One of the most popular sessions at the recent 48th Annual Global Symposium On Racing was undoubtedly a discussion between fan favorite race callers Tom Durkin and Dave Johnson.
Durkin retired in 2014 after spending nearly 25 years calling for the New York Racing Association. He became familiar to television viewers as the voice of the Breeders' Cup through 2005 and many of the Triple Crown races on NBC.
Johnson, whose signature line “and down the stretch they come” is known far and wide, called the Kentucky Derby for ABC in the late 1970s and from 1987 to 2000. Johnson was based at NYRA tracks prior to Durkin and also at the Meadowlands, and has done a Sirius XM radio show for the past 16 years called Down the Stretch.
The panel was moderated by Gulfstream Park announcer Peter Aiello.
While much of the discussion was a colorful trade of war stories between two veterans of the profession, Aiello helped the audience appreciate a few of the ways the job changed in the tenure of Durkin and Johnson.
A few takeaways:
–At one point, announcers were forbidden from calling the finisher of the race due to the confines of the Wire Act. This was also during the time when there was limited pay phone availability at the racetrack, which was created so that it would be difficult for people off-site to know which horse finished first. Durkin remembers his predecessors walking the line by saying a horse was “in front” as they came down to the finish.
There was also, for part of their careers, a discomfort from track management about including any color commentary with races, as this was thought to be unprofessional.
–Television changed the way racecallers did their job – and not just on a nuts and bolts technical level, but in the way they communicated with their audience.
“Back then you had to over-annunciate to be understood because you were outside and the acoustics were bad,” said Johnson. “You had to speak more slowly.”
When people started shifting to watching the races on television, announcers were speaking to a group of mini-audiences crowded around their TV sets instead of one big group straining to hear them on-site. With television, Johnson said they could do vocal things, auditory dynamics, increase or decrease speaking tempo, and they knew the audience would hear them.
–Announcers sometimes have to work in adverse conditions in the course of their jobs. Durkin recalled clinging to a seven-story scaffold in a thunderstorm to see and call Smarty Jones' Kentucky Derby. Other times, he may be sitting on the roof at Pimlico, which had (and still has) minimal, if any, safety railing to prevent television anchors from tumbling off.
Johnson recalled Santa Anita having the same sound system when he called there in the 1970s as what it did in a 1935 Marx Brothers movie, because it rented the equipment. Forty years in, the shape of the speakers was archaic and caused sound to reverberate through the facility, feeding his own voice back to him on a two or three second delay.
Both compared frustrations about the construction of the announcer's booth at Saratoga, which had been added onto the building well after the rest of it was built and designed for an extraordinarily short predecessor. There's a pane of glass with a seam in the middle of the announcer's view there, a pole interfering with the view into the first turn, glare from one pane of glass flowing light through onto the other, and a significant number of trees obscuring the view of the backstretch.
–Many outsiders underestimate the mental fatigue that comes with an announcer's job. Not only is there pressure to be accurate when time is tight, but a lot of preparation goes into matching silks to horses' names. Johnson suspects he was one of the first announcers to start the trend of coloring the race program to help him match silks to names.
Durkin, whose performance anxiety ahead of televised race calls is well-documented, agreed that the turnover of memorized information is a real challenge.
“It's much harder to forget than it is to remember,” Johnson agreed.
–In the beginning of Johnson's career, race announcers were paid similarly to entry clerks. Johnson largely gets the credit for negotiating contracts with racetracks to change the way they were compensated.
Durkin said he would assert racing is a form of entertainment, and as such the announcer is key to the user experience of that.
–Despite their status as announcing legends, both were quick to remember times they had dropped the ball. Durkin recalled being mic'd up by both the track and ESPN for his call of the Alabama one year when, at the start of the race, he inhaled an insect. He struggled through the call, turned off his track mic, and began hacking and harfing trying to expel the bug – forgetting that he was still live on the radio. Johnson remembered a 1 3/8-mile race at Cahokia Downs which he called like a real nailbiter down to the wire before hanging up his headset, only to have an engineer tell him the race had another rotation of the track to go.
The post RTIP: The Rhythm Of the Race Call Changed In The Tenure Of Durkin, Johnson appeared first on Horse Racing News | Paulick Report.
