The Impact of Negative News
Friday, March 11, 2005
10:00 a.m. - 10:45 a.m.

Mr. Bergstein: The people that we have here next have something of substance to say and I think you will enjoy hearing from them all. First, the president of the American Horse Council, with the view from Washington right now, and then we are also going to talk to him about the subject matter of the panel, which is the impact of negative news. You can tell us briefly, if you want to, Jay Hickey, what George is doing these days.

Mr. Hickey: Well, I believe he is in Washington right now. Things are fairly safe in Washington right now, but the legislation that we are interested in has not been introduced, but will be shortly. Things are quiet in Washington at this point and we would like to keep it quiet for the most part.

Mr. Bergstein: I know you have something else to say, but yesterday I was much surprised when Connie Whitfield from the Kentucky Racing Authority, whose husband is Ed Whitfield of the US Congress, said that he had been appointed chairman of an oversight committee for sports that included horse racing.

Mr. Hickey: He is on the House Commerce Committee and he is chairman of the oversight subcommittee, which has jurisdiction over many things, including sports and racing. It is not a special committee that was set up. 

Mr. Bergstein: So it is nothing new.

Mr. Hickey: Right, it is not a new committee, but he is interested in horse racing activities and legislation.

Mr. Bergstein: I think we are lucky and fortunate if we are going to have someone in charge of racing oversight in Congress that at least it is a guy who knows horse racing.

Mr. Hickey: Yes, it is not a new committee that was set up specifically, for example to look at steroid use in major league baseball of something like that. 

Mr. Bergstein: Okay, fine. Do you have a report you want to start with?

Mr. Hickey: We are going to talk about bad news. 

Mr. Bergstein: Well, we are going to talk about bad news, so let’s talk about the impact of negative news on Congress if there is such a thing.

Mr. Hickey: First of all, thank you for having me here. Secondly, I want to apologize. I am just getting over something, so I may sound unfortunate. Fortunately I fell this morning getting ready, but I was able to get my pants on so I did not show up in my pajamas. This panel is to talk about bad news and its effect on various parts of our industry. Clearly, bad news, and I assume by bad news we are talking about some of the unfortunate betting experiences and incidents that have occurred over the last several years. Federal and state legislators are important to our industry. They control us. They regulate us. For many of them it is an opportunity to get into things that they really don’t have any business being involved in, but it brings headlines. I mean, the hearings on MLB and steroids, you can make an argument that they should, but I am not sure that their hearts are all pure when they start these hearings. It is important to remember that not everyone in Congress thinks that gambling is the greatest thing. Not everyone says that what this country needs is for everybody to be able to bet out of their living room. We think it is a good idea, but not all members of Congress do. Congress still looks at racing differently than other forms of wagering, like casinos, slots, poker. We are different. We are still an agri-business. We are still a sport. We are talking about a different argument than what we just had, and we are also small. In this case, being small is somewhat good. They don’t worry about us. They look at us a different way. Politicians, some of them are very supportive, they love horse racing, it is important to their states, and therefore they will do all that they can to promote it. Some could care less one way or the other and don’t think about it until they are forced to. Others are opposed to horse racing because it is part of gambling, not because it’s horse racing. We have to sort of think about them in different ways, and we have to sort of, when things happen that are unfortunate, we have to be able to give our supporters the ability to say, “Yes, this happened, but men were born with original sin, and some women too, and therefore these things do occur,” and not let our opponents use what happens against us. You have to keep that in consideration. We can’t give our opponents the ability to go after us for things that happen in our activities. The legislation that we are dealing with—we passed the alien withholding last year, so the industry is trying to get the $85 billion that is bet worldwide, more of it bet on US. That is all passed, that is done. A lot of people (NTRA, Horse Council, AQHA, TRA, HTA, USTA), that took a lot of effort and very few people know how many contacts were actually made, including a contact by the dentist of a member of Congress’ son. That is the kind of thing that actually gets legislation moving, but it took a whole industry to do it. That involves what? It involves betting, merging pools from foreign sources. That is why we changed the withholding. Internet gambling—for the last 8 years, we have been talking about the federal legislation on Internet gambling. We have always been able to get carve outs, exclusions grandfathers for horse racing. We got it in a bill that passed the House last year. We had it in the final legislation that the Senate was considering which shifted everything to sports betting, but we excluded horse racing in that. That is still coming up. You can expect those bills to be reintroduced shortly, but what do they involve? They involve Internet betting. They involve betting on the phone, on the computer, on electronic media. They certainly involve, in terms of prohibition, betting offshore with foreign interests. That is the second thing we are interested in. We have been excluded again because some think us small. Those religious groups that are opposed to gambling permit our exclusions because they are more concerned about casino games, poker games, sports betting on the Internet, and they want to get that passed. They need our support to do it. Again, that is another thing. It involves account wagering, obviously. Account wagering is a huge part of our future. 

We have other bills. We want to change the capital gains bill, holding period for horses. We don’t want anything that happens in our industry to spill over. Why would it spill over to the capital gains change? Changing the holding period? For those of you who have white hair, there used to be something called the investment tax credit on all assets. The horses were never eligible for the investment tax credit, which went out the door ten years ago because of racing. The people who put it in said they were not going to promote people getting investment tax credit, and therefore getting more horses because of the gambling, so it can spill over. 

So what are we talking about? The incidents that we have to worry about, the Breeders’ Cup pick six. As everyone will recall, the federal indictments in New York, the Racing Services guilty verdict, all of those have happened in a very short time. And what do they all involve other than cheating by various people? They all involve account wagering, betting offshore, betting on electronic media, all of the things that we are very concerned about in federal legislation. Remember we still have this Department of Justice investigating various things, and they never really put up the white flag as to whether interstate simulcasting, interstate account wagering, is legal or not, even though we got the changes to the Interstate Horse Racing Act. So all of those things you take into consideration when you talk about the incidents, because those incidents highlight the activities that we are trying to promote. Now they are very small. Fortunately there has been some industry response. The NTRA set up their Wagering Task Force to look into the pick six and identify what it was. We caught them. The NTRA has also put together a task force, called “Handle Up, Purses Down,” which if you have not read, it is a terrific report. Both of them call for knowing your customers. Know who is betting into your pools. Improve the tote system. Improve the betting system so that we have integrity and we can show our members of Congress that we have it. So those are the steps that the industry has taken. Can we do more? Yes, but there are steps that have been taken so that the people who support us can say, “Well, yes, this happened, but look what they have done. They have made some recommendations. They have actually looked into what is going on and they are trying to adopt these positions. We are never going to convince those people who are opposed to gambling, but we have to make sure that the people that support us have ammunition to do so and the people that don’t care one way or the other don’t wake up and raise cain. I would like to quote from D.G. Van Clief, who is the commissioner of the NTRA. I think he said it best after the New York indictments. He said, “All of this, the improvements, the sport, what we are trying to do, account wagering, international merging pools, all of this is at risk if we cannot prove to regulators, government, and customers that we can keep our own house.” That is a fairly simple statement, but it is a very important statement, so I would encourage you that when you talk about this with your members of Congress or your state legislators, if they bring this up, tell them exactly what we have done so far and what we hope to do because they need the ammunition. They will step up, not the guys who oppose us, but those who support us, we need to make sure that they have the ammunition to defend us in Congress because what we are still trying to do is very important. It involves some of the basic core things that these incidents have involved. That is my report on this specific topic, and now I will sit down.

Mr. Bergstein: You gave the message, and you are free to join the rest of the conversation at any point you want. Bill Christine, of course, is known to anybody who reads racing in this country whether they are on the west coast, where he works for the Los Angeles Times, or whether they are east coast. Your name was taken in vain in the previous conversation. Whether you want to stand up or sit down is your choice again, Bill. I have know Bill Christine since the old Hambletonian days in Illinois. He is an old Illinois journalist. He is not an old Illinois journalist. He is a journalist from Illinois who is an old timer in the sport and knows everything there is to know about racing and is as good a writer about it as there is anywhere. Bill.

Mr. Christine: Thanks, Stan, good morning. I thought I would talk a little bit about negative news and how it applies to somebody talking from my perspective and maybe in passing give a little advice to how it can be handled by many of those out there that wind up with negative news in your own back yard, then you have to deal with it with guys like me. One of the important things, I think, is you should say something. You can’t burrow your head in the sand and hope that it will go away, because it never goes away. Editors have this feeling that negative news sells newspapers. I am not sure, I have never really found the formula that proves that right or wrong, but that is an attitude and they are stuck with it and this is the nature, the dynamic of our business. I think when something negative does happen, you are better off addressing it immediately and in an organized way. A couple of examples—I do go back far, Stan, to the Kentucky Derby of 1968. It was the first Derby that I ever covered, Dancer’s Image and Forward Pass. At that time butazolidin was an illegal drug and Dancer’s Image had that in his system after the Derby. Churchill Downs knew this a day later, but never made an announcement, and actually never made an announcement to this day. There happened to be an AP reporter who was hanging around the barns looking for some kind of a follow-up news story the Monday after the race, and he stumbled across this. He wound up writing the story. I was working for the Louisville Times at the time, so we were the hometown paper and we are in our office, and this story is so old old that bute was illegal and we are also talking about a teletype to disseminate news, news came over the teletype, the AP wire, that Dancer’s Image had been disqualified. So you have the Louisville newspapers that had about 15 people two days before covering the race with a great amount of egg on our chin for not getting the story. Eventually, of course, we wound up writing it and writing it and writing it, but we certainly were not going to give Churchill Downs the benefit of the doubt anymore and there were some scars from the way that story was mishandled for several years afterwards. There is such a thing as damage control, and once you know that you have got a negative story, you have just got to fess up and maybe try to go into some spin format to try to reduce your losses. I think it is important that in doing that you have a spokesman or if you have multiple spokespersons, they are all going to say the same thing. You don’t want to have somebody picking up the phone and telling me one thing and then later somebody else saying another thing, then you wind up having the various media representatives playing one person off the other. Whatever story you have, establish that story with your staff early and then stick to it. I wanted to give you a good example of how negative news was handled and this was the Breeders’ Cup pick six scandal in Chicago a few years ago. Well, it was and it was not handled depending on who you are talking about. I thought the NTRA and the Breeders’ Cup did an excellent job. They vetted the whole thing on Sunday, the day after the races, wound up with what they thought was a reasonable response by very early on Monday and notified all the media people what had happened, what they thought had happened, and what they were going to do to address this horrible situation. I can’t say the same thing about the tote company. I think the tote company was much more difficult to deal with and seemed to put their heads in the sand and was much more reluctant to be honest about a lot of the things that happened, even though they had to know that it was inevitable that something was going to happen. I also want to talk about the trainer Jeff Mullins incident which just happened last Sunday at Santa Anita. I think it is very fresh in our minds. He gave a reporter, a columnist, at my paper a very negative story about racing. He accused other trainers of having an edge with the racing board because of being related to certain executives. If the racetrack had gotten a hold of Mullins in the aftermath of that even before the ink was dry on our Monday paper, and made some sort of an attempt to make an apology to the public and maybe dilute the impact of what he said, it would have been better. Now I understand that it is a sticky wicket with racetracks because they have no contractual relationship to trainers or jockeys or even owners, so maybe you have to do a little arm twisting and hand wringing in order to bring these people to bear. Still in all I think they would have been better off diffusing this immediately rather than having it drag out to even today. As a matter of fact, yesterday I was talking to some representatives from the track and they said that they were going to issue an apology on behalf of Mullins who had finally realized that he had said some stupid things, but it was not forthcoming after we were alerted that it might be. I think it is probably going to be coming out today after a couple of lawyers dot the I’s and cross the T’s. At any rate, there are good ways and bad ways of handling things. I think you are better off not revisiting the issue once you do come out and try to do a little spin control. If reporters persist in calling you and trying to get the last ounce of blood out of you, I think you are better off just referring to the original statement and letting it go at that and letting it stand up for what the company’s position might be. At any rate, I just wanted to give you a couple of ideas of how you might do it. As a guy who has worked in the trenches for a long time, when I am treated that way by tracks and track executives, I don’t take it in a negative way. I realize that they have a job to do and sometimes things go wrong and I don’t try to make out to be the bad guy that maybe somebody said I was earlier, although I did not exactly hear what the details were of that to be able to defend myself. I just wanted to give you a few ideas from both sides of the fence. Thank you.

Mr. Bergstein: Thanks, Bill. You mentioned that you covered for the Louisville Times at the time of the Dancer’s Image Derby. If you recall, there was conflicting testimony by chemists at high levels about the use of bute in that race. I just would like your comment, now that there is a racing medication and testing consortium. When someone like Scot Waterman, who speaks with unified voice for racing, as far as racing has ever had a unified voice. Is that not a helpful situation? Scot is both a technical guy and he is a very PR-oriented man, Scot Waterman.

Mr. Christine: Yes, I think there is no question that is a step forward and I think it alludes to what I was saying. Have somebody knowledgeable upfront, and once you arrive at a conclusion and decide what the game plan is going to be, let him be the spokesman, and don’t necessarily let everybody on the panel speak, because the more people that get into the fray, the more chance you are going to be contradicting your own operation. That is when I think you really get into trouble.

Mr. Bergstein: Thank you. On the marketing side, our spokesman today is Allen Gutterman. He currently is VP of marketing at Hollywood Park, but he also worked for the New York City OTB, he worked for NYRA, he worked for the Meadowlands, he worked in the mountains at Monticello Raceway. He may not remember a conversation, but I do vividly because one morning after our television show, which was then sponsored by the NYCOTB Corporation, Allen asked me to talk to him. We sat in the front seat of a car in the parking lot at Yonkers Raceway, where he was then working. Two guys sitting in the front seat of a car at Yonkers at 2 in the morning aroused some suspicion from the security division. But actually what we were talking about was whether Allen should go to the Meadowlands or not. Happily he made that decision and then progressed from there to NYRA and became a member of that illustrious alumni association of the New York Racing Association, and ultimately went on to his present job at Hollywood Park. So, in that job and currently in California with all of the tumultuous events of recent days, how is it affecting marketing?

Mr. Gutterman: You know, there is never a shortage of negative news and sometimes when you work in management you feel like the guy at the circus who follows the elephant around. You just always are cleaning up and trying to put a good face on things. It seems to me like right now our milkshake situation, which is an evolving story both here and on the east coast and probably all over the country, is analogous to the steroid situation with humans in pro sports. I have decided that Jeff Mullins is our Jose Canseco. We have got to watch what he says all the time. I do want to talk about that for a minute because I was not aware until Bill told me earlier that there is some attempt to do some damage control at Santa Anita. I am not sure that it might be too late because there is definitely a statute of limitations on good will. You can make a mistake, and you are allowed to make a mistake, but you have to address it pretty soon. Jeff Mullins needs to ask the Santa Anita publicity department for help in making a formal apology. I understand that every day it gets more raucous down in the paddock and people come in to boo him. He has to apologize to racing fans in California and all over the country, and it may be too late. For him personally, not to kind of carry this monkey on his back all of the time, he should say that he was upset and angry and probably egged on a little bit by a very clever and brilliant columnist who had a legitimate complaint about some of the things that are going on in horse racing. He has to say that he is responsible for himself and that he is sorry and certainly Bill and all the papers would run with it and it is just a way of making some lemonade out of lemons. I also maybe would take this one step further because sometimes things get thrown in your lap and you deal with them and if you can laugh about it, it helps diffuse situations and maybe Santa Anita should hold a “come out and boo Jeff Mullins day.” He should stand in the winner’s circle, publicly apologize, and invite everyone to boo him one last time and get it out of their system. I think that would probably get national exposure. I would actually have him personally hand out t-shirts that say, “I am Jeff Mullins and I am a fool.”

Mr. Bergstein: Well, they should do more than that. If you had a poll as to who was the idiot, I think he would win hands down, going away. There was an interesting comment made in the previous panel, which I know you heard, by Bill Hoge, in which he said it did not make any difference to him what Jeff Mullins did as long as he knew about it. Do you think that reflects the general opinion of bettors in this country?

Mr. Gutterman: I think there are some bettors who assume that much of horse racing is just fixed and that they still have to figure out who the winner is in one form or another. I think that is unfortunate, and it is not true, but I think there are an awful lot of players who just feel that the reason they do not win is because the races are fixed.

Mr. Bergstein: Do you think there is any way to change that image?

Mr. Gutterman: Integrity. We can’t live without integrity in this game. Having the whole business of milkshakes exposed, I mean, harness racing did it a long time ago. Anything that can give the public reason to believe that they have a fair shake is the most important thing we can do.

Mr. Christine: The more negative news you have, the less chance you have of recruiting the new fan and that is what racing is very much supposed to be about—developing new customers and getting those people to come out and not only converting them from fans to bettors, and I think there is a distinction. You are going to have difficulty getting them to make that leap as well. There is an accrual of this that is going to hurt you with the non-racing public that you are trying to get to.

Mr. Gutterman: On my end, I have to not only market to potential racing fans, horse players, but I also have to market to sponsors. I can’t have the integrity of the game questioned. I have a major California bank, for instance, sponsoring a day of stakes races in April. They can’t be associated with that kind of thing. I have a major airline sponsoring a stakes race in July, and they don’t want to be associated with that.

Mr. Bergstein: There are two incidents that you will remember. Bill may not because they were east coast incidents. In 1974, there was a harness racing scandal in New York involving 10 or 12 drivers. That was the year that Dave Johnson and I started our partnership for NYC OTB Corporation on television. I told Roosevelt Raceway at the time that the only way they were going to resolve this thing was through television and through getting the drivers involved on television and letting people look at them, look in their eyes, look in their face. Maybe George Bush can tell by looking in Putin’s eyes what he is thinking deep in his heart. Whether he can or not, I felt then and I still feel that part of the problem of racing is that the people who are involved in some of these things are invisible. They are backstretch people or they are elsewhere on the racetrack. We put them on, and I think the story died a natural death as people saw and heard the stories of the people who were actually involved rather than having to read them through the interpretation of the press at the time. 

Mr. Hickey: I was just going to say, another thing you should not forget is that quite often it is the industry itself, TRPB or Bill Nader with the pick six, who brings the incident to the attention of the authorities. Even in New York I think there was some substantial cooperation and that is an important thing, not necessarily for the public, but certainly for members of Congress. I just wanted to say, you have talked about the boo Jeff Mullins day. I actually had a pretty good idea. I thought for the 2004 Breeders’ Cup pick six, I made the suggestion that they have what is called the Drexel University Breeders’ Cup Pick Six, where you pick the first three horses and then are given the last three, but it didn’t go anywhere. I couldn’t understand it.

Mr. Gutterman: They are very conservative over at the Breeders’ Cup.

Mr. Christine: A number of years ago, Saratoga had a tote screw up on opening day. I think they had to call off, at least for betting purposes, the last five or six races since the tote system crashed. Either the following day or maybe later in the meet, they had a day honoring all the spectators who survived that day. They gave out t-shirts that said, “I survived opening day at Saratoga,” so I think that alludes to what Allen was talking about, you know, maybe trying to take a light approach and kind of laughing at yourself a little bit.

Mr. Gutterman: I was going to say, Stan, one of the sadder aspects to this is it as been a very tough winter for Santa Anita and I am suspecting it will be a very tough spring for Hollywood Park. But it has been a very tough winter for Santa Anita because of all the bad weather. I mean, out here bad weather is rain. You get two or three weeks of it, as it happened, it just destroys the meet and they have never really recovered. On last Saturday, it was just a glorious day. Declan’s Moon was running, it was an Eddie Delahousse retirement salute, there was a giveaway, there were a whole bunch of things that together produced 36,000 people. That is just enormous to have 36,000 people and $6 million dollars bet on-track and $22 million around the country. It was the best day for horse racing so far this year. Bill dutifully covered the results of all the races, did his interviews, his stories, and it played on page one of the sports section. I was there Saturday, had a great time. On Sunday morning, I am reading the paper, I am reading Bill’s, and I jump over to page two and there is TJ Seimers’ column with Jeff Mullins and it just makes your heart sink because that became actually much more talked about than your story.

Mr. Christine: And some people said that, why couldn’t Seimers have found some of these positives that Allen just rattled off? Why did he have to find a negative to what looked like a 99 percent positive day? Well, putting yourselves in the shoes of the writer, he had gone to the barn, really not looking to bait Mullins, but he was going there to look for a story because he had written some milkshake stuff a couple of weeks before, and then Mullins went into this rant in front of him. If somebody gives you a built-in column, you don’t sit on it for two or three days. That is not the nature of our game. So even though he knew he was raining on somebody’s parade, he had the news and he was obligated to go with it. 

Mr. Gutterman: I think TJ Seimers is an equal opportunity columnist in that he regularly rips the LA Lakers and Kobe Bryant and the LA Dodgers and their new owner, so I guess that puts us in serious sports company in LA. It is not the end of the world when this happens. It means that the best read columnist in LA is interested in horse racing. He writes something about it every week. He will often, if you need some help with notes about a charity thing, he will do it. The fact that he takes horse racing seriously enough to write about it, and your editor Bill Dwyer encourages it, and that your stories will play on page one on a big day, we should not place the blame on the messenger here. This is a good thing that TJ Seimers has an interest in horse racing. 

Mr. Christine: Well, he went to the Kentucky Derby for the first time last year. I go to the Derby every year because I am the beat guy, and some years we send an extra guy or even two extra guys, some years we don’t. This year we are sending both Seimers and another columnist, Bill Plasky. We are sending three and it is the result of Seimers having an interest in horse racing. I think we have other columnists at the paper who never do racing at all, so here you are getting three people covering the Derby instead of one or two, which, in the eyes of racing, should be considered a bonus. What Allen was saying about Seimers being an equal opportunity knocker, he even knocks his own guys, his colleagues. We have a handicapper named Bob Mazurski, and he refers to him as “misery” in his column. So this is the guy, but what is the old story? Just spell my name right?

Mr. Bergstein: Speaking of negative developments, as far as LA is concerned, both of you are pretty fortunate. You are fortunate in your job at Hollywood Park and Bill is fortunate that he works at a newspaper that still has someone like him covering racing full-time. That is not true all over the country. As a matter of fact, one of the most negative aspects is the reduction, and in some cases, disappearance of entries and results in papers.

Mr. Christine: We actually have two people full-time, Stan, and I don’t think there is paper in the country that also has two full-time people covering racing. Me and the handicapper, Bob, one of the two of us is at the races every day. I think you can count on maybe both hands just the number of papers that just have one full-time horse racing guy, let alone two.

Mr. Bergstein: Well, the New York Times treats racing in very strange ways. If you are from a harness racing point of view, subjectively, if you were to read only the NY Times, you would not know the sport existed. It does not cover it, has no interest in covering it, and fortunately for us every now and then Bill Findlay does a feature, but does not cover it regularly. The sport is not covered.

Mr. Gutterman: And worse than negative news is no news because you become irrelevant.

Mr. Bergstein: You become irrelevant and particularly if you are not in the NY Times, you become very irrelevant because sports editors all over the country read the NY Times, and so do people who are TV news editors. Consequently, if it is not in the Times it is not news. You are totally right, it is irrelevant. I would be interested in, Jay, I have been busy out here all week, I don’t know how Andy Beyers treated this in the Washington Post.

Mr. Hickey: I did not see anything. Andy doesn’t write that often any longer in the Post. Did anybody else?

Mr. Gutterman: I say Sherry Ross in the Daily News wrote something. I think Gary West in Fort Worth wrote something.

Mr. Christine: Yes.

Mr. Gutterman: They were very rough.

Mr. Christine: Well, Bill Handleman of the Asbury Park paper wrote a piece the other day and he actually took the trade publications to task for not covering this. He felt that the Blood-Horse, Thoroughbred Times, and the Racing Form should have bounced off of this story, and to my knowledge, they have not acknowledged it, except the Blood-Horse had an item on the web page where Mullins gave an interview with one of their correspondents. Even that interview was a “chop the head off the messenger” type of format. 

Mr. Bergstein: Racing coverage in general, from the editor’s view, is always that we have less space and that racing is irrelevant. It is irrelevant to them because most of the sports editors today grew up in the television environment and most of them do not see racing on television. Is it a valid thought that if racing publicists were to concentrate on racing features rather than trying to build racing news, the earlier convention here or the dialog before you came on was that the stars are not around. Well there can’t be a star every day of racing and there can’t be a star every Saturday. So racing features might be the only way from my point of view, but I don’t know from your point of view as a newspaper man whether you get enough of them.

Mr. Christine: Well there is too much emphasis from our standpoint on numbers, on handle, on attendance, and all of that stuff. It does not mean much to our readers, and therefore does not mean much to us. It is barely a paragraph for me at the end of the meet to recite what the business was at the meet. Now occasionally, throughout the course of the year, we might do a trend story where you have to get into the numbers big time, but on a regular basis we would rather have feature ideas. I am out there enough that I don’t need that many ideas, but we have people that spell me when I am on vacation and people in other sections of the newspaper who might have little interest in racing, and they might have to be led by the hand and given an occasional good feature. I will give you an example. I hate to jump on Santa Anita because it seems like I am always doing that at these sessions, but a couple of years ago there was a pick six at Santa Anita that was won by a Catholic school that happened to have an outing of nuns at the racetrack. They won like $150,000 or something like this for the school. This was an inner city school that did not have a library. Now if this is not a cross-over story that ought to be on Dan Rather, let alone the LA Times, I don’t know one. Now this happened on a Saturday. The only reason I found out about it was on a Monday our radio-TV columnist happened to be at the track that day socially, and somebody called him that happened to overhear these nuns celebrating in the turf club or wherever they were that they had won all this money for the school, and called our radio-TV reporter and he called me, and then the story evolved from there. But I was still waiting for one phone call from Santa Anita. I mean, if I am working at Santa Anita, I am shouting that story from the rooftops. It is a great feature story. 

Mr. Bergstein: Obviously it is a great feature story and leads to a personal narrative. Very few people know that harness racing used to be a big sport at both Santa Anita and Hollywood Park, but when I worked here I was banned to the backstretch and my job was simply to write feature stories. There also happened to be ten newspapers in LA at that time. All ten newspapers covered that meeting. But I was plowing around the backstretch looking for a story and there was one horse that was a pretty good horse, and I asked the trainer for something that was unusual or unique or odd about him. You know, his diet, does he have a pet goat? A pet snake? There had to be some story somewhere about this horse. He kept telling me, “No, he is just another horse. There is nothing unusual.” I was getting desperate and I started to walk away, and I said, “Isn’t there anything unusual about him?” He said, “No. You really ought to talk to my grandmother.” I said, “What does your grandmother have to do with it?” He said, “She trains the horse. She is 83 and has one leg.” True. People today, because of the publicity staffs at tracks, whether it is thoroughbred or harness racing or quarter horse, they are so limited and they are so overworked in their duties that they seem to think that all they should write about is who the feature is in the sixth race that night, which is not news. And on six of the seven nights, if they race seven nights, six of the seven nights, whoever is in the feature is not news and it is not newsworthy. 

Mr. Gutterman: I think part of the solution to that is outside PR firms, making an investment in an outside PR firm. They are sort of the Joey Goldstein’s of the world. It is true that your own PR department, I don’t want to say they are overwhelmed, but they are busy with the Declan’s Moons and all of the things that he needs to know and trying to get as much attention to what their core product is. But an outside PR firm can come in and sell the features, not to Bill, but like this past Thursday in the weekend section of the LA Times, yesterday the cover of it, it is in magazine format on Thurdays, was all about thoroughbred racing, then you open it up inside and there was about a four page take on thoroughbred racing at Santa Anita and that included upcoming Hollywood and Del Mar. I don’t know the genesis of it, but I would bet that it was an outside PR firm that they use sometimes.

Mr. Christine: This is what happened, Allen. It was written by Jay Michael Kennedy, a guy who I don’t know, but he has been at our paper a long time, and he works for the calendar section, the feature section of our paper. He happens to live in Arcadia, about five minutes away from Santa Anita, and he called me before Christmas time. This story just ran yesterday. Boy, to have the luxury of getting an idea at Christmas time and having a couple of months to write it. Anyhow, he called me and he said, “I have been driving by Santa Anita on my way to work every day. I thought maybe if I just went out there a few mornings and kind of hung out at the races in the afternoon I might come up with something for my section.” I said to go ahead and I gave him a couple of ideas, so that is actually how that story happened. I mean, just because the guy happened to live in the area.

Mr. Gutterman: But it is intended for some of the people that I think, Richard Shapiro, you were talking about in the last session, just trying to get some people out to have a good time and to have a great day whether they make many bets or not. That kind of piece in the calendar section is phenomenally valuable. 

Mr. Bergstein: Well, I think what Richard said about features is totally true from the point of view of the racing networks that have decided that they are going to preach to the choir. I don’t think they do enough feature work, but that is a whole other subject. As the Hollywood actor said, “That is enough talk about me. Let’s talk about you. What did you think of my last picture?” I want to get to the audience now and see what they thought of the last picture and Ed DeRosa has the first question.

Mr. DeRosa, Thoroughbred Times: You mentioned the papers losing beat writers, etc. I think you still see people covering racing. One of the big problems I saw last year was when Funny Cide was running, and you would have thought the way he was written about that he was running in $10,000 claimers at Delta Downs. I mean, he was still a grade one horse. He ended up winning the Jockey Club Gold Cup later in the year. It just seems like too often, people, if all of a sudden if anything goes wrong it is doomsday, and I think that was a good example.  Here we have a champion, a Derby winner still running at four, and the mainstream press could not wait to say how he does not have it anymore, he finished second in a race or he finished third in the Suburban. I mean, I think that is pretty good that we have a Derby winner sticking around for races like that, who ends up winning the Jockey Club Gold Cup. So I don’t know how we fix that problem, but I think that is a big one that we have. I would take a hundred Funny Cide’s over Smarty Jones right now.

Mr. Christine: It is funny you bring up Funny Cide, and again this relates to the racetracks not having control over the trainers, over the horsemen. Funny Cide is trained by a guy who is not media-friendly. You know, I have a thick skin and I can turn the other cheek as well as the next guy, but if you get somebody who is just covering racing for a day or is just blowing into town to do a Funny Cide story, and he has got to go to this trainer, it is going to be a real turn-off. Between the Derby and the Preakness, Funny Cide was stabled at Belmont Park because that is where Barkley Tagg’s barn is. Tagg actually misled Pimlico as to when he was going to be shipping the horse down to Baltimore. He told them the horse was going to arrive on Saturday morning, the day of the Preakness, and he actually, without telling anybody, shipped the horse on Friday morning. So there were a couple of things that happened. The guys who were already in Baltimore were expecting an interview with Tagg and expecting to see the horse the morning of the race and did not think they were going to get much of a story. Then when the horse actually blew into town, it was about 2 in the afternoon, the PR department at Pimlico asked Tagg to come over to the press box and subject himself to some interviews because that is where everybody was. Everybody had been looking for Funny Cide on Friday morning, but the horse was still in New York. Tagg did not want to come over. They finally convinced him that otherwise 100 guys were going to have to go over to his barn and get piecemeal interviews. So they finally convinced him that was the way to go. I was already in New York. I did not go directly to Baltimore, and I covered the Funny Cide story because, like you say, he was the people’s horse and that was the place to be. I was not interested in the other nine horses that were in Baltimore. So one morning, I guess maybe it was the morning that he was shipping, I followed Tagg out to the track to see Funny Cide gallop around Belmont Park before he got on the fan, then I walked back to the barn. I was like 50-75 yards away from the nearest horse. I was not sniffing around any of the horses. I was not getting in any of the help’s way because I know where you are supposed to be, and you are supposed to stay out of people’s way when they are doing work back there. Tagg came up from behind, and he was on his pony looking down at me and went into this ten minute rant about how I am driving up his worker’s comp cost by being around the barn. I kept telling him I understood and that I would get as far away as I needed to, but he kept going on and on and on. He did not realize that I was the guy that was going the last yard. I could have been sitting in Balitmore waiting for people to be handing out quotes, and I am actually interested in his horse, staying in New York an extra couple of days to cover him. Again, this is beyond the control of the racetrack.

Mr. Gutterman: Yes, some guys understand the bigger picture, and some understand it and don’t care. John Service understood the bigger picture. He understood his moment in the sun and his responsibility to the game. Bob Baffert can, there are a million things that you could say about him positively and negatively, but he is a great asset to the game because he knows when he has to be on. Those couple of years where he was on the Triple Crown trail were very good for the sport.

Mr. Christine: John Service was a real exception. He was a quick study in all of this. He was a guy who had never been exposed to the really big time of racing before and he seemed to pick it up in an instant. He hit the ground running.

Mr. Bergstein: Any other questions for Bill, Jay, or Allen? Go ahead.

Question: This kind of blends in with everything we have been talking about as far as the press because the whole industry needs more positive things in trying to get new patrons. Would it be advisable to have the horsemen and management as we try to create stars, create public interest, take some kind of courses similar to the PGA? Golfers go through a little thing where the PGA teaches them how to talk to the press. They tell them what kinds of things you say and don’t say. Should the racing industry do that with its people?

Mr. Christine: Well, I am not looking for a job, but I think better than that it might not hurt to have an ex-newspaper guy on your staff in some capacity. I think he would relate to what we are about. The star thing is awfully tough because horses come and go. I mean, Declan’s Moon is out of the Derby. We just found this out this morning, so here we had a star for about 20 seconds. It is awfully tough to develop stars, but you can develop, on the human side, those are the guys that you have to latch onto. I remember Lou Olsen saying to me a number of years ago, Shoemaker came into New York to ride in a race at Belmont Park, and you could not find his name in any of the papers. I think when something like that happens, when a major jockey comes to town and he is not used to riding in that city, you ought to at least make some people aware, hey we have got Shoemaker today, that kind of thing. Santa Anita made a mistake. You know, they hired Chris McCarran as a GM. That was a crossover story. It was a business story in addition to being a racing story and Magna seemed to hide out. You could not find anybody that was going to tell you that he had been hired. Somebody from the New York Times said to me a week or two later, “You know, we did not have a line about McCarran in our paper, but we could have sold…you know, this was a jockey probably getting a higher position in racing than any other jockey had ever had.” That was the hook on the story. For some reason, at my own paper the day that he was hired, it was like a rumor that you had to confirm. They should have had a full-blown press conference with they guy. You have an articulate guy that had recently retired, and this was a story that could not be over blown.

Mr. Bergstein: We are going to go directly to the next panel because of the time and because it has a lot of relativity on what is going to happen in the future. We are going to talk with Alex Corckran, and Dave Haslett, and Joe Tracy, the key officials of the three major tote companies.