Regulators Fiddle While Horseplayers Burn

SARATOGA SPRINGS, NY, July 2, 2009--At Monday’s press conference trumpeting the upcoming 2009 Saratoga race meet, NYRA President Charlie Hayward announced new directives sanctioned by the State Racing and Wagering Board Chairman that would allow superfecta wagering with fewer betting interests.

For thoroughbred tracks in the state, the Board has given permission to conduct superfecta wagering with seven program betting interests. The wager would remain viable if there is a late scratch after the horses leave the paddock that reduces the field to six interests.

As racetrackers say, “close, but no cigar.”

This SRWB rules change doesn’t go far enough and hence is less significant than it should be. Indeed, it’s an improvement. It makes it unnecessary for the racing office to hustle some no-chance entrant just to make a potential superfecta race go, and saves the tracks and the state money by making refunds in the above scenario a non-starter.

Hayward also indicated that the Board is working on changes that will affect Pick 3, Pick 4 and Pick 6 wagering and, most significantly, a rule allowing uncoupled entries in all races. In addition to being a “purse-money-only” handle saver, it also increases field size and wagering in a significant way.

We queried the State Racing and Wagering Board Wednesday regarding multiple-race wagers and the status of allowing uncoupled entries. “It’s not soup yet,” we were told.

I’m aware that good food takes time but this stock has been cooking for some time. A change in the coupled entry rule has been at issue for as many as four years, when then NYRA executive Bill Nader, now with the Hong Kong Jockey Club, was the point man.

How hard is this, really? Senseless delay costs the state’s taxpayers money, although it’s good for job security for political appointees when they can say improvements are in the pipeline. Permitting uncoupled entries, now way past overdue, helps horseplayers and the state alike. Stop “protecting” thinking horseplayers from themselves.

Mine That Bird’s People Made the Right Call

SARATOGA SPRINGS, NY, July 1, 2009--Calvin Borel’s loss of his Kentucky Derby winner Mine That Bird as a future mount was inevitable and probably the best scenario for both parties.

Trainer Chip Woolley might have known that taking Mine That Bird far back off the early pace was the gelding’s hole card, but it’s quite another thing to execute the tack so effectively.

Call it right place, right time, or anything you please. But it’s doubtful whether any jockey who ever lived could have gotten as much out of the son of Birdstone as Borel did on the first Saturday this past May.

We’re not just referring to his death defying instincts and superb timing. And if you believe that description to be hyperbolic, go back to the videotape. That final sloppy sixteenth of a mile still seems unbelievable coming at the end of such an enervating run.

Borel’s exhibition, identified by many veteran observers as the best ride they had ever seen, completed a Cinderella story that began in the back of an old pickup 2,100 miles away and ended up a never to be forgotten piece of Derby history.

Del Mar and Joe Palmer’s Saratoga:  Two of a Kind

After my last change of address, I began putting books back on shelves at the new abode, only to realize that my copy of the fabulous Joe Palmer anthology, "This Was Racing," was missing. I was sick, because I knew the book was out of print, and I remained sick until just the other day when I was able to buy a replacement. I'll be more careful this time. The Palmer collection will not leave my side, even when I go swimming.

This always was the time of the year when re-reading Palmer was de rigueur, because the opening of Saratoga loomed. Palmer loved all of racing, but especially places like Saratoga. "A man who would change (Saratoga) would stir champagne," he wrote. ". . . It is a successful turning back of the pages, a stroll through the mirror, the slow drop of Alice down the rabbit-hole. It is a month of living in about 1910, though some visitors insist that the hotels take this too literally. . . Saratoga is slightly contagious, but you can't catch it at Jamaica."

Palmer was only 48 when he died, of a coronary, in 1952. He was, according to his friend and colleague Red Smith, "America's best-known racing writer, and in the opinion of many the best writer of sports anywhere." The last day he was alive, Palmer covered the races at the old Jamaica track, filed his column and went home. His final words were entertaining and informing readers of the New York Herald Tribune while his family, out on Long Island, was thinking about funeral arrangements. According to Smith, the prolific Palmer had another half-finished column in his typewriter the night he died.

Lucy of Overbrook Farm

The first time I talked to William T. Young's daughter Lucy was on the phone. She was in France with her husband, the famous trainer Francois Boutin, and I was in California, groveling for an interview so I could write a story about Arazi. The colt had blown their doors off at Churchill Downs, in one of the most electric performances the Breeders' Cup had ever seen, but not long afterwards he had undergone surgery on both knees, and I was hoping Boutin would tell me how that might play out going into the 1992 Kentucky Derby.

"You wanna talk to him?" Lucy said, not exactly out of earshot. Her father was tactful and soft-spoken. Lucy was brass and knuckles.

The voice from across the room spoke only in French, and none of the words sounded like yes.

"You ask the questions, I'll ask him, and I'll give you the answers," Lucy said to me. "OK?"

Through his wife, Boutin told me all I needed to know about Arazi, or at least all he wanted me to know. Even among friends, he was tight-lipped, and in the company of journalists, tight-lipped turned to taciturn. When the American trainer Ron McAnally, who was a friend, once asked Boutin an innocent question about Arazi, the Frenchman said: "You're beginning to sound like those journalists."

Provincialism Taking a Toll on Rachel, Zenyatta Match

SARATOGA SPRINGS, NY, June 30, 2009--For the current darlings of Thoroughbred racing, it’s game on. Unfortunately it’s not the game anyone wants to see.

In contemporary racing history, the game we’re seeing played out now goes back to War Admiral and Seabiscuit, the battle of East vs. West.

In the older version of the game, the man from out West, Charles S. Howard, believed he had the best horse in the country. So he shipped Seabiscuit everywhere, taking on and beating all comers.

Thoroughbred racing, college football and boxing were the most popular sports of their day. But it took the egocentric connections of the country’s two best horses a long time to reach a compromise and create a sports event for the ages..

Samuel D. Riddle was the owner of the Triple Crown champion, leading candidate for Horse of the Year 1937. Riddle believed it unnecessary to accept a challenge leveled by an upstart, some nouveau riche car dealer from California.

Finally, however, Howard pushed the right button, the public clamored for the matchup and the press played it up big time. The result was the most famous renewal of the Pimlico Special ever.

Racing’s Problems and Government’s Role

SARATOGA SPRINGS, NY, June 25, 2009--As one looks around the racing industry and the country as a whole, the game’s troubles are very much representative of current big picture realities. So far, this millennium hasn‘t been the wondrous new age it was purported to be.

So it’s not surprising, then, that what’s happening presently in regions that always have been considered America’s leading circuits, those of California, New York and Kentucky, are also reflective of larger issues. There’s no other way to say it: the racing industry in these states are in a shambles.

No need to rehash what everyone seems to know as to the root causes: A general lack of cohesiveness, uniformity, proactive vision and fat cat entitlement has stunted whatever growth was possible when the game reached its zenith of popularity in the 1970s.

Just as racing’s growth stopped, other professional sports leagues were becoming more aggressive, and niche sports started to gain in popularity. Then came the advent of convenience market wagering, the resultant growth of various forms of off-track betting.

Simulcasting arrived on the scene and almost immediately handle grew significantly across the board. Shortly thereafter, in-home wagering fostered more growth--inevitable cannibalization notwithstanding--aided by the burgeoning popularity of the Internet, the ideal tool for taking advantage of racing’s statistical orientation.

With states becoming more dependent on alternative forms of revenue raising, casinos became the new gambling reality. Native American gaming, with its huge tax advantages; a paradigm shift that turned the Sin City of Las Vegas into Disneyland for adults; Lottery expansion, and the exponential growth of cable television that helped kill the notion of night racing as choice entertainment, have all conspired to compel an industry to look at itself from the outside in.

Suppose They Both Run the Table

Los Angeles, June 30, 2009--You're supposed to play 'em one at a time, whether it's quoits or horse races, but I can't resist speculating about what those erudite Eclipse Awards voters will do with Zenyatta and Rachel Alexandra should they go their separate ways and not show up on the same day on the same track the rest of the year. That likelihood hit the game between the eyes on June 29 when Jerry Moss, the owner of Zenyatta, suggested in an interview with The Blood-Horse that his unbeaten filly, just as she did a year ago, will keep to California tracks as she readies for another California Breeders' Cup. Earlier, Jess Jackson, the principal owner of Rachel Alexandra, said in effect that it would take wild horses to drag his horse to California, where dirt is a dirty word.

As an aside, I never did buy into the canard that a Triple Crown champion is all racing needs to reinvigorate itself, not any more than a Zenyatta-Rachel Alexandra Armageddon would be a panacea for the sport's myriad problems. Whether it's showdowns or slot machines, racing is going to be in the short-term fix business for a long time.

A Lack of Leaders in Lotus Land

Los Angeles, June 23, 2009--Usually the Thoroughbred Times' annual recitation of top industry leaders goes in one memory bank and out the other. My overloaded cranial Rolodex is no longer large enough to retain compilations such as these, which make for a magazine story for a rainy day and are seldom worthy of a second reading. But this time this ranking of the game's high and the mighty struck me as geographically revealing:

There are scarcely any Californians on the list.

The Thoroughbred Times, after polling its editors and writers, goes 20 deep, from Jess Jackson to Joe Santanna, president of the HBPA, and I'm hard-pressed to find more than two entries who can in any way be claimed as from California. On the periphery are Jackson, the celebrated winemaker, and Frank Stronach, skipper of the beleaguered Magna Entertainment combine. Jackson might live in California, but his best horses seldom run here, purportedly because there are no dirt tracks left in the state. Stronach, who's No. 2 on the list, is a bona fide carpetbagger, who has residences all over the world, but none in California. Austrian-born, his North American business interests are centered just outside Toronto. He governs Santa Anita and Golden Gate Fields largely by phone, and emissaries. He is as California as a grand duke.