Elmer Polzin wasn’t a horseplayer during the more than 40 years he worked as a handicapper and racing writer for Chicago newspapers.

What Elmer Polzin always was and always will be is a horse lover.

It is a passionate love affair that dates back to his boyhood.

“The thing that stands out in my mind is I’ve never met another guy who was as passionate about what he did as Elmer was about the horses,” said Dave Surico, who in 1985 succeeded him as the Chicago Tribune handicapper.

One of the things Elmer said—and I totally agree with him—is: “You always have to write about the horses. Too many writers write about the people and the betting. The horses are what the people love. That’s why they’re in the game.”

“He loved the animals most but he also loved the people. He loved the whole thing. He lived a couple of lifetimes during his years on the track. It was his social life; it was his work life; it was his athletic life.”

Sadly, health problems prevented the 86-year-old father of Arlington’s director of racing, Chris Polzin, from making his annual retirement pilgrimage to the track for an afternoon of racing this summer.

When the Arlington meeting hit the homestretch in September he was in the hospital, being treated for a bladder infection and a staph infection at Lexington Health Care of LaGrange.

A psychiatrist analyzing Polzin’s approach to his job during his years on the racing beat no doubt would have described him as “a workaholic.”

During the last six years he spent at the Chicago American and its tabloid successor Chicago Today, he did a graded line with comments on every horse in every race, an advance line on the following day’s card and a story. That was the norm six days a week and he agonized over every pick every day, an obsession and compulsion that continued during his years at the Tribune.

When Surico started at the Tribune in 1983 he worked on the sports department phone desk, relaying messages from writers to copy editors and answering calls from readers with questions. One of his jobs was sending the racing agate to the composing room.

“This guy with a real husky kind of voice typically would call three or four times a night and he’d ask me to flip horses he’d picked for races back and forth,” Surico reminisced.

“Sometimes he would do it three or four times for the same race. He was very business-like, never a lot of small talk. From listening to this voice, I thought Elmer Polzin would be a big, strong, husky guy.

“Then when night this guy I’d never seen before walked in and was at the mail-boxes across from the phone. I said: ‘Who’s that?’ and when they told me: ‘Elmer Polzin’ I almost fell out of my chair because he was small of stature, entirely different from the huge guy I’d imagined. But even though he wasn’t that big a guy, physically he had a presence and I felt it when I went to the track to work under him.”

Polzin came to the Tribune after its sister paper, Chicago Today, was shut down on Sept. 13, 1974, one of only seven members of Today’s sports staff retained by the parent company.

In those days racing still was considered a high-profile sport by the newspapers and keeping Polzin translated into selling more newspapers.

After spending much of his career overshadowed by the flamboyant Dave Feldman at the Chicago American he became the paper’s racing writer and handicapper when Feldman moved to the Chicago Daily News in 1968.

Feldman and Joe Agrella of the Chicago Sun-Times were considered two of the nation’s foremost handicappers at the time but Polzin quickly joined them at the top and, in the years that followed, he often outdid them in the fine art of picking winners.

Although Polzin retired before the computer became a handicapping tool he consistently picked more winners and horses with higher payoffs than most of the current handicappers who have a huge advantage, thanks to computer technology.

John Brokopp, who went on to become one of the country’s foremost racing publicists at Sportsman’s Park and Hawthorne Race Course after starting out as a bartender in the Arlington press box, has a vivid memory of Polzin in his heyday.

“I got the bartenders’ job in the summer of 1972 on my 21st birthday,” Brokopp recalled. “I had been a racing fan since I was in my teens. I knew Elmer from reading his comments and stories in the Chicago-American and Chicago Today. That was the heyday of racing editions. The first edition in the morning was the turf edition; it was centered around racing and it had all the scratches. Then, there was a later edition that had the daily double.

“The day I took the job at Arlington, one-by-one all of the writers I’d been reading started walking into the Press Box. In came Elmer Polzin and I think (track announcer) Phil Georgeff was the one who introduced me to him.

“The first words out of Elmer’s mouth were: ‘There’s our shortstop!’ Even though I wasn’t an athlete Elmer took it for granted that I was and he was thinking about his Press team in the softball league on the backstretch.

“I quickly discovered wherever Elmer went there was a constant synergy surrounding him. Elmer wasn’t just in the Press Box; Elmer was the Press Box!

“And I saw how hard he worked. He was very conscientious. He loved the sport. He had a passion for it. He took it very seriously. He’d get up from his desk and watch every single race.”

Even though Polzin seldom bet he rooted so loudly for the horses he picked for the newspaper that it seemed he had a fortune riding on every race.

In those days the room at the pre-fire Arlington where the stewards watched films of races during an inquiry was located next door to the Press Box.

If an Arlington objection was lodged on a horse that Polzin picked he would be bellowing in the Press Box, insisting that the result be allowed to stand. Conversely, if an objection was upheld and it would transform a Polzin pick into a winner he also be would be advising the stewards in no uncertain terms: “What the hell is taking them so long? They saw what happened. The horse got fouled! Take the damn number down!”

The old Hawthorne’s Press Box hung over the grandstand and clubhouse apron in close proximity to the deep stretch and finish-line and there, without needing a microphone, he would be verbally dueling Georgeff on the PA system, using more than a few choice words to implore the rider of the horse he’d picked to charge across the finish-line in front.

Once described by Daily Racing Form columnist Teddy Cox as “never a man of a few words when several thousand would suffice,” Polzin was an often coarse but always colorful and charismatic presence in the Press Box at the Chicago tracks.

He also was and remains a complex man with a compassionate side.

Polzin has read and reflected on the novels of John Dos Passos and Ernest Hemingway. On vacations during his working years and the years following his retirement he and his late wife, Pat, traveled across the country and overseas, shunning guided tours to explore on their own and meet the local people.

“Elmer had a wonderful way about him,” said Brokopp, recalling the years they spent in the Press Boxes. “He would regale me with stories. You knew you could talk to Elmer about funny things.

“You also knew you could talk to Elmer about serious things. He would be concerned and he always would give you an honest answer. He didn’t mince words—Elmer was Elmer.”

Surico, who went on to become an outstanding handicapper in his own right, did the equivalent of an internship under Polzin during the summer of 1985 at Arlington before succeeding him at that fall’s Hawthorne meeting.

Polzin also took it upon himself to informally school those who were breaking in as racing writers, even those who worked for rival paper such as Tom Rivera, who covered racing at the Tribune in the 1960s, and yours truly, Rivera’s 1970 successor. Mike Kiley, who had a stint on the Tribune harness and thoroughbred beats in the 1970s and early ‘80s, was another writer/handicapper from the Elmer Polzin academy.

“Elmer made everybody else in the Press Box a better handicapper,” said Surico. “Elmer would be sitting there looking at the Form when all of a sudden he would say: ‘Hey Joe (Agrella), what do you think about this horse?’ He always was looking for every piece of knowledge he could find. He wanted every opinion. He wanted to know if there was anything he might have missed that would help him pick the winner of that race.

“If there was a racetrackers’ life for a journalist, Elmer lived it.”

We will cross the finish-line of this sentimental journey with a personal note: any success that I have had in the field of turf writing has its roots in the days and nights I spent with Elmer Polzin in the early 1970s. I’ll always owe him a debt of gratitude.   

Neil Milbert is the undisputed Dean of Chicago horse racing writers having covered the sport for more than 40 years. Midwest Thoroughbred is thrilled that Mr. Milbert has contributed this story about another racing writer-legend, Elmer Polzin.