Flatter: Fair Grounds makes tough call in face of tragedy

The business-as-usual approach Fair Grounds took Wednesday to running horses only hours after a terror attack barely two miles away had me perplexed. It was not that the races went ahead in the face of deadly tragedy in the French Quarter of New Orleans. It was my own reaction that baffled me.

We have borne witness to this sort of atrocity far too often. After senselessness brings us to a standstill, we struggle with when it is appropriate to move forward from the sudden elegy to resume living.

Fair Grounds races on after French Quarter terror attack.

Images flicker in my mind from 1963, when I was only 4 and wondering why my mom and dad cried about a young man who was murdered in Dallas. There was 1972, when I was 13 and forever separated from innocence when a movement bent on genocide brutalized the Olympics in Munich. There would be the shooting of Reagan and the atrocities of 9/11 and so on and so on.

Each and every time, a decision had to be made about whether it was right to play games or throw balls or run races.

“I don’t know the answer of when you should postpone or cancel events based on a very tragic event,” John Cherwa said on my podcast this week. This is a man who, in addition to covering racing for the Los Angeles Times, has been to more Olympics than a flagbearer from Greece.

Since we are close in age, he wound his way through many of the flashpoints I just did.

“You know what?” he said. “There is no right answer. It’s all situational.”

So it was Wednesday afternoon, when Fair Grounds ran its card as scheduled. The first post came only 9 1/2 hours after that ISIS sympathizer drove his rented pickup truck through a Bourbon Street crowd, murdering 14 innocent bystanders and injuring dozens of others before police killed him in a shootout.

“You don't let a terrorist stop your daily life. That’s their goal,” said trainer Neil Pessin, a second-generation man about horses who is woven into the fabric of the New Orleans racing community. “If you do that, you’re playing into exactly what they want. That’s their whole deal is to disorient everybody, to make everybody change plans, to do something different. So I was all for racing and for the football game going on.”

That football game, however, was pushed back more than 19 hours from Wednesday night to Thursday afternoon. That was because there were more lives at risk there, what with 70,000 seats in the Superdome that had to be inspected to make sure there were not any bombs left behind.

Pessin was more matter of fact about the comparison between running races and pausing football.

“I don’t think Fair Grounds is a major target, because honestly and truly, we don’t get a lot of people here,” he said on my podcast. “Even for the live racing, we still don’t have mass crowds unless it’s a big day.”

Pessin spoke when some others in the New Orleans racing family were still too rattled about what happened Wednesday morning to talk about it.

“All my friends are good,” one person texted me, “but there was a (friend’s) kid killed who just graduated last year from high school. Just awful.”

Adrianne DeVaux, a budding trainer who worked for her sister Cherie DeVaux, got married on New Year’s Eve and celebrated with family and friends at what could have been a new ground zero.

“We were standing with everyone we love right where a bomb was supposed to go off the moment this photo was taken,” she wrote on an X post showing the newlyweds. “It makes you really think about how quickly something can change.”

It would have been understandable for anyone who was that close to the tragedy to have wanted Wednesday off, but Pessin said that was not the case from what he saw on the backside at dawn or the frontside in the afternoon.

“It was a very somber mood but a mood of continuing on and doing our regular routine,” he said. “I don’t know of anybody on the racetrack who was not for racing that day.”

Which brings me back to my own uncertainty. We all have been touched without notice in some way by horrible news. And we all have watched as some flyover media type from far, far away decides it was right or wrong to go ahead or not go ahead with something that already was planned.

In this case, while I was a most interested observer and had my privately ambivalent opinion, how the horsemen and horsewomen of Fair Grounds decided to keep on keeping on was none of my damn business. I did not need to play the role of carpetbagger.

Cherwa agreed.

“New Orleans did what they thought they needed to do,” he said. “Fair Grounds did what they thought they wanted to do. It’s all up to second guessing, but I don’t want to do that second guessing.”

Even hindsight can be blurry. NFL commissioner Pete Rozelle rued his decision to play on in 1963 only three days after the killing of John F. Kennedy. Where that call was questioned, the postponing and subsequent playing of the Army-Navy game two weeks later was lauded, partly because widow Jacqueline Kennedy encouraged it.

After one day to mourn the 12 hostages killed when the Israel delegation was attacked in Munich more than 52 years ago, autocratic Olympic czar Avery Brundage said “the Games must go on.” Even though his iron-fisted decision was endorsed by the government in Israel, it remains a bitter source of debate more than a half-century later. The new movie “September 5” even seizes on this.

When Ronald Reagan was shot in 1981, the Oscars were postponed one night, but the championship game of the Final Four went on as scheduled six hours later. When Indiana and North Carolina tipped off in Philadelphia, Reagan was in surgery in Washington.

After 9/11, baseball went on hold for a week, and football was not going to follow the Rozelle template. Commissioner Paul Tagliabue pushed week 2 back to week 18, and the Super Bowl was played for the first time in February, coincidentally in New Orleans.

Not many races were scheduled Tuesday, Sept. 11, 2001, but they all were canceled. Four tracks went ahead with their cards the next day. A total of 26 were up and running that Friday.

Right, wrong or neither, those decisions were made on the fly with a unique set of circumstances each time. Sometimes, however, there are compelling differences.

Two years ago this month, exercise rider Daniel Quintero died in a training accident at Tampa Bay Downs. Five hours later, on the very surface where his life ended, racing went ahead. That was different. It was not a matter of standing up to terrorism or a question of public safety. It was callous disregard for a 19-year-old life that was cut short on the very ground where it was decided the show must go on.

Churchill Downs Inc., which owns Fair Grounds, did not make any big, formal announcement about what happened in New Orleans. I am sure race caller John G. Dooley would have had something appropriate to say Wednesday, and TV host Joe Kristufek posted a social-media message that struck the right tone.

Thoughts and prayers. That is a phrase often used as a crutch to prop up an uneasy reaction to tragedy. They were very real this time, though. I know they were for me.

As for whether it was right or wrong to go ahead with racing Wednesday or postpone the Sugar Bowl until Thursday or even reconsider historic precedents, I go back to a personal memory from 9/11. I was the production manager at ESPN Radio in Connecticut, where we suspended our national programming for most of the day. Sometime that afternoon, I got a call from a network bureaucrat representing the sales team in New York.

“What are you going to do about all the commercials we’ve missed today?” was what was said to me. Actually barked. “Did you ever stop to discuss those?”

“Seriously?” I said. “I’ll tell you what. Please refer me to the page in the procedures manual about what to do when two large airplanes fly into a matched pair of New York skyscrapers. Once I read it, we can talk after that.”

Condition books only go so far.

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.