Had a certain Cleveland Indians game in June of 1951 not been called off due to wet grounds, Russ Harris' life probably would have gone in a different direction. He was on his way to that ball game with his father when he heard the news it had been called off. So, they went to the track instead.

It was a lucky turn of events for Harris, who discovered the magical worlds of horse racing on that wet day at the old Cranwood Park in Ohio. It became more than his passion. It became his life. Six years after the rainout, he became a newspaper handicapper, and a darn good one. Russ Harris, no doubt, has picked more winners than anyone in the history of this game.

"I tried to figure that out one day," he said. "I think I've picked 30,000 winners. It looks like I've handicapped 90,000 races and I usually average three winners out of nine."

So maybe he's really picked 29,412 or 31,899 or 30,011. Whatever the number is it represents a remarkable accomplishment, an accomplishment that gets more impressive by the day. At age 81, Dr. Russ Harris (he got his Ph. D recently at age 75) is still grinding out winners every day for the New York Daily News, where he's been employed since January, 1977.

There's just no stopping him.

"Will I be doing this 10 years from now? Yes," he said. "I have fun doing it and I love to compete. I don't do a lot of things well. For instance, when it comes to mechanics and doing anything with my hands, well, I'm really dumb. The things I do well I tend to do for a long time and I give them my all."

Harris dreamt of being a major league baseball player, but his ambitions were derailed by World War II. Back from the war, he went into journalism, with his first stop being the Canton Repository. He bounced around a bit, working for the Youngstown paper, as a news director for Kent State, as director of public relations and as a part-time professor at Akron University. He barely knew horse racing existed.

That is until that fateful day in 1951.

"We were on the way to the game when we heard it had been called off," Harris recounted. "We were right by Cranwood Park and my dad suggested we go to the races instead. I had never been to the track before."

It came down to the ninth race on the card and Harris noticed that a horse named Skelton, who was 8-1 in the morning line, was going to the post at 45-1. Sensing a bargain, he bet $2 win and $2 place on the horse. Skelton won and paid $98.00.

"I was hooked," Harris said. "That horse changed my life."

The next week, instead of going to the ball game on what was a perfectly sunny day, the Harris pair was back at the track.

His career as a public handicapper and racing writer began in 1957 at the Akron Beacon Journal, where he made his selections under the nom de plume Phil Dancer. He discovered that the word Phil meant lover of horses in Greek. Dancer came from the horse Native Dancer, a favorite of Harris'.

Picking the races and writing about them at the Ohio tracks, he soon discovered his strength. Harris didn't pick many longshots, but he was incredibly consistent. Day after day, he'd come up with winners, two, three, four, even five a day. No one picked more. On May 8, 1981 at Belmont, he pickled nine winners, sweeping the card.

"My theory is, I pick every card like it's May 8, 1981 at Belmont," he said. "I picked nine straight at Belmont that day and no one had ever done that before. That really meant something to me. I look at every race like I've had eight winners on the day and this is the ninth race. I don't pick any duds, if I can avoid it."

From the Akron Beacon Journal, he moved to the Miami Herald and also worked some summers for the Daily Racing Form in Chicago, which eventually led to a job as a steward at Hawthorne, Arlington and Washington Park.

His next stop as a newspaperman was the Philadelphia Inquirer. Someone very smart people at the New York Daily News, understanding the need to go toe-to-toe with the rival New York Post's beefed up racing section, hired him away. He doubled as the racing writer and handicapper until 1988, when he became solely a handicapper.

Along the way, one of his greatest thrills was the time he picked Coastal to defeat the seemingly invincible Spectacular Bid in the 1979 Belmont.

"I loved horses stretching out from a mile and an eighth to a mile and a half," he said. "I especially love them when the race is at Belmont and they're trying to repeat. I felt bad for Spectacular Bid because he was a great horse and belonged in the same league with Secretariat, Seattle Slew and Affirmed."

His accomplishments away from racing are every bit as impressive. Hoping to resume his teaching career, he earned his Ph. D from Lehigh University in 1999 at the age of 75. He wrote a 378-page thesis on the relationship between Charles DeGaulle and six U.S. presidents. Unfortunately, he found there's not much of a market for a 75-year-old college professor who spent the last 47 some years picking horses.

But there's still plenty of interest in an 81-year-old handicapper with some 30,000 winners to his credit. So he'll just keep pounding out his picks and his winners and thousands of New York Daily News readers will keep plopping down their 50 cents a day to see who Harris likes today at Aqueduct. Rarely are his fans disappointed. Good thing it rained that day in Cleveland.