Mike MacAdam

May 22, 2026

SARATOGA SPRINGS — “Here comes Pebbles up the rail …”

Not narration or plot, just a casual observation from Tom Durkin as he tucked into lunch at West Side Sports Bar & Grill on Thursday, and a replay of the 1985 Breeders’ Cup Turf at Aqueduct popped up on one of the many TVs.

On that day in 1985, he gave narration and plot to the nation as the voice of the Breeders’ Cup for NBC, urgently supplying “Pebbles with racing room now, and a daring move by Pat Eddery …” to the frantic story, which ended when “they’re running out of ground, and England’s superfilly, Pebbles, has won it!”

The iconic track announcer, who worked for the New York Racing Association from 1990 to 2014 and added the soundtrack to such spine-tingling moments as Rachel Alexandra’s desperate win in the 2009 Woodward at Saratoga Race Course, has a new plot to tell: his own.

In collaboration with the distinguished racing writers Paul Volponi and Lenny Shulman, Durkin has written a memoir titled “A Life’s Calling: The Voice Behind the World’s Greatest Horse Races,” to be released on Thursday, May 28.

He said he never wanted to write a book, but, since a young age, he always wanted to be a racetrack announcer, and after having done so through decades of attempts to end the Triple Crown drought, Breeders’ Cup glory and ridiculous upsets on the biggest stages of the sport, he has stories.

“I’ve got a million of ’em,” he said.

Durkin was born and raised in Chicago and got his first race-calling gig at the Fond du Lac County Fair in Wisconsin by virtue of “The Lie That Took Wing,” the title of the fourth chapter in “A Life’s Calling.”

In 1971, his friend Jim Forret was hitchhiking up I-41 to visit Durkin in Green Bay, where he was a drama major at St. Norbert College, and Forret got picked up by a guy named Marty Helmbrecht, who happened to run all the county fair racing in the state.

Forret knew that Durkin, who idolized Phil Georgeff at Arlington Park in Chicago and called “races” from the top of the bar at school while well-oiled barmate “horses” ran around in a circle, only wanted to be a track announcer.

So Forret told Helmbrecht that his friend was the assistant track announcer at Arlington, a position that didn’t exist.

“So in the middle of May in 1971, Fond du Lac County Fair, and Marty gets up there and introduces me as the assistant announcer at Arlington Park. Which was complete news to me,” Durkin said.

“The first race I called was 150 yards. The horse didn’t really have a proper name, so they just called him Brownie. No, it’s not in Equibase. Forty-five years later … to quote Woody Stephens, I’d rather be lucky than good.”

Durkin stressed how big of a role that luck played in his story.

But there were several other factors that he outlines in “A Life’s Calling.”

“Growing up, my background. To me, that was very important,” he said. “I hate these people that say ‘self-made man.’ It makes me want to puke. Nobody is self-made, and any successes that I’ve been able to enjoy are the result of a whole bunch of things.

“Geneology. The fact that I’m Irish. And I love the language, and I love to speak. The fact that, in birth order, I was the youngest kid in the family, and I always wanted to seek attention.

“The fact that I was born with a flat accent from the Midwest, not from Canarsie, Brooklyn … ‘If I tawk like dat, I never woulda been an announcer, you know what I’m sayin’?’ The fact that I had good vision. Just all of this stuff.

“But luck is huge. None of this would’ve ever happened if a friend of mine wasn’t hitchhiking down highway 41 in Wisconsin in 1971.”

What happened after that put Durkin in position to call some of the biggest moments in the history of the sport.

Those include Triple Crown bids, which became a fervent focus of attention once we got into the 2000’s and hadn’t seen one since Affirmed in 1978.

As the NYRA race caller from 1990 to 2014, Durkin called the Belmont Stakes eight times with a Triple Crown on the line, and eight times the Kentucky Derby/Preakness winner fell short, including the New York-bred Funny Cide in 2003, Big Brown in 2008 and California Chrome in 2014.

When Smarty Jones lost the 2004 Belmont, you could hear a hint of dejection in Durkin’s “… and Birdstone … has won … the Belmont Stakes.”

So, naturally, the year that the New York Racing Association agreed to let Durkin retire with one year left on a five-year contract, American Pharoah won the Triple Crown, with Larry Collmus on the call.

“I was supposed to call it,” Durkin said. “I used to spend my winters in Italy, I would decompress for two months, and I was ready to get over there and sit on the side of a vineyard and drink wine and chase Italian girls.

“But I was always anxious to get back to work. That year, I wasn’t feeling it.”

At the time, Durkin admitted that the stress of being a race caller and having to sort out the chaos in the big races in a way that would coherently tell the story in real time became overwhelming.

“It’s a big part of the book. Yep,” he said.

Another big part was sparked by a request from Volponi and Shulman: Top five favorite race calls.

So you can get Durkin’s take on “the incomparable, invincible, unbeatable” Cigar’s win in the 1995 Breeders’ Cup Classic.

Wild Again’s Classic win in the first Breeders’ Cup in 1984 in a three-way photo at betting odds of 31-1, a day that “changed my life forever,” Durkin says in the first line of “A Life’s Calling.”

A combo Saratoga entry of Rachel’s Woodward and Holy Bull’s 1994 Travers (“… but there is cause for Concern!”).

The filly Rags to Riches’ winning duel against Curlin in the 2007 Belmont Stakes.

And Victory Gallop coming from the clouds to catch Real Quiet and thwart his Triple Crown attempt in the 1998 Belmont (“IT’S TOO CLOSE TO CALL!”)

Spine, please return to an untingled position.

“I’ve had an enormous amount of unbelievable opportunities to call basically the best horses of the last 25 years. Every good horse. With one exception, Zenyatta,” Durkin said.

There will eventually be an audiobook for “A Life’s Calling.” Because of course there should be one.

Durkin’s book promotion events will include a signing and Q&A at the National Museum of Racing and Hall of Fame from 6-7 p.m. on Wednesday, June 3, as the Belmont Stakes Racing Festival kicks off at Saratoga Race Course that day.

He has stories.

“When you go to a show or watch a TV show, a movie, you know if it’s a comedy or a drama going in,” he said. “If it’s comedy, you know at the end everybody’s going to be happy and smiling.

“But a drama, you don’t know what’s going to happen. Certitude is the enemy of drama. And that’s one thing that makes horse racing so interesting. The characters are the horses and to some extent the jockeys. The plot is, are they going to win? So you try to incorporate that into the race call, and then there’s also narration. You’ve got to do the narration. That’s ‘so-and-so’s first, so-and-so’s second, so-and-so’s third …’

“But plot is something you can put in there to make it more dramatic.”