Sport & Fitness

It’s a Derby double on Saturday, with Epsom’s equine version in the afternoon and the William Hill Greyhound Derby final at Wimbledon Stadium in the evening. You may be pleased to learn that it’s no longer de rigueur to arrive at either track in a cloth cap and blazer combo with a hip flask full of Bell’s and a bulging money clip of large denomination bank notes. But that’s not to say you shouldn’t.

Greyhound racing in particular is evolving to meet changing demands and appetites. The methods of placing a bet have been simplified, caterers have upped the ante considerably by offering proper food (as opposed to the traditional deep-fried plimsoll) and you don’t get the overriding feeling of being barraged by an incessant stream of meaningless numbers. The venues now pitch dog racing as more of a night out than a method of paying off the mortgage. Feature continues

As a result, dog racing is shedding some of its eccentricities. One such is the decline in use of tic-tac. Like Aramaic, Latin and Sanskrit before it, tic-tac is fast becoming a dead language. This blend of hand jiving and inscrutable terminology has long been used by bookmakers to send information quickly and accurately across long distances.

If you’ve ever witnessed the manic limb movements of John McCririck on Channel 4’s racing programmes, you’ll have seen tic-tac in all its glory. Odds of 9/4 (‘top of the head’) are indicated with both hands touching the top of the head. For 10/1 (‘cockle’ or ‘net’), the fists are held together with the right-hand thumb protruding upwards to resemble the number ten. For odds of 33/1 (‘double carpet’), it’s arms crossed, hands flat against the chest. The names come from Cockney rhyming slang and backslang. For example, ‘enin’ for 9/1, ‘neves’ for 7/1, ‘roof’ for 4/1 and ‘Burlington Bertie’ for 100/30.

Ben Clarke has been in the bookmaking game since he was 17. Snubbing a scholarship from the RAF and a place at university, Clarke was smitten by the profession while working for his dad and is now a PR for William Hill. ‘Early on in my career,’ he recalls, ‘I got work on the racetracks doing two key tasks. The first was acting as clerk [who makes a record of all the bets made] and the second was being a floorman, which involved relaying prices from other boards back to the bookmaker I was working for. You can do that in two ways: tic-tac or a walkie-talkie. It’s easier to use a walkie-talkie but in many ways it’s not as effective.’

The art of traditional bookmaking is what Clarke calls ‘liability management’. This is where a bookie will modify the odds on a race to ensure that he’s going to make an overall profit. With tic-tac, this was achieved instantly by keeping a close watch on the odds being chalked up by rival pitches. Nevertheless, it seems that most bookmakers now use walkie-talkies. Why?

‘Bookmaking was very much a family thing. To get a pitch at a racecourse, you’d go on a waiting list and once you’d got in there it was yours for keeps. The only person you could hand it down to was your next of kin. If you work in that sort of family business it’s easier for something like tic-tac to develop. It was a kind of secret code.’

However, a change occurred in the late 1990s when bookies were permitted to sell their pitch to whoever they
wanted, ending the need to spend ten years on a waiting list. This ushered in a new breed of bookmakers who didn’t understand tic-tac and, frankly, didn’t need to.

Internet gambling has also been a factor in tic-tac’s decline. Websites now offer betting exchanges allowing anyone to become a bookmaker without the rigmarole of getting a licence or going through the requisite checks. As with most things, the internet also removes the satisfying physicality of placing a bet – but for some, it’s the internet or nothing. As Clarke says, ‘The amount of leisure time people now have has decreased. Although they have more disposable income, they’re getting fewer hours to spend it.’

The final, sobering reason Clarke gives for the gradual disappearance of tic-tac men is that there is no longer enough business to warrant their existence. Where greyhound and horse racing tracks once played host to large crowds seeking an easy buck, most punters now put their money on the outcome of ‘Big Brother’ or the number of corners in a Premiership match.If you want to see a tic-tac in action, it’s likely there will be four or five at Wimbledon on Saturday. But even if watching grown men waving their hands about isn’t your thing, you can still put a bet on Westmead Hawk (‘the Einstein of greyhounds’, according to Clarke) who’s bidding to become only the third dog to win the Derby twice. That’s got to be worth a pony at ear’ole*.* £25 at 6/4