By T. D. Thornton
In 1976, 23-year-old Trevor Denman took a vacation from his race calling gigs at three tracks in Natal, South Africa, to venture to the United States to see what racing in a different part of the world was like. Because it was January, he left in the middle of a long, hot summer at home, packing only lightweight clothing and traveling in a dapper Palm Beach suit. His wardrobe choices left him ill-prepared for the first several stops on his cross-country tour of America, which happened to be the winter meets at Aqueduct and Latonia (the former name of Turfway), plus breeding farms in Kentucky.
“I couldn't believe the temperature,” Denman told Bill Anzer of the Cincinnati Inquirer in what was very likely his first interview in an American newspaper. “Racing in snow is downright chattering. I've never seen a horse race at night, and that was quite surprising, too.”
Denman also admitted he had never witnessed a race on dirt (“sand” as he called it). And he was taken aback by seeing betting odds displayed on the tote boards of tracks in the United States, as opposed to the more genteel, all-grass meets in South Africa, which back then showed only the total amount of money bet to win on each horse. If you wanted to know the odds, you learned to compute them yourself.
Of Aqueduct, Denman said, “It's a tremendously big track. I found the announcers to be very professional, accurate. However, I also found that American racing is strictly business, not sport.”
Later on his itinerary, Denman would visit Santa Anita, where he would find both the climate and the Thoroughbred pageantry more to his liking. He was invited to the racing office, where he immersed himself in learning about how the game was conducted at Southern California's premier track.
This was a kid, after all, who had become fascinated with racing from his first visit to a South African track at age six. By 10 he had set his sights on attending South Africa's jockey academy, and as a teenager began exercising horses during morning training as he prepared his application. But the school turned him down because officials believed he would outgrow that vocation.
“At that age I thought the next best thing to do in racing would be to become a commentator, or announcer,” Denman would later explain.
He went to a friend's flat, which had a view of the racetrack, but was a quarter mile away from the action. Denman called countless races into a tape recorder to practice, and in his own words, started “pestering” track officials for a job. When he was named an assistant announcer at age 18, the move to a proper booth directly above trackside seemed like a piece of cake compared to his far-away perch at the apartment.
But Denman's career appetite hungered for a different flavor of cake. By the time the 1980s rolled around, he had a decade of experience and already paid his own way back to the U.S. on several occasions to call races that featured international jockeys at Aqueduct and Bay Meadows. On one such trip in to San Francisco in January 1983, he remembered the friendly reception he had received on his visit to Santa Anita seven years earlier, so he built in a side trip to “The Great Race Place” to see if executives there remembered him.
They certainly did, and this time Denman was invited to call the last race on a rainy Thursday afternoon. Santa Anita management liked the performance enough that he was given the opportunity for an encore call the next day, too.
Night racing at Hollywood Park in 2013 | Horsephotos
By the time Denman returned home to South Africa, there was a letter waiting for him. Santa Anita wanted to know if he would come back in October to call the Oak Tree meet, because Alan Buchdahl was giving up the gig to call both Thoroughbreds and Standardbreds at Hollywood Park. The offer included a job as Dave Johnson's assistant during Santa Anita's longer winter/spring season.
Denman accepted and never looked back.
In the pre-simulcasting era, American announcers called races for on-track audiences, and their calls were generally straightforward recitations of the running order with little elaboration. At some tracks race callers were even forbidden by management to call tight photos (lest the public throw away tickets in the event of a miscall), and at others they were not allowed to use the word “last” when describing the trailing horse, in the belief that saying so over the public-address system would be embarrassing to the slow horse's owner.
But Denman's style was far more descriptive, and although not all ears were initially attuned to his calls, Andrew Beyer of the Washington Post took notice. Within two weeks of Denman's starting, one of the most respected turf writers in the country penned a profile of the South African announcer that heralded Denman as doing something that was breaking new ground in announcing, even elevating it to an art form.
“Because most Americans have never heard a race called in any other way, the fans at Santa Anita were shocked when the track's fall season opened two weeks ago and they heard a smooth, British-accented voice calling the races like this: 'With a quarter mile to run, Pillager is coming forcefully on the grandstand side and puts his head in front! Full Choke is fighting back gamely, but Pillager has got his measure and he's drawing away in the final hundred.'
“This was the voice of Trevor Denman, and after he had been on the job for only a few days, Santa Anita fans were already swapping stories of his more memorable calls,” Beyer wrote. “A race caller who tries to interpret what is happening on the track may be a novelty to most Americans, but the style is common in other countries and is second nature to the 31-year-old Denman.”
Denman would effortlessly pick up far-turn moves long before they appeared evident. He would employ colorful language to describe not only long-shot upsets in the making, but favorites who weren't getting the job done. He incorporated previously unheard-of comments regarding the body language of jockeys, and would point out how horses were traveling based on the positioning of their ears.
“I believe my ace card is that I understand racing,” Denman told Beyer 42 years ago. “If a horse is in tenth place but he's running well, I say that the jockey has got a good hold on him. If a horse is in front but he's laboring, I may know that he's finished. So I say it. I owe it to people to pass on what I know.”
By the end of that 1983 Oak Tree meet, the Los Angeles Times was already chronicling lists of what its turf journalists called “Denmanisms.” Decades later, generations of racegoers now know those unique and original phrasings as the one-of-a-kind announcer's “greatest hits” soundtrack.
From his understated “And away they go!” start call to horses “scraping the paint” with an inside run at the fence, fans were treated to Denman creating a verbal picture on a stream-of-consciousness aural canvas that stretched only a minute or two.
Rivals far behind a runaway leader “would need to sprout wings to catch” those big-margin winners, and when frontrunners appeared especially strong, Denman let bettors know it was as if those horses had “just jumped in at the quarter pole.”
When deep closers zeroed in with a visually impressive late-race kick they were “coming like an express train,” which might lead to a directive from Denman for bettors to “go to the windows and queue up to collect” on such sure things.
In that 1983 profile, Beyer even got Denman to explain the origin of what would later come to be one of his most famous phrases, the “moving like a winner” articulation that often featured Denman drawing out the word “mooooving,” accentuating it to underscore how smoothly a horse was accelerating.
Denman traced that turn of phrase to the Durban July Handicap, South Africa's highest-profile race. In the 1978 edition of that Group I stakes, a fan favorite named Politician was running sixth in a field of 18 with three furlongs to go. Denman could sense the horse was just starting to unwind with plenty left in the tank, so he punctuated his call by telling the crowd, “Politician is moving like a winner!”
Trevor Denman (standing), Mike Smith (left), Gary Stevens (right) | Benoit
As Beyer put it, “As soon as the words had escaped his lips, he wondered why he had done something so audacious.”
But when Politician did, indeed, rally to win, Denman told Beyer, “That really put me on the map.”
Even with the initial favorable press, Santa Anita didn't really know what the public's long-term reaction would be to the novelty of a South African voice. The track's assistant general manager at the time, Alan Balch, estimated to Beyer that “the reaction is 80% favorable.”
But, Balch added, making a prediction that would turn out to be prophetic, “Before he's finished, Trevor is going to have a big impact on the whole style of American race-calling.”
Denman's magnetic persona–both on and off the microphone–soon allowed him to build up an impressive résumé of announcing gigs. Within 10 months he was calling the races at Del Mar, and he later branched out to Golden Gate Fields and Maryland. By the 1990s Denman was the primary voice at every stop on the SoCal circuit, including Hollywood and the Fairplex fair.
But his passion for the sport extended beyond “hollering horses.” After building up enough gravitas with a decade of American race calling and national TV commentary, Denman decided to start speaking up about issues in the industry that had bothered him for quite some time.
In June of 1993, Denman told Bill Finley, who now writes for TDN but at the time was covering racing for the New York Daily News, that the American version of the sport was too cruel with regard to the overuse of the whip and that there was lax veterinary oversight about running sore horses.
“If we do everything possible to protect the horses, it's ethically correct,” Denman told Finley. “But we're not, and that's where this sport falls down.”
Denman's outspoken opinions got picked up by numerous other media outlets, and he repeated and elaborated upon his criticisms in the months that followed. In what is now generally perceived as a less-enlightened era for our game, Denman's words both stung and carried clout.
The controversy followed Denman to Remington Park in February 1994, where he had been invited to call races as part of a “Racing's Greatest Voices” promotion featuring guest announcers.
In a profile by Jerry Shottenkirk of the Daily Oklahoman 1994, Denman put it on record that even though did not want himself to be considered “an animal rights activist,” reform needed to happen.
“Let me tell you something right now–animal 'rights' is just a dirty word,” Denman said 31 years ago. “It's been so twisted out of all proportion that the moment you put the word 'rights' in there, you become a fanatic. They say, 'Oh, we can't listen to him, he's a fanatic.'
“I'd rather say that I'm just compassionate towards animals,” Denman asserted. “When I first came here, I couldn't believe it. But there was nothing I could do. So I waited until I was secure enough that I felt I could make a statement.”
The controversy eventually died down to the point where it is now largely forgotten today. Yet Denman's speaking up did, in fact, after bring about mid-1990s rule modifications in California about jockeys not being allowed to hit horses that weren't responding to whipping. His opinions also factored into that state's attempts some 30 years ago to change the structure of whips from being “medieval” (Denman's word) to forerunners of today's more cushioned and humane foam-based crops that have since become the standard in America.
Denman continued to epitomize SoCal racing into the 21st Century, and he went on to become the voice of the Breeders' Cup from 2006 through 2011. But as the decades wore on he gradually cut back his day-to-day recalling duties to the point where the Del Mar summer meet was his lone remaining mainstay.
When he announced his retirement from Del Mar last Thursday at age 72, the move was not exactly a surprise. You could even backfit an argument that Denman knew in September that his final call would be his last. He emphasized the last stretch run he called at Del Mar by intoning that the mare in front was “mooooving like a winner.”
Over the weekend tributes have poured in about Denman's legacy and his influence on subsequent generations of race callers. And of course, many of those articles recited his litany of “greatest hits.”
But Denman's appeal and success extended far beyond those favorite stock phrases. None of them really would have worked on their own if he hadn't crafted an overall style that was layered with charisma and a deep respect for the sport.
Denman's tone was distinctive yet chatty; his South African accent exotic yet approachable, lending an air of importance to even mundane tasks like reciting program changes or alerting the public to stewards' inquiries. Over 42 years in America, Denman worked hard to establish himself as a master of cadence and inflection, building in-race narratives that, as per one of his own favorite descriptors, simply “exuded class.”
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