Day after day. Set after set. Horse after horse. Story after story. Race after race. Summer after summer. This right here in your hand has been in my head. The Saratoga Special, a daily newspaper covering it all for the six weeks at Saratoga.
It’s been in there, rocking and banging and needing to get out. And now it’s out.
Will it work? I’ll tell you in six weeks.
That was how the first Cup of Coffee started. Wednesday, July 25, 2001. Year 1. No. 1.
Eight months retired from being a steeplechase jockey, concussions still ringing as I tried to start over at 31, I had somehow convinced my old college roommate Paul Wasserman, who was out of work and had nothing to lose and my older brother Joe, who had a newborn and a lot to lose, to start a racing newspaper.
Paul found cheap rent in an out-of-business exercise studio in the back of the Palio Building on Broadway. A big bronze statue of a horse stood out front, that had to be an omen. We taped an 8 X 10 sheet of paper on the door. In black and white letters, it read simply The Saratoga Special. That was our shingle. The smallest shingle. And the biggest shingle.
How’s that line go? We didn’t know what we didn’t know. I had recruited college interns and quickly learned that creative writing at Skidmore didn’t translate to journalism at Saratoga. Four wannabe Alice Munros walked out the door and never came back. We lost another writer early when he refused to leave the press box. It was bare bones.
Tod Marks, Dave Harmon, Frank Scatoni, Pete Fornatale, Susie Alexander, Kelly Sullivan, Daniel Burns, Bill Corey, Tom Coyle and a few other family and friends stayed the course that year. Thank you, Sam and Andrea, you stayed forever.
The first advertisers in the first edition deserve commemorative bricks. Cooper Horse Vanning, Trackmen Golf Club, Beresford Gallery, The Lodge, Lyrical Ballad, Hoffberger Insurance, Celtic Treasures, Point Given! Collectibles, Doug Fout, the Parting Glass, Triple Crown Custom Blankets, Cromwell Insurance, Fasig-Tipton, Grayson Jockey Club and Nutramax Laboratories. Most of them paid. Some of them are still in business.
In that first issue, we interviewed Mike Lakow about filling races, Bill Nader about lowering the takeout and Neil Howard about what it’s like to win at Saratoga. We chatted with Joe Orseno about Macho Uno’s 3-year-old debut and Tony Dutrow about Touch Love pointing for the Schuylerville. We walked Broadway and caught up with Impressions’ Marianne Barker, the chief of police Robert Flanagan and Heather Hibbard, the receptionist at the Adelphi, about summers in Saratoga. We ran three pages of Calendar of Events because we had one extra page and Joe explained how a newspaper had to be in multiples of four. That one still confounds me.
We were in deep. Joe designed all the pages, and I wrote most of them. It was the year I became a writer. Out of pure necessity. Every day, we wondered if we could pull it off, like, really wondered if it was going to work. We felt an obligation to make it work, we had told people it was going to work and now it had to work. Every night was a war as we drove the newspaper on disks in shifts to Staffield Printing in Clifton Park. Jan picked up the first one on the way to work. Paul delivered the second, slept on a pile of cardboard boxes until the late-night pressmen woke him up with a thump of newspapers ready to be delivered back to Saratoga. He would throw them at my feet poking out from under a table on the office floor. We missed a few 4:30 deliveries to The Paper Lady but never missed the 5:30 delivery at the Morning Line Kitchen.
We published several eight-page editions during the season. Yeah, eight pages. A trainer threw one at a delivery boy and said, “This isn’t a paper. It’s a pamphlet.” He had a point. But I’ll never forgive him.
Undeterred, we kept going. We started with six papers a week, Wednesday through Monday, every racing day. Halfway through the meet, we stopped doing Monday editions. Just stopped. No one noticed. We charged $1 a copy, then stopped somewhere along the way, too. Charlie Boden was the last reader to give a dollar for a copy a few years later.
We began a subscribers’ list in issue number three. Tom Voss Stable, Chuck Simon, Mark Hennig, Ken Ramsey. I think they gave us $35 each. We added The Reading Room, Lisa Lewis, Toadie Taylor, Lynn Whiting, Carl Nafzger, Al Stall, Ronnie Ebanks and the Saratoga Sleigh Bed and Breakfast in the fourth. By the 35th, the list ran half the page of Here & There.
Six weeks. 35 issues.
There were glimmers that it might work.
We ran two-page spreads with Laura Hillenbrand about Seabiscuit (thanks Pete), Bobby Frankel about Flute, Allen Jerkens about Shine Again and Gary Stevens about Travers favorite Point Given.
The advertisers started to change with each issue, Claiborne, Lane’s End, Gainesway, Eaton Sales found their spots between McSorley’s, Leo O’Brien Stable, Richard Hutchinson and a couple named Jill and Rich. And then Sam Slater saved the day, the meet, the paper with The Heart Award, in Memory of Mrs. Miles Valentine.
Joe wrote the cover story in the first issue.
The best line?
Welcome. To a town. A newspaper. An attitude.
We’ve tried to honor those tenets ever since. Here’s to 25 years of Saratoga, 25 years of The Special.
Read the first issue of The Saratoga Special.
