Flatter: California racing turns into north vs. south vs. reality

New Orleans

Oscar Madison was an idol, truly one of the people who had me growing up to be a sportswriter. Not so much the Walter Matthau version from “The Odd Couple” movie. I wanted to be Jack Klugman in “The Odd Couple” TV show.

Lovable slob. Horse player. Eligible bachelor. Apartment in Manhattan. Banging out copy on a manual typewriter while nursing a foaming bottle of warm beer. Sitting in those aeries high above the sold-out stadium. Calling my bookie to beg for more time.

California board votes 6-0 to approve Pleasanton fall meet.

“I’ll rise when the sun goes down. Cover every game in town. A world of my own, I’ll make it my home sweet home.” Yeah, Steely Dan got to me, too.

Career dreams were more about being immersed in the roar of the crowd. Not sitting in a quiet press box at Fair Grounds so I could spend nearly four hours monitoring the audio-only feed of a government panel getting together 2,000 miles away.

An important chunk of a sport’s future was being decided not by two great minutes on the track beneath me but by seven members of the California Horse Racing Board who listened to themselves and 36 other people pontificate Thursday.

When its chairman was not providing the drumbeat with his loud, hacking cough into his unmuted mic, he and five of his fellow bored members (sc) voted 6-0 to approve a new, 26-day fall meet for a scruffy Northern California group that did not meet the approval of the powerful Southern California racing establishment.

Gee, Ron. How did you spend your time in New Orleans?

“I do feel badly for you,” one press-box colleague said when he heard what I was doing Thursday. “I really do feel badly for you.” Thank goodness Steve Byk had brought beignets and made coffee.

The reality of 21st century sports media wipes out the glamor of 20th century career dreams with a concept that goes back to 17th century compacts. The public meeting.

“I’ll be brief.”

Yes, folks lie at these things. According to an Otter transcript of Thursday’s meeting, someone declared six times they would be brief. Those six times added up to 21 minutes and 20 seconds.

My friend John Cherwa at the Los Angeles Times called this the most important meeting in the 91-year history of the CHRB. I scoffed at his hyperbolic declaration before I realized I could not top it.

It all turned into a referendum on the Stronach Group and its desire to focus all its California resources on Santa Anita after it closes Golden Gate this spring. Del Mar felt like a nodding sycophant. Los Alamitos did not even bother to show up. Lucky ducks. Even the north-state fair circuit that asked the CHRB to grow it from an itinerant, summertime sideshow to a grown-up fall meet seemed like it was a passenger on this ride.

It also turned into a town-square trial for Craig Fravel, the former Del Mar and Breeders’ Cup honcho who has spent nearly five years as a boss at Stronach cum 1/ST. The letter he sent Tuesday to the CHRB rang out like a bureaucratic version of the shot on Fort Sumter 163 years ago. Then as now, the south fired on the north.

If the CHRB approved the new fall meet at Pleasanton, Fravel wrote that “immediate purse cuts in Southern California will be required.” That “further planned investments in capital projects at Santa Anita will be reevaluated.” That “further operation of Santa Anita and San Luis Rey as training and stabling facilities may be in jeopardy.” That “an analysis of alternative uses for Santa Anita and San Luis Rey will be undertaken in short order.”

Cherwa covers the CHRB more closely than any reporter. This week he handicapped the outcome of the vote, predicting it could swing on the feelings of one member. Instead, it swung on Fravel’s letter, which backfired faster than David Cameron could say Brexit.

“Your letter, to me, was crap,” CHRB member Damascus Castellanos said. “It shouldn’t have been done. But that’s the way you chose to play the game. So we’ll go from there.”

Nothing like poking the sleeping Teamster. That is what Castellanos is, except for his being wide awake through this drama. He has spent more than 20 years as a union negotiator in Southern California. In essence, he told Fravel to get outta here with your weak-bleep threat.

It turned out Castellanos spoke loudly and clearly and accurately for the rest of the board. The closest there was to dissent came from CHRB member Thomas Hudnut, a private-school headmaster who saw Fravel’s letter as being a slice of reality.

Oh, there was board member Dennis Alfieri, a Pasadena real-estate executive who Cherwa said regularly sides with Santa Anita. He was gone by the time of the vote. He was the envy of the room.

Instead it was 6-0. The NorCal plan that feels like it is being made up as it goes along won the day. The California Association of Racing Fairs has been trying to cobble together its plan to stay afloat on its side of the Tehachapis. It still has to figure out its financing, its purse structure, its expanded stabling, its backside housing, its sewer water, its promotion, its advertising and the daunting prospect of building a $7 million turf course next year on a $4 million line of credit.

CARF, a poet’s dream, is the star on which California breeders may be hitching their collective wagons. The north, after all, is the part of the state where Cal-bred horses have an afternoon stage. Santa Anita and Del Mar really cannot afford to write a high percentage of those races. Not if they want to cling to their big-league cachet.

Here is an inconvenient truth. Fravel’s letter may have been about as elegant as Oscar Madison’s eternally unmade bed, but Hudnut was right. Buried like a rotten Easter egg in the threatening language was a very real element.

“The number of race days run in California has declined 32 percent since 2018, and the number of starters has declined (30 percent),” Fravel said. “In the last five years, Santa Anita has incurred operating losses in excess of $31 million.”

All that may be true. The same goes for Hudnut telling Fravel, “Setting up the CHRB as the determinant for you to go out of business is really unfair. Because if you go out of business, it’s because of mismanagement, not because of this board.”

Fravel and his letter became a convenient target for the rath of frustrated stakeholders and participants and horseplayers who have looked to California as the last bastion of big-time racing west of Arlington Heights. There were said to be more than 250 people in the meeting room Thursday at Cal Expo. Since that is in the north, there was a home-court feel to the ardor.

But a unanimous vote of a government board sitting through a marathon meeting does not a solution make. It is not even a ray of hope. It is a reprieve. Nothing more nor less than that.

Field sizes dwindle. Handle erodes, especially weighed against the rate of inflation. The red carpet for computer wagering is a revenue Band-Aid for racetracks trying to tread their choppy financial water with ill-gotten gains. More and more trainers find less and less reason to stick around. And there are fewer racehorses being bred.

In case this was not made clear, this applies not just to California but to racing all across America. Fravel’s letter might be not have been a primer on how to win friends and influence people, but it may yet have an I-told-you-so tinge to it.

With that, we will see you Oct. 19 at Pleasanton. Felix has other plans.

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