Numerology - by Robert Laurence

Blood-Horse Staff — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 13:38:00 GMT

Let me tell you a story: I was out of town over the President’s Day holiday, and when I returned home, I was curious about who had won the Southwest Stakes (gr. III) at Oaklawn Park. I like the looks of this horse Old Fashioned and wanted to see if he’d taken a step toward the Derby. Now, I’m not wired at home—more about that later—and had missed the paper, so what to do, other than wait for next week’s edition of The Blood-Horse? I thought I’d call Oaklawn. The conversation went like this:

OP: “Hello. Oaklawn Park.”

RL: “Could you please tell me who won the Southwest Stakes yesterday?”

OP: “Hold, please.”

I’m put on hold. Music plays. I drum my fingers on the kitchen table.

OP: “Did you mean the featured race on Monday, not yesterday?”

RL: “Yes, I’m sorry. Monday.” (One of the maladies of the retired life is that one never knows for sure what day of the week it is.)

OP: “5-3-6-7.”

RL: “Oh, I’m sorry. I don’t know the numbers. Do you have the name of the winner?”

OP: “Hold, please.”

Music. Finger-drumming.

OP: “Hello? The name of the winner was Old Fashioned.”

RL: “Thank you. Goodbye.”

OP: “Goodbye.”

“5-3-6-7.” I sat at the table and contemplated this answer. I could think of no other sport in which you’d get such a response. “Hello? Texas Stadium? Who won the game yesterday?” “The team wearing red; I’m not sure where they were from.”

Hardly.

Well, OK, maybe at some small-time drag strip, but Oaklawn is not small-time. Smarty Jones ran here. Curlin ran here. Azeri ran here. And, OK, maybe for some small-time races, but the Southwest is an acknowledged Derby prep. And, OK, maybe for some teams, competitors, or horses, but Old Fashioned is a legitimate Derby threat; Haskin had him at No. 1 on his “Derby Dozen.”

No, the answer “5-3-6-7” must be unique in this circumstance to horse racing.

And “5-3-6-7” has, I think, something to do with how horse racing presents itself to the public and something to do with the future health of the game.

Obsessive readers of “Final Turn” may know that I am not a bettor; I’ve written about that here in the past. And hence not typical of the horse racing fan. And God knows I’m an oddball in my inability to find the results of a race online faster than I could have dialed the phone.

Still, there’s something to be said for packaging the sport for me, or at least for those like me. That’s the way most people enjoy football or basketball or NASCAR or the Olympics or golf or curling. OK, forget curling—you have to be a complete fanatic to watch curling, and no one bets on the matches. But if horse racing doesn’t want to end up with popularity somewhere around that of curling, it had better do something about the way it’s packaged and do it quickly.

We have exactly one race that 80% of Americans care about, and, with careful packaging, the races leading up to that one could become popular. But it is not careful packaging to reduce the results of the race to “5-3-6-7.” The last thing we need is to take the horses out of the game and leave only numbers behind. There are players at Oaklawn who never watch a live horse race, merely pulling a lever to bet on a race that has already been run. If that’s the future of the game, count me out.

Am I making too much out of all this? Perhaps. It was one phone call to one track about one race. Maybe it was a day with a temp answering the phone. Maybe I caught someone on a bad day who knew who Old Fashioned was and how important the Southwest was. Maybe I put her off-stride by getting my days mixed up. Maybe no one cares anymore about people who phone for information like that, when anyone—well, almost anyone—can get all the information he or she needs online.

Maybe. But for me, Old Fashioned was not just the five horse in the ninth race. He and his cousins are the reasons I follow the races, and horse racing needs fans like me, too. The future of the sport must not be just “5-3-6-7.”

Robert Laurence is retired from teaching at the University of Arkansas Law School and now looks after equally retired horses near Hindsville, Ark.

Subsidize or Downsize - by Robert Laurence

Blood-Horse Staff — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 13:45:00 GMT

I don’t gamble. Shoot, I don’t even fill out a March Madness bracket. I do follow the games to see how the seedings play out. The win-or-go-home format makes irrelevant that great artifice of the gambler—the point-spread.

I have no high-minded, moral principle against gambling; I just never caught the bug. I recall playing golf in my college days, when someone in the foursome said, “Let’s put something in the pot to make it interesting. ”Make it interesting? How much more interesting than trying to run a 7-iron shot against a crosswind onto a summer-hard, backward sloping green? Any more interesting than that, and I’d collapse under interest-overload.

I don’t bet, but I do like to watch Thoroughbreds race, whether across the south pasture, running for the sake of running, or around an oval for a handsome purse. Has there been a better match than Curlin versus Rags to Riches, head-to-head, eye-to-eye, for the length of the stretch at Belmont? Pick your sport, any sport, and beat that. Maybe, for some, racing is more interesting if the mortgage payment is on War Pass to show, but for me, the running is enough.

I also don’t know much about Kentucky politics. I have no opinion on why Steve Beshear disappointed the horse industry. I have no idea why some Kentuckians want to amend their Constitution and others don’t.

OK, so I don’t gamble and don’t know much about Kentucky. Still, maybe the observations of such an outsider can shed some light on the failure of the Kentucky casino bill. Here goes:

Horse racing used to have a virtual monopoly on legal gambling. It still does in some states, but by and large those days are gone, never to return. For good or ill, we live in a slot-machined country. And the truth is just this plain—for the heart and the buck of the typical gambler, horse races lose out to slot machines. Don’t ask me why, but people would rather drive to Indiana and play the slots than stay in Louisville and play the horses.

Patrons at Oaklawn will sit for hours at slot machines, betting on the outcome of a previously-run horse race, and will hardly bother to walk outside and watch the live races.

And if our game loses the gamblers in a match with slots, can it win the hearts and dollars of the pure sports fan? Sadly, no. Betting aside, most Americans care about just two races in the spring. Three, if the same horse wins those two. A few will tune in to watch a day’s worth of championship racing in the fall, though getting them to watch two days’ worth is problematic.

There are many reasons for this. First, the sport is still packaged first and foremost as gamblers’ entertainment. Second, our heroes and heroines don’t stick around long enough for the fans to know them. Curlin versus “Rags” was a once-in-a-lifetime event. Real Quiet versus Victory Gallop was three times for a generation. Affirmed versus Alydar, three times for a century. It’s as if Magic and Bird had played one game against each other in 1979 and never set foot on the same court again. Or Ali and Frazier had fought once and then retired to open a restaurant together. Connors versus McEnroe, again and again? Forget it.

If I’m right, and we lose to the slots for the gamblers and to NASCAR for the racing fans (God knows why; maybe it’s the hats), then it looks like one of two things is going to happen—either we face a downsizing of the Thoroughbred industry or we need a subsidy.

The gaming industry in today’s market is so darned profitable that they can give the state a cut, subsidize the Thoroughbred industry, and still run out of places to put the money they have left. What do they get? An air of respectability, maybe, and our industry’s fabled influence with legislators. What do we get? A direct conduit from the slot machines to race purses, thence to owners, thence to trainers, jockeys, breeders, and the rest of us hangers-on. There may even be some support for the retirement operations.

So, a subsidy, or we downsize to about five or six tracks, nationwide, and maybe a thousand new foals a year. I have nothing against subsidies. Lots of industries get them, directly or indirectly. But let’s be honest enough to admit that that’s what we’re doing—getting money that, if the market were left free and unregulated, would be going elsewhere. Let’s drop the smugness and sense of entitlement. We aren’t owed a cut of the slot machine take. We’ll turn the clubhouses into casinos, and run races that will barely be noticed by the players. We’ll take some of the money poured into the slots in order to keep our industry going. And we’ll hope that it will be enough.

It would help to say “please” in advance, and “thanks” at the end.

Final Turn : robert laurence

Numerology - by Robert Laurence

Subsidize or Downsize - by Robert Laurence