Flatter: Far from Saratoga come last days of Golden Gate

Albany, Calif.

Everything feels out of whack this week, especially since the Belmont Stakes* has been displaced by 164 miles. Sorry. Make that 163 3/4.

Forget about a Triple Crown. How about a double? Counting Justify’s simultaneous coronation and farewell in 2018, there have been 18 different winners of the last 18 U.S. classics.

So without a horse on the verge of instant recognition by mainstream America, why not move the Belmont* up where Red Smith said you take a left turn onto Union Avenue and go back 100 years? Actually, no one can seem to find where Smith actually wrote that. It seems the foundation for this column is getting more rickety by the word.

No live Triple Crown chance. No final quarter-mile to test a would-be champion. No air-quality panic like we had on Long Island last year. Heck, I cannot even replicate the illegal right-hand turn that earned me a traffic ticket from the fine people of Nassau County.

Instead of adding to my personal streak of 50 consecutive Triple Crown races that were not masked in a global pandemic, I flew west to cover the final days of Golden Gate Fields, write a piece for next week about the future of California racing and then start a 2 1/2-week vacation.

This was my own time machine. I got into an airplane, actually two, flew west and landed back in 1959.

At long last, I set foot this week where the bay comes to play. At least that is what the faded sign says at the entrance on Gilman Drive. Long gone is the time-and-temperature board beyond the backstretch next to I-80, literally a familiar signpost for Northern Californians stuck in traffic on the way to the Bay Bridge.

For years, for decades, that was as close as I got to Golden Gate Fields. No excuses, either, especially since I was born across the bay in San Rafael, and I grew up farther north in Chico.

In the ’70s and ’80s, I made hundreds of trips past the track without setting foot inside. Even when I covered Super Bowl 50, the last time I spent much time in the area, I did not make the side trip.

And now I have, and my first weekend at Golden Gate Fields will be everyone’s last.

I feel like a knowledgeable outsider, the guy who has been in so many flight simulators that getting into a real cockpit and grabbing the throttle should be second nature. I watched so many episodes of the “Golden Gate Report” with the late Sam Spear that I already knew every nook and cranny of this track.

Well, not quite. When I arrived Wednesday, the GPS took me to the wrong entrance. I doubt that would have happened had I bothered to show up back in the days of folded maps in the glove compartment.

Once I found my way to the horsemen’s entrance, it was easy to find a parking space down the knoll from the familiar-looking grandstand. Wednesdays used to be busy with races back in the day. Not anymore.

A dark-green shack stands near the outer rail where the homestretch becomes the clubhouse turn and where the backside begins on the Albany-Berkeley city line. Dennis Anderson, the attentive guard, popped out to see who this stranger was. I, interloper.

I was off and running with my game-worn story about driving past the track a zillion times, perennially headed to Candlestick Park or the Coliseum or a weekend in The City, always with capital letters in these parts, but never once setting foot on the racetrack property. I can recite the whole yarn now like a waiter repeating the specials.

As I shared experiences about places like Tracy and French Camp and even far away Oroville, Anderson realized I was not some carpetbagger from back east. I got the feeling this 82-year-old former jockey who still exercises horses every morning had a B.S. needle that would not be hard for some poseur to peg.

He did not sound very dour about the impending doom that faces this track that has been around since the year before he was born. As happens every year at this time, Anderson will be doing similar work next weekend about 35 miles east in Pleasanton. The difference now is that instead of going for just a couple weeks of races at the Alameda County Fair, he and what remains of Northern California racing will be back there this fall, too, to see what the shaky future holds in their makeshift new hub.

I was back again Thursday for what seemed like a routine morning of training on the pitch-black Tapeta surface. Routine for a track that has lost a lot of its regulars, both horses and humans. Once The Stronach Group fessed up last summer that it was closing the joint, the exodus began. First it was a trickle. Then it accelerated to the point that there were not enough horses to run even three days of racing most weeks.

There was a Chicken Little style rumor that they would not even make it to this weekend, that my trip would be a complete waste of time, that the sky was falling before the last overnight could be written. The withering nature of other people’s gossip never ceases to gnash. For what it is worth, they will be running Friday and Saturday and Sunday with a whopping total of 140 horses for 21 races.

For those who still go about day-to-day work here, they speak dutifully of how sad it is and how they wish it did not happen and how they did not want to leave. But the feeling of resignation that was so palpable three years ago at Arlington Park does not seem as obvious to me this week at Golden Gate.

My career has been peppered with closings. When I was at ESPN Radio, I felt like I was the guy who would hang condemnation notices on iconic sports venues. I produced audio features on the closing of Chicago Stadium and Boston Garden and Maple Leaf Gardens. When I lived and worked in New York, I witnessed the final days of Yankee Stadium and Shea Stadium and Giants Stadium and, yes, the old Meadowlands grandstand that was much nicer than that new, sub-compact version that faces the sun on Hambletonian day.

Come to think of it, I was there for the last running of the Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe at the old Longchamp. Trust me, when I travel abroad, I carry on almost everything, but I check my scythe.

Having been there and done that for the final days of so many sports palaces, and since I am at a point where I get the senior rate on pretty much everything, maybe I have developed a veneer like that of a tour guide in New York who has come to ignore the OMG stares of visitors getting their first looks at buildings taller than trees.

It may hit me at some point this weekend when races actually happen, and then Sunday at around 5:30 p.m. local time, when they won’t anymore. It really smacked me at Arlington when I walked out for the last time and looked up at the sleek architecture of that beautiful grandstand as the sun set on a beautiful night in the early autumn of ’21.

The grandstand at Golden Gate Fields is not as pretty or inspiring. It ain’t Pimlico, either, thank goodness. It has good bones, even if the paint is worn and the big panes of glass that form the facades on the north and south ends look like they have not been cleaned since the nearby baseball teams were winning World Series.

One of those baseball teams will be the last ones to lock up and take the keys out of the East Bay. The A’s go to Sacramento next year, supposedly on their way to Las Vegas. The Raiders preceded them into the desert. The Warriors found their way back across the water four years ago. Those of us of a certain age remember, too, the Seals getting the puck out of the area and moving to Cleveland and then merging with Minnesota and finally landing in Dallas.

In truth, Golden Gate Fields was the first major-league venue in the East Bay. It sure was major when Citation showed up in 1950 and when Silky Sullivan made a name for himself as the deepest of deep closers in 1957 and when John Henry set a course record in 1984.

The bay stopped coming to play long ago, although it happened gradually. Simulcast wagering cracked the exit door ajar. Racing’s retreat from its peak days led to the dwindling of foal crops led to fewer faces led to fewer places to showcase California breeding led to dwindling of foal crops led to this chicken-and-egg narrative.

There is no slot-machine revenue to help racetracks in California, and casinos owned by Native American tribes certainly are not coming to the rescue of their gaming-dollar rivals. Historic horse-racing machines have been mentioned as a possible lifeline, too late it seems for this half of the state.

So these 140 acres will be abandoned by this time next week, when it seems the last of the horses will be shipped to Pleasanton or somewhere else to keep on keeping on.

The future for the land seems uncertain. The scuttlebutt among more than few of the denizens is that the soil has been so polluted that it would cost too much to clean it up and turn it into, well, anything. Considering the property’s pre-racing past as a dynamite factory and a wartime dry dock for battleships, there may be a lot more than horse manure in this story.

One wonders what might have been if the Stronach Group did not run both Golden Gate and Santa Anita. What if the two tracks had separate owners? As with any business from corporate conglomerates to franchised coffee houses, downsizing is inevitable with any consolidation. For better or worse, getting out of the racing business in Northern California and Maryland means Stronach will be down to Santa Anita and Gulfstream Park.

Even if a ragtag coalition born of county fairs can make a go of racing year-round at Pleasanton, it will not be the same. Just ask anyone in Chicagoland who still worships the game but does so at the altar of Hawthorne. A cathedral like Arlington Park it ain’t.

There will be something poignant about spending Saturday watching the Belmont Stakes* on TV from 3,000 miles away instead of in the flesh. I will be at one old track to see the race unfold at another track that is even older.

Here’s to aging. As I may be reminded this weekend, it sure beats the alternative.

Ron Flatter’s column returns July 5, appearing 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.