Sport: Lucky Punch

In the seventh race at California’s Santa Anita Park one day last week, No. 6 was a horse named Rock X, No. 5 was Bright Mark. At his window under the grandstand, just before post time, a little ticket seller named Lonnie Gray was impassively, handing out $10 pari-mutuel tickets to a line of impatient betters. Suddenly a batch of tickets was poked back through the window and an irate customer demanded that he be given what he had asked for—five tickets on No. 6, not No. 5. Because the tickets had been punched out and recorded, Lonnie Gray was thus stuck with a $50 bet on a rank outsider that no one else seemed to want. And, because he had to get ready for the next race, he was not even going to see Bright Mark run. If Bright Mark had actually lost, he would not only have done Lonnie out of a week’s pay, but violated every canon of a good horse-racing story. Keeping the conventions intact, Bright Mark came in first. What the man who rejected the five tickets did is not a matter of record. Lonnie Gray stoically continued selling tickets. When his work was done, he leaped out of his cage, went over to the payoff windows, collected $2,860.