DRF's Privman among three named to National Museum of Racing’s Joe Hirsch Media Roll of Honor

Jay Privman, the national correspondent for Daily Racing Form since 1998, has been selected for induction into the National Museum of Racing’s Joe Hirsch Media Roll of Honor, along with the late writers Walter Haight and Jack Mann, the museum announced on Tuesday.

Privman, 62, will join a short list of 26 media members who have already been inducted into the Media Roll of Honor since it was first established in 2010. Selection into the Roll of Honor is determined by a committee that includes historians and media members, both current and retired.

A lifelong resident of California, Privman’s beat has included all races of national importance since joining DRF, including the races of the Triple Crown and the Breeders’ Cup. He has been honored with individual awards for the coverage of those races 17 times, and was given the Walter Haight Award, for career excellence, by the National Turf Writers Association in 2005.

Known for filing clean, in-depth stories quickly, Privman has spent a lifetime honing his craft. His first story on racing appeared in the Los Angeles Daily News while attending California State University in 1980. He worked for the Daily News full-time from 1981-1991, was the West Coast editor for the short-lived Racing Times in 1991-1992, and was a correspondent for the Thoroughbred Record and Thoroughbred Times from 1983-1998, after which he was brought aboard Daily Racing Form when a group including Steven Crist, a Media Roll of Honor member inducted in the inaugural class, purchased the publication.

Privman has also worked as a television reporter for various networks and has hosted a radio show, “Thoroughbred Los Angeles,” from 2003 to the present.

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Haight, who died in 1968, worked for The Washington Post for 44 years, with 36 of those years devoted to coverage of Thoroughbred racing as both the lead racing writer and editor. A gifted storyteller, Haight covered 37 straight Kentucky Derbys, and was instrumental in the formation of the Maryland Racing Writers Association and the National Turf Writers Association, which named its career-excellence award in his honor.

In an obituary, The Blood-Horse magazine said Haight “wrote with glee, for he saw the humor and drama in the game” of racing. The obituary called him the “Aesop of the press box.”

Mann, who died in 2000, filed stories for a legion of major newspapers and magazines, mostly on racing and baseball, during a career spanning six decades. He was the sports editor for Newsday for 10 years and has been credited with expanding the paper’s local focus to one that covered sports nationwide.

According to a release from the Hall of Fame, “Mann also had a combative side that led him to tangle with his superior and often change employers.” He wrote for Newsday, The Detroit Free Press, The New York Herald-Tribune, Sports Illustrated, The Miami Herald, The Washington Daily News, The Washington Star, The Baltimore Evening Sun, and The Racing Times, while also doing freelance work for Look, Life, People, and Penthouse magazines.

“He said he’d been fired from the best,” said Clem Florio, the longtime Maryland-based racing reporter, at the time of Mann’s death. “He was a very special kind of guy.”