First, Hoof, thanks for that experienced-based appraisal.
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And Sartin begat Bradshaw, Pizzolla, Brohamer, Schmidt, Purdy, Hambleton, and - dare I say it - even had a certain influence on Schwartz ...
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Absolutely!
No "daring" about it. My first real winning year came as a direct result of Howard's stuff. That is why I give him credit as the true
father of pace handicapping.
Over the years a lot of people have enjoyed beating Howard (and his legacy) up pretty badly. Believe me when I say that I have heard all the stories. And some of them may well be true - he was not perfect. But I will tell you what he was - he was an original thinker; an idea man of the first magnitude.
Another thing about Howard was that he raised people up. Ted named just a few of them. PIRCO in those early days was quite a place. I don't know about the REAL EARLY days as I did not enter the Sartin arena until 1987 but from 1987 to 1993 or so I made some wonderful friends in that group.
We were all successes, to one degree or another. I am not aware of a single one that has not given Howard Sartin great credit at one time or another.
Howard once paid me a great compliment by describing me as one of the only original thinkers in the game. Permit me to tell you what an original thinker does: He begins with what he knows/believes to be true and then adds to it.
What does he add? He adds
what everyone else has done before him. Then he mixes it up into new combinations. Finally, he tries to add
something of his own to the mix. The ultimate result is something not so much NEW as NEW-er.
If you think about it, that is exactly what Howard did.
He did not
invent pace handicapping, any more than Newton
invented gravity. Like Newton, Sartin
explained pace in terms we could understand.
This allowed pace handicapping to grow. Over the years there were many pieces of software written by "Sartin People." Some were truly amateurish in terms of ergonomics, etc. A few didn't work out so well. Such it is with ideas.
But some of them - and perhaps your list would be different than mine - were absolute killer programs.
Looking back on my history with Howard - and I always called him that - never "Doc" as some people did; I recall many Saturday evening phone calls from him. Not once a week but certainly once every month or so (for several years). LOL - It was almost a game. He'd ask me what I was working on then he would tell me how he had thought of that before or always wanted to try it.
I used to kid him about the fact that having a passing thought on an idea did not actually give him ownership of it. I would remind him that it was the successful implementation of an idea that really earns one the credit.
One of my regrets is that I was never able to share NewPace with him; to collaborate with him on it. I firmly believe that he would have loved its simplicity. It's ability to come up with amazing pace scenarios without actually using any pace ratings could very much have determined the direction of one last Sartin software product. I would have loved to write it. (I almost did write a software product FOR Howard once. That is another story, for another time.)
My point in writing all this is that we are ALL "children of the same branch of the handicapping tree" and at its root is Doctor Howard Sartin.
Regards,
Dave Schwartz