Sports announcers, whether it be baseball, football, basketball or horse racing, strive to be unbiased in their calls. It’s their duty to the listeners. Don’t be cheerleaders. Be entertaining, but by all means bring objectivity to your craft.
Longtime Southern California track announcer Trevor Denman, who still works at Del Mar, says he never bets when working, that it’s “irrelevant to me who wins the race.”
But Denman also admits to two occasions when he “cheated.”
“One was Bill Shoemaker’s last ride, I wanted him to win that really bad,” Denman said Thursday of that February 1990 afternoon when Shoemaker finished fourth aboard Patchy Groundfog. “And then, not as extreme, but a little biased when Zenyatta got beat in the Breeders’ Cup in that last race against Blame. That race, I wasn’t biased toward Zenyatta, but that was one race I was hoping she would win.”
These are good times for the 65-year-old Denman. He’s 99 percent recovered from a severely broken leg he suffered in April in a fall at his 500-acre farm in Minnesota, and he works only three months a year after giving up his full-time gig at Santa Anita only weeks before the track’s 2015-16 winter meet.
Denman also received word earlier this month that he’s been elected to the Southern California Sports Broadcasters Hall of Fame. He’ll be inducted on Jan. 22, along with Lakers TV color man Stu Lantz. They’ll become the 36th and 37th members of the SCSB Hall of Fame, joining such other broadcasting greats as Vin Scully, Chick Hearn, Bob Miller, Tom Harmon, Fred Hessler and Bob Kelley.
It will be Denman’s second Hall of Fame honor after he was inducted into the California Thoroughbred Breeders’ Association Hall of Fame in 2013. Horse racing itself inexplicably doesn’t have a Hall of Fame for its announcers.
“It’s right up there with the biggest of my whole career,” Denman said of his latest honor. “You just gotta look at the names on that plaque of the previous winners. It doesn’t get any better than this. Right up there, maybe the highlight of my whole career. This I am really, really pleased with.”
Denman said he never could have dreamed this would happen when he arrived in Southern California from his native South Africa in 1983 to begin calling the races at Santa Anita’s old Oak Tree meet.
“It’s something you strive for. I’ve strived for it since I was basically 5 years old,” he said. “So you’re always hoping, but obviously it’s a dream come true. You can’t get any higher. You know, Santa Anita, Del Mar, Hall of Fame, what else can you ask for when you’re an announcer?”
Denman’s favorite all-time call? Zenyatta’s 2009 Breeders’ Cup Classic victory at Santa Anita by a nose over Sunday Silence’s narrow victory over Easy Goer in the 1989 Preakness.
“I happened to be calling at Pimlico at that time and that was what I call a quintessential horse race,” Denman said. “They basically jumped out noses apart and they went the whole way around, Pat Day and Pat Valenzuela, two of the best jockeys in the world on two of the best horses in the world. That was a fantastic horse race. But Zenyatta might beat it by a nose.”
Denman is still irked a bit to this day by the way some perceived his departure from Santa Anita.
“I read somewhere where I kinda dropped them in trouble, well that’s absolute nonsense,” he said. “They had six weeks to get an announcer and … Michael Wrona, Frank Mirahmadi, the Australians, the English, they were lining up. They could have found an announcer. So just to put that little myth to bed, I knew what I was doing. They had six weeks to choose an announcer, and if, IF, there’d been some catastrophic problem I’d have gone back. I didn’t dump them at all. I get along very well with (Keith) Brackpool. He’s my buddy.”
Denman says he and Wrona, the man who ultimately replaced him, know each other.
“We’re not drinking buddies,” he said, but Denman made it known he has the utmost respect for Wrona as a race caller.
“Top class. He’s with the best,” he said. “I don’t think there is such a thing as the best in announcing, but he belongs with the best. You’re not going to get better than Michael Wrona.”
Denman, who cited the need for a change in lifestyle away from the L.A. freeways and “seven hours in a box (announcer’s booth)” as the main reasons why he left Santa Anita, acknowledges not knowing how much longer he wants to call races. He says it could be as long as 20 years, though as he said, “That’s a bit of a hyperbole.” He says five to 10 years longer in the booth is a more realistic time frame.
“You only work three months of the year and it’s Del Mar,” he said. “I mean, gosh, nothing could be better than that.”
Unless you’re talking about Denman’s call of the 2009 Breeders’ Cup Classic.
