Familiar voice Byers back at Lone Star

GRAND PRAIRIE, Texas – Jim Byers is back in the game.

Byers, an announcer who took a break from racing of more than 15 years to work in other sports, is back calling races on a regular basis this meet at Lone Star Park.

“It’s been great to be back in it,” said Byers, 55. “It kind of feels like I’ve been in it all along, even though there was a 16-year gap when I didn’t do it regularly. I had to relearn some things I hadn’t dealt with in a long time, but it didn’t take too long to shake the rust off.”

Byers, a former announcer at Hollywood Park who also spent 11 years in the booth at Remington Park, said he had done some sporadic subbing at regional tracks starting in 2011. But a significant opportunity arose this year when John Lies, the longtime announcer at Lone Star, resigned to become the racing secretary for Will Rogers Downs.

Byers was in place for the start of Lone Star’s meet in April and will be the track’s announcer for the Quarter Horse season that starts in September. The timing could not have been better for Byers, who during his time away from the sport was a play-by-play broadcaster for baseball and hockey teams, first for the Oklahoma City RedHawks and then for the American Hockey League’s Oklahoma City Barons through 2015.

“The hockey team left town, and I had been thinking for several years I wanted to try to get back into racing,” said Byers. “The timing worked well.”

Byers first began working in racing as a junior at San Diego State University. He had a little exposure growing up, having spent some of his childhood a few miles from Arlington Park.

“In college, I wanted to be a sportscaster, but I thought, ‘What’s something that would be a little unique?’ I wasn’t really a football, basketball guy.”

Byers said an ad in the local paper for work in the San Diego offices of Agua Caliente Racetrack in Tijuana, Mexico, caught his attention, and he went to work in the office. After graduation, his role grew, among his duties reading race results. In time, he practiced calling races from the roof of Caliente.

“The first race I called was at Del Mar,” said Byers. “I was the backup to announcer Harry Henson.”

That was in 1983, and not long afterward, Byers became the announcer at Hollywood Park. He later was the first announcer for Remington Park when the track opened in 1988.

“In the 1990s, I had the urge to do other forms of play-by-play,” he said. “I had mixed in some ice hockey work, play-by-play, while at Remington. It mainly involved work in the offseason. I was just trying to branch out because I got into horse racing almost directly out of college and hadn’t really had a chance to do anything else.”

Byers now has come full circle and on a recent night was right in his element calling the card at Lone Star.

“The job is the same as it was in the ‘80s and ‘90s, but it has evolved,” he said. “The audience is bigger on TV and in the simulcast world. There’s a little less emphasis on the public-address aspects of the job. It’s a little more conversational than it was back when you were just the P.A. voice, only the people down below heard you. But I like that evolution. I think things have gone very well.”