Odds Are High They’ll Be Found at the Race Track : Leisure: Their styles are different. Their lives are different. But one thing they all have in common: their love of horse racing.

Ray, a 73-year-old retired lawyer who has been betting on the horses for four decades plus, avoids mingling when he goes to the track. He also forsakes the refreshments sold from the international food bazaar and doesn’t buy the Daily Racing Form or any of the other tip sheets sold at the front gate.

Unlike other horse-racing loyalists who whoop it up in the grandstands urging their animals on, Ray sits solemnly a few feet from an automatic betting machine, never actually watching his favorites gallop across the finish line.

A big win may draw a smile. A loss, a few shakes of the head.

“I have no interest at all in seeing the horses,” said Ray, who is so dedicated to racing that he lives in a hotel next door to Inglewood’s Hollywood Park race track. “No interest at all.”

Ray, who wears a light blue beach hat with his name stitched into the brim, is one of Hollywood Park’s regulars. He shuns the costlier seating in the track’s upscale Club House and Cary Grant Pavilion for the down-to-earth atmosphere of the drab ground-level benches in the grandstands. He says he’s never even seen the members-only Turf Club; there a strict dress code is enforced, tuxedoed waiters take the place of self-service, and fans rest on cushioned chairs at fancy tables overlooking the track.

The ground-level seats are to horse bettors what the bleachers are to Cubs fans at Wrigley Field. The true track loyalists, Ray says, are workers who bet before heading to their jobs on the late shift, retirees with nothing better to do and the unemployed who use racing to keep their minds off their woes.

“This is how racing is supposed to be,” Ray said, surveying a large dimly lighted room with people standing and sitting everywhere on a floor strewn with betting slips. “We’re everyday people down here on the ground. Most of the people here don’t make too much. They bet their welfare checks and come back day after day waiting for that big win.”

Just down the bench from Ray is Marie, a woman in her 40s who waits for her husband to place a bet as her two preschool children color newspapers laid out on the floor. Whereas her unemployed husband is the serious bettor in the family, Marie said she only occasionally steps up to a window to put $2 down. Going to the track a few afternoons a week gives the four of them something to do as a family that they all enjoy.

“My husband loves it,” she says. “The kids just love it here, too--especially watching the horses and playing on the playground.”

A 340-acre complex at the corner of Prairie Avenue and Century Boulevard, Hollywood Park is just as much an escape as Disneyland or the Mark Taper Forum. It’s a world of daily doubles and trifectas, a screeching announcer and lean thoroughbreds with names like “Oh Dat Fox,” “Horsche” and “Gin Rummy Judy.”

When the track opens every Wednesday through Sunday at 11 a.m., up the entrance ramp come those so old they can barely walk, those so young they haven’t learned to do it yet and others who fill the decades in between.

One line leading up to a betting window was made up of a mail carrier chatting with a Toyota repairman about horse No. 5, a cabdriver with his 6-year-old son, and a man in a rumpled suit who called himself “a horse-racing junkie who practices law in my spare time.”

Track fanatics have turned horse racing into a science complete with abstract theories and statistical formulas. They put different emphasis on such things as the horse’s and jockey’s weight, the owner, the length of the course, the finish in the last race, the weather and even how excited the horse struts as it parades by the stands before the race begins.

The entrance fee to watch the spectacle is $2.75--but other costs creep in, too. It’s $3 to park, another $1 for a program of horses running in the day’s nine races. Then comes some assorted change to buy the tout sheets to check on what the professionals think. It’s $2.75 for a hot dog and large soda.

Then the real money-letting begins.

“I come here to invest,” boasts Ray, “not to gamble.”

He says he knows more about a fast horse he’s going to back with two bucks than those who play the stock market know about “a guy down in Texas drilling an oil well.”

His exact technique remains a secret, but he did successfully pick the No. 9 horse to beat its rivals in one race last month. He lost the next one to sentimentality, dropping the eventual winner at the last minute to support a nag named Howdy Lynn who shares the name with his daughter.

“I did that on purpose to teach you something,” he said. “Don’t ever change your mind. Go with your instincts.”

Down by the track, the No. 3 horse is pulling past the No. 8 in the final stretch as fans stand on benches yelling, cursing and encouraging.

“Come on, Irish Cookie,” one woman yells at her horse.

“Way to ride ‘em,” screams a burly man nearby. “Stay right there. . . . Stay right there in front. . . . Awright, you know what to do.”

His horse lost.

A little more low-key is John Craig, who sits by himself away from the crowds, rarely getting up from his bench. He stops by the track three times a week to relax in the break time between his two jobs.

“I don’t do much else except work and bet,” he says. “This is my sport and relaxation all in one. You get emotions as those horses come around, and that’s what’s so great about this.”

Another woman says it’s the “thrill of victory” that draws her to Hollywood Park. Relaxing? Not a bit, she says.

“It’s as nerve-racking as heck,” she says, her eyes focused toward the starting gate at the opposite end of the track. “I get so hyper. I don’t scream real loud but I talk to the horses and jockeys. You’ve got to.”

She cuts the conversation short. “I’ve got to go,” she says, rushing off to the betting window.

Back in the corner by the automatic betting machine, Ray hasn’t budged.

He has his own theory about what draws people to the track in the middle of the traditional workday.

“This is where the money is,” he says wistfully. “It’s the same reason Jesse James gave when they asked him why he robbed banks. For most of these people, there’s no money at home. It’s right here. Just pick the right horse.”