Flatter: A negotiating light at the end of the Florida tunnel

There was an inconvenient coincidence to what happened Wednesday in Florida. Gulfstream Park had an expiration date slapped on it exactly 100 years to the day after the Miami Jockey Club started racing Thoroughbreds at Hialeah Park.

The coincidence of the centenary was underscored on X this week by Barbara Livingston, the photographer from Daily Racing Form who owns the collection of her legendary antecedent Jim Raftery. She shared a few of the tens of thousands of gorgeous Turfotos-branded images Raftery shot through the years as the official photographer at Hialeah.

In the throng of well-heeled people who showed up on that earlier 1/15/25 afternoon, it is unlikely even a single soul would have had the thought bubble that read, “In exactly 100 years, this grand sport will be put on its last legs in Florida.” The stilts on the pink flamingos seemed to be no match.

Flash forward to Wednesday, when about 100 horsemen were called to the Sport of Kings hall at Gulfstream Park to hear that racing at the track might limp only as far as 2028 before it is put out of the Stronach Group’s economic misery.

“It can’t end like this” was Jerry Seinfeld’s plea in the middle of a fictitious plane crash that wasn’t from the finale of his TV show. That line and that mood fit here, and they feel even worse. Considering how bad that episode was, that is saying something.

I have been in contact with a dozen people who were plugged in to that meeting. Most are trainers who were there, all concerned about their livelihoods being tied to what they felt was a dubious promise by Stronach to keep Gulfstream Park open if and only if the state legislature unshackles the racing and slot-machine licenses that depend on one another.

One, however, offered an interesting thought that has gained traction since Stronach emissaries Keith Brackpool and Stephen Screnci delivered the terminal diagnosis Wednesday.

“We’re not dead in the water. We’ve got some bargaining angles, too,” the trainer said. Like so many I had on the phone this week, he thought out loud in exchange for my keeping his name private.

The thought was that Brackpool and Screnci put their chip on the table. Don’t fight the decoupling of horses and slots, let us be free to expand the casino, build a hotel on the north end of the property, maybe take in a partner and, gulp, try to sell most of the 245 acres. In poker terms, if you see our chip, we will race three more years and perhaps have more money to pump into purses.

“I called their bluff on it,” another horseman said Wednesday. “And then it just got into long-winded s---.”

Cutting through that solid waste, the trainer with whom I spoke about trying to establish a negotiating position said he could not offer specifics on what the countermove might be. He did know one thing that it is not.

“What they want is they don’t want us to oppose them,” he said. “What I don’t like is they also want us to help them if they need it. That’s really not fair. It’s bad enough we’ve got to not oppose them, but why should we have to fight for them?”

Sun Tzu wrote about 2,500 years ago, “The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.” In other words, if you can’t beat ’em, then let them add slots. That essentially was the position that Florida Thoroughbred Horsemen’s Association executive director Herb Oster took when he explained signing on to Stronach’s decoupling plan.

“They voted not to fight them,” the trainer said about the FTHA’s position. “That’s all they voted for. They didn’t vote to fight for them. They just voted not to fight.”

We have seen this before, 3,000 miles west.

“It’s a classic case of the Stronach Group playbook,” said Los Angeles Times turf writer John Cherwa, who exhaustively covers every twist and turn of the company’s treading of water in California. “Remember, when they closed Golden Gate, they were asking for more (legislative) concessions with simulcast money.”

Cherwa pointed out that Craig Fravel, who left Stronach last summer less than two months after Golden Gate Fields was shuttered, made a pronouncement to the California Horse Racing Board that sounded a lot like what Brackpool said in Florida this week.

“He wrote in a letter that (paraphrasing) ‘if you didn’t give us what we wanted, we’re going to shut down Santa Anita,’ ” Cherwa said. “I don’t know why this should be of any surprise to anyone. These strong-armed tactics have been in place before.”

As was the case in California, this becomes a chess game in Florida. If Stronach just said check, how does the racing industry avoid hearing the word mate?

OK, it is chess and poker for the purposes of this exercise. If there is a hole card that the horsemen have not played yet, the trainer with whom I spoke Wednesday night said it might be further up the assembly line.

“The breeders have a stronger hand than we do,” he said. “They’ve got more to lose than we do. They’re the ones who are strong in Tallahassee, and they’re going to fight it.”

With an entire sport getting white knuckles gripping a steering wheel on what feels like an out-of-control big rig into the Atlantic, the destination here really should be Florida’s capital city.

We all learned how a bill becomes a law. We also learned that most of them do not. A lot of them get too much attention in a media industry that suckles on spoon-fed publicity. Seriously, does anyone really believe the Ohio state legislature is going to pass a law banning flag planting on the 50-yard line at The Ohio State?

The bill to decouple racing and slots at Gulfstream has been posted. That is it. It has not gone to a committee or a vote or a full chamber or the other chamber or the governor.

If the Stronach Group really covets decoupling, it would want it sooner than later. If it shut down racing without getting what it wants out of the halls of the state capitol, that would be like a kidnapper rubbing out a hostage before the ransom was paid.

To that end, time might be on the side of the horsemen, even if it means they, like the Stronach Group, may wait interminably to reap any of the benefits that were dangled Wednesday like a carrot on a stick.

“It’ll be down the road,” the trainer said. “Probably by the time the casino is paid for, by the time they make X amount of dollars a year, then we’d be privy to some of the money. But at the moment, we don’t see any upside like any immediate money. Everybody is (talking) about 2028. It’s going to take them, what, seven years to get everything underway.”

It is not a simple tale. As I stubbornly tried to make it so, I asked this horseman at the end of our conversation to rate the future of racing in South Florida on a 0-10 scale with zero being total pessimism and 10 being cockeyed optimism.

“I’d say right in the middle,” he said. “Five.”

There is that five again, like the ones in 1/15/25. Isn’t it ironic, don’t you think? Better to drift into Alanis Morissette than into Zager and Evans. Look ’em up. Hopefully, horse racing does not go the way of that forgotten duo. Besides, we have to take these things one century at a time.

Ron Flatter’s column appears Friday mornings at Horse Racing Nation. Comments below and at RonFlatterRacingPod@gmail.com are welcomed, encouraged and may be used in the feedback segment of the Ron Flatter Racing Pod, which also is posted every Friday.