When It Comes to Unbiased Reporting, Ignorance Is Bliss
Tuesday, February 23, 2016

    From time to time, to remind the aging set who may have seen it in the past, and to bring it for the first time to many others, I like to refer to an article written in the Blood-Horse magazine sometime in the '90s. The writer discussed at length about how the old-timers who had been betting on racing for decades were slowly dying off, and the sport wasn't making new fans. The younger set was more interested in other forms of entertainment, etc., etc., etc., and racing had little appeal to them. Therefore, the game would soon be obsolete.

    At the end of the article, there was a short paragraph in parentheses that explained simply that this piece was reprinted from an issue from the early '60s.

    Get the picture? It's now another 20 or so years later and we're still bombarded with the 'dying off and making no new fans' baloney. The newspaper writers of today are mostly in the same boat: they have no real idea about the status of the sport and they take their cues from some other writer of the same ilk who wrote it last week or last month or last year. That writer got it from someone else last week or last month, and so on.

    What compounds the felony is that the sports editors of their respective newspapers believe the drivel, because there are usually some juicy quotes from somebody in a think tank who also doesn't have a clue.

    In Saturday's edition of the Tampa Bay Times, there's a joint article from Mary Ellen Klas and Jeremy Wallace datelined Tallahassee and headlined, "Slots no sure thing to save betting." This is in response to the recent disclosure of the bill that passed out of the House Regulated Industries Committee pertaining to the de-coupling of tracks and frontons from their casinos and all that goes with it.

    Here's the first paragraph of that article: "For years, the owners of the dying dog and horse racing industries have seen salvation in the cherry-spinning fortunes behind slot machines. Their vision was to convert their vast real estate into bold entertainment venues with blue-lighted rooms lined with slots machines, some offering dog racing as a novelty, or thoroughbred derbies as a nostalgic draw."

    I have news for the two writers, and it's much like the old saw, "What came first, the chicken or the egg." If they weren't so quick to throw thoroughbred racing into the same old tub as the others, and had asked for guidance from thoroughbred people who understand the sport, they would have known that there were no real estate operators who turned their holdings into gaming venues and added derbies "as a nostalgic draw." We who do get it all know that the racing was there first - for 100 years, for cryin' out loud.    

    Among the many aspects of this article that brought my blood to a boil was that nowhere in it was there a quote from anybody in the thoroughbred industry. All the gloom and doom came from other venues, and think tank specialists, you know, the types who proclaimed several months ago that Donald Trump was a fad and would soon be gone from memory. We know how that brilliant prognostication turned out.   

    From the other side, the slots themselves, here's what the writers deduced: "But as Florida Legislators decide whether to ratify a deal with the Seminole Tribe that cements into place the parameters of gaming in the state for the next 20 years, no one is talking about one thing: slot machines are declining, too." I absolutely loved that one. No one's talking about it because it's a blatant lie. It's an area that you don't have to take anybody's word for it, you just have to own a computer that can Google the Florida Board of Business and Professional Regulation, then click on the line that brings up casino results. It isn't brain surgery - we leave that to Ben Carson. Back to this area little later.  

   Here are some of those quoted, and what they let us in on: "There is no hope for the pari-mutuels to ever become what they once were," said Dave Jonas, the owner of Casino Miami, home to one of the state's last jai alai frontons. (For the record, they still play jai alai in Miami, Dania and  Ft. Pierce, and a version of it in Ocala and Orlando). Unfortunately, Mr. Jonas didn't just stick to his own plant, he had to throw a blanket over all of them. So I'll clue him in.

    In 1979, advertising and public relations guru David Goldman of Ocala was hired by Sam F. Davis, then president of Florida Downs (now Tampa Bay Downs), to help bring the daily average handle at the track up to $300,000 or more, which it had never done. Sam offered David a $10,000 bonus if he could make it happen. David pulled out every marketing gimmick in the book and with two weeks left in the meeting, the average was up around $309,000. Then the sno-birds began leaving the Bay area in droves, and the number dropped to $297,500 by season's end. The meeting was less than 90 days then and the total handle was somewhere between $20 million and $26 million.

    Now, due to the wonders of simulcasting, Tampa Bay Downs is one of the favorite betting venues among race fans across North America. Here are some recent handles for Tampa, and they're not cherry-picked in order to prove my point. I simply grabbed newspapers laying around from the last few weeks and wrote down the handle for the day.   

    Wednesday, Feb. 3 - $4,342,952; Friday, Feb. 19 - $4,290,925; Saturday, Feb. 20 - $6,557,452; Sunday, Feb. 21 - $4,418,724; and, last, but not least, Saturday, Feb. 13, the day, ironically, they ran the Sam F. Davis Stakes, $10,743,714. On that same day, the handle at Gulfstream Park reached $15,147,691, and at Santa Anita it was $12,429,620. A few weeks before, Gulfstream had a $20 million-plus Saturday. 

    If the sport of thoroughbred racing is "dying," somebody needs to tell its customers so they can make plans to take up other interests. 

    Here's another brilliant quote: "I don't believe pari-mutuels can be saved," said Izzy Havenick, vice president of his family-owned Magic City Casino (Flagler dogs) and owner of greyhound tracks in Miami-Dade and Lee counties."It's slow. It's boring. If you live in Florida it's hot and rainy. Most people under 40, they will never go outside and look at the racetrack. Unless there is some way to make dog, horse racing or jai alai exciting again, I don't see the pari-mutuels surviving as tracks." There we go again, the owner of a run-down dog track believing he has to speak for thoroughbred interests instead of sticking to his own dilapidated track. 

    A great portion of the Times article focused on the supposed decline of South Florida's slots venues. Here are some statistics pertaining to the slots: In the fiscal year 2012-2013 (July 1-June 30), the total amount of money that was slipped into the machines was $6,690,513,855. For 2013-2014 it came to $7,953,655,789. For 2014-2015 the number was a record $7,979,515,006. Remember, that first digit is billions.   

    For the first six months of the current fiscal year, the total is $3,838,683,245, but January, February and March are typically the best three months of the year so the final tally should be close to or better than last year's record betting.

    A long time ago, Priscilla Mullens said to Mr. Alden, "Why don't you speak for yourself, John?" The thoroughbred industry doesn't need dog track owners, jai alai fronton owners and think tankers to speak for it. 

    Note to Mary Ellen Klas and Jeremy Wallace: I assume you ran out of room this time so you'll have the quotes from Frank Stronach or Tim Ritvo of Gulfstream Park, and Stella Thayer or Peter Berube of Tampa Bay Downs, in a future column. 

    


     

 

    

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