Flatter: After this January, we really need some cheering up

Groundhog Day arrived early for horse racing this winter, and it feels like it blew up in our faces like Ned Ryerson’s sure-as-heck-fire memory.

We long have heard the fears about hitching our game’s money wagon to the slot-machine star, hoping against hope that it would not be decoupled. Doomsayers have been telling us for years racing was on borrowed time in California, especially in the north. And the incessant carping about small fields in graded stakes has been like Shaq and Sir Charles arguing about Jimmy Butler to the point E.J. had to declare, “We’re about to do our third lap saying the same thing.”

Flatter Pod: State of the game & Kentucky Derby preps.

This month that brought us Gulfstream Park’s tenuous future and Northern California’s death knell and fewer pill pulls at Santa Anita mercifully is in its final hours. Since Punxsutawney Phil is an odds-on favorite to present us with an early spring from Sunday’s opener at Gobbler’s Knob, the object of this column this particular week is to try to take some of the bleakness off the horizon.

Yes, it really is me. I, Doomsboy, am not being held hostage. Married, yes. Kidnapped, no.

Normally I would be expected to hector about the challenges of eroded foal crops and shrunken purses and rapacious computer betting and rising takeout and cheating horsemen and crumbling racetracks. Even though they are not going away, it says here there is enough of a foundation elsewhere on which the future of racing may be built. For the moment, my eyes are cocked.

First, we have to get over the idea we ever will see halcyon days again. The sooner we dismiss the thoughts of weekday crowds in excess of 20,000 and network telecasts revving up weekend races to a ratings crescendo, the better we may fulfill realistic expectations.

The truth is there are three states in America where racing is doing just fine. They are Kentucky, New York and Arkansas. All three have side-hustle gaming money filling their purses, and all three have made significant investments in their signature racing properties.

Churchill Downs speaks for itself, especially since it is a construction site 11 months a year. Keeneland, also in a building mood, is crowded practically every day of its spring and fall meets. Turfway Park attracts full fields more often than not. Kentucky Downs is a bucket-list stop for fans and horsemen chasing big bucks. Even though Ellis Park is like the .182 hitter who plays defense well enough to stay in the lineup, the rest of the batting order is loaded. The commonwealth also accounts for more than half the new Thoroughbred foals every year. Kentucky is the Los Angeles Dodgers of racing.

New York, of course, is the Yankees. In the heart of the state’s breeding region, Saratoga is the greatest calling card our game has. Unlike the two-day bacchanal of the Kentucky Oaks and Derby, those two months every upstate summer are as close as we are going to reliving the good ol’ days. The state’s $455 million loan to rebuild Belmont Park is as important a one-off commitment as any government ever has made to the sport. Aqueduct sadly is on borrowed time, and future winters of synthetic-track racing at Belmont already are a bone of contention. Still, the sport is on strong legs in and around the nation’s economic hub.

Arkansas is not exactly traditional horse country, but we would not know it from the crowds of people who pour into that jewel of a track in the Ouachita Mountains. Not just the grandstand. Oaklawn has that fairly new hotel and casino that I cannot afford, and it always seems to be sold out for big racing weekends. Purses are no problem there. While California struggles to find enough horses and money to fashion a $300,000 Grade 1, the Cella family throw 10 times that much at a Grade 3 race like the Southwest Stakes. Oaklawn is the Green Bay Packers.

Those are the three franchises that represent racing’s bull market. Even if the rest of the country lets all its tracks rot away, it is impossible to imagine Kentucky, New York and Arkansas abandoning the sport altogether.

I am not trying to ignore the problems that are present even in these utopian landscapes I have colored so brightly. All these states are dependent on the same sort of casino money that may be ripped away soon in Florida and next in Virginia, which until a decoupling threat reared its ugly head this week seemed like another racing state on the rise. Who is to say future politicos will not seize on a shift in the wind to move slot-machine money and historic horse-racing dollars to pay for something more trendy, even in our richest racing states?

There also is the not-so-small matter of losing the ranks of horses and humans who are the engine for this sport in about three dozen states that do not have the glamor of a Derby week or a Spa summer or a Hot Springs spring. The major leagues still need a minor-league system to grow the talent. Without overnight races with claimers and maidens and a-other-thans, the whole sport crumbles.

I wish I had an answer for all that threatens racing’s substructure. Who is going to try to raise Thoroughbreds in California if there is no place to run them there? The same goes for South Florida and Virginia and Maryland, and the list goes on.

Alabama and Wyoming are trying to make headway with new racing ventures. Those are modest seedlings, but at least they carry a morsel or two of hope.

Let’s face it. Three states do not a Horse Racing Nation make, and Horse Racing Archipelago does not have the same ring to it.

The most important asset that is not going away is racing’s core of bettors. Horseplayers are the most loyal customers in any sport. Name another business that continues to serve up bowls full of shortsightedness and avarice and still find its customers displaying unfettered loyalty and its front door every day. Once racing’s establishment figures out that it should quit dumping on this invaluable constituency, then it actually might find ways to build on these positives.

Lacking the wisdom to solve the bigger problems, I am here this week simply trying to salve the pain we all have been feeling from a month of gut punches. Who among us has not wondered if we really are near the end of the road for pari-mutuel racing? I simply had to dust off the pom-poms.

As yestercentury late-night talk show host Jack Paar used to say, “You have to believe me, because if you don’t, we have nothing.” I feel the same way about racing right now. If we don’t try to build on the positives of this sport, we have nothing.

Now that I have gone all Pollyandy for a week, I will wait for someone to tell me that I am all fluffed up and should remember January 2025. Accurately.

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.