NoCar-- Holy smokes, a Figs Form reference.
They were a true (and as it turned out, significant) footnote to Racing history. Located less than a five minute walk from where I sit in Soho, the paper was the brainchild of Dr. Robert Sinn, a self-declared genius, and holder of several patents. His younger wife was Jersey trainer Pamela Sinn, who supposedly hired only great looking girls to work in her barn, girls she was supposed to be very fond of. I don\'t know about that, but I know she was a pretty good looking woman herself.
But I digress. In about 1990 or so, Robert Maxwell bought a share of the paper, and sent one of his trusted flunkies, a guy named George White (Mandown of this site), to work with Sinn, in the hopes of eventually taking on the DRF, then owned by Maxwell arch-rival Murdoch (this actually may have been George\'s idea to start with). At the time the DRF was refusing to give me the access to online data I needed to take TG from the old handwritten sheets to the high-tech product we have now, so when I found out what was going on I made it my business to look up this George White guy. Turned out he liked to hang out in bars, but needed a guide to show him downtown Manhattan, and a beautiful friendship was born. At our first meeting I told him I wanted to do a high end product with the sheet on one side and the ancillary data on the other, a concept that no-one else seemed to see the value of. George, who wasn\'t even American, got it in ten seconds flat.
But I digress again. Anyway, one thing led to another (as it often did with Maxwell), and it ended up with Maxwell owning Figs Form, and Sinn screaming (and suing, if memory serves), to no avail. The thing that was really valuable there was the same thing I wanted access to-- the past performance data base. And guess what-- that Figs Form data base became the Racing Times data base (George became president of the RT), and in turn became the Equibase data base when George did a deal with them to share the data and collection cost. And now that the DRF shut down their own data base to use Equibase\'s, it\'s the industry\'s only historical data base.
Which, of course, worked out pretty well for me. George was going to publish TG as a side product of the RT, but when Maxwell went swimming that idea and the RT went under with him. So George walked in to see Equibase with me, and since at that point he had a fair amount of credibility with them, we became the first company to do a deal to get electronic access to the data base.
And if we stay in business a couple more years, I\'ll make back most of the money I spent buying George beer.
Meanwhile, George might be willing to explain the laser system going across the street, and offer other comments about Figs Form.
