Last Name extraction in query

having a problem posting this message - forgive any duplication please. Hi, I'm trying to use sql to extract the last name from a person's name field in my table. Here's my Select: $q = "SELECT race_winner,count(race_date) as wins, substr(race_winner,FIELD(' ',race_winner)) as last_name etc.,,, My result keeps coming up with a 0 for the FIELD portion I assume since my output shows a blank last_name. From the docs I believe it should be giving me the right-most portion of the 'race_winner' field beginning where the first space char is found. Am I not using this correctly? Is there a better way to do this? I'm trying to have my results sorted by last name and since the table was not built with separate first/last name fields, I'm stuck with figuring somethign out.