alleged stomach punches?