McChump Change

At 6:30 p.m. on a Saturday night in August, McChump sets forth from Rockford, Illinois, in the McChumpmobile, a '96 Saturn the driver charitably describes as "cheesy." He is fresh from a company golf tournament, during which his team distinguished itself by drinking the second-largest quantity of alcohol. The official traveling tape of The McChump Racing Tour, the high-voltage novelty rock of the New Duncan Imperials, has been misplaced. So Wisconsin's radio wasteland must suffice. The road is draped in fog and rain as McChump heads northwest on Interstate 90. Every now and then he eases off the gas pedal for fear that a deer will bolt out of the woods. Somewhere near Eau Claire he finally locks onto a decent blues station.

This is the eighth leg of McChumpalooza, the whirlwind, two-month tour of 18 different horse tracks that has already taken McChump to such venues as Evergreen Park in Alberta, Canada, and Rockingham Park in Salem, New Hampshire. His destination this weekend is Canterbury Park in Shakopee. The occasion is the Claiming Crown, the biggest racing day of the year in Minnesota.

McChump is Terry Bjork. Monday through Friday he writes computer programs for a pharmaceutical company in Chicago. On weekends the 45-year-old becomes the P.J. O'Rourke of horseracing travelogues. The Web site for The McChump Racing Tour (www.mcchump.com) bills itself as "a tireless tour of the racetracks of our land (and its territorial possessions, and some furrin' countries) in pursuit of cheap thrills, cheap beer, and some of the eassssy money."

It is an amicable antidote to the Daily Racing Form, the solemn Bible of the horseracing set. McChump refuses to take any aspect of the sport seriously--with the exception of alcohol consumption. Instead, his travel essays are filled with quirky meditations on air travel, racetrack aesthetics, and bar cuisine. "This bag of animal crackers that passes for breakfast on Southwest seems a bit heavy on the elephants and rhinos," he recently wrote on an airplane somewhere over Toledo. "Not a single tiger. That really chaps me."

The site grew out of Bjork's posts to the Derby List, an online discussion group dedicated to thoroughbred racing. In September 1994 he posted a particularly long, outrageous account of a 1994 trip to Prescott Downs in Arizona. (Horses sliding across mud-ravaged tracks; a woman screaming at the simulcast screen, "C'mon, ya piece of shit! Ride that piece of garbage!") McChump's fellow Derby List-ers urged him to post this and other travelogues for posterity. "It wasn't anything fancy at the time," McChump says of the original site. "But as time went on I got all these other stupid ideas."

In his more reflective moments, McChump views the site as a way to document some of the smaller racetracks around the country that are in constant economic peril, such as the Woodlands in Kansas and Colonial Downs in Virginia. "I see it as a legacy sort of thing, because I don't think a lot of these little tracks are gonna be around for a lot of years," he says. "The way that racing's going, it's more and more that the money is going to simulcasting, to the big tracks. A lot of the tiny, tiny tracks that I visit are just barely holding on by their fingernails."

McChumpalooza is the poor man's answer to "Handicapalooza," the Daily Racing Form's 12-day, 12-city tour of larger racetracks and casinos. It is largely an excuse for McChump to travel around the nation and play the ponies. His fascination with the game has its roots in summer nights at the state fairgrounds in Great Falls, Montana, where he first encountered the novel possibility of making money by simply picking a winning horse, and the "vague sleaazery" of the racetrack. As he notes on the Web site, it was "a far cry from the Boy Scouts."

But there is also a philanthropic element to McChumpalooza. At each stop along the tour he is placing a five-dollar bet on a horse and donating any winnings to the United Pegasus Fund, a charity that provides comfortable homes for retired thoroughbreds. McChump is also offering to put up five dollars for anyone who flags him down at the track and wants to help out Pegasus. (This is typically only two or three fellow horse players per track.) After the first seven legs of McChumpalooza, $152.75 had been raised for charity.

The Claiming Crown is a suitably modest destination for McChumpalooza. The recently resuscitated Canterbury bills the event, now in its second year, as the "blue collar Breeders' Cup." Claiming horses are the free agents of the horseracing world. Before the race takes place, any of the thoroughbreds can be purchased by another owner. These horses are not on anyone's short list for racing immortality, and they typically run for relatively tiny stakes of $10,000 or $20,000. The Claiming Crown is the one day of the year when they get to feel like they're running for the roses. The top purse in the seven-race event is $125,000.