Comic No. 1: Pardon me, sir, but did you know you have a banana in your ear?

Comic No. 2: Sorry, can't hear you. I have a banana in my ear.

***********

Baggy pants No. 1 (holding his nose): Did you take a bath today?

Baggy pants No. 2: Why, is there one missing?


There is no hoary humor like that coming out of meetings of the California Horse Racing Board. The yucks from the racing board sessions are worse. You don't know whether to laugh or cry.

During the recent meeting, there was an appearance by Frank Stronach, the Magna panjandrum, who was ostensibly there in the best interests of agenda item No. 15, which said something about "future plans for horse racing at (Magna-owned) Santa Anita and Golden Gate Fields."

With Stronach, what you see is not what you get. You see a successful industrialist, a self-made man in pursuits other than racing. But then Stronach opens his mouth and all jabberwocky breaks loose. Is it shtick or is it Stronach's calculated way of begging every question? I have known him for a long time, and the one thing you can say about him is that his standup routine never varies. You ask Frank Stronach for the time, and he tells you how to make a watch. Most of the time, he has nothing to say and goes right on saying it.

Those around him are addled by his fractured syntax, and eventually they start to sound just like him. At the meeting, Stronach kept calling his racetrack company a store, but then later on he referred to it as a house. "Is it a house or a store?" said David Israel, a state commissioner who seems to relish picking apart Stronach's vocabulary.

"Have you ever seen a store with a house on the bottom?" Stronach said.

Keith Brackpool, chairman of the racing board, seems like a decent man. He wants to be fair and do the right thing. He tries to run a tight ship at these meetings, which can be marathons, and can wisecrack with the timing of Sir Norman Wisdom, an old comic from Brackpool's native England. But even Brackpool is no match for the Stronach non sequiturs. When Stronach's in the room, Brackpool is like Hannibal crossing the alps, without his elephants.

Stronach turned around a suggestion by Bo Derek, my favorite commissioner, that he had cost California at least five Breeders' Cups.

Stronach had cancelled the Oak Tree lease to race at Santa Anita in the fall, effectively leaving the Breeders' Cup in limbo vis-a-vis Santa Anita. So they gave 2011 to Churchill Downs.

Asked by Derek to justify this, Stronach said: "It was up to you people (the board). You hand out the dates."

"But there were no indicators that you asked for dates," Brackpool said.

"All you had to do was pick up the phone," Stronach said, "and say, 'Look, Frank, what can we do?'"

I saw this meeting as the day when the racing board drove a permanent wedge between it and Stronach. They were never on the same page, far from it, but now they never will be. There's no trust, no respect, no common goals. David Israel envisions Santa Anita as a "public trust." Every other phrase from Stronach includes the words "free enterprise." How can you have both?

Stronach set the tone at the start of the day, and it never shifted. It was he against them. They couldn't even agree on the rules of order. "You said I only had three minutes up here," Stronach said.

"Not for you," Brackpool said.

"You didn't say that," Stronach said. "You stressed that (it was three minutes)."

Brackpool, who had done his homework, reminded Stronach what he had said, and promised, at previous meetings.

"I know exactly what I said," Stronach said. "You make a lot of fun out of people who come up here. You seem to get great pleasure out of doing that."

At the end of the day, improbably, Stronach did a 360 and threw Oak Tree a reprieve, one last meet this fall. After that, sayonara. Del Mar may be in the wings, but that's another marriage not necessarily made in heaven. What we are seeing is the dismantling of California horse racing, brick by brick.

After the meeting, Sherwood Chillingworth, who runs the pardon-the-expression store at Oak Tree, told me about a bet that didn't happen.

The day before the racing board meeting, Chillingworth was talking with George Fasching, former mayor of the City of Arcadia, where Santa Anita sits.

"I've still got a hunch that you're going to get the (Santa Anita) dates," Fasching said.

"No chance," Chillingworth said. "I'd bet you a hundred dollars that we don't."

Fasching declined the bet, but clung to his instincts. Of all the bets at all the tracks in all the world, this was one that Chillingworth was glad that he didn't win.