Dave Johnson may be the last man alive to call a Triple Crown winner, and he didn’t even get to finish it.
Johnson was behind the mic as the track announcer at Belmont Park in 1973 when Secretariat eviscerated the five-horse field. But there was a law aimed at keeping the results from leaving the track for gambling purposes.
“In those days in the announcer’s booth at NYRA tracks, we were instructed to shut off the microphone for the track with about a sixteenth of a mile to the finish,” said Johnson, who now hosts a weekly show on SiriusXM.
Chic Anderson, who passed away in 1979, was behind the microphone for CBS that day, and again in 1977 (Seattle Slew) and ’78 (Affirmed), when he had also taken over for Johnson as the track announcer.
Thirty-six years have passed and 12 horses have come to New York with a chance to make history, but all have failed. California Chrome is hoping to be lucky No. 13 on Saturday evening when the colt tries to win the third leg of the Triple Crown after convincing victories at the Kentucky Derby and Preakness Stakes.
Tom Durkin will be the track announcer at Belmont and Larry Collmus for NBC, and both could be part of horse racing history. It will be Durkin’s final Belmont Stakes after he announced his retirement earlier this year.
“I am 0-for-7 with a scratch,” Durkin said of the potential Triple Crowns he has called that have been denied. “I always walk into the booth that day kind of hoping for a Triple Crown, but as a caller you can’t get it into your mind that it will happen because there are other horses there.”
Along with his job at Belmont, Durkin called races for NBC for 36 years and kept calling the Belmont Stakes even when it moved to ABC for a short time. He quit his television job before the Triple Crown season began in 2011, handing the reins over to Collmus.
The 48-year-old’s first flirtation with calling a Triple Crown winner ended before it started when I’ll Have Another scratched the day before the Belmont two years ago.
“While it doesn’t get any easier, it’s good to have 11 Triple Crown races and three Belmont Stakes under my belt before calling a Triple Crown,” Collmus said. “That’s going to help, but it’s still a first for me to call a horse going for a Triple Crown, so there definitely will be a lot of excitement for that. You know your call is going to be part of history if it happens and you just want to say the right thing.”
Collmus said he is going to use the same call at the finish he had picked out for I’ll Have Another. And what was Johnson’s call more than 40 years ago, before he had to sign off prematurely, but with the race easily in hand for Secretariat?
“The finish, was something like: ‘At the 1/16 pole, Secretariat with jockey Ron Turcotte aboard, is in front by 25 lengths …,’” said Johnson, who made “down the stretch they come” one of the most famous phrases in sports broadcasting.
Johnson remembers the call specifically because he mentioned Turcotte’s name and was later chided for bringing up the jockey because “the horse was the star.”
California Chrome will try to be the latest star on Saturday.