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Tuesday, May 19, 1998

Lone Star's Chuck Badone educates fans on selecting a winner

By ANDY FRIEDLANDER Fort Worth Star-Telegram

GRAND PRAIRIE, Texas - This is Chuck Badone's time of year.

The horses are running at Lone Star Park at Grand Prairie. The Stars are pushing deep into the NHL playoffs. Life can't possibly get any better than this.

"I don't know," said Badone, Lone Star Park's official handicapper and fan education manager. "Those hockey playoffs take a lot out of me."

If the Stars are playing, Badone's watching. Hockey is in his blood.

A native of Massachusetts, Badone grew up adoring the Boston Bruins, and was on the ice every chance he could get. He became a high school hockey star, and played in the NCAA Final Four as a sophomore at hockey power St. Lawrence University.

After graduation, he turned to coaching, building a successful career behind the bench at Chicopee (Mass.) High School. He even realized his ambition to coach college hockey in 1972, when he was hired at American International, a Division II school in Springfield, Mass.

But Badone's coaching career took a wrong turn when the athletic director who hired him was fired two months later. When it became apparent the new situation was not to his liking, he bolted, eventually winding up in Phoenix.

And there, everything changed.

"When I was a graduate student at Arizona State, I was teaching and going to school, so every day I'd go to Turf Paradise in Phoenix just to kind of get away from everything," he said. "When I got back to Phoenix, I was selling insurance, just for something to do. Then an old professor of mine, who knew I was always at the track, asked me, 'Why don't you work in horse racing?' "

It sounded good to Badone, who loved the races as much as he loved hockey. He wrote a letter, followed up with a telephone call, and before he knew it, he was a part-time publicity man at Turf Paradise. His first project was to teach adult education classes at three local community colleges on the art of handicapping.

"Horse racing was not educating the fans," he said. "It was the only sport that was teaching nothing. Instead, you should be feeding these people as much information as you can, because when they do better, they'll come back, and the track will do better."

Badone has carried that theory to Lone Star Park, where he teaches his handicapping classes during two three-week sessions in the spring and one in the fall. This year, almost 1,700 people attended his spring classes. He also holds seminars before the first race each day and provides information between each race on closed-circuit television.

Of course, Badone's information doesn't always lead to picking a winner. In 24 years in the horse-racing business, and 20 years as a handicapper, he has learned the hard way that it's far from an exact science.

"I'm in a profession where the best person in the world is still not very good at it," he said. "You get all this information on past performances, but you never get the information you really need. How does the horse feel? What did the trainer do to his legs? That's the kind of thing I'd like to know. But it's like hitting a baseball. You're going to be wrong more often than not."

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Distributed by The Associated Press