Long Path to the Top of Racing for Larry Collmus, the Voice of the Triple Crown - By Richard Sandomir I New York Times
Posted on - 04 Jun 2015
Long Path to the Top of Racing for Larry Collmus, the Voice of the Triple Crown
The New York Times
Larry Collmus was practicing his equine scales in the race announcer’s booth at Belmont Park. “Regia Marina, Clearly Cheating — that’s a nice name — Tiger Moth,” he said, speaking to himself, memorizing the six new names before doing it again. “Clearly Cheating. Regia Marina, Fast Retailing.” His pace picked up. “Il Mulino, Majestic Empire, Tiger Moth.”
His call, a few minutes later, was a smooth narrative that followed horses going a mile and a sixteenth on dirt until, at the finish, he said, “And Tiger Moth did it.”
Larry Collmus has called the Triple Crown since 2011
The names of most race horses, like the ones running on a nondescript Thursday afternoon last week in front of a small crowd swallowed by Belmont’s bulk, are largely forgettable. But quotidian races run outside the national consciousness are basic to Collmus’s job as theNew York Racing Association’s new race-caller at Belmont, Aqueduct and Saratoga.
Collmus began calling races at age 18 at Maryland tracks, which led him to the Birmingham Turf Club, Golden Gate Fields, Suffolk Downs, Gulfstream Park, Monmouth Park and Churchill Downs, which he left after one year to come to New York.
But Saturday, the pulse of everyday racing will quicken at theBelmont Stakes, where Collmus will call American Pharoah’s attempt to win the Triple Crown for NBC, his other employer.
Collmus, 48, will be in his unadorned, glass-enclosed booth, with one television monitor to his left and two to his right, and a console to flip on the public address system to his left. The day’s race program will lie flat before him. He will have prepared flash cards with basic information about the horses and jockeys on one side, and a small depiction of the jockeys’ silks on the other.
The 5-foot-6 Collmus will call the race from atop a foot-high platform. He will raise and lower his powerful Canon binoculars depending on how close the horses are to him.
And he will know, to some degree, what he will say if American Pharoah wins, whether by a photo finish, from behind or going away by five or 10 lengths.
“You want to have something decent to say, but not overly scripted,” he said, not divulging the possible phrases. “It’s for the history books.”
But he hopes that history will not occur on a sunny day. The forecast is for a partly cloudy day, he said, but he wants it cloudier.
“The way the sun goes at 6:50 is awful,” he said. “The horses are completely backlit when they turn for home, and all their silks turn black. It’s shadowy. And it doesn’t get better until the middle of the stretch.”
In 2013, as Palace Malice, Oxbow and Orb made that turn, it happened: Collmus could not tell one horse from the other. “Luckily,” he said, “I knew the order before they turned for home.”
Last month, when torrential rain pelted Pimlico for the Preakness Stakes, Collmus could not see the track. Fog during a $5,000 claimer is one thing, he said, something he could have fun with. But this was a Triple Crown race, where he could not fake his call.
“I was hoping that Drew Esocoff’s shots would help,” he said, referring to the NBC director. “I told the cameraman in there not to block the monitor because I was going to need it. But two minutes before the race, I could see through my binoculars. It was just a sloppy mess.”
Collmus may never fully escape being the successor to Tom Durkin at NBC (in 2011) and the NYRA (after Durkin retired last year). Durkin was the signature voice of horse racing, with an outsize personality and dramatic, even lyrical, calls. When NBC called Collmus to gauge his interest in calling the Triple Crown races, his response was amazement. “But that’s Tom Durkin’s job,” he said.
Rob Hyland, the coordinating producer of NBC’s horse racing coverage, said: “To me, Tom will always be synonymous with horse racing. Larry is going to create his own legacy.”
Collmus usually sounds assured, creative with his word play and energized as horses enter the stretch. At the 2011 Kentucky Derby, he memorably growled, “Animal Kingdom roaring down the center of the track!” Two years later, at Churchill Downs, he declared,“Normandy Invasion is storming home.” Last year, as California Chrome sought the Triple Crown at the Belmont Stakes, Collmus excitedly said, “He’s a furlong from immortality,” but he then recognized quickly that the colt would fall short and added: “It won’t be a Triple Crown this year. It’s going to be close. It’s going to very close, and Tonalist got there.”
After American Pharoah’s victory in Kentucky, Collmus cheered and hugged an audio engineer. After the Preakness, he shook his left first in the air.
Collmus still recalls what he felt was a glitch in his delivery of the 2012 Preakness: His voice cracked as he described the final moments of I’ll Have Another’s victory.
“To me, it showed his connection to the sport,” said Hyland. “In that moment, he became a bit of a fan. He was a little disappointed, but I liked it.”
Since then, Collmus has tried to stave off another voice-cracking moment “by going guttural. Rather than say, ‘Ahhhhh!’ I go, ‘Grrrr.’ ”
But in this, his fifth Triple Crown season, he is still remembered for — or perhaps haunted by — his call of a duel at Monmouth Park in 2010 between two similarly named oddities.
He is reminded every day of the weirdness of that race, but would prefer that it be omitted from his legacy. But its many views online — 683,000 on YouTube — suggest this his wish will go unrequited.
“I’d prefer to be known as the guy who called the Triple Crown and Breeders’ Cup and all these great races,” he said, “not some race between two wife horses.”
