Eyes on the Prize : CSUN Swim Coach Pete Accardy Turns Off-Season Focus to Del Mar and His Small Stable of Racehorses

It is an unusually drab-looking day at Del Mar race track, a little patch of horseplayer’s heaven located by the seaside 20 miles north of San Diego.

Here, “where the turf meets the surf,” the summer sky is typically clear of everything but sea birds.

On this day, however, it is overcast, the air wet and heavy.

“This weather is horrible,” says Pete Accardy, who might say the same about the barnyard aroma that envelops him.

Tromping around the mud and straw of the stable, Accardy, for 23 years the swimming coach at Cal State Northridge, would appear to be far from his aqua element.

But not entirely. Since 1984, Del Mar has been Accardy’s summer home, and although he doesn’t normally prowl the backstretch, he knows his way around.

Currently, under the watchful eyes of various small but ominous-looking guard dogs, Accardy is in search of Jeff Copland, a Woody Allen look-alike who trains four of the five horses of which Accardy is part owner.

It is 11 a.m., three hours before post time for the first race, and Copland is nowhere to be found. However, after a couple of laps around the barn, Accardy locates a trio of familiar horses.

“Really, it’s hard to tell them apart when they’re in their stalls,” Accardy says. “I think that one is Carolina North, that one would be Asia and the one over there Racer Rex.”

Carolina North, Accardy says, is “a hard-knocking horse,” which in lay terms means he tries hard. Carolina North runs in claiming races bearing price tags from $32,000 to $50,000 and is considered better on the turf.

Asia, the star of the stable, is a stakes winner and the best horse Accardy has had in 10 years as an owner. Asia is being prepared to run in either a six-furlong (three-quarter mile) allowance race Friday or the seven-furlong $100,000 Pat O’Brien Handicap the following day.

Racer Rex, a sprinter who runs in claiming races of $25,000 to $40,000, is the most handsome of the trio and one obviously blessed with a fair share of horse sense.

On this warm and humid day, he is leaning out of his stall to let his face catch the full gust of a fan that has been set up to circulate air.

A fourth Accardy horse, Tu Eres Mi Heroe (in Spanish, You Are My Hero), is at Feeder Hills Farm in Rancho Santa Fe, recuperating from wounds sustained when he bolted through a fence while leading a race at Hollywood Park on May 12.

Another claimer, Polar Ridge, which Accardy co-owns with his mother-in-law and Bob Burt, the Northridge football coach, is in an adjacent stable with horses trained by Paul Assinesi, a former assistant to Copland.

Accardy, 51, usually avoids such trips to the backstretch so he can emotionally separate himself from his horses. “I can get real close to animals,” he says while watching Racer Rex stretch toward the fan. “It’s a dangerous sport and because of the way they are put together, horses get hurt all the time.

“That, and it’s better from a business standpoint if you don’t get attached. If someone offers you a lot of money for a horse that has become like a pet, you might think differently than you would if you were selling a stock. I want to keep it on a business level.”

Accardy broke into racing as an owner in 1980 when he purchased 10% of a $15,000 claiming horse named Hidden Hills. Today, his 35% share of Polar Ridge together with the 20% of the other four horses he owns along with Albert Nadel and Bill Snyder is worth roughly $70,000.

“We’ve been fortunate,” Accardy says. “The statistic on the percentage of owners who lose money is ridiculous, something like 90%. We’ve done pretty well.”

In the past decade, Accardy estimates, he has owned shares of more than two dozen horses--all but one taken in claiming races. Asia, a well-bred son of Danzig, was purchased in a private sale.

Accardy prefers to buy in partnerships rather than on his own because of the high purchase prices and the rising cost of care, which, depending on the trainer, runs anywhere from $55 to $75 per day.

Copland has a reputation for meticulously caring for the horses he trains, hence the fans aimed into each stall. On this particular day, Accardy said he would meet him on the backstretch between 10 and 11 a.m., but Copland was late.

“He has a schedule he sticks to,” Accardy says. “He may be gone for a while.”

It is 11:30 a.m. In about two hours, the track’s anthem, an oldie but goodie recorded by Bing Crosby, will be played to signify the start of another racing day.

Accardy has time to spare and he would rather spend it at the condominium he shares with Nadel during the summer at an impeccably landscaped complex in Solano Beach, a short jog from the track and within hailing distance of the waterfront.

Nadel, whose youngest son Keith swam for Northridge, owns the place and has owned racehorses since the 1960s.

The decor shows Nadel’s affinity for horses. A framed picture of John Henry, a top money winner from the 1980s, hangs next to the fireplace in the living room. Nadel didn’t own John Henry, but there are smaller photos of some of his winners on the walls of an adjacent bedroom.

One of them shows a Nadel horse named Reb’s Policy, an accomplished sprinter from years ago, crossing the finish line.

“Look at what the purse was in that race, $10,000,” Accardy says, pointing to the fine-print caption. “The cheap claimers, plodders, race for more than that now.”

Accardy turns on the television and tunes in the Financial News Network. Playing the stock market is much like handicapping horses, he says, only not as much fun.

He checks the telephone answering machine. There are 17 messages, a record.

A couple of them are from Northridge swimmers who have the usual preregistration questions. “It is amazing how things get messed up,” Accardy says, decrying the school’s system of handling various forms of paper work.

“This is the way I get away from the tension and pressure,” he adds, returning the subject to racing. “I get to the races and I just relax. It’s been like therapy over the years.”

Accardy studies charts and visits Del Mar almost daily during the summer, but he does not invest heavily in the races he handicaps. He learned the danger of compulsive gambling at an early age while tagging along with his father, Pete Accardy Sr., a comedian in the 1940s who performed with, among others, Spike Jones.

“I don’t go to bet. I like the atmosphere, the challenge, the competitiveness,” Accardy says a bit wistfully. “It’s like something you really can’t conquer completely. You can’t go to a computer and put in certain numbers and get all the right answers.

“Coaching is a lot like that. When the gun goes off at the NCAA championships, each kid reacts a little different. Their physical makeup is different. Their emotional makeup is different, so there is never a sure thing. If I knew I could go someplace and put in some numbers and get an exact result, I would probably get bored with it and quit.”

Although he now has a rather large financial stake in it, racing still has a recreational attraction for Accardy because of the way he approaches the sport.

“I don’t overextend myself from a financial standpoint,” he says, shooting a glance at the stock prices flashing across the screen. “Whatever money I use is not going to affect my life style.”

Accardy’s initial $1,500 investment was typically cautious. “I wanted to see the operation, how the backstretch ran, what the expenses were and who I could trust before I just went diving into it,” Accardy says. “I wanted to experience a little of the highs and lows, which in this sport are unbelievable. You can have a great horse one day and the next day he could break a leg and you would have nothing.”

For years, Accardy has considered retiring from coaching to train horses himself, but he is not sure he could make the commitment.

“In swimming, many years I got up at 4 in the morning, had workouts and, with college, would go all the way through until 8 at night,” he says. “Racing is an everyday, 365 days a year job. I’m not sure at this point that I want to dedicate my life like that again.”

As a result, he lets his trainers have the final say when it comes to decisions about when, where, how and against whom his horses will race.

“You leave things up to the trainer because he’s the guy who works with the horse on a daily basis,” Accardy says. “It’s an amazing business as far as that goes. You’ll have multimillionaires spending a half-million to a million dollars on a horse and really not have anything to say about the investment. If they spent that kind of money on their business, they’d have everything to say about it.”

Accardy makes an effort to hold his tongue despite some well-defined ideas about how racehorses should be utilized to fully capitalize on their talent.

“A lot of trainers are stagnant in their thinking as far as that goes,” he says. “Racing is pretty stable in terms of what you’re supposed to do and not do and trainers don’t like to be embarrassed. If he takes a cheap horse and runs it in a fairly expensive race on the grass and is badly beaten, he might take some criticism on the backstretch.

“Personally, I wouldn’t care. It’s like with swimming. When I first started coaching, shaving and tapering were just starting to become popular but a lot of coaches, the so-called macho coaches, still said that guys shouldn’t shave their arms and legs.

“We’d get our head beat in in most meets, then we’d rest and shave for the finals and I looked like I had some kind of secret. It was no secret, but we had an advantage because I was willing to try something other people were still fighting.”

Accardy hopes to continue winning in horse racing the same way his swimming teams have won 13 NCAA Division II titles.

“We didn’t win with well-known athletes, we won with kids who got a lot better,” he says. “The same can happen with horses. I think I have a good opinion when it comes to looking at horses and knowing where they belong and where they will excel.”

It is almost time to test those instincts at a betting window. After a five-minute drive to the race track, Accardy, flashing his owner’s license at all the proper places, makes his way to the owners’ boxes, says a few hellos and sits down to pore over the entries for the first race.

True to his word, he bets in $2 combinations, usually covering his projections by “boxing” or “baseballing” two or three horses in the same race.

“Pete is a student of the game,” says Assinesi, who drops by the box before a race. “He’s followed it and he knows his stuff.”

Accardy’s handicapping doesn’t pay off in the first race, but Assinesi points out that it is likely to return big dividends when Accardy and his partners set out to claim a horse.

“He doesn’t make hasty decisions or emotional decisions. Pete plans,” Assinesi says. “He is a waiter and he is very accurate because he is patient.

“Where Pete is very far ahead of a lot of other people in racing is that, along with being a very good handicapper, he knows pedigree, which is why he is very good at claiming horses on speculation.

“If he sees a horse up for $32,000 that is running on dirt but was bred to run on grass, he’ll take the chance.”

Copland, who drops by later, calls Accardy “a lucky man,” then adds, “but you make your own luck.”

As the day wears on, Accardy begins cashing in on his luck at the betting windows. He hits an exacta in the third race, another exacta in the sixth, and a longshot in the seventh.

By post time for the ninth and final race of the day, Accardy already has secured a tidy profit. Still, he cannot resist the challenge of the trifecta--picking the top three finishers in order.

“Geez, what a messy race,” Accardy says, scratching notes on his program.

The 10 entered horses have a combined 93 starts and only 10 victories in 1991 and the odds are fairly equally spread.

Accardy’s three horses break out of the gate seventh, eighth and ninth. He follows them with his binoculars while quietly commenting on their progress.

As the horses make the far turn and enter the stretch, Accardy’s whisper turns into a yelp. “Here comes the Boogieboy,” he says. “Got the first three.”

Dipping into his pocket, his fingers emerge with a ticket worth $349.20.

“I’ll cash this in tomorrow,” Accardy says, tucking away the ducat and heading for the parking lot. “Way to go Boogie.”

Boogieboard Boy, 11-to-1 on the tote board when the flag went up, has won for only the second time in 14 starts.

Someone asks Accardy how he made his choice.

“I thought there was a lot of speed in the race and the way the track played today, it favored closing horses,” he says. “I was worried about that No. 10 post position, but since he was a stretch runner, it wasn’t as much of a negative.”

The Racing Form charts show that Boogieboard Boy has made up ground in the stretch only twice in his previous 10 races. Somehow, Accardy’s explanation seems plausible anyway.

In the background, old Bing is once again crooning a popular tune:

“Where the turf meets the surf

Down at old Del Mar

Take a plane, take a train, take a car.

There’s a smile on every face

And a winner in each race.

Where the turf meets the surf at

Del Mar.

Accardy’s smile is particularly broad. “Really,” he says, “today turned out to be a nice day.”

He is not referring to the weather.