Flatter: A proposal to save the Preakness & the Triple Crown

Hurley’s was a great old bar in Manhattan. At 49th Street and Sixth Avenue, it stood as a monument to a resilient, work-a-day family who refused to be bullied by the big foot of affluent progress.

The story goes that when the Rockefellers made their midtown land grab just before the Great Depression, the owner of the saloon which opened in the 1890s stubbornly refused to sell. So the Rockefellers built around it, and Hurley’s soldiered on like a pup tent behind a mansion.

It took more than a century for the family to cave. In 1999, Hurley’s was closed and turned into a bakery.

Horse racing’s Triple Crown is Hurley’s. And this is the new 1999.

Since Sir Barton pulled off the first sweep in 1919, and since sports writer Charlie Hatton apocryphally advanced the nickname for the three chosen classics, America has spent five weeks every spring watching the Kentucky Derby, Preakness and Belmont Stakes.

Well, that is only partially true. When Citation won the 1948 Triple Crown, he did it in 42 days against small fields. During six of the 10 years in the ’50s, the three races spanned six weeks. No one pulled off the supposedly easier sweep any of those years. In spite of that loosening of the racing calendar coupled with the red scare, the earth somehow did not careen out of orbit.

We have graduated through radio and television to dial-up modems to wi-fi that has sped up nearly as quickly as our complaints about it. We have advanced from prop planes to jets to airplanes grounded by recalcitrant flight crews. Route 66 has given way to a crumbling, snarled interstate highway system. Even the craft of writing has gone from pen and ink to AI. Sorry. I forgot to put an F before that last one.

We also have come to endure load management in all sports. It has come to horse racing, too, with Kentucky Derby winner Sovereignty’s absence from the Preakness being the latest example. Like it or not, and I don’t, the timing is right for a change to the Triple Crown. That sound you hear is the echo of my kicking and screaming and dragging boot heels and making a racket that would be the envy of morning shout-fests on ESPN.

This goes beyond the whole racing-to-breed zeitgeist. The current five-week Triple Crown schedule has been in place since 1969. In truth, it really was not chiseled into stone until 1972, when the New York Racing Association untethered the Belmont from the first Saturday in June and decreed it would be exactly five weeks after the Derby.

Mine is not a baby-after-bath-water plan. It is very simple. Move the Preakness and Belmont Stakes back one week. Most years the Preakness would fall on Memorial Day weekend. Keep it on Saturday, or move it to the Monday holiday. Don’t mess with Sunday. Gearheads have the remote control from Monaco in the morning through Indy in the afternoon to Charlotte at night. They are not clicking away, not even for less than two minutes.

The goal here is something that is anathema to modern-day America. It is called compromise. It tries to find a middle ground. On one side are codgers like me who want to keep the Triple Crown damn near impossible to achieve, the better to parse legends from run-of-the-mill champions. On the other side are the crowd that says Thoroughbreds are bred nowadays more for speed than stamina.

What makes the here and now different is a series of new circumstances that may not be ideal, but they are part of an uncompromising new reality as unappealingly intractable as inflation, disease and basketball’s three-point line.

First, there is the off-again, off-again rebuilding of Pimlico. The money has been in place twice. Demolition plans have been put off this past year twice. The Maryland Thoroughbred Racetrack Operating Authority, which was supposed to oversee the handoff from The Stronach Group to state horsemen, is being dissolved unceremoniously. Older parts of Maryland bureaucracy are taking over amid promises of more, ahem, transparency with the $400 million bond sale that is supposed to pay for the new Pimlico. We shall see.

This week another arm of the state government announced a land purchase for the building of a training center 20 miles west of Baltimore. There was yet another promise to bring the wrecking ball to Pimlico this month right after the Preakness, which is supposed to be run next year at Laurel Park. We shall see.

This crossroads facing Maryland racing provides the perfect time for new caretakers to reschedule the Preakness, something that the outgoing Stronach management floated as recently as two years ago. Whether the race is held at old Pimlico, new Pimlico, old Laurel, torn-down Laurel or taking laps around Camden Yards, the Preakness needs to be pushed back to prevent it from rotting on the vine.

The other circumstance has been the gradual widening of the gap between races for horses. We don’t have to like it, but refusing to accept it is the ultimate expression of denial. So is refusing to move the Preakness.

Kentucky Derby preps used to pepper the spring calendar a lot more than they do now. When Spend a Buck won in 1985, he prepped in the Grade 2 Bayshore on March 23, the Cherry Hill Mile on April 6 and the Garden State on April 20 before he won at Churchill Downs on May 4. Four races in six weeks. Then owner Dennis Diaz blew off the Preakness and went to the Jersey Derby (G3). By the way, who in the pool had Pimlico outlasting Garden State Park?

That preview of coming attractions is 40 years old now, and the trend is unabating. As noted this week, Kentucky Derby horses made up 73% of Preakness starters from 1970 to 2005. In the 19 runnings since, that portion has dropped to 39%.

While the Triple Crown has clung to its five-week schedule like shrink wrap, the road to the Kentucky Derby has been malleable. Historic, local races have been moved further from the first Saturday in May to preserve their relevance. The Preakness might pick up a few pointers here.

A polar opposite Triple Crown proposal would scuttle the Preakness, use the Belmont as the second race and the Travers (G1) as the third. Say what? It is bad enough that the Belmont was contracted so it could be wedged into Saratoga while its old home is rebuilt. Yeah, run a 10-furlong race for $5 million, and then run it again five weeks later for $2 million. Under the alternative plan, it would be rerun 3 1/2 months later against week 0 in college football for $1.25 million. Either way, the jewels in the crown would include one conspicuous zircon.

Legitimately, the Triple Crown has to have three very different races in a relatively short period of time. A 1 1/4-mile Kentucky Derby three weeks before a 1 3/16-mile Preakness three weeks before a 1 1/2-mile Belmont look perfectly good. It may not completely cure what ails the Preakness, but isn’t it worth a try to keep the Triple Crown from turning into a garden-variety trio of Grade 1 races? It was good enough for Citation.

There is one other way to fix all this. Has anyone in ad sales asked Chrysler or Visa if they still have $5 million rattling around petty cash to resurrect the old Triple Crown bonus?

Think of it this way. Money finally got Hurley’s to cave.

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.