How much would it take to change your life?
They say, “Everyone has a price.” What’s yours?
How many times have you thought, “If only I had [insert random sum of money here], my life would be so much better…”? If your answer is “never”, that’s great. If, however, you have inserted a number in the brackets, not only can I relate to you, but I also have a story to tell you. My life to date has been a series of small risks, and whenever I think of big risks, I think of this story.
When I was hired for my first teaching job in Los Angeles, was “adopted” by a social studies teacher who became my unofficial mentor. She was a veteran teacher who was a mother figure to all the new teachers, but when we discovered we had a mutual fondness for horse racing, we immediately made plans to go to Hollywood Park on our day off.
Most people are surprised to hear of my handicapping past, me being an English teacher, drama major, and ardent lover of animals. However, as a child I somehow became obsessed with memorizing all the Triple Crown winners since 1919, and having a grandfather who made his career printing the racing programs for all the New York racetracks gave me access to a world few sixth-grade girls even knew about. When I told my mother that I wanted to work at the track as an exercise rider when I was sixteen, my grandfather killed that dream with the words: “The racetrack ain’t no place for a goil!”
It must have been a weekday at Hollywood Park, because I don’t remember many other people in the clubhouse (she insisted we were a cut above the grandstand riff-raff). Killing some time between races, my mentor told me a story of a particularly profitable day she had at the track, many years ago. Since she was the close relative of one of the most successful horse trainers in the country at the time, she had more than the average gambler’s knowledge of who was a good bet and who wasn’t. To make a potentially long story short, she had just gone through a divorce and, throwing caution to the wind, parlayed a bet and ended up winning $90,000 dollars. Not bad, but now here comes the crazy part: she then said, as she told me the story, “I figured that 90 grand at that point wasn’t going to change my life, so I bet the whole thing on the next race.”
She figured 90 grand (and this was 90k in seventies dollars, mind you) WOULDN’T change her life. I sat there and listened in shock, thinking, you better damn well believe it would’ve changed MY life. But wait, the second crazy part is coming up…
She then went on to tell me that, after betting the whole ninety grand, she ended up winning over $250,000 the same day…and decided THAT was enough to change her life, and called it a day at the track. She used the money to buy a new house in the Hollywood Hills, much to the envy of her fellow LA public school teachers. The story taught me a lesson about the value of taking calculated risks, although I’m still not so sure I would’ve done it myself.
I almost forgot to tell the third and final crazy part of the story: shortly after she told me this, somewhere around the fifth race of the day, I bet a $2 trifecta and ended up winning over $700 dollars— the most I’ve ever won on a single race, before or since that day. After I cashed in my ticket, my colleague shook her head. “I don’t know how in hell you picked those horses,” she said. Maybe, I replied, her story brought me luck. We left after that race— I decided not to bet my winnings.
