Flatter: Good to hear racing stories from Musburger & Zipse

There is nothing like horse racing to conjure great, individual stories, because we fall in love with it all the time and in such different ways.

We love a horse or a race or a moment or an experience or especially a winning bet. We even find ourselves embracing those instances that tear our hearts out. The nose by which we lost a Pick 6. The what-is-he-thinking ride. That long shot who we considered and rejected and frustratingly watched win. They all provide fuel for our stories. Our own stories.

As Kentucky Derby 2025 comes soon but also not quickly enough, we will add memories of where we were when. Like when Mystik Dan won the closest one ever. Or when Rich Strike blew up the toteboard. Or when Secretariat was filling in the colors of his legend. We were at Churchill or another track or a party or in the family room or watching on the phone.

But racing offers even more individual memories from even more races than just the Derby. I thought about this as two terrific storytellers in my professional and personal life came to mind this week. Brent Musburger and Brian Zipse.

I will invoke columnist’s privilege and use first names here, especially with Brent, who I have known half my life and watched for longer than that. He finally was named to the Pro Football Hall of Fame on Thursday, announced as the winner of the 2025 Pete Rozelle radio-television award. Talk about overdue.

“The phone indicated Hall of Fame, and hearing (former coach and longtime friend) Dick Vermeil’s voice was shocking,” he said. True to form, when I offered him congratulations, Brent said, “Thanks, Flatterman. How ’bout those Gators?”

Brent and I talk on the phone about once a week. He and Arlene split time between their property in his native Montana and their condo in Las Vegas. Most of the time, he and I are working out betting strategies. Whenever he tells me “I won’t talk you out of that,” I wish he had. And yes, we both cashed futures bets on Florida to win the NCAA men’s basketball championship.

“I can close my eyes and see (Walter) Clayton jumping out, attacking the shot that wasn’t,” he said, flashing back to the last play of Monday’s title game.

And yes, he bets horses. He has been asking me about the Derby for a couple months and has been plugged in on the major preps. Even though we both are impressed by Journalism, we are looking for a price. Join the club, right?

Brent’s love for the horses is as much steeped in the action as it is in the memories he has of growing up in a state where animals live in heaven on earth. It was a summer day in the ’50s when he first went to the races.

“The fairgrounds in Billings, Mont., in August,” he said on my podcast about five years ago. “I was too young to bet. I had to find somebody who would go up. There was a jockey, Kenny something. He was a salesman for my father at the appliance store, and he actually gave me a couple winners. I don’t know how he knew, but he did know.”

Brent said the Crow reservation had some of the best horsemen on the Plains, and a lot of them were jockeys in those summer races.

“I so looked forward to it,” he said. “We didn’t have any television in Montana at the time, and I was not yet in high school. The Kentucky Derby was something we read about in the newspaper, these great horses’ names back in the day. You would hear a radio call of the race, but real, actual horses, every August, they would race (in Billings) for two weeks. There would be a rodeo that would go on in the middle, and the horses would race around the outside on the track. Two shows going on at once. I fell in love with it back then.”

Once a minor-league baseball umpire who had dropped out of Northwestern, Brent Musburger made his name first as a Chicago newspaperman covering sports and then going on TV calling them as he saw them. His ability to tell stories went beyond the after-dinner speeches, where I have seen him own a big room, and really found a home when his family started the Vegas Stats & Information Network eight years ago.

All the while, he has maintained certain rules for himself when betting Thoroughbreds.

“I don’t like to bet an abundance of exotics, but that’s just me,” he said. “I think honestly, through the last 30 years or so, that horse racing takes so much money out with the exotics that you can’t win, and it discourages people when they first start betting. It’s hard enough picking winners leave alone getting yourself always involved (in exotics). Now I mentioned the Derby. We’ve talked about the trifecta. That’s an exception, because there’s so much money in that pool that you might as well take a crack at it.”

Between the Hall of Fame and the horses and those times we closed down the dining room at Meadowlands after betting harness races, I think I found a good reason or two to get Brent back on the podcast before the Derby. That is precisely what I did this week with Brian Zipse.

After more than 10 years of hosting weekly episodes of HorseCenter on YouTube, Brian suddenly had to leave the show in December.

“It’s with a heavy heart to inform you there will be no HorseCenter for now due to my severe hearing loss,” he wrote on X. “An ongoing issue for a decade, it’s recently taken a turn for the worse. I would like nothing better than to be able to return soon. Thank you for watching all these years.”

He and Matt Shifman have tried to fill the void by taking their conversations to the written platform of this website, but the thousands of people who came to make HorseCenter a weekly habit must want to turn back the clock.

“It’s a pleasure to be on and talking horses again,” Brian said on the podcast this week. And yes, it was him. Not AI. Not a bot. All I did was set up a Zoom recording, use the voice text on my phone to let him read the unscripted questions I was asking live, and then I edited out the silent pauses. It is the same trick TV producers use when they squeeze the delays out of recorded satellite interviews. Thanks to modern audio tools, it took all of 15 minutes to remove the seams.

“I’m hopeful if things work out I will be able to do (HorseCenter) again,” Brian said. “Hearing loss for me was a little bit of a mystery, according to doctors. They’re not exactly telling me what happened. It was both progressive and sudden, because my hearing had deteriorated for years, especially in one ear. But the other ear was kind of sudden basically around the holidays.”

Brian hopes cochlear implants or some other medical advance may restore his hearing in the yet-to-be-determined future, and maybe that will be a path back to HorseCenter. So, too, might an application of the technology we used on the podcast. Suffice it to say, we are working on it.

In the meantime, he still gets to the races. He lives in Kentucky, so Keeneland was a must this past week. On Friday, Brian makes the eight-hour drive to Oaklawn to see his favorite horse currently in training. One he saw break her maiden on debut Oct. 26, 2023.

“I absolutely love getting excited about good horses or potentially good horses,” he said. “Thorpedo Anna was a horse I was lucky enough to be at Keeneland when she won her maiden by a pole there. It was very impressive. You had no idea what you were seeing at that point in a restricted maiden race that you could only be up for so much as a purchase price in that race. She has just gone on to be better and better and better.”

As much as he loves a good bet, Brian knows he will not be getting one in the Grade 1 Apple Blossom Handicap on Saturday. Not with Thorpedo Anna going off at maybe 1-10 or shorter.

“I think Thorpedo Anna is underrated,” he said. “That’s kind of a strange statement being said about a horse who just won the horse of the year, but I think she’s better than a lot of people realize. I think handicapping the sport, I don’t want to say it’s lazy to rely on speed figures, but I guess that’s what I’m saying. I think speed figures have become far too prevalent in how horses are judged and handicapped, and I think she’s a really good example.”

Brian’s eagerness to see Thorpedo Anna again came through loud and clear. The same goes for his Sunday morning columns at Horse Racing Nation which are new stories that have their own warm, didactic feel.

Even though he might not be able to hear himself, the quality and timbre of Brian’s voice has not changed one bit. The same goes for Brent, who turns 86 next month and sounds every bit like the colt of a broadcaster he was more than 50 years ago.

One thing I have learned to love about Brent in the 33 years I have known him is that he sometimes is taken aback by his own celebrity. Just last week on “Jeopardy!” he was the subject of a clue in the category called “your verb form is most irregular.”

“In a famous Brent Musburger call, it’s the past participle that follows, ‘Flutie flushed, throws it down.’ ” None of the contestants had the correct response, “What is caught?”

When I told him about it, he texted, “I don’t believe it.”

Of course, he might have been quoting the end of that 1984 call, too. Now there is a story.

Ron Flatter’s column appears Friday mornings at Horse Racing Nation. Comments below and at RonFlatterRacingPod@gmail.com are welcomed, encouraged and may be used in the feedback segment of the Ron Flatter Racing Pod, which also is posted every Friday.