Goodnight, Sam

Remembering Northern California Racing's most visible personality

Sam Spear hosting the Golden Gate Report in 2003

Sam Spear, the Northern California horse racing media personality who died Friday at the age of 72, had a longevity that exceeded the Baze-Hollendorfer era of dominance; the careers of locally based horses like Moment to Buy, Brown Bess, Soviet Problem, Event of the Year, Lost in the Fog, Bold Chieftain, and Shared Belief; and Bay Meadows Racecourse and the San Joaquin and Solano county fair race meets. 

As the jockeys, trainers, and horses came and went, Sam was there through it all, hosting his replay show (which he created in 1978 and produced and hosted until the end of 2017) on KTSF-26 and radio show on KNBR 680 and working as a media relations consultant for Bay Meadows and Golden Gate Fields. General sports fans knew him from his guest appearances on KNBR's Murph & Mac Show during which he would talk about racing or maybe complain about how analytics were, in his opinion, ruining baseball. Sam had no connections to the racing industry prior to the late 1970s, but he used his gumption, gregariousness, and grit to become the face of Northern California racing.

Other stories (such as T.D. Thornton’s tribute in the Thoroughbred Daily News) can give you a better synopsis of the intensive work Sam did to make his replay show a success, so instead I will focus on my own relationship with Sam. My father was the person most responsible for my interest in racing, but it was Sam who completed the exacta.

I have memories from my preschool days of my father coming home from the track early and then watch Sam’s replay show to learn the outcomes of the final races on the card. Sam began every show with “A pleasant good evening and welcome once again to the Golden Gate/Summer Fair/Bay Meadows Report” and ended with “And I will see you...at the races! Goooooodniiiiiight everybody!” Sometimes when I would accompany my father to Bay Meadows, we would see Sam walking about, and I would think, “That’s Sam Spear, the man on TV!” 

As I progressed through childhood and my early adolescence, my interest in racing waned and my trips to the racetrack with my father became increasingly sporadic, but on one fateful Saturday evening in early 2002 I was flipping through the channels and came across the Golden Gate Report. For whatever reason, I decided to watch and I saw a replay of Danthebluegrassman winning the Golden Gate Derby for trainer Bob Baffert and owner Mike Pegram, and given that horse’s name and connections I thought he was worth following in case he made an impact in the spring at Churchill Downs (he did, but in the Northern Dancer and not in the Kentucky Derby). 

In the upcoming weeks and months I found myself tuning into Sam’s show to watch replays of the Golden State Mile and El Camino Real Derby. I got to know the local horses and I enjoyed following the rivalry of sorts between local turf sprint claimers Is It True Mex and Sarigor. I joined my father on trips to Bay Meadows to watch races like the Santa Anita Handicap via simulcast, played a computer game called Horse Racing Fantasy, read Seabiscuit: An American Legend in about three days, and began counting down the weeks until live racing returned to Bay Meadows, which was much more accessible from our home in Sunnyvale than Golden Gate Fields. 

These days It’s easy to take streaming live video and replays for granted, but back then I relied on Sam’s replay show (hosted by Sam himself during the Golden Gate and fair seasons and track announcer Tony Calo during the Bay Meadows meets) to watch full replays from the Northern California tracks, stretch runs from the Southern California venues, and the occasional major race in New York, Kentucky, or Florida. I recorded the show for two years, resulting in a pile of VHS tapes that probably annoyed my mother. 

During my junior year, my high school hosted a track meet on a rainy Wednesday, and my teammates and I took refuge in a storage shed. Inside was a television set the pole vaulters would use to watch replays of their jumps and evaluate their form. One of the seniors turned on the television so he and a few of his friends could watch the music video show that preceded the Bay Meadows Report. I made a gleeful realization: I can watch the Bay Meadows replays when they come on at 5:30! Everyone else left when the music video show ended, but I remained inside, ignoring my teammates’ races as I contentedly watched the horses compete over sloppy and soft going up the Peninsula in San Mateo.

My racing obsession that was partially fueled by Sam’s show led to me enrolling in the University of Arizona’s Race Track Industry Program in the hope of starting my own career in racing media. I began to interact with Sam when I did freelance work covering stakes races at Golden Gate and Bay Meadows for Bloodhorse.com, but I truly got to know him in 2008 when I landed a customer service position at Bay Meadows as I waited for a media job to become available somewhere. Before and after my shifts and during my lunch breaks I would visit the press box and talk to Sam and the track’s publicity director, Tom Ferrall. Although I was green and my ambition exceeded my writing skills, Sam and Tom did everything they could to make me feel welcome. 

Following the conclusion of that final Bay Meadows commercial meet, I moved to the East Coast where I first worked for the Thoroughbred Daily News and then the New York Racing Association. I returned to California in the fall of 2014 to try a new role as a racing office entry clerk and placing judge at Golden Gate. In the spring Golden Gate management launched a podcast series that was to be hosted by Sam and I was invited to participate as a co-host and feature story reporter. Suddenly at the age of 28 I found myself recording a podcast with the man who was more recognizable to me during my early years than Tom Brokaw or Peter Jennings. 

Tom Ferrall, who had worked as the Golden Gate’s publicist since 1989, retired in the spring of 2015 and I was hired as his replacement. With Sam I shared a fire hazard of an office that was full of dusty programs, charts, media guides, and other detritus. We were an odd but mostly complementary pair. He was the older extrovert who could barely type and was happiest when he could go into raconteur mode. I was the young introvert who enjoyed writing stories and wanted to update the track’s approach on social media but did not particularly enjoy pitching stories to local media outlets. We had our occasional disagreements, but we were always quick to put those aside when we needed to form an alliance in response to meddling by the Stronach Group's West Coast management team.

Sam's antics and habits could be endearing or annoying, depending on my mood and workload. Sam enjoyed listening to jazz and big band music in the early morning and sports talk radio before the races began. He would go on rants about baseball (“I don’t need a computer to tell me that Joe Morgan was a good ballplayer!”) and politics (He would express his displeasure with Ronald Reagan’s policies...during his terms as governor of California). A passionate Notre Dame football fan, Sam's optimism was only briefly replaced by despair following their usual bowl game beatdowns. On more than one occasion he looked at the nomination list for the California Derby and made it clear to everyone in the room that there were hundreds of nominees to the race in 1978. He would talk about how the press box was once packed with reporters from different newspapers and mention names of turf writers whose names I had never heard of before and have since forgotten. He would talk about his friendship with Joe DiMaggio, who would watch the races at Golden Gate and Bay Meadows from the relative privacy of the press box. Sam had perhaps the coolest 1989 Loma Prieta Earthquake story because he was at Candlestick Park with DiMaggio when the earthquake struck and he drove DiMaggio back to his home through the darkness of the post-earthquake blackouts after game 3 of the World Series was postponed. He liked to tell jokes (some more politically correct than others) and would frequently begin them by saying, “I got a good one for you, Harry!” with “Harry” being the generic name for whoever was within earshot. 

Sam was a holdover from a bygone era when racing could guarantee itself regular and positive coverage just by having the press box supplied with an adequate amount of beer, but even in his final years he could still talk an editor into running a racing story. Although Sam would lament the declining number of press box regulars, he never lost his zeal for racing and the people in the game. Even as his health failed, he continued hosting his Sunday morning radio show until the very end. Northern California racing benefited immensely from Sam’s passion for racing and his job, and it’s sad knowing that we will no longer be seeing him...at the races. Goodnight, Sam.

The preceding blog post was sponsored by Sam Spear Enterprises.