I was seated at a table in the Selima Room of the Bowie Library pouring over chart books from the Maryland tracks when Big Ray walked in. My memory is that it was the summer of 1977. We were there for the same reason. We had read Andrew Beyer’s classic book “Picking Winners.” If you wanted to make accurate speed figures, Beyer had instructed his readers, you needed to go to the library, ask for old chart books, and start the arduous process of constructing parallel time charts. That chance meeting began a friendship that would span nearly four decades. Ray Tannahill, a 1976 graduate of what was then Towson State and is now Towson University, was a starting forward on the basketball team. He also had an incredibly quick, analytical mind, perfect for the track. We learned how to make figures at the same time. We learned how to play the game at the same time. We learned how to win and how to lose. The last race, we eventually discovered, was over. The next race was all that really mattered. Everybody knew Ray at the Maryland tracks. His opinion was revered by a wide group of his friends. And their friends wanted to know what Ray liked and how he was going to bet. A group of us are going to gather at Laurel this weekend to make some bets in Ray’s memory and tell Ray stories. He died last week. The racetrack experience won’t ever be quite the same for me or any of us. Our marathon early-morning phone-call brainstorming sessions will be forever missed. The first big score any of us made was in March 1978 at Pimlico when I cold punched an exacta that paid $61.80. Ray walked me to my car just in case anybody noticed the $100 bills protruding from my pocket. I spent hundreds of days with Ray at Pimlico, Laurel, Bowie, and Timonium. We played contests together and took a few dollars out of Penn National’s World Series of Handicapping through the years. We always had a money goal and multiple strategies that could be adjusted. Back in the day, I would arrive at the Grantville, Pa., track with a VCR and a supply of tapes in case we needed to review races we had already seen multiple times. Those weekends at Penn with Ray will always be precious memories. Win or lose, you knew you were alive. After I moved to Philadelphia in 1985 and then Ray moved to Las Vegas for a time, we always stayed close, sharing ideas on how to play the game, even though Ray was a full-time player and I was just part time. Ray’s mind was made for simulcasting. I have never seen anybody who could process so much information and come up with a rational betting strategy so quickly. He was fearless and almost never let bad beats linger. There was no bet too large and no moment too big for Ray. He was killing superfectas before anybody knew how to bet them. He loved the small tracks where he could overwhelm the pool and take down the whole pot. The10-cent supers were a recurring nightmare that really took away his edge. We played whole meets together, talking on the phone every morning after independently looking at the day’s races. We played pick sixes together. Took down a nice one a few years back at Fairplex, a meet Ray loved because of all the short sprints. We played the Breeders’ Cup contest twice together, first in 2010 after we got on a great roll that summer. I still laugh about it because I remember telling Ray, “You have to understand I know more about the BC horses because I follow them all year,” strongly implying that my opinion would be better than his. He didn’t say anything, just went to work. When we began to talk about the races and formulate a strategy, he dazzled me with his knowledge and insights. I might have known the horses better, but he knew those races way better than I did. He came up with a horse in the Turf Sprint who I never would have found. We bet enough on that horse to blow away the competition if he won. The horse led all the way until the final yards. It was a very tough beat. We went on to the next bet. Ray’s opinions got us near the front in last year’s BC contest. We needed to be right one more time to win it. We bet what was necessary but were wrong on the horse. He respected my opinion, and I respected his, but this was no equal partnership. He worked harder than I did, knew more than I did, was far more in tune with day-to-day subtleties than I was. When we disagreed, I generally deferred to his judgment because I knew he had put more into it. I learned long ago that it’s never about who is right but how much money you win or lose. Ray’s racetrack friends won’t know where to turn now. He was everybody’s security blanket, a man with acquired racetrack wisdom, a unique understanding of how to bet and a willingness to share. That day in the Selima Room lingers still, a beginning to a shared racetrack journey, one I hoped would never end.