He’s Not Joking About the Track

It is a quiet afternoon at Hollywood Park. Unlike days past, there is plenty of peace and quiet to ponder your bets, which is OK with Sheldon Greenfield, also known as Shecky Greene.

The comedian who once commanded six-figure weekly salaries is at home here. Actually, he might be more at home here than he is at home.

“Never took a job if there wasn’t a track in the town,” Greene says. “Probably ruined my career. First question I asked when we were doing the deal: Got a track?”

It is time for the fifth race. Greene is working hard at it. There are newspapers and the Racing Form and scribbles on sheets of paper all over the place. There is also a pile of crumpled tickets. He notices a visitor’s eyes going to that.

“I got seven drawers of those at home,” he says. “I probably lost $10 million over the years doing this, but who’s counting?

Looking on the bright side, Greene turned 80 in April, so that $10 million could be amortized over, say, 60 years.

He lives in Palm Springs now but still manages to make his way to tracks in Los Angeles occasionally.

The horses leave the gate. He has a Trifecta ticket with the Nos. 5-6-7 boxed. That means that if those three horses finish first, second and third, in any order, Greene wins. He watches in silence. His horses are in the front all the way, but at the end, the No. 8 horse squeezes into the front trio and his ticket is worthless. A woman with blue hair who appears to be approaching her 90s squawks at him, “I told you, bet on the 8 horse.”

He says nothing. He quietly crumples the ticket, deposits it into the pile, reaches for a glass of water, and pours large swigs into each eye. The water runs down his face, soaks his shirt.

Once a comic, always a comic. After all, what’s a lost race if it positions you for a laugh?

“My father took me to track when I was 5,” he says. “Most other fathers took their sons out and found a piece of great land, and took a handful of dirt and said to them, ‘Here, feel this. If you work hard, you can own this.’

“My father took me to Aqueduct [a New York track], reached down, took a handful and said, ‘Son, this is horse manure. This is the reason you will never go to college.’

“I never shook hands with him again, but I kissed him a lot.”

Greene said that he treasures some of the friendships he made over the years at the track.

Among those, Greene said, was the late Vince Edwards, the actor best known for his television portrayal of Dr. Ben Casey.

“He was such a sick gambler, I thought I was well,” Greene said. “He’d borrow money from a jockey while the guy was still riding the race.”

Another friend, who didn’t stay a friend, bought a horse and named it after him. Soon, Shecky Greene, the horse, began to rival the fame of Shecky Greene, the comedian.

“I started shaking peoples’ hands and stomping three times,” Greene says.

Shecky the horse turned out to be the sprinter of the year in racing in 1973.

He also led the Kentucky Derby for seven furlongs that year and finished sixth. The winner was some horse named Secretariat.

Later, Greene visited the horse when it was sent to a stud farm.

“He walks over to me and bites me on the shoulder. Hurt like hell. Still got a mark.”

He starts to pull his shirt up, thinks better of it, then looks wistfully out at the track.

“You know, over the years,” he says, “I’ve probably made tens of tens of dollars here.”