ARCADIA — Every time a field of thoroughbreds breaks from the starting gate at Santa Anita Park, a man six floors above them in a press-box booth begins a race of his own.
Curtis Treece, peering through binoculars, starts by quickly reciting the horses’ saddle-cloth numbers in their early running order: In a recent contest, “2, 3, 5, 8, 4, 7, 6, 1.” Treece’s working partner Ken Davis writes down the numbers on a grid. Treece continues when the horses have gone a quarter-mile, now adding the margins between them: “5, one and a half (lengths); 8, a half; 3, a half; 2, one and a half; 4, a half; 1, one; 7, one; 6.” Davis enters the code on his grid. It continues that way until the horses cross the finish.
Then the real sprint begins: After using video to double-check horses’ running positions throughout the race, Treece runs replays on a TV screen, jots barely legible notes about every horse’s performance, and then turns to a computer keyboard to type up a terse but remarkably complete narrative of the event.
He has only a half-hour to do this before the next race begins.
Treece is the “chart caller” – Davis is the “chart taker” – responsible for the data and footnotes in the official result charts for Santa Anita, Del Mar and Los Alamitos that appear on the Equibase and Daily Racing Form websites and in abbreviation on past-performance pages.
The information is vital to most bettors trying to pick winners. That’s especially so at this time of year, when handicappers count on footnotes from Treece and his counterparts at tracks all over the country to help them assess often-unfamiliar horses coming to the Breeders’ Cup. Racing’s championship event will take place at Del Mar on Nov. 1-2 (more about Treece’s view of some important horses in a moment).
“I analyze horse races, basically,” Treece, 39, said in the Santa Anita press box, trying to sum up his job. “I try and present it in a box-score format every 30 minutes.
“What you’re really trying to do in the footnotes is present what the reader can’t see just from the margins (in the chart). You want to capture (if) a horse is fractious in the gate, if the horse stumbled, if the jockey lost his crop.”
Or if a horse encountered traffic, engaged in a hard duel for the early lead, lost ground by racing wide, put up a good fight in the homestretch or merely “churned on” (a favorite Treeceism), or any of the infinite observations that can mean the horse ran better or worse than the result would indicate.
Chart-callers see it all, the sublime and the ridiculous. Jack Wilson, a legend in the craft, did the chart for Secretariat’s 31-length win in the 1973 Belmont Stakes and called out “Secretariat, 30” at the finish, an amazingly accurate eyeball judgment. Wilson also wrote the matter-of-fact footnote on a race at Miami’s Tropical Park that was run after a local reptile crawled out of an infield pond: A horse named Swamp Rabbit was “running close to the lead when he ran over an alligator.”
Treece has yet to deal with an alligator. The closest is when he has had to write that horses “shied” from coyotes in the Los Alamitos infield.
Treece is indigenous to Los Alamitos. He grew up in that Orange County city and attended Los Alamitos High. Curtis’ father, Charles, is one of the great trainers at the night quarter-horse and thoroughbred meets at Los Alamitos Race Course, and his mother, Debi, works for the Pacific Coast Quarter Horse Racing Association. Curtis met his wife, April, a middle-school teacher in Yorba Linda, when she worked in the Los Al press box.
Curtis’ parents discouraged him from going into racing, so he earned a degree in communications at Long Beach State. Then he went into racing.
After 15 years calling charts for Los Al night races, he moved to Southern California’s bigger daytime tracks in 2020 to replace the retiring Mike Schneider.
“Once you get a passion for the game, it’s just ingrained in you. Sometimes you can’t believe you get paid to do it,” said the affable Treece, whose other sport is bowling – he has rolled three 300 games.
Even a widely respected chart-caller like Treece hears criticism.
“It’s so subjective,” he said. “Two people can watch a race, and you’ll get two different opinions on what’s happening. Sometimes I’ll put ‘stumbled.’ A guy will say, ‘That didn’t matter, why did you put that?’ And another guy will say, ‘That (trouble) cost (the horse) everything.’”
Treece encourages horseplayers who read about trouble in a footnote to check out a video replay online and judge for themselves if it mattered.
That could have led a bettor to a high-priced winner at Santa Anita last weekend. Quick Omen (who paid $41.60 for a $2 win bet) came out of a race in which, according to Treece’s abbreviated footnote in the Racing Form past performances, she was “bp st, 3w, 4-5w into stretch” (bumped at the start, raced wide on the turn and into the stretch). Sapadilla ($45.60) was “steadied early, 3-4 wide” – steadied meaning paused behind horses. Toulouse Detrac ($28.80) “lost path/bumped st, 4-5w” – lost path meaning other horses got in her way.
After charting the Del Mar and Santa Anita races for all of California’s Breeders’ Cup prospects, Treece has opinions. I asked him to to expand on his chart comments, and he emailed further thoughts.
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Horses whose latest races particularly impressed him include National Treasure (pointing for the Dirt Mile), Gaming (Juvenile), Vodka With a Twist (Juvenile Fillies), Thought Process (Juvenile Fillies Turf) and Pali Kitten (Juvenile Turf Sprint). He was less encouraging about Newgate (Classic), One Magic Philly (Filly and Mare Sprint) and Dreamaway (Juvenile Turf Sprint).
Vodka With a Twist finished a battling second to Tenma in the Del Mar Debutante. Treece’s footnote in the chart highlighted the obstacles the 2-year-old nearly overcame. His email to me summed it up this way: “She ran way too good to lose that day.”
Opinions like that, from a seasoned eye, can help to bettors find long shots.
Curtis Treece shares them every 30 minutes.
Follow horse racing correspondent Kevin Modesti at Twitter.com/KevinModesti.