A SPORT BREAKING ITS FORM.

Byline: KEVIN MODESTI

I was in high school, or actually home in bed with a winter flu, when I learned that the sport of horse racing lived on the shadowy outskirts of polite society.

Mom was on her way to the store and asked if she could bring me anything to cheer me up. In earlier years the answer might have been, ``The new 'Spiderman' comic, from the supermarket.'' This time it was, ``The Daily Racing Form, from the liquor store.''

Having come to grips with the fact her son was beginning to follow the ponies, my very dignified mother now had to figure out how to go into Frank's Liquor in Sepulveda and buy the Daily Racing Form without seeming to be the sort of person who would do such a thing.

A while later, Mom returned with the paper, proud of her own ingenuity.

She said she hadn't wanted the liquor store's other customers to know she was there for the Daily Racing Form. So she had walked up to the cashier and spoke softly. And she had asked the man for ``the Form.''

I gently broke the news to Monica Modesti that when she called it ``the Form,'' she had used the exact shorthand of the racetrack derelicts she despised.

What teen-ager wouldn't have been entranced by a world, in this case the netherworld of the horseplayer, that so offended the sensibilities of his mother?

Thinking about the new high-tech landscape of thoroughbred racing as the sport gets ready for Saturday's Breeders' Cup contests at Lone Star Park in Texas, I can't help but worry that it no longer holds the same outlaw appeal for potential fans.

In the not-so-old days before fans could legally place wagers online or by telephone, working men and women who wanted to get down on a hot horse had to sneak away to the racetrack in the middle of the day, or they had to know the bookie in the back of the local barbershop.

Before networks such as TVG beamed races live into living rooms and offices, horseplayers had to sneak out to the car to hear the tape-delayed stretch calls on the news-radio station.

Before the Form's past-performance charts were available online, acquiring the vital facts and figures meant getting newspaper ink on your fingers - or, in my mom's case, smudging your reputation.

That horse racing was forbidden fruit, that you needed the cunning of a revolutionary to participate, only made it more exciting.

Wrote Andrew Beyer in ``Picking Winners,'' the 1975 book that illuminated the game for many novices: ``By the time I was 15 I was buying the Form every weekend, studying it from cover to cover and placing $2 bets with an indulgent bookmaker. My fondest memory of Strong Vincent High School was sitting in the physics class of grim-faced, humorless Mr. Armagost when a messenger came into the room and handed the student-council president a note reading, 'Your parlay at Aqueduct paid $74.' Mr. Armagost was not impressed.''

Since those days, gambling has changed and the popular perceptions of it have changed too.

Horse racing - once the only legal gambling in most American towns - has been joined by state lotteries, card clubs and Indian casinos. Televised poker tournaments are a national fad. Sports fantasy leagues, for money, are widespread.

With all this gambling in the air, playing the horses doesn't seem as sinister as it used to.

At the same time, all of these other forms of gambling have given horse racing competition for the wagering dollar, competition that the attendance figures suggest it is not withstanding.

So racing loses twice: It isn't as deliciously naughty as it was, and it's farther from the mainstream than ever.

Bill Garr, whose radio race calls kept diehards up to date in the low-tech days, showed me a classic old cartoon over the weekend at Santa Anita. A man and a little boy are walking through a front door. The little boy is speaking to an unseen mother.

``Daddy took me to the zoo,'' the boy is saying. ``One of the animals paid $33.80 across the board.''

Nowadays, that dad would ``attend'' the races in sterile cyberspace.

Here's the worst news yet:

The National Thoroughbred Racing Association has announced that the sixth annual national handicapping tournament in Las Vegas in January will be televised on ESPN. The goal, obviously, is to bring horseplayers, with their speed figures and their hot tips and their hunches, out of the shadows. To take the game of picking winners and make it kind of acceptable.

Well, where's the fun in that?

Oh for the bad old days.

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Photo:

Horse racing's allure has changed. Other forms of gambling are popular and betting has entered a more high-tech age.

Benoit Photo/Associated Press