Panel sessions from the 2003 Joint Annual
Meeting of HTA, Thoroughbred Racing
Associations and Racetracks of Canada
held in Hollywood, Florida, March 13-14, 2003

Coverage - And Non-Coverage - Of Racing

Mr. Chris Scherf: I'd like to ask everyone their favorite character in racing while they’ve been covering it.

Mr. Allen Gutterman: There’s one guy that’s coming to mind — he really was out of Damon Runyon. It’s probably appropriate because he goes back to my harness racing days, and he worked for the publication Sports Eye, and he was a handicapper and he hung around in the press box at Yonkers Raceway, and his name was John—he went under the professional name of Meshugas, which if you know Jewish at all means like “crazy” or “nuts,” and, that’s how he was listed in Sports Eye. He stammered, could not speak a whole sentence without stammering. There was a betting window in the press box in Yonkers those days, and the guys in the press box would take turns going up to the window and being the last one to make the bet. And when it was his turn, there was a real problem for the clerk manning the window, because he never could quite get out everything he wanted to say. Yonkers had a short stretch, so it was very significant what horse would leave, because the leavers would win like 70 or 80 percent of the time, the front runners, you could get up there and you could punch out a good maybe two second and a half or a seconds worth of tickets before the window closed, Meshugas would get up there and the horses would break out of the gate, and he’d go “F-f-f-f—forget it.”

Mr. Scherf: Anybody want to follow that?

Mr. Bill Christine: Dave Feldman would be mine. The late turf writer in Chicago who Neil worked alongside for a number of years. There are a hundred Feldman stories, but the best one I like is, I was actually involved. Codex had won the Preakness and mugged the filly Genuine Risk at Pimlico, and moved on to the Belmont, and Dave arrived in New York with $2,000 from a friend of his in Chicago to bet on Codex’s nose. There were rumors leading up to the race that Codex was not 100 percent, and Dave was debating all week whether to book this $2,000. Now it gets to be Friday afternoon, and we’re leaving the press box and I’m giving Dave a ride over to Esposito’s Bar across the street from Belmont, and he says, “Let’s go by Wayne Lukas’s barn, Codex’s trainer.” Dave says, “I want to take one last look at the horse.” This is about 5:00 p.m. on Friday, Lukas is still holding court with about 10 turf writers, and has his back to Codex’s stall. Dave and I get out of the car and I lose track of him, Dave, of course, also trained horses, he wore a lot of hats, and I’m looking around for Dave to leave, and I look over Lukas’s shoulder, and there’s Dave in the stall with Codex, on all fours, feeling his legs. And I hope the statute of limitations is up on this and Dave’s no longer with us anyhow, because if Lukas had turned around, he would’ve shot him. But now we get back in the car. Lukas to this day didn’t know that this had happened, and we continue driving over to Esposito’s, and I says, “Well, whaddya think, Dave?” and he says, “Sore as a boil. I’m booking the two grand.” And the horse did run that way.

By the way, Codex did not mug Genuine Risk, that was a myth creation.

Mr. Neil Milbert: I’d have to second what Bill said about Dave Feldman. I always consider in the annals of turf writers, Dave Feldman would be Ty Cobb and the late Teddy Cox of the Racing Form would be Babe Ruth. Any form of vice, women, liquor, gambling, anything in excess was Teddy’s lifestyle day in, day out, from the day he set foot on a racetrack, probably as a 12-year-old boy or 14-year-old boy, I think he was handicapping to the end. There are just a zillion stories. He was only in Chicago one year, but, his desk was alongside mine, and he’d take his dog Jocko out to the track every day, and then disappear, and the phone would begin ringing, and it was just a circus, it was a constant circus. Any story you want on Teddy, I could spend hours telling about my one year with Teddy Cox. And I see Mrs. Chenery there nodding her head; she knew him well.

Mr. Scherf: Anybody else want to jump in, or should we move to another —

Mr. Charles Leehrsen: Well, I worked with Joe Goldstein for a few years, and Joe is intimately associated with harness racing, in his Roosevelt days, he was the publicity director there during a time of, great growth and expansion. Then, he was working for the U.S. Trotting Association, and I was young and impressionable, Joe is still active and still working, he just had a 75th birthday party for himself last summer, but his big thing was how he often played his card. He’d bring a horse into midtown Manhattan, you know, and that would be a great way to get publicity. I remember when the Meadowlands opened he was going to let carrier pigeons loose to publicize how close the Meadowlands was to midtown Manhattan, and I had a crank-out and do research. I was this young publicity assistant, I was writing the history of carrier pigeons, for whom I’m not sure, but we were sending these out for immediate release, the history of carrier pigeons. He had maybe 20 pigeons and when they were let loose, only two found their way to the Meadowlands. The other 18 are still out there, but actually that got him more publicity than anything else, more than if all 20 had landed there.

Mr. Andy Beyer: I’ve spent much of my journalistic career writing about gamblers, and certainly the most interesting I’ve ever met was actually not a colorful character at all, but the biggest bettor in the world, a man I identified as Mr. B in Hong Kong. I did a series of articles about gambling in Asia, and met him when I was going out to Happy Valley for an evening. He sort of gave me his ratings, and he had a long shot run second in the last race, but that was kind of his only good opinion, and I called him up the next day and said, “How’d you do?” and he said, “Lemme look at the printout.” He said, “Well, you know, we were down a million going into the last race, but I hit that quinella for a million six.” This was the scale he bet on, I mean, he would bet more, on one six-race card than the entire handle, of a mid-sized American track, and it was quite a revelation.

Mr. Scherf: Okay, we’ll turn more to the point of, this panel coming together, and that is the coverage of racing, and where it is today. I’ve got a Sports Illustrated here, and we’ve got racing on the cover, it’s got three pages on the Santa Anita Derby, it’s got a page, in advance, for the Flamingo, and it’s got two pages on horse art. The only problem is, it’s a 1955 Sports Illustrated. So I guess the question is, how we got to where we are today.

I’d like to ask the panel in terms of the news that’s devoted at their own places, other than Steve’s with the Racing Form, do you think personally that your paper devotes enough coverage to racing?

Mr. Christine: Well, my paper, we still have two people, myself and Bob Mieszerski that are full time, we do nothing else; Bob’s primarily a handicapper, but he does do some writing, and like when I’m back here for the Florida Derby, he fills the breach at Santa Anita or whatever local track would be open. And between the two of us, we see every race that’s run every day in Southern California. I don’t imagine there are too many newspapers or regions that still have that distinction.

Mr. Gutterman: That’s true, and I’ve been in and out of Los Angeles for three years now and the LA Times treats racing with dignity and respect, and I think a lot of that comes from the sports editor, Bill Dwyer. He holds racing in high regard, and in fact we’re doing an LA Times Day with them, and we’ve bumped up the purse of the Jim Murray, from $75,000 to $400,000 this year. For those who don’t know, he was the great sports writer at the LA Times who loved horse racing. We’re trying to turn it into a graded stakes event, and we’re tying that into a scholarship program that they’re working with us on in May. We’re going to try to emulate some of the things Churchill’s done in that area. On the other hand in Los Angeles, an important paper is the Orange County Register, and they have let Larry Bortstein go. He has covered the sport for over 15 years for that publication, but because they needed to cut somewhere, they decided they no longer needed a full-time racing writer. That’s discouraging, and it shows a lack of respect for a significant sport and business in their area.

Mr. Steven Crist: Concerning the New York Times, where I worked in the 80s: Ben Liebman, his Albany Law School site had a really interesting article, I guess they did a lot of Lexis/Nexis searching, and they compared the amount of space that the New York Times did with the Belmont Park fall meeting in 1987 with what they did in 2002. Somewhat to my horror, Ben found that I had written 18,000 words about the Belmont fall meeting in the fall of 1987 and that, last year the Belmont fall meeting, between Bill Finley and Joe Drape, they squeezed in a combined 2,800 words on the entire meeting. So you’re talking about a reduction of, 80 to 90 percent in the coverage of racing, in the so-called newspaper of record in a major market, and that’s pretty discouraging. We all have our reasons, I guess I would always put at the top of the list, what I consider this massive historical mistake that racing made with television, when the era of sports on television began, everyone else said, “Great, let me put my product on television, that’s how I’ll build a market,” and everyone in racing said, “Oh, no, we’ll lose the admission and hot dog money.” You know what happens. Twenty, thirty years later, you have an entire generation of sports editors and executives who grew up without seeing racing on television, who don’t think it’s a major sport, and think it’s a fringe interest sport like, yachting or badminton rather than a mainstream sport. And that’s going to take a long, long time to overcome and turn around.

Mr. Bill Finley: Chris, everybody on the panel here loves horse racing, I’m sure everybody in this room loves racing, and there’s nothing any of us would like more than to see more and more coverage of it, but you know, I think our view is a little bit tainted. Even in the post-television era now, it’s getting worse all the time. You talk about 2,800 words, we didn’t write a single word on the Cigar Mile, a grade 1 race in the fall in New York. I pitched the story to them, as a major race, and also two other major races on the card, but there just was no interest in it. As much as we’d like to see it, sometimes we forget their viewpoint. Television ratings are very poor, and attendance is very poor. It’s obviously hard for them to justify, and the print media still gives it much better coverage than the electronic media. Just to give you an example, my stop before this was the Louisiana Derby, which again was a lot of my doing, saying this is a very important race, the two major three-year-olds in the country are running in it; I was there, a handful of other writers from out of town were there. They drew 5,000 people, and that just stunned me, and you know, my expenses to go there were in the neighborhood of $1,300. What other sport would send somebody, or what other newspaper would send somebody to cover a sporting event where 5,000 people were there, at a cost of, a thousand, $1,200, $1,300. I didn’t put that figure in my story, because I thought I’d have some explaining to do if I did. What are you doing there? 5,000 people at the Louisiana Derby, and I don’t mean to pick on Fair Grounds, they did a great job, but that number just blew me away when I saw that.

Mr. Milbert: I think that if people in racing who complain about coverage put themselves in the position of a sports editor, I think, they would see that racing gets probably about what it deserves. Most sports sections are shrinking with the economy contracting, at the same time you’ve had an explosion of more sports, I mean, NASCAR wasn’t on the radar screen, you know, in the era Steve was talking about, there’s just more news, more sports, and racing, becomes more and more marginalized sport on the spectrum. I don’t think, when you consider the inches that most newspapers devote to agate, to results and entries and so on, I don’t think you could persuade many sports editors that racing deserves more space in their newspaper.

Mr. Leehrsen: I think that’s very true. I work at Sports Illustrated, and last year we came within a hair of putting War Emblem on the cover. It was up for discussion, it was one of the things that could have been on the cover that week, or, probably a couple of times, after the Derby and before the Belmont and maybe even after the Belmont. We did cover those races and we did do a long, what we call a bonus piece on that before the Derby on the Irish trainer and the horse, who were coming over from Ireland last year; I’m not apologizing for Sports Illustrated. The coverage is there and the willingness is there in my area, and I think all these things are very situational, because they all depend on the people—the sports editor at the Times, the sports editor at the LA Times, the New York Times, you know, the people at Sports Illustrated. If this could be a reason for hope, I think we’ve reached a point of apathy, perhaps, on the part of these people rather than prejudice, and rather than pushing away, I think enough time has passed since the period when racing was becoming unfashionable, after the children of the people who made racing boom after the war sort of rejected it. That’s been our history.

It became not a thing to do anymore, and not one of the things you’d consider doing on a Friday night or Saturday night, when you think, “Should we go out to the movies? Should we go out to eat?” People completely stopped having the racetrack, on that, lazy Susan of options that they were thinking about. So I think we’re past that point now, and I think minds are open now. Of course there are a lot of situations where that’s not true, it’s situational, but overall in the mainstream media, I think minds are open, and I think this Seabiscuit movie this summer is going to be a huge wave that the industry can ride. The young people I talk to about racing, I say, “Oh, I was at Aqueduct a couple weeks ago on a Saturday afternoon, where’d you go?” “Oh, I’d love to go there, love to go with you,” and they have this impression, this Seabiscuit picture of racing.

And now they’re going to get that delivered to them on July 23rd or whenever, and there will be this message that racing is cool and fashionable, that it’s not what your father used to do, because now it’s what your grandfather used to do. I think that it is breaking, and I’m sensing that there’s not a hostility towards racing where there used to be, but at worst, an apathy, and at best an openness and an interest in it.

Mr. Milbert: Bill touched on a couple things and Andy touched on two things that I think are very important. For instance, when I came down here, I opened up the Miami papers, and the lead sports story was about the NCAA women’s tournament, what had happened to Connecticut. Now go back to 1955, women’s sports were non-existent. Look at the expansion in the other sports. Basketball, hockey, baseball, and yet the news hole, as Andy pointed out, has shrunk.

I think another factor is the expansion of racing season, because suddenly it’s ceased to be an event, it was kind of an omnipresent thing. And when that happens, sports editors started looking at things and saying, “Well, these aren’t very important, these races in the winter,” and then kind of that mindset carried over to the summer. The experience I’ve had at my paper, we no longer have anyone fulltime doing racing. I’m like Bill, I do college basketball and I do some hockey. But I found that mega-events such as the Kentucky Derby, the Triple Crown races, I shouldn’t just say the Derby, the Breeders’ Cup, we get tremendous, tremendous amounts of space then. It’s whatever you write, everybody is very eager. I say everybody, our editors are very, very eager to have in-depth stories, but that window closes very, very fast. Our coverage of the Arlington Million has dwindled greatly over the years, simply because it’s kind of here every year. The Bears are starting camp now. The seasons, that’s one other thing, not only have sports expanded, but in the 50s, NBA basketball was a marginal sport and it was over by this time of the year; first of April. Basketball, hockey, whatever, now both those sports go into June. Pro football goes into February; that used to be over early in December. The colleges, the number of bowls, it just proliferated, and all that has hurt racing coverage.

I think like Bill, I have to, when I go in, I try to sell races. The Illinois Derby, I’ll have to go in and sell, say, “Look, War Emblem, we might have a second year in a row,” things like that. When Hawthorne was positioned in the fall, I used to have to try to go in and sell the Hawthorne Gold Cup. We had Awesome Again, the winner of the Hawthorne Gold Cup, go on to win the Breeders’ Cup. Black Tie Affair ran there. One of our problems in Chicago is we don’t — unlike New York and Los Angeles — we don’t have starts regularly. They’re in and out, so it’s very difficult unless you have somebody like Carl Nafzger with Unbridled or Ernie Poulos with Black Tie Affair, you don’t have the people day-in day-out, like Bill does, Bobby Frankel, Lukas, they’re all right there. With us, the stars of racing are located elsewhere.

Mr. Christine: One of the problems, Chris, with the tracks, is that sometimes they don’t know when they’ve got a good story, and they should be more aggressive in pitching stories. Some recent examples, at Santa Anita, of all places, where I think the PR department is in swift decline, they’ve only had two positives to what has been pretty much a dismal race meet, or at least the two biggest positives they’ve was the re-emergence of Julie Krone, before her spill, and the hiring of Chris McCarron. And they didn’t make an attempt to run with either one of these stories. The McCarron story, I had to call Jim McAlpine in Toronto at four in the afternoon and beg him to fax me a release that McCarron had been hired. You can count on one hand the number of jockeys that have risen to this level at racetrack management, probably can’t even fill up one hand. They had a tremendous story here, and didn’t haul McCarron out, a very well-spoken, popular guy, Hall of Fame rider who’s recently retired, he should have been at a podium someplace that day, he’s yet to appear at a podium out there, and it’s been a week to 10 days since he’s been hired. This was one of the best stories they’ve had at this meet, and they seemed to run away from it.

Mr. Leehrsen: That’s true, I almost never hear, anyone approaches us with a story from racing, and we do a lot, on a little basis at Sports Illustrated, of racing coverage. This week we have, in our Records section, we have the Julie Krone injury and the Lafitte Pincay injury and we have a note in our Beat column about Bouchard, the harness driver, winning 10 races in a row. The week before we had something about the trainer controversy here at Gulfstream. We stay in touch with this, but, I found out watching television that Steven Spielberg bought into this horse who’s a Triple Crown hopeful. I’m still waiting for a person from the industry to tell me about that. I did get an Ellen Harvey story on harness racing. She e-mailed me about the Bouchard thing, but that was so rare, and most of the stuff that’s in there, we’re finding it out ourselves. No one is making us aware of it.

Mr. Milbert: I think I’d be kind of remiss, since this is a combined meeting, if I didn’t address some of the problems of harness racing. The biggest problem there is the events are at night, and nighttime is deadline time. For example, Balmoral Park has these American National classic races, when I try to sell those to our editors, it’ll be “Well, okay, but keep it short, cause we’ve got to get this stuff in.” They’re usually on weekends, which unfortunately for us is our biggest press run, so Saturday night they push up the deadlines, and it’s a battle to get a story in. If I get about six inches in, which means you’re really cutting on the story, you’re doing a bare-bones story and grabbing the quote as best you can and going from there, and that factors against advancing stories because they’ll say, “Well, you advance this thing and—we might not know the result,” because naturally a track will try to stage its best event late at night. We have had some success; if we have stars come in, generally I’ll say, “Well, look, there’s still magic names like the Hambletonian, this horse won the Hambletonian or was runner-up,” I think when you can identify a local participant, at least at our place, with a major event, some horse who’s coming in who’s been connected either to Kentucky Derby, the Hambletonian, Breeders’ Cup—then it has an impact. They say, “Oh, that horse was in the Breeders’ Cup. In the Hambletonian? Yeah, how’d he do? Second? Oh, yeah, maybe you should do something,” is the reaction I get.

Mr. Christine: When I was growing up, I found that I actually started going to harness races before I started going to Thoroughbred races, and I was fascinated by it, and one of the reasons was, the New York Daily News and the New York Post had many more editions in those days, and so there was a bulldog edition which would have on the back page a picture from the feature race at Aqueduct or Belmont, and in the morning that back page would have a picture of a finish from Roosevelt or Yonkers, that’s how big harness racing was in those days, and Stan can attest to that, and when I was growing up, I could go to Roosevelt Raceway, there’d be 50,000 people at the International Trot races and things like that, and over the years, for a variety of reasons, which no need to get into now, but, as other sports proliferated, and particularly in New York with expansion, when the Nets came about, when the Islanders came about, there wasn’t an expansion of the sports section, it was just the same thing we had talked about, that less space went to racing. Not only that, but the guy who was covering harness racing at that time, a gentleman named Wes Gaffer, was assigned to cover the Islanders, so not only weren’t you going to have somebody on the beat, but you weren’t going to get that space anymore, and that was, I think, one of the things that led to the swift decline of harness racing.

Mr. Bill Finley: Chris, I want to elaborate on what Charlie and Bill said, too. I think the writers up here are on your side, but it’s not always up to us, it’s us going to the editors. But I can tell you basically what sells and what doesn’t.

And Bill, you do a lot better than me; Santa Anita never contacted me, and I was on a list to be contacted and just never heard a word, which was a horribly blown opportunity, because I could've absolutely written a story about Chris McCarron, but I don’t know what happened there, that was a mess. Just like Charlie said, and I’ve done several of these panels before, the easiest thing to say is, contact us, be in touch. I got to be at a basketball tournament next week, I don’t necessarily know what’s going on, and there are some people that do quite a good job of that, but it never hurts to do that, all they can do is say “No.”

Personality pieces, those can sell. There’s still so many, I mean, Julie Krone, her accomplishments in and of themselves are very modest compared to other jockeys, but she’s a personality. You know, personalities you can always sell.

You can sell anything that’s construed as a big event. In New York, anything we do now, any horse racing story, of a race, I guarantee you’ll have a link to one of three things. The Triple Crown, Saratoga, or the Breeders’ Cup. The Brooklyn Handicap, in the middle of the summer, some $250,000 race, really just sort of sits out there. Doesn’t mean anything to anybody anymore. But those sort of things, you know, can still be sold, but it is a matter of, letting us know, getting in touch with anybody, you know, it sounds to me like if people, like Charlie had gotten 20 more phone calls in the last couple years, there would’ve been maybe four or five more things in Sports Illustrated, but it’s surprising how little we hear that from people, and how little contact. Carol Hodes at the Meadowlands contacted me just a week ago and gave me a very good story idea, and it may or may not happen, but it’s something about a harness driver that I had no idea the guy existed, anything about him, and come Hambletonian time I’m going to try to, do a story on him. If it works, she was very successful in doing her job to get that in there, but those kind of phone calls don’t come about that often, and you know, I don’t want to get too far off the point, but I know there’s a lot of harness people in here, and your struggles are obviously so much greater than the Thoroughbred people, but the one thing that I’ve never understood about harness racing, and forgive me if I’m just missing a point here, is why they’ve never developed a viable Triple Crown series. That would be the easiest sell in the world. When you have your horses that are nominated to some races and not others, and a horse that wins the first leg of the Triple Crown can’t run in the second, when the race is like the Meadowlands Pace, which is clearly, the biggest 3-year-old race in the country but not part of the Triple Crown, that’s damaging. Just that name alone, if I can go to a sports editor and say, “You know, it’s the harness racing Triple Crown,” and have it mean something, I could probably, cover that, but forgive me, I can’t even name the races. I mean, the Cane Pace or something like that, it’s got no shot of getting that. Is it still at Freehold? I don’t even know. That’s right in our backyard. There’s just zero chance of getting that in there, because again, it just sort of sits out there by itself. I mean, if I could give one piece of advice to that industry, you must develop some sort of Triple Crown and, from a media standpoint, it really would work if you hyped it up and got it going, but your Triple Crown is a mess right now.

Mr. Beyer: One of the things that our sport does have going for it is that there are a lot of great stories in racing. That’s the reason I’ve loved what I’ve done for the last 30 years. And the colorful characters, these interesting owners who have, connections with racing just by virtue of owning a horse or two. All the people are more approachable than just about any other sport, and I just think that racetrack publicity should exploit this and find these ideas and, and then contact or buttonhole their local owners and say, to their local media, “Hey, we’ve got this great story for you.” But they almost never do. When you think of the mass of press releases that come out of racetrack publicity departments, what’s the last time anyone has ever written anything, or gotten a feature idea based on something that the PR department, put out? I mean, it almost never happens, and I really think that, you know, publicity operations should very much rethink, what they’re doing, other than wasting all this paper.

Mr. Scherf: I was fascinated a few weeks ago by a column you did on Cindy Lauper, which seemed very un-Andy Beyerish. I wondered how that came about.

Mr. Beyer: Somebody had mentioned that she had heard that she had a racing background, and it was, pulling teeth to get to her, but it was worth doing, it was a good story. There are so many. A few years ago I did a piece on Burt Bacharach. He loved racing, he was extremely accessible, and he loved talking horses. You have lots of owners who, in their main professional activities, may be very unapproachable from the press, but they love to talk horses. I think they’re just a lot of unexploited opportunities out there, and if the local, the horse racing writer or the local media aren’t getting to them, then the PR departments should, facilitate.

Mr. Finley: I think we have to get a plug in here for both Harness Racing Communications and the NTRA and its predecessor, Thoroughbred Racing Communications, because I remember Steve, Chris and I talking, we were both very skeptical about Thoroughbred Racing Communications, and we thought it was a silly idea, but over the years they have proven to be very, very valuable. Harness Racing Communications pitches some good feature stories and Thoroughbred Racing Communications, if you’re stuck for a number or a statistic or anything like that, it’s, they’ve been very, very helpful, and I think that’s been one positive I’ve seen over the years; I was very skeptical at the outset, and they’ve really made a believer out of me, and I think a lot of other people as well.

Mr. Christine: Reflecting just quickly on what Neil said about post times at night, my paper made a deal with Los Alamitos, the Quarter Horse track in Orange County, about a year or two ago. And our end of it was, we’ll give you more space if you move up your stakes race on Saturday night so that we can deal with it in our main edition, and they did and we did.

Mr. Scherf: I have a question. When I first came into racing, and this is almost ancient, I guess, but at these kinds of conventions, the biggest topic was always should racetracks even have a marketing department. We had tons of publicity in the newspapers, we had great coverage; marketing was put out as a Holy Grail. Eventually, I think we all bought into marketing, and yet I’m sitting here now going, “We want to be more than a niche sport,” but I open the paper every day and in most locations, I’m not seeing a word about horse racing, and I’m not sure how we can ever move out of being a niche sport if we can’t get back into the newspapers on a regular basis. Do you think we can, or has that ship sailed on us because we weren’t on TV or because—I wonder about editors, too. I know, I mean, Bill Dwyer at the LA Times has been around a long time, you write a lot, Andy wrote under George Solomon, but as you turn over editors, Bill, are we going to see even less racing coverage in the future possibly from your papers?

Mr. Christine: Well, I mean, you know, the ship has completely sailed in terms of what the coverage was 50 years ago. There’s this widespread nostalgia for those days and a belief that “gee, if we could just come up with a few more cute feature stories, racing would be okay again.” Forget it. There are such a number of entertainment options; the growth of sports, everything else, and it’s never going back any more. The stands in the coliseum-size racetracks are never going to be filled again. I mean, that’s gone, that’s over, let’s move on.

When you talk about publicity and marketing departments, the one thought I have is that, I think that racing does a horrendous job of corporate communications. Maybe that’s an area that they should be thinking of instead of having three guys grinding out advances on tomorrow’s feature race. I mean, if you think of all the major business developments in this sport, the way that they’ve been handled by the tracks, corporate communications on behalf of Churchill and Magna and of every place that’s trying to get slots really could not have been worse. I think that racing could be getting a lot more coverage on the business pages than it is. The total national pari-mutuel handle of around $20 billion—that’s a huge number that’s bigger than the combined budget of every movie that’s made every year. Unfortunately, all the sports editors’ perceptions are, “Oh, it’s a dying game, and it’s six old men screaming at a TV monitor,” no, you know, it’s really not a dying game. People really like to bet on horses, and $20 billion is a ton of money, and that’s a message that this industry has done a horrendous job of getting out.

Mr. Beyer: As the sport changes and the big grandstands are no longer filled, your typical sports editor is going to look and say, “Geeze, you know, 5,000 people at Laurel, I mean, this is a dying game.” But if you say, it’s just changed, the money is coming in by different ways, people are betting at home, you can tell sports editors that it’s still got a pulse and is alive.

Mr. Gutterman: If that ship has sailed, we’ve all been sailing in another direction for a while. TVG is now part of life in California, and if I’m losing people at the track, I’m getting in the first year a pretty good dump of money at the end of the day from people who are sitting at home. I’ve always believed that convenience overwhelms everything else, and at least I saw it all my years in New York, and I am seeing it here in California, and we just have to keep moving, and we’re in that painful process now of redeveloping where we are. But there’s no doubt that people are watching us and people are betting us. Part of the TVG programming is on Fox Sports on big-time cable every single day from Hollywood Park from 3 to 5. TVG is not all that accessible right now unless you have a digital platform in certain neighborhoods, but with Fox Sports there are two hours a day of live horse racing, and it’s all very positive, very pro stuff, and interviews and making jockeys and trainers accessible and genial. As you’ve mentioned, there always are very entertaining and good, decent people, and they make a good impression for racing. So having racing on every day for two hours in Los Angeles, is the beginning of something new for us. And it is not to bypass anything you guys do; it just is going to make our business bigger and stronger.

Mr. Finley: But I think that misses the point, because, we all understand, horse racing is not a dying game. Because of all this money’s coming in. But, take today at Aqueduct. I mean, there’ll be absolutely nobody there, there’ll be not a single horse that means anything, yet an awful lot of money will be bet on this. But why should a newspaper cover that? I mean, there’s a lot more money being bet at the lottery, we don’t cover people betting the lottery. I mean, that’s not a sporting event in any case. There is nothing about that deserving of coverage in a sports section. It’s not a sport. It exists, I mean, we call it a sport, but Saratoga’s a sport, the Kentucky Derby’s a sport, but today at Aqueduct it exists merely for people who are inclined to want to bet on something on, horse racing. You can’t sell that as coverage, or anything that is a sporting endeavor. I would gather that, just guessing, that when Ball State plays Toledo in basketball, there’s an awful lot of money bet on that too, maybe even more than is bet on any one race at Aqueduct. But, that is not anything that I’m going to cover in the newspaper either, because it is of no interest to anyone other than maybe the gamblers who are in Las Vegas or elsewhere who are betting on it. So, if you just want to make the argument to a sports editor, “Hey, there’s $20 billion bet on this,” in front of 1,600 people today at Aqueduct, and they handled $8 million, well, fine, that’s great, it’s great for the business and everything, but it’s not going to get anybody at our newspapers to say “Go out to Aqueduct today and write a story on Glow Worm winning the 8th race.”

Mr. Christine: I think racetrack managements make peace with that, but for newspapers, entries and results and selections do sell newspapers. They still do. And that’s important. Last week the LA Times, for the first time, I guess, ever, somehow managed to slip through nine different people and the racing page, did not make the paper. It was just a total mess-up. And we got 600, 700 phone calls about it. Where was it? Is this going to be a permanent thing? The next day we got 600 to 700 phone calls because the handicap inadvertently had been left out of the paper. Bill Dwyer had said, “As bad as it was, a terrible thing that happens, it wasn’t a bad wake-up call to realize that sometimes we take this for granted.”

Mr. Milbert: 25 years ago, I think it was, we had a whole back page in our final edition would be devoted to Thoroughbred and harness racing, and of course that was done away with, but it was interesting what happened—in line with what Allen was saying—that came up at a Tribune meeting, a general meeting, when somebody said, “Why are we wasting all this space?” and the managing editor at the time, who was a proponent of horse racing, was from Australia, he said, “No,” he said, “We’ve charted growth, and we’ve grown 11,000 readers we can directly ascribe to that.” Now that was 25 years ago, but none-the-less, there are people out there who follow and who follow intently, and he said, “With just this daily page, you get 11,000 additional readers.”

Mr. Scherf: Along those lines, we can get information out and basic information—entries and results—are now being put on the Internet, and to some extent that’s an information source, not just with racing. The Internet competes with newspapers. And Bill actually writes for an Internet on ESPN, Dave Johnson writes a regular column for them, it’s another way of reaching fans, and I also know some tracks are using the internet as PR offices. Instead of putting out press releases, they are just contacting writers and things like that. Any general impression on any impact the Internet could have good or bad, on our sport and the coverage of it?

Mr. Crist: We’ve had a lot of experience with a Web site just building one out in the last couple of years, and we’re still a 98 percent hardcopy, two percent electronic business, but, that’s only going to change as the years go on. It’s great that 600 people called to complain when the Times didn’t run the entries and results, but I would bet anyone that within 10 or 15 years, no daily newspaper in America’s going to run entries and results. It’s completely inefficient. Does anyone in this room know someone who bets on a race and then waits until the next day’s newspaper to find out if they won? This idea that it’s important to put results in the daily newspaper is just absurd to me. We have thousands of hits on each track in America each day of people getting entries and results. In terms of the immediacy of the information, if papers are still going to allot the same number of inches to racing, maybe there’s an opportunity for more writing and more coverage, but I really think in this day and age that entries and results are a waste of effort as a bedrock of racing coverage in newspapers.

Mr. Finley: I would disagree with that only to the point that I can see exactly what Steve’s saying about entries and results, but there is still a need for people to do handicapping. The phenomenon that blows my mind is to go into a New York City OTB shop, where you have the most unsophisticated horseplayers in New York, and so many of them are holding the Post, the Daily News, and want to know who John DaSilva or Russ Harris likes in the 4th race today. They don’t need more information than that, I don’t see how they can make an intelligent decision and it’s not why I would like betting on the horses. I don’t think they can make the best elevated decision, but I don’t think that’s going anywhere. I’d be interested to know if anybody in the Philadelphia area, complained when the Philadelphia Daily News abruptly yanked all results, entries, and, handicapping out of their paper four, five years ago, just for the same reason. Some sports editor said one day, “Hey, there’s a lot of space you’re taking up, and only 1,100 people a day go to Philadelphia Park, why are we doing this?” I’m sure they got a lot of negative, nasty phone calls at first, but it’s died down and I don’t see that paper going out of business or anything. That would be a good test case, because that is a major newspaper that made this very draconian decision, and you might have to fear it has been done.

Mr. Scherf: Well, I go back to when Steve first went over to the racing beat at the New York Times. It was interesting that they were going to cut entries and results, and Steve and I had a conversation, because NYRA was up in arms about it, obviously, it was going to be decided at a higher level than Steve and I. It was a choice. You either get the agate or you’re going to get the 18,000 words on the Belmont fall meeting, and I strongly advised take the 18,000 words, it’s worth a lot more to the sport. I think there will be further regression of at least agate in newspapers.

A voice: I have a question for anyone who wishes to tackle it. Excluding the perspective of the ownership, or the patron or the bettor of either harness or Thoroughbred horses, what impact, if any, does the issue of integrity have from your perspective in terms of whether you’re interested in covering a particular story or horse or certainly, again, from the perspective of whether your editors wish to cover a particular story or horse? If it does have an impact, how do we change it?

Mr. Milbert: Well, I think integrity has an issue, but it’s a backlash issue. I mentioned we did a tremendous amount of writing on the Breeders’ Cup beforehand; afterward, we did a tremendous amount of writing on the Breeders’ Cup betting scandal. Now it’s very interesting, I spoke to a college group, college sports law students, and we discussed everything, I said “The biggest event probably in the history of Chicago racing was the Breeders’ Cup this last fall. What do any of you remember about the Breeders’ Cup? What will you take with it?” Hands shot up all over the place; “What do you take with it?” “How they fixed the races.” And that was the general consensus among all these kids, they were all nodding, I said, “Do you remember anything—“ “No, but they fixed that one race, that last race,” and that was the perception, all these words were written and yet the scandal was there. I don’t think it’s so much the editors are just going to report want us to report what’s out there, but I don’t think the rank-and-file reader reads it, like we all do. In other words, they see a scandal, a fixed race, and that sticks in their mind. It wasn’t a fixed race, it was manipulation of the pools, but that’s the carryover, no matter how many times you explain it, there are some people out there who are going to get that connotation. I saw a column by Stan, I don’t know if it was in the Form or if it was in Hoof Beats, but he addressed that, it’s terrible, terrible damage. I never thought, it probably is as bad as Seabiscuit was good. I never thought a Triple Crown winner was the answer, this cure-all, but I think if ever there’s going to be a Triple Crown winner, now is a good time just to get people’s minds off the Breeders’ Cup scandal.

Mr. Beyer: Sometimes theoretically positive stories can be double-edged swords. You take the current meet at Gulfstream Park. You’ve got a trainer over here that has had more than 60 wins at the meet, he’s not only broken the record, but he’s going to double the previous record by the time the meet ends, but all the hearsay is that the guy’s one of the biggest cheats to ever come around, and that he’s using drugs on horses that the chemists haven’t been able to catch up with yet. And our editors are going to look for that aspect of the story rather than the fact that he’s winning all these races.

Ms. Mea Knapp: I’d be interested in your opinion; what can horse racing do to be of more interest to the general public so that you would want to write about it? The other sports have stars, Tiger Woods or Michael Jordan; in horse racing, certainly Secretariat was a star that everybody wanted to hear about, but our horses don’t stay around long enough sometimes, so what can horse racing do so that you would want to write general-interest stories rather than just aiming at existing fans.

Mr. Finley: This is the real crux of our problem, and it’s beyond the solution of reporters or publicists or anybody else. Our horses today are more fragile, they get injured, the good ones are whisked off to stud at the end of their 3-year-old seasons. Aside from the Triple Crown races, just because they get a lot of type, what’s the last time there’s been a horse or a race that has really compelled, you know, broad public interest? The quality of racing, the quality of the game, has just sunk so badly that, it really is hard to find great events or great horses to write about, and there’s really nothing we can do about that that I can see.

Mr. Gutterman: And the proliferation of big-money races is also a double-edged sword, because it keeps really good, interesting horses away from each other, at least until the Breeders’ Cup. I work for a track that’s been around since 1938 and for many, many decades was one of the handful of tracks that kind of controlled the big-money races. That’s not the case anymore, because now if we have five or six horses in the Hollywood Gold Cup it’s a big deal, and the same weekend there’s a big race in New York and a race in Kentucky where all these horses can avoid each other, so you wind up with somebody who’s 2-5 going against whatever the racing secretary can fill the race with, and that’s not a good thing.

Mr. Leehrsen: I don’t know, maybe I’m just going to be the Pollyanna here. It seems to me that although the champions don’t stay around, there’s a new Triple Crown every year for a public that needs just the basics and can’t get too confused and needs to be brought into the sport slowly — I’m talking about the mainstream public — friends who are not in the business, who’ve never been to the racetrack, who are like us in every other way, except they haven’t discovered this thing that we’re very passionate about. I mean, that’s when racing’s going to make a breakthrough, when those people start entering the fold, and for them, the Triple Crown and the Breeders’ Cup and Saratoga, from an eastern perspective, those are examples of things that run counter to the general, and to me, give hope.

It’s an unusual sport in where it fits in. I don’t think it’s a niche sport. Lacrosse is a niche sport. But horse racing is something that when you have a possible Triple Crown winner, you get—what did they get at Belmont last year, over 100,000? The biggest sports crowd in the history of New York. Okay, some of it was probably that the house’s papered a little bit, probably. Still, the last time they did it, they had 80,000 people; last time there was a Triple Crown possibility. It’s a weird sport that can suddenly grow that big at the right time. And that can fill Saratoga up the way it does every year and then shrink down again. But you can see that as a negative or a positive; I think there’s stuff to build on there, because lacrosse doesn’t have that, and if you could ever break through and capture the mainstream again, the people like us, who are like us in every other way except they don’t know racing, that would be to see a change in the sport, and the beginning of a whole new era.

Mr. Beyer: One of the problems is that this is a lot easier said than done, but racing desperately needs to create more of these sort of things. Charlie brought up the point of the Preakness. Isn’t it great that there is x-amount of people here or whatever? Let’s just add to this scenario; let’s suppose somebody goes to the Preakness, first time they ever go to the racetrack, and have a wonderful time. This is a great event and the sport is really neat, I really like it, I’m going to come back. They go back to Pimlico that Thursday, the following week. They are going to scream in terror the minute they get through the gate and are going to be out of there in 10 minutes.

A voice: But they’re going to get a good parking spot.

Mr. Beyer: It’s all well and fine to bring them to the Preakness and show them this. I don’t mean to pick on Pimlico, I could say that about any one of 30, 40 racetracks in the country, but that’s the problem. It exists in these two worlds right now. I don’t know how you develop more of these sort of things, but, on the other hand, if they go back to Saratoga, they’re going to say “This is wonderful.” I use this as an example; a decrepit inner-city racetrack with six old men cursing at television sets. If any young person who’s impressionable, if they wanted to bring a date or something, was brought back into that second kind of environment, they’re going to have the absolute worst impression of this sport, and they are going to say, “What was I thinking? This is disgusting!” and they are never going to come back again.

Mr. Gutterman: Well, maybe it gets down to circumstances again, because, you talk about Saratoga and Del Mar, they are the shining examples of horse racing in America, and they work, and it’s large groups of people betting moderate sums of money, it’s not just a handful of guys who are betting all the money, betting thousands of dollars a day and then dying off and not being replaced. What do we learn from that? Is it that the circumstances are such that I can’t make that happen in Inglewood or at Queens in February? There are certain things I think maybe we have to make peace with and do the best we can under those circumstances, and revel in what we can, what Saratoga and Del Mar brings to us much of the year, and Gulfstream to a lesser extent.

Mr. Finley: I don’t think you’ve done a good job with the Friday night things, but I mean — we’re getting back to issues that are — go beyond the scope of this panel, but you know racing needs seasonality. When I got interested in racing, the way racing was then, and then fast forward to racing like it is now, 30 years later, I don’t think I would become interested in it. We grew up in the Philadelphia area, and the old Garden State Park had an opening day and a closing day, and there was something a little bit special about every single day there, because you looked forward to it all winter, and it wasn’t just a gambling factory, and you knew there was going to be a really big race in the fall with the Garden State Stakes and a really big race in the spring with the Jersey Derby. How does racing duplicate that sort of experience that was available to that 12-year-old kid back in the 1970s? That’s a great big challenge, but 365-days-a-year of racing factories like Philadelphia Park, don’t interest me, don’t interest sports editors, and appeal only to hard-core gamblers.

Mr. Milbert: The best racing in Chicago history, were the 13 days at Arlington Park under tents. No crowds, 12,000 to 15,000, stories every day, big stories. People came out, it was, as Bill said, an event. It was only 13 days, but boy, they were there every single day. People would come streaming in, all ages, it wasn’t just gamblers, and the off-track betting revenue was huge, huge, huge. And I think we miss so much—I remember when I began covering racing, when the Chicago Thoroughbred season opened, it was an event. People would come, oh, yeah, the Thoroughbreds are opening, there was a buzz. Now it’s such a compression. There was a harness strike, I asked these kids about the harness strike, and they were unaware of it, they said, “No.” one girl said, “I go to the races at Balmoral in the summer, is there a strike now? I don’t go in the winter. I just like to go out there, its fun during the summer, I go to the track with my friends,” but they were unaware that we had a 2 ½ month strike.

Mr. Scherf: I want to thank this panel, I think it’s just been terrific and before we disband, I want to thank Stan Bergstein for putting together these sessions; I want to thank all of HTA, the TRA members, the Racetracks of Canada who participated. Thank you, everyone.