Today, the man who once edited an upstart competitor to the age-old Daily Racing Form now calls himself publisher of the long-standing bettor’s bible.

He has written about horses, edited racing publications, even rewritten laws that regulate the sport. But for all he’s seen and done, he still considers himself a “customer” of the game.

Just last month, Crist received the proofs of a 240-page memoir about his life in racing and writing entitled Betting on Myself. And for the man who loves the sport—its spectacle and its statistics—that story starts at Wonderland.

It’s a Wonderland Life

One day in May 1977, George A. Meyer ’78 took Steven Crist to the end of the Blue Line subway—home of Wonderland Greyhound Park.

The two had become close after what, in Lampoon lingo, was called a “pus war” over the presidency of the semi-secret Sorrento Square social organization that used to occasionally publish a so-called humor magazine. (See Meyer profile above.)

“I didn’t know what Wonderland was. I didn’t know what a dog track was,” Crist recalls. “I went out there that night, and that was the end of my academic career.”

“I was immediately hooked,” he says. “I loved the scene, I loved the atmosphere. I loved the fact that if you studied all these numbers...and you were smart enough, you could correlate this with how the animals would perform and make some money at it.”

After they went once, they kept going back—almost every day. They visited all four dog tracks located within an hour of Cambridge and took chartered busses to the greyhound park in Seabrook, N.H.

They bet only whatever money they happened to have with them—and “if we had 50 bucks in our pockets, that was a lot,” Crist says. The one night they dipped into their bank account, they lost big—and vowed never to do that again.

Over the summer, their new obsession helped Crist and Meyer procrastinate from editing a catch-all collection of campus-related humor called The Harvard Lampoon Big Book of College Life.

A half-dozen Lampoon staffers had rented Thomas Professor of Divinity Harvey Cox’s house for the summer—smoking cigarettes, playing records and, once in a while, working on the book.

Most days, Crist and Meyer went to the races at night, came back with the next day’s lineup and studied it until dawn. Then they slept—often up to the time they had to head back to Wonderland.

So little work got done on the book that, when it still wasn’t done by Labor Day, their friends had to strand them at a remote hotel away from the dog tracks, where the only entertainment was the Jerry Lewis telethon.

In the Big Times