Tuesday, July 14, 2009

Consultants by the Carload

Los Angeles, July 14, 2009--My best friend, who lives near St. Louis, and I are always talking about our favorite "sleeper" movies. You know, the films that don't get much public attention or critical praise, or earn much money, but are highly entertaining just the same.

One of the pictures that's been on my "sleeper" list for a long time is "The Last Time I Saw Archie." In some curious casting, Jack Webb, who also directed, tried his hand at comedy opposite Robert Mitchum. Somebody must have thought, how could a movie starring the two sleepiest-eyed actors in Hollywood not be funny?

Webb, not capable of much else, played Sgt. Friday in khaki, while Mitchum, in a laid-back version of Sgt. Bilko, walked around an Air Force base with a clipboard and a sharp pencil, which convinced everybody, including the officers, that he was in charge. It might be a small genre, but "The Last Time I Saw Archie" is my favorite consultant movie.

All racing needs is one more consultant, and that's what reminded me of "Archie." One of the differences, I guess, is that consultants don't carry clipboards anymore. They don't want to be confused with efficiency experts. They've moved on to bespoken three-piece suits, philosophical platitudes, and gobbledygook. When racing needs one, which seems to be all the time, it's not hard. They're on every corner.

I've always been wary of consultants, perhaps because I've never been paid to be one. At cocktail parties, they make me nervous. They seem to be working the room with their eyes, counting the olives in the martinis and trying to come up with the average age of the waiters. Many of them, in my judgment, sniff around for a while, take a survey or two, and then issue a white paper which contains (a) what the client already knows, but in highfalutin language; (b) what the client wants to hear; and (c) a dash of what the client hopes he wouldn't hear. The one thing an army of consultants has never told racing is that it's on life support. You say that, and you don't get asked back in a couple of years.

Consulting can be quite lucrative. In 2007, Frank Stronach's total compensation at Magna International was $70.6 million--but only $215,000 of that was base salary and $40.6 million was for consulting. Frank Stronach consulting Frank Stronach is a bad case of double exposure. For three years in the 1990s, when Kenny Noe was running the New York Racing Association, he collected his salary as well as an estimated $586,000 for consulting fees.

One of racing's early consultants was Bill Killingsworth. When a group of investors decided that Birmingham, Alabama, deserved a race track, Killingsworth was called in. He had already made the rounds at a few other tracks. Killingsworth estimated that the Birmingham market would be good for $1 million a night in handle. After that first, interminable meet mercifully came to a close, the average nightly handle was $359,000. They spent $84 million to build the joint, and lost another $50 million at the races. They did not stay in business long. One of the biggest mistakes, a simple thing, was calling the track the Birmingham Turf Club. Many blacks, who made up more than half the population of Birmingham, thought that it was a private club, not a race track.

"Remington Park, Canterbury Downs, Birmingham and Prairie Meadows are architectural remnants and relics of the age of Bill Killingsworth," Stan Bergstein wrote many years later in the Daily Racing Form. "(Killingsworth was an) MIT whiz who preached the gospel of grandeur just as the television screen was dictating that showy spaciousness no longer was needed for racing prosperity."

I checked the roster of speakers for the Jockey Club Round Table next month at Saratoga Springs, and didn't spot one consultant, which is unusual and a blessing. The snooty Round Table is as close as racing can come to a state-of-the-game confab. Several years ago, Rudy Giuliani was the speaker du jour. Racing was not far removed from the pick-six scandal at the Arlington Park Breeders' Cup, and Giuliani, fresh from the 9/11 attacks as mayor of New York City, had launched a consulting firm and was the perfect white knight for a sport in bad need of an integrity facelift. I've heard that it cost more than $1 million to buy Giuliani's name, reputation and firm. At the Round Table, Giuliani's farewell before he cashed the last check, he issued a laundry list of jeremiads that have largely been ignored. Some felt that the mayor mailed it in, as though that would have made any difference. Giuliani's remarks, somebody wrote, "might read like an introductory lecture in Business Ethics 101."

Voguish in American racing are London-based consultants. It is veddy, veddy chic. NYRA has one. So does the Breeders' Cup. If Saratoga needs a consultant, the souls in hell need another log on the fire, but NYRA has been told that its wooden barns won't do. Funny, but Saratoga had trainers with 3,000 horses applying for 1,800 stalls this year.

According to the Paulick Report, the Breeders' Cup was led to its British consultant by the owner-breeder Satish Sanan, who had heard about the international outfit through Malcolm Glazer, principal investor in the Tampa Bay Bucaneers and Manchester United, the New York Yankees of English soccer. Advised to keep its strategic planning committee, the Breeders' Cup has reportedly disbanded it instead. Chairman of the strategic planning committee was Satish Sanan. Casey Stengel gets credit for saying it first: "Can't anybody here play this game?"

Comments (2)