He landed back in Phoenix in 1993, when the Daily Racing Form moved from California to Arizona, taking a job there as a handicapper and columnist. But Badone didn't like the gig--never got to the track and wasn't teaching--and he was thrilled to make the move to Lone Star Park when Johnson offered him the "perfect opportunity," the chance to educate a virgin horse-racing market.
Still, after all these years, Badone has discovered you can't teach someone how to bet--you either understand the logic of the racing form, or you get destroyed by its mathematical details. The racing form itself contains more than 30 different variables about each horse running in each race, from the horse's trainer to its lineage to its results in recent races to its times in workouts. Each horse's line contains a series of symbols and numbers and abbreviations almost unchanged since the Daily Racing Form first began publication in 1894.
To a novice (and Badone has taught thousands here alone), the form is confusing, convoluted, intimidating. But to a veteran handicapper, it reveals the world. The only way to understand the line is to live and die at the track every single day, to win and lose so often, you can spot a winner as he enters the gate and leave the losers to the chumps who think there is such a thing as a sure thing.
It's perhaps most appropriate that Badone begins each class by telling his students that betting is about discipline first and foremost, about betting your brain instead of your gut. Badone does bet every single night, but he has to--it's how he stays interested, sharp. He bets on his own picks "almost always"--to do otherwise would be like asking others to eat a steak you made but wouldn't dare touch.
And the fact is, Badone would prefer that next time you go to the track, you don't spend all your money betting alongside him at the window. Study your own form, pick your own horses, become your own handicapper. "Otherwise, it's all about gambling, and then it's no longer a sport," he says.
Sometimes, he wins what he hoped to win. Other times, he loses more than he expected to. Even now, Badone still wrestles with betting carefully, with discretion and discipline instead of blind passion.
"I've never economically hurt myself or my family," he says. "I've never lost money meant to pay a bill, but I'm still wrestling with discipline. I've always done this as a hobby. It's never been a money-making situation. I enjoy it. I like the action. But I never told the kids they couldn't have shoes this week because the eight horse ran fourth."
And that, ultimately, is the sign of a good handicapper.
