HORSE RACING : From Suddenly Dead to Suddenly Rich

Lifelong horseplayers are so accustomed to wild swings of fortune that they learn to take in stride almost anything that happens to them. So Bobby Vaughan was surprised to find tears welling in his eyes and his voice choking with emotion after Saturday’s events at Laurel Race Course in Maryland.

But even the most stoic gambler would find Vaughan’s reactions understandable. In a year when he had already confronted death and financial crisis, one wager turned out to be the culmination of a dizzying ride on an emotional roller coaster.

Not that Vaughan’s life had ever settled into a dull routine. Energetic and enthusiastic, he had worked at a variety of sales jobs before he decided in the mid-1980s to combine his natural salesmanship with his love of racing. He became the agent for a young jockey, Allen Stacy, and together they worked feverishly in an effort to make Stacy the country’s leading apprentice rider of 1986.

Stacy rode day and night, with Vaughan driving from Maryland to New Jersey and back to maximize their opportunities, and at the end of the year they had won 307 races. One month after Stacy had earned the Eclipse Award, Vaughan gave up his career as an agent. “I’d burned myself out,” he said.

He went back to selling commercial real estate, and there too he enjoyed steady success--until the local real-estate market went into a tailspin. For the past year he had been earning almost nothing. His limited savings were disappearing. He wondered how he would be able to pay his two daughters’ college tuition. Vaughan thought his life had reached its lowest ebb. He was wrong.

In March he was showing a plot of land in Howard County, Md., to a prospective client when suddenly he had the eerie sense a curtain was coming down in front of him. “I thought I was dead,” he said. He was almost correct. Vaughan collapsed, and he was taken to the hospital for heart surgery.

“I had passed out from a locked aortic valve,” he said, “and when that happens the term for it is ‘sudden death.’ ”

A week later, just as he was about to be released from the hospital, Vaughan’s heart stopped beating and he was rushed to the emergency room for surgery again.

After he spent two months at home recuperating from the operations, his wife, June Ann, advised him: “You should do something that you really love.” Although he hadn’t set foot in a racetrack in many months, Vaughan still loved the sport. Racing would be a pleasant diversion and, he hoped, it might be a source of profit too--for Vaughan’s financial condition had only worsened during his medical ordeal.

“I was supposed to walk four miles a day,” Vaughan said, “so I figured, why not do it on the backstretch?” He hooked up with jockey Jo Jo Ladner and became his agent, and in the morning he would walk from barn to barn, trying to line up mounts for the rider.

He spent his afternoons gambling. When he went to Laurel Saturday for the simulcast of the races from Pimlico, Vaughan thought his prospects looked good in the double-triple, which requires a bettor to pick the top three finishers in the third and fifth races.

Vaughan invested $414 in the third race, playing Jove’s Verdict on top in all of his combinations. When the horse won and an implausible long shot ran third, Vaughan collected $2,900 and held two live tickets that he could exchange for combinations on the fifth race. He played the standout, This Ones Easy, to win; a speed horse, Rabbit, to finish second; and two horses, including the 12-1 shot Transferencia, in the third spot.

This Ones Easy drew away from the field in the stretch, and Rabbit was holding second place, but weakening, as Transferencia closed in on him. The television camera focused on the leader and ignored the crucial battle for second place, and those agonizing moments put Vaughan’s heart to a strenuous test.

But when those horses came back into the view of the camera, Vaughan saw that Rabbit had managed to hold on to second place. A minute later, he stared transfixed at the television monitor that informed him he held the only winning ticket on the double-triple. It was worth $84,616.80.

Vaughan could hardly speak. He telephoned June Ann and told her to come to Laurel. When she arrived, she seemed so stunned she could barely speak either.

Their lives had been transformed.

The surgery had left Vaughan’s health better than ever, and now this windfall had wiped away their financial worries so completely they could contemplate celebrating the triumph with a vacation in St. Thomas and a summer season in Saratoga.

Vaughan could barely comprehend all the twists and turns of fate that had led him to Laurel on this day: “I wouldn’t have been at the track, and this wouldn’t have happened, if it hadn’t been for my heart. God works in mysterious ways.”