What got Crist noticed in the Times newsroom was an un-bylined story he wrote as a copyboy about the increase in the price of marijuana.

What got him a job as the paper’s horse racing columnist was persistence.

He had become a copy editor on the op-ed page in 1979. He took his vacation time in Florida, so he could file stories on the winter racing season there, and covered a race in Saratoga when the lead writer got sick.

Finally, when the sports page’s racing writer retired in 1981, Crist landed the job and began his nearly decade-long stint.

Always a customer of the game, he continued to bet on races even as he now covered them. When the Times’ management confronted him, he successfully convinced them that a reporter had to wager—“people who didn’t bet weren’t paying attention,” he says.

In 1988, he drove from Los Angeles to Miami, stopping off at every racetrack along the way, from a “dusty dirt fair” in New Mexico to more major establishments. He visited 10 tracks in 15 days and wrote an article about the pilgrimage.

But mostly Crist filed a steady stream of straight racing results pieces, and his copy editor remembers him as a “really clean writer” and reliable reporter.

“He was very facile,” says Richard Rosenbush, who had an 18-year career at the Times. “If there was a problem with a story we could work it out over the phone. If he was given a story assignment that wasn’t particularly to his liking, he could still do a pretty good job on it.”

Once, editors asked Crist—“somewhat to his consternation,” as Rosenbush recalls—to obtain a recipe for a mint julep. He didn’t like it, but he did it.

Banking on NYRA

When he arrived in 1994 at the New York Racing Association (NYRA), the company that runs the state’s three largest horse racing tracks assumed that if you wanted to play the horses you would go to the racetrack.

Crist changed all that.

Over his reporting years, he had come to feel the horse racing industry didn’t care about the bettors—the people like himself.

“I became increasingly sympathetic to the customers and less sympathetic to the owners,” he says, “and began to take up the customers’ cause on things.”

He left the Times in 1990 to serve a hectic six months as the founding editor-in-chief of the Racing Times, started by the colorful British publisher Robert Maxwell.