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Health & Fitness

"Big Mike"

One of Monmouth Park's all-time leading characters

One of the funniest, craziest, and most daring characters I ever met at Monmouth Park Race Track while I worked there (1974-1982) was “Big Mike” Hassett. 

Big Mike was a tip card hustler from Providence, Rhode Island. A big husky Irishman, he was proud of his Irish and New England roots. He was a guy with no filters who could drink almost anyone under the table. 

He was full of anecdotes that he told me over the course of our many years of friendship. I used to kid him that he had more short stories than Eudora Welty.

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The setting for one of his most memorable tales was Churchill Downs on Kentucky Derby Day, sometime in the early 1970's. The ABC Television Network was airing the big race, and Howard Cosell was going through the crowds with a microphone in hand, asking people questions about the race. He happened to walk up to Big Mike and asked him what the Kentucky Derby meant to him as a bettor. Without missing a beat, he said to Cosell on national TV, “It’s just another race!” 

Another time, Jimmy “The Greek” Snyder came up to me in the clubhouse to buy a Racing Form, and Big Mike was working next to me. As Snyder approached, Big Mike reached out to shake his hand and thank him for his great oddsmaking abilities (of course, he was being sarcastic). Later on after Snyder left, Big Mike told me that he made a ton of money in Las Vegas a few years earlier when “The Greek” laid three-to-one odds that there would never be a hockey team in Washington DC. Big Mike took the bet and cleaned up, all thanks to the Washington Capitals. 

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Big Mike sold the Clocker Lawton card, which was the most popular tip sheet back then. Every day when the gates opened at 11AM, you could hear his booming voice clear into the grandstand parking lot. He and his partner, “Pokey” Grafton, would pull in several hundred dollars a day. As quickly as they made it, they spent it just as fast. Clearly, they both lived for each day.

Big Mike worked what was known as “the circuit”. He worked Monmouth Park in the summer, then the Meadowlands in the fall. He’d take a break in January, heading back to Rhode Island to reconnect with family and friends for about a month, then move on to Oaklawn Park in Hot Springs, Arkansas until April. Then it was on to Keeneland Race Track in Kentucky, and finally Churchill Downs for the Kentucky Derby, where he’d start the circuit all over again back at Monmouth Park in late May. He worked this circuit or a variation of it for many years. 

Big Mike kept to himself pretty much when it came to his family in Rhode Island, but he did brag a lot about his nephew, Joey Hassett, who was a star basketball player for Providence College and went on to play in both the ABA and the NBA. He couldn’t talk about him enough to anyone who would listen to him.

Probably one of the most unforgettable nights of my life on the Jersey Shore involved Big Mike and a friend of mine, Jerri Lynch, who worked in the information booth right across from where I hustled newspapers and Racing Forms in the Monmouth Park clubhouse. It was the summer of 1978. A local comedian who Big Mike had befriended, Lenny Galloway, was doing his act at the Aztec Motel in Seaside Heights, and he invited the three of us down for a good time. 

One night, we took my car, a 1972 Chevrolet Malibu, and headed to Seaside. We sat at the bar and began to catch Lenny’s act. All of a sudden, Big Mike, who I think was stewed before we even got to Seaside, starts going back and forth with Lenny while he was onstage doing his act. 

The crowd roared. They ate it up. People were coming into the bar from off the boardwalk to catch the repartee between them. They must have thought it was part of the act. Jerri and I were laughing so hard, we just couldn’t contain ourselves. 

When Lenny took a break, he came over and thanked us for coming out. I had a great time, except that when we left, I accidentally pulled apart my car’s muffler pipe on an elevated sidewalk leaving the parking lot. My car sounded like a tank coming all the way up the Parkway heading home to Long Branch. Luckily, Big Mike was so bombed that he slept in the back seat all the way home and didn’t complain about the noise it made. 

After he retired from the track, Big Mike spent his remaining years in a one-bedroom apartment on Union Avenue and continued to maintain his lifestyle as best as he could. Unfortunately, the hustler lifestyle doesn’t lend itself to taking care of the hustler himself very well. Over the last few years of his life, Big Mike never went to a doctor, got sick and eventually passed away from cancer sometime in the late 1990’s. 

Jerri and I maintained our friendship over the years. I see her around town from time to time. Whenever we do run into one another, I’m pretty sure Big Mike is the first thing that comes to our minds. . .a larger than life character and one of the heroes of my early life at the Jersey Shore who I’ll never forget.

(The entire Jersey Shore Retro Blogography can be found at http://longbranch.patch.com/blogs/kevin-cieris-blog. You can also follow Kevin Cieri's blog on his Facebook page, "Jersey Shore Retro" as well as on Twitter @jsretro).

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