New York Horsemen, Racing Director Caught in Cost-Cutting Crossfire

SARATOGA SPRINGS, NY, March 12, 2010--While trainer Bob Baffert was being questioned on Tuesday’s teleconference relative to the condition of Lookin At Lucky, who makes his season’s debut tomorrow in Oaklawn Park’s Rebel Stakes, the interview was interrupted.

“Sorry, but I have to jump in here, it’s Bob Kulina,” vice president and general manager at Monmouth Park. After a brief friendly exchange, Kulina invited Baffert to send a string of horses to Monmouth for its upcoming purse-inflated meet.

“I want Pletcher’s barn,” quipped Baffert.

“You can have whatever you want,” assured Kulina.

This is known as kidding on the square. Kulina would love to have a string of Baffert horses on his backside. And, as everyone knows, it wouldn’t take much coaxing to get the Hall of Famer out of California and on an Eastern-based dirt racetrack.

Across the river, meanwhile, Director of Racing Paul J. Campo has the exact same concerns, only in reverse. He will have trainers lined up three deep looking for stalls when Belmont Park opens its summer meet. The problem, however, is where to put them.

Not Everyone’s Rooting for Monmouth Park

SARATOGA SPRINGS, NY, March 11, 2010--While most reasonable people without provincial interest are rooting that Monmouth Park has created a template by which racing will not only survive but even thrive in the future, the smart money is betting against.

Speaking on condition of anonymity, highly placed industry sources are telling HRI there is no way Monmouth Park can reasonably expect to double its handle, something it would need to do to remain viable, given a purse structure that will distribute an average $1-million daily.

The facet that seems clear given the new approach, accenting both quantity and quality, is that Monmouth should have little problem improving its live gate, drawing fans and bettors from the densely populated metropolitan area while New York’s horses are in Saratoga.

This makes sense in that the few tracks that are thriving in this country specialize. Saratoga and Del Mar are destination tracks, summer places to be for racing fans and bettors from America’s two largest markets.

While less of a destination track per se, Keeneland works because it owns the highest octane race meet in North America, racing for only three weeks each spring and fall.

And Oaklawn Park, meanwhile, with the exception of its impressive Racing Festival of the South concept, thrives not only because it’s become a racino but because it draws patrons from five states: Location, location, location.

Beyond Provincialism, Audacious Monmouth Plan a Blueprint for Saving an Industry?

SARATOGA SPRINGS, NY, March 9, 2009--If New York racing knows what’s good for it, and if the racing industry in general wants to grow instead of subsisting, withering and, eventually, disappearing, it had better wish Monmouth Park and New Jersey racing all the luck in the world.

Virtually since the day after hosting the Breeders’ Cup, Monmouth Park and its horsemen began thinking about a new model that would ensure its existence going forward. Like every other racetrack in this country, big and small, it’s in survival mode.

But that’s what happens when you fall out of favor, are no longer a part of the fabric, and betting revenue drops nearly 25 percent in the last two years. To be provincial about Monmouth’s grand experiment this summer would miss the point at best, myopic at worst.

This is bigger than whether Monmouth can effectively compete in a racing environment in which it finds itself surrounded on all sides by slots-infused competition. It is bigger than seeing how negatively Monmouth Park’s incursion into the high end of the “good horse circuit” negatively impacts Saratoga Race Course this summer.

And so all with a vested interest in this industry needs to root for New Jersey to succeed in 2010. If it doesn’t, there won’t be a 2011 in the Garden State. If it doesn’t, then the rest of racing has no future, either. Monmouth Park has created a new paradigm, a model that finally--finally--addresses the state of the modern game.

As Monmouth Park vice president and general manager, Bob Kulina, and trainer John Forbes, president of the New Jersey Horsemen’s Association, expressed so clearly on an NTRA conference call Tuesday afternoon, the public has spoken: “Racing has got to change.”

“We’ve gone from a local sport to a national sport with simulcasting,” explained Forbes. “Fans want larger fields and better horses. We decided to concentrate on the big picture rather than worry about the provincial aspect, focus on what the customer wants.

Rachel v. Zenyatta: Where’s the Network Coverage?

SARATOGA SPRINGS, NY, February 25, 2010--To paraphrase a convalescing Vito Corleone from Godfather I, who admitted to liking wine more than he used to, I feel the same way about the winter Olympics: Well, I’m watching it more, anyway.

Back in the day, I felt the same way present-day sports talkers feel: How modern era Olympics exist as a made-for-TV event, appealing to a contrived sense of patriotic nationalism performed by pro athletes, not the amateurs of yesteryear.

You could easily blame the old Communist bloc countries for that, especially the U.S.S.R., for subsidizing the Olympic program so their athletes could train full time to earn propaganda points they believed Gold medals provided.

Finally, when we sent Charles Barkley, Larry Bird, Clyde Drexler, Patrick Ewing, Magic Johnson, Michael Jordan, Christian Laettner, Karl Malone, Chris Mullin, Scottie Pippen, David Robinson and John Stockton to Barcelona to play basketball in 1992, all pretense of amateurism was gone forever.

The age of innocence is long gone, too, and so is the time we ask modern day athletes to perform athletic feats that once were the purview of mere mortals. It’s not so much that modern athletes are better, which they are, but technology has made the achieving of excellence that much more difficult.

Forget about whether you think that Snowboarding or the Biathlon or Aerial Skiing are legitimate sports. The more relevant question is why would athletes subject themselves to such risks.

Was there really a need for the world’s fastest luge run? And won’t there will be a point where humans cannot ski jump any farther, traverse a Giant Slalom faster or perform a quintuple axel from the time you leave the ice until the time you return?

Anyway, I was thinking about all this as I watched the Olympics last week and this on NBC when late last week it occurred to a friend of mine to ask: “Where are the ads for the $5-million Apple Blossom starring Rachel Alexandra and Zenyatta?

BIG 12 TOURNAMENT PREVIEW

PROJECTED FINAL FOUR:
Kansas, Kansas State, Missouri and Texas

THE WAY WE SEE IT:
The NCAA committee will probably hand out invitations to seven Big 12 schools, but can any of them be trusted in this event? KANSAS does arrive with some gaudy offensive and defensive numbers but their rusty 2-11 ATS mark with 3 or more days of rest this season is cause for concern. So is their 1-5 ATS record over their last six tourney games. After last year’s opening round loss to Baylor, expect the Jayhawks to be all business. HC Bill’s Self’s 14-3 ATS post-season log against a foe off a SU dog win ensures that.

SEC TOURNAMENT PREVIEW

PROJECTED FINAL FOUR:
Kentucky, Vanderbilt, Tennessee and Mississippi State

THE WAY WE SEE IT:
KENTUCKY enters as the No. 1 seed for the first time since 2005 and we’ll look for them to continue their dominant play in this event. Since 1992, the Wildcats are 38-8 SU and 31-13-2 ATS, including an amazing 28-8-1 ATS as favorites of more than four points in this tourney. The top rebounding team (+10.6 margin) in the land also brings the nation’s 7th-stingiest Defensive Field Goal Percentage (36.1). That combo is a formula for SU and ATS success.

Blather and Billingsgate

LOS ANGELES, March 9, 2010--Frank Stronach has his good points and his bad points, although most of the time I find too much of one and not enough of the other. Satish Sanan is a much easier listen, as potty-mouthed as he sometimes becomes during his courageous regular appearances on Steve Byk's satellite radio show. I wonder whether Byk would allow less prestigious guests--and callers--to get away with the salty language that Sanan occasionally resorts to, but then I remind myself: This is the network that gives us a daily diet of Howard Stern, at approximately, what would you say?, $5,000 an f-bomb.

Maybe I'm a prude. During many of the years I worked for the Los Angeles Times, there was a corps of political-correctness police who were so rigid that we couldn't use the word "alien" unless it was someone from outer space; "Dutch treat" was verboten because it might insult the Dutch; and "paddywagon" was a no-no for fear those thin-skinned Irish would be offended. The late George Carlin talked about the 10 words you couldn't say on TV, but at The Times, there were hundreds of words, while acceptable in polite conversation, that couldn't be used in the newspaper. They even gave us updates--never subtracting words, but always adding--from time to time, and maybe, while I wasn't looking, I became a prude by osmosis.

A Winter’s Tale

LOS ANGELES, March 2, 2010--A visit to Santa Anita on a dank Wednesday reminded me of a hoary show-biz joke. The one in which a patron calls the theater box office to buy a couple of tickets for a turkey. "What time is the show?" the customer asks. "What time can you get here?" the guy in the box office says.

My wife Pat and I head for the Turf Club, and there's hardly anybody there, save Jimmy O'Hara, the faithful maitre d'. Business is so slow that the personable O'Hara, who never seems to age, has time to chit-chat. He would also have time for a few hands of gin rummy.

"A lot of our best customers are leaving us," says O'Hara, who also works Hollywood Park and Del Mar on the Southern California circuit.

Between us, we name Ed Gann, Mary Jones Bradley and Betty Mabee, just in recent weeks. Not only were they Turf Club regulars, you knew the table where you could find them. Mary Jones Bradley, who raced Cougar II and Greinton, to name two, was always camped out at the first table at the top of the spiral staircase that led downstairs to Santa Anita's Chandelier Room.