Me and Sam McKee

Got a chance to talk to Meadowlands announcer Sam McKee today for a sidebar to our Hambletonian coverge in the September issue. I caught him as he was driving to Alabama to drop his kids off at school. Let me say, Sam is a class act all around.

He has been calling races at the Meadowlands for 10 years now in a platoon system with Ken Warkentin. This year, Ken worked as an on-air analyst for the NBC broadcast, so Sam got a chance to do something that he couldn't even dream of as an aspiring race caller growing up in Michigan--he called the Hambletonian final. When I spoke with him before the race, I could tell that he was excited.

Sam already has called some of the most memorable races in recent memory--including Art Official's upset of Somebeachsomewhere in the 2008 Meadowlands Pace and the raceoff of the 2007 Kentucky Filly Futurity when Ron Pierce waved at fellow driver Trond Smedshammer when he passed by with Passionate Glide--but he said calling the Hambo was a special thrill that will be hard to top. He's so humble, yet so personable, that I walk away in a better mood whenever I speak with him.

A huge reason why I'm such a huge Sam McKee fan goes back to the day I met him. It was 2006, and I was covering the Hambo as part of the team at the Horseman & Fair World. I was introduced to Sam during a break in his nightly TV broadcast when he said, "Didn't a relative of yours race a son of Crash at Sports Creek?" Yes, Sam, my uncle Kelly Burkett raced Supreme Battle p, 2:00f ($22,087), a son of Crash, at Sports Creek Raceway--in 1984! I was stunned that he would remember such a thing about my family, especially since my family's involvement in the sport has been so sporadic. This unbelieveble memory pull endeared him to me for life.

(Side note: I looked it up on PATHWAY, and that year, Supreme Battle made 19 starts, with 16 wins, two seconds and a third, and earned $3,139! I guess we were racing for the love of the game.)

After our formal interview was done today we began to chat. Sam started out calling county fair races in Michigan and Ohio in 1976. I grew up and raced at fairs in Michigan as well, so we shared a common bond in how far we've come from the Michigan county fair circuit to the bright lights of the Meadowlands Racetrack, even if it's just "on the fringe of the sport," as he so eloquently put it.

When I was 15, I remember how my dad and I would finish the fair racing season and ship out to catch the last two months at Hazel Park Raceway. When I would get to warm up on the big five-eighths-mile Detroit oval I thought I had hit the big time, so to get to do what I do now is just over and above any of my wildest expectations. Sam told me about a similar situation when he was driving in qualifiers at the old Wolverine Raceway to get his driver's license, and he "thought he was the cheese!"

I think these humble beginnings keep us both earnest and excited about harness racing. TJB