Tuesday, February 02, 2010

So Long to a Schmoozer

LOS ANGELES, February 2, 2010--The last couple of years, the main thing that bugged Larry Bortstein wasn't the dropoff in quality racehorses, or the direction the whole racing game had taken, but the loneliness in the press box. An incurable schmoozer, Larry looked around and found fewer and fewer co-workers to schmooze with. Racing isn't on the A-list for most news outlets anymore.

For Larry, the last two Breeders' Cups were Christmas come early, because the press box at his home track was chockablock again with old friends and colleagues. Like a tosspot who had one last quarter for the juke box, Larry didn't want to go home, and one night after the last Breeders' Cup race, he almost couldn't. It seems the only guy left with the key at Santa Anita couldn't believe anybody would still be up there, so he locked the door. I could just see Larry calling his wife Pat to tell her that he'd be spending the night at Santa Anita. Pat knew her Larry, and she would have believed him.

Larry called the next day to tell me what happened, how he and the few other stragglers had finally busted out. Next-day calls from Larry were routine. He might have a tidbit to share, he might want to make sure I hadn't missed something, or he might want an opinion about something he'd written. Larry protected his turf like any newspaperman would, but I remember he was the one who first told me that Fred Hooper had fired Ross Fenstermaker as the trainer of Precisionist.

The last time we spoke was the day after last month's Eclipse Awards dinner. He had attended, and I had watched at home on TVG, and he wanted to know what I thought. He had voted for Zenyatta for Horse of the Year, and passionately thought that her loss at the polls to Rachel Alexandra was a rank injustice. I didn't want to break his heart, or fool with a long friendship, by telling him that I had voted for Rachel Alexandra.

If Larry and I had had a greenback for every time we shared the press box at Santa Anita, or the ones at Hollywood Park and Del Mar, we could have given up this writing dodge long ago. When Larry went from newspapering to racetrack PR at Santa Anita in the early 1980s, it had to be the most difficult of career shifts. I don't know if he was legally blind, but his eyesight was so poor that he couldn't drive a car. So here was a transplanted New Yorker, where all you needed was shoe leather, the pavement under your feet, a subway token or a loud cab whistle, plunging into a sport of fine print in a land of wall-to-wall suburbs, hardly any of them connected by the same transportation system. It was impossible for Larry to read the Racing Form without getting an ink smudge on his nose. When it came time to write, he'd plant his Coke-bottle glasses on his forehead and you could see his breath on his laptop screen.

After a brief spell, he left Santa Anita's employ, but not its surroundings, to return to the newspaper game. He covered horse racing, and many other sports, for the Orange County Register, and was still working for them as a freelance when he died, of a pulmonary embolism, the other day. My guess is that when he left us he also had a dozen stories in the hopper for the California Thoroughbred. In recent years, you could check out the table of contents for that breeders' monthly and find Larry's name on about half of the articles. If they had paid him by the word, he could have bought the building. When California-breds won back-to-back races on Breeders' Cup Saturday last year, I thought Larry was going to tear the Santa Anita interview room apart. My guess is that he never had a sou on either horse, but he was anxious to put his arms around a good story for the magazine.

I first knew Larry when he was still in New York, where he wrote books about a variety of subjects--Joe Namath, the Olympics, Muhammed Ali, hockey and UCLA basketball. One of the first races Larry covered was Secretariat's win in the 1973 Belmont Stakes.

You work very long in this business and sooner or later you get under somebody's skin, and Larry was no exception. He wrote something Gary Stevens didn't like, and one night at a bowling alley the jockey knocked off Larry's glasses, threw him to the ground and jumped on top. The roly-poly Bortstein, more than 20 years Stevens' senior, at least doubled him in weight but was still on the bottom of a classic mismatch. It's a credit to both of them that after a handshake and an apology, they became friends again.

Seventeen years ago, Larry and Pat Bortstein were married in the winner's circle at the Los Alamitos track. Four chums from his barbershop harmonizing group were on hand for vocals. Through the years, I knew of no more rabid a movie-watching couple than Larry and Pat. If they liked a film, they'd watch it over and over again, and that's what they were doing less than two weeks ago with "O Brother, Where Art Thou?" at their place not far from Santa Anita. Larry was stricken, rushed to a hospital and never regained consciousness. Hey, pardner, it's a little late, but I need to tell you that I voted for Rachel Alexandra. Wherever you are, here's my chin. Take your best shot.

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Tuesday, January 26, 2010

Bad Idea Dept.

LOS ANGELES, January 26, 2010--In the 1980s, Bill Dwyre, who hired me and tolerated me at the Los Angeles Times, decided to go along to a Kentucky Derby and write columns and sidebars. Dwyre had been to the Derby before--I remember him interviewing the right trainer, Johnny Campo, several days before Pleasant Colony's win--but this time his first day in Louisville he was open to story angles. "They're having the post-position draw in a little while," I said. "I'm not going to do much with it, why don't you go and see what's going on?"

In those days, the draw was a low-key thing, almost an afterthought, that was held in the racing secretary's office or in the old Churchill Downs paddock. Dwyre returned to the press box about an hour later, with a scowl on his face. "Thanks," he said, "you just sent me to the most boring event I've ever tried to cover. Got any other ideas?"

By 1998, while a little late for Dwyre, Churchill Downs, after 123 years, decided that the draw needed gussying up. They vacated previous locations, revamped the format and dragged out a five-minute exercise for a full hour in the Derby Museum. That ESPN agreed to televise the whole thing live had more than a little to do with the changes. Trainers who didn't own neckties went out and bought some. Tour groups were allowed to gawk at the proceedings from the balcony, if the track deigned to let them in. What transpired was more boring than what Dwyre had seen, years before, and was also a whole lot longer. As television, the Derby draw made "The Gong Show" look like Emmy Award-winning stuff.

Poor Chris Lincoln was the first host for the new draw, and with too much to do, the show turned into a fiasco. There was so much confusion that they had to have a do-over. Instead of having the first pick for post position, Wayne Lukas was the 10th trainer to pick the second time around.

Actually, this was the only year of the new-fangled draw that anyone had anything interesting to write about, although much of it was at Lincoln's expense. Bill Shoemaker, watching at home in California, called Lincoln at his hotel to commiserate. Cheer up, Chris, Shoemaker said. At least you didn't misjudge the finish line and blow the race.

After more than a decade of ennui, Churchill Downs has announced that it's finally going to return to the traditional draw. They're even going to hold it at high noon and at the racetrack. The boldness of these strokes has me spinning. Nobody's said that the two-tiered draw was an annual invitation to watch grass grow. Churchill pulled the plug because ESPN pulled the plug on the telecast.

Bad ideas in racing are a quarter a carload, and another one, incubating in the halls of the Breeders' Cup, is to discontinue the rotation of tracks and hold the event at a permanent site. Your first two guesses on that site should be Churchill Downs and Churchill Downs. Reportedly, Churchill might sign a 10-year contract to hold the Breeders' Cup non-stop. Since I worry about buying green bananas, I shouldn't worry about this, but there's still time for sanity to set in.

If a long-term commitment to Churchill is the Breeders' Cup's idea of atonement for two straight years at Santa Anita, I can think of better ways to pay for their sins. It is time for John Gaines to reincarnate himself, come back as an orangutan and shake some sense into the organization. There are still some addle-pated Californians who think that Santa Anita should be the permanent location for the races. But after what's happened with Pro-Ride there this rainy winter, and what's going to happen to the Santa Anita surface after the meet ends, California redux is too much of a crap shoot even for the Breeders' Cup. Del Mar has temporarily lost ground in its aspirations as Breeders' Cup host solely because organizers need to take a deep breath after a couple of years of synthetics.

I don't know what's happened to Gaines' seminal philosophy of moving the Breeders' Cup around so fans all over the country can be entertained. Granted, Woodbine and Arlington Park got lucky with the weather, Monmouth Park was unlucky and Lone Star Park got mixed reviews, but Churchill for 10 years after this one? It's bound to snow at least twice.

Sherwood Chillingworth of Oak Tree at Santa Anita is in a terrible spot. As a tenant, he has no voice in what kind of new surface the track chooses, which leaves him in limbo as far as future Breeders' Cups are concerned. "I know only one thing," Chillingworth said. "We're the only one out there that's got the weather." In October and November, that is. And not counting Del Mar, that is. Santa Anita in 2012, over a dirt track that's a year old, sounds about right.

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Tuesday, January 19, 2010

Hold Your Horses

LOS ANGELES, January 19, 2010--One Horse of the Year voter, a journalist, had found the choice between Rachel Alexandra and Zenyatta so impossible that he turned over the task to his readers. Eighty-four of them preferred Zenyatta and 82 went for Rachel Alexandra, so that's the way the voter voted.

Zenyatta could have used more help at the ballot box, because the final count, announced during a dinner break at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel, was Rachel Alexandra 130, Zenyatta 99. Jess Jackson, majority owner of Rachel Alexandra, said later that he thought the outcome would be closer. "I was looking for a John Henry one-vote (result)," Jackson said, referring to John Henry's narrow Horse of the Year decision over Slew o' Gold in 1984.

The further the electorate got away from Zenyatta's electrifying win in the Breeders' Cup Classic, the more I sensed that most of them, swayed by an overall campaign, would swing over to Rachel Alexandra. But I wouldn't have bet that Rachel Alexandra would have scored majorities among all three voting groups. I thought her strength was in the NTRA, whose voters' list is top-heavy with racing secretaries from Eastern tracks, where Rachel Alexandra ran all of her races. But the NTRA group was the closest of the three, 28-25 in favor of Rachel Alexandra. From there, her margins grew group by group: the Daily Racing Form by 31-23 and the turf writers by 71-51. Only the turf writers make public their votes, so at least from them we'll get a look at which votes came from which pews in a few weeks.

In winning, and making Jackson and Steve Asmussen Horse of the Year owner and trainer, respectively, for the third straight year, Rachel Alexandra overcame a covert bias against Jackson, whose limited popularity was not an asset in this election. Most voters vote for horses and not owners, but unpopular owners seldom help their causes. Sheik Mohammed's Godolphin Racing won the Eclipse Award for top owner, but the owners of Zenyatta, Jerry and Ann Moss, lost by only five votes, and Jackson, whose purchase of Rachel Alexandra led to her season-long habit of beating males, wasn't even one of the three finalists. "I'm very outspoken," Jackson said on TVG. "I'm not to be applauded for occasionally saying that the emperor doesn't have any clothes on."

When Alex Waldrop of the NTRA made the Horse of the Year announcement from the hotel stage, Jerry Moss kissed his wife and tried to put on a happy face, but reading between the lines on that face you could see the disappointment in an owner who fielded a horse who's won 14 races without a stumble. "Zenyatta never lost," Moss said afterwards. "Nobody's beat her on the track. They beat us by proxy, in my opinion. I wouldn't trade positions with anybody, and I'm looking forward to (a race against Rachel Alexandra)."

Unlike last year, that will likely come, but later rather than sooner. A member of Asmussen's division at the Fair Grounds, Rachel Alexandra is hardly revved up. By contrast, Zenyatta has had some solid workouts at Hollywood Park, where trainer John Shirreffs is based, and she is likely to run once at Santa Anita before appearing in the Apple Blossom Handicap at Oaklawn Park. Rachel Alexandra is not likely to have run her first race of 2010 by then.

Zenyatta lost points with Horse of the Year voters because all of her 2009 races were in California, on synthetic tracks, whereas Rachel Alexandra, winning eight times, all on dirt, hit the same track only once. If Moss is true to his word, Zenyatta's homebody days are behind her. "We like to travel, John Shirreffs likes to travel and Zenyatta travels well," Moss said. "We're looking forward to the road, and running on dirt."

After two years at Santa Anita, the Breeders' Cup returns to Churchill Downs and a dirt surface this year. They'll never do it (think of how long it took them to adopt color-coded saddlecloths), but the time has come for the Breeders' Cup crowd to strike the words "World Championships" from its branding. Historically, it's just not so. Twenty-six years on, there have now been 15 Horse of the Year champions who either didn't win or didn't run in the Breeders' Cup Classic. Rachel Alexandra is the eighth national champion who didn't run in any Breeders' Cup race. At election time, Eclipse voters, most of them, have shown a predilection for a body of work rather than one big afternoon in the fall. They're throwbacks, in a way. They still value the races that meant the most before the Breeders' Cup came along.

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