My friend at high school, let's just call him Gordy, began betting young, as did I.
We probably should have been sent to prison, but that's another story for another time.
It is an inevitable rite of passage that passionate bettors will one day buy a racehorse, and one day in 1978, Gordy did, along with another school friend, let's just call him Rod.
I think there was a brother in there too, plus some wives.
Six people.
The horse was called Liat Macca, which regular readers well aware of Gaelic will know translates as Grey Son.
The horse began racing up north, and was useless.
One night, as Gordy and Rod bellowed at each other over cards and whisky, Rod said the horse could win in the South even if it ran backwards.
Gordy dared him to send the beast down.
Rod did, and Stan McKay at Wingatui reluctantly agreed to train the horse for six months or six starts, whichever came first.
Stan, I suspect, saw Liat Macca as fit only for hauling a night cart, and as Gordy lived in Bannockburn, then just tussock and a bowling green, not the flourishing olive farm and wine-growing paradise it is today, where night carts still ran freely, then he couldn't really lose.
Liat Macca proceeded to run some of the worst races ever seen on a southern racetrack, but mercifully the sixth start came on Gordy's back doorstep, Cromwell, a typical small rural track where many suspect all races were fixed, won by either the butcher, the baker or the candlestick maker.
Even with this inside edge, Liat Macca was still paying $20 to win on the day, because Liat Macca was useless.
But horse racing is a quaint old merry-go-round, and even when Liat Macca settled at the rear that day in Cromwell, almost running in a race by himself, so distant were the rest of the field, Gordy, noting with pride his Stewart tartan beneath the urging thighs of jockey Russell McAra, also noted the horse was making a run.
He suddenly dreamed of 4th, unprecedented, 4th being actual money.
But then Liat Macca surged more and then more again to finally win by a lip, blood running from his eyes and McAra slumped in the saddle like a used cloth, his tongue hanging down to the waist.
I know intimately of this race because when I go and see Gordy, he has a giant Louvre-framed photo of the horse hitting the line above his lounge mantelpiece, and every door handle in the house connects directly to a home audio system which beams the official race commentary into every room the minute the handle is touched.
Right at the end, commentator Rob Fielder's yelping incredulity is completely drowned out by screams of whisky-garnished joy from Gordy and Rod. That the horse won $2000, half the costs to that point, is neither here nor there.
That Rob Fielder later admitted that Rod vaulting over the birdcage fence to kiss both the horse and the trainer's wife was nothing he had ever seen in the sport, is also a story that doesn't need repeating.
Nor does the tale's fitting climax, that Liat Macca blew a tendon a week later and never raced again, need to be added to a tale already filled to the brim with greed, corruption, insanity and the immaturity of youth.
But as a kind of ironic postscript, I, too, followed a betting career by buying a horse, a dominating share, 0.5%, in Aotearower, who lined up 10 days ago at Te Rapa in a field described by many racing veterans as better than seven of the past 10 Melbourne Cups.
And slaughtered that field by three and a-half lengths, only a snippet of the runner-up's snout making it into a very wide race-finishing photo.
I won $32.
There was no greed.
Or corruption, insanity or immaturity.
Though I have been thundering drunk for 10 days.
• Roy Colbert is a Dunedin writer.
