There is trouble here: the stench of a sport that is dying. As the 44-year-old Baffert prepares to saddle Silver Charm this Saturday with a chance to become the 12th horse in history to win the Triple Crown, he knows his colt is being looked to as the sport’s Tiger Woods, its Michael Jordan. But many racing people fear that Silver Charm will gambol with the ghosts of Secretariat and Citation, and nobody will notice. ““The sport really needs this,’’ Baffert says. ““We need to turn this into an event and give the young people something to remember. My own kids think it’s boring - or did until now - and they know everything about Ken Griffey.''
He says the racing industry should have created something like Joe Camel to lure young people, and though he’s right, he doesn’t realize he’s picked a guileless metaphor. Baffert is refreshingly unpretentious and direct. ““I’m a ’90s kind of trainer,’’ he says, and indeed, efforts were being made for him to appear on the Howard Stern radio show this week. Baffert is a Howard fan. Is Stern a racing fan? No. His father is. (We rest our case.)
Everything is in alignment for racing to romp home this week: a gutty colt with several serious challengers; a handsome, articulate jockey in Gary Stevens. But running Silver Charm through the celebrity machinery is no sure thing. The vaunted winning streak of an older horse named Cigar, which ended last year, was no magic bullet. Attendance at racetracks has slumped nearly 50 percent since 1980, and TV ratings have plummeted.
The problem is attracting younger fans. ““I’ve been through two generations, and I’ve seen everything get cool at one time or another,’’ says Allen Gutterman, marketing chief for New York City’s Off-Track Betting Corp. ““Golf is cool now. Pool has been cool - twice. Even bowling was cool for a while. But in all that time, horse racing has never been perceived as cool.''
The sport should have everything going for it. Racing facilities are lovely relics of another time. Women jockeys compete equally with the men. The athletes don’t act like jerks, chasing mares around singles bars. The sport is highly telegenic, and has great cyber-possibilities: it’s full of railbird chatter, and handicappers analyze more downloadable data than fantasy-baseball practitioners do. But too few fans are young enough to know a byte from a bridle.
The enthusiasm of those who love the game is infectious. ABC’s Al Michaels has seen everything in sports, but nothing like the time a horse he co-owned won its first race. ““By the time the horse crossed the finish line, my shirt and my jacket were soaked with sweat. My tie was sopping. I thought I was going to have a heart attack. It was one of the greatest thrills of my life.''
Another racing aficionado is political writer and TV commentator Jack Germond, who recalls going to the track with the late Virginia Kelley, mother of Bill Clinton and a fanatical player of the ponies. ““We were losing one day, and she said, “The next best thing to a winning day at the track is a losing day’.’’ (Not original, maybe, but it beats certain bridges to the 21st century we could mention.) Germond attributes horse racing’s woes to the ““goddamn politicians.’’ And it is true that the business is heavily regulated and taxed by a hodgepodge of local authorities.
Racing in Maryland, for example, has been devastated by the arrival of slot machines at tracks in nearby Delaware. The slots have saved some struggling racetracks and they may attract warm bodies, but whether they create new fans is questionable. The old guard winces, as it did when a jockey wore a logo for Breathe Right nasal strips for the first time at a major race in Boston last Saturday. They cringe at the razzmatazz of Hollywood Park in L.A., where cheerleaders shake their booty between races and frat parties rock out at a packed bar called Longshots. A card casino bustles, and races are pumped in from Hong Kong.
This kind of thing may not dignify the memory of Man o’ War, but Hollywood Park has doubled its Friday attendance to about 17,000 people. And racing people argue that even if simulcasting and in-home telephone betting are rescuing some tracks financially, the only way to create new fans is to get them physically out to the track, and hope they hit an exacta.
Horse racing used to be the only legal game in town. Now lotteries are everywhere and many states have casino gambling. Las Vegas has improbably marketed itself as a family resort. But racing’s problems predate these competitors, to when the sport resisted being on TV. Racing authorities are currently trying to devise a national program of races that could be televised every weekend so that a casual fan would have something to follow.
Washington attorney and powerbroker Robert Strauss, who is such a zealot that he and his wife spend their summer vacation attending the races at Del Mar in southern California - every day - laments: ““The racing industry let it go. They were a pretty self-centered crowd, a smug crowd. Butthe arrogance is gone now. They’re looking for help.’’ It’s time, in other words, to go to the whip.
Although off-track wagering has increased overall revenue for many racetracks, fewer people go to the races or watch them on TV.
