Almost all of the stories this week leading up to the Preakness which you can bet on Idabet.com has been about the state of racing in Maryland.  Before we go there, it appears most of the top handicappers are showing their respect to Animal Kingdom in the race tomorrow.  I’ll take a look at the race and offer my selections later today.

Since I grew up in Maryland and worked for many years at the Maryland tracks including as a kid at Bowie, Timonium, Marlboro, Fair Hill and of course Laurel and Pimlico as well as Freestate Raceway, I feel I can make some interesting comments about Maryland’s serious problems.

Today the two Maryland tracks are faced with short fields, depressed purses and antiquated facilities.  Unfortunately, the problems are deeply rooted and go back to the 1960’s as the heyday of racing came to an end.  Until then, Maryland was a benefactor of an East Coast circuit of racing that began in Florida in the winter and moved northward as the weather warmed.  The top horses, trainers and stables followed this circuit which brought fans in daily via trains and busses from Richmond to the south to New York to the north.  Meantime, the winter featured a meet at Bowie which ushered in off season racing for the mid Atlantic hardcore.

As the only game in town for legalized racing, racetracks were notorious for sticking it to the fans in those days.  You paid as many as three parking fees (general, preferred and valet), followed by admission, program, Racing Form or Telegraph, a Stable Boy tip sheet of course, a hot dog and a beer before you probably even made your first bet.  By the time the first race was over, you might be out $30 and now have to sit around and wait a half hour for the next race.  Oh yeah, in those days, your only exotic was the double so, it was just WPS from that point on.

Things began to change in the 1970’s.  Pennsylvania legalized racing siphoning off many fans who came from the north.  Racing date battles between Liberty Bell, Delaware Park and Garden State caused further competition.  This was followed by the creation of the state lottery which drained the tracks of most of its “casual” customers, those just looking to gamble for a quick buck.

The advent of year round racing in 1976 with Bowie racing in the summer was nothing short of horrible.  Bowie was basically just a big barn of a grandstand with no turf course, no charm and no trees around the building.  Worse yet, the grandstand faced the sun all afternoon turning the outside of the concrete apron into a sauna.  Inside, the sun rays shrouded a building encased in smoke.  If there was a total opposite to summertime racing at Saratoga, Bowie was surely it.

For decades, Marylanders would travel to Delaware Park for the summer leg of racing.  Now the two tracks were fighting for the same horses and most of the same fans.  The geniuses at Delaware Park were no better.  When Delaware was part of the Maryland circuit they used the same racing staff. Yet when they competed, they still used the same staff.  The racing secretary that summer at Delaware was the same as at Bowie-their competition. With Maryland paying his year round salary, guess who got most of the horses?

Within a few years it was all out war between all the area tracks and one by one many of the top stables and bettors deserted the Maryland scene. Meanwhile the tracks continue to age and management wasn’t much better.

I once worked Preakness Day in the admission booth.  Grandstand admission was $35 and each fan went through a turnstile.  On this day, the other clerk in my booth manipulated the turnstiles so three people would go through with one click enabling him to admit three for the price of two and pocket the difference.  He happened to be the son of the admissions director and believe it or not would become the CFO of Laurel in a few years.

My first day as a mutuel teller, I worked next to a shop steward who took me under his wing and tried to teach me how to rip people off…True, true story.  I won’t go into the details, but a sad storyline about how tracks were operating was unfolding.

In the early 80’s, there was a brief renaissance in Maryland when the late Frank DeFrancis, an international attorney and horse owner bought Freestate (harness) Raceway and then eventually Laurel and then Pimlico.  De Francis invested into modernizing the tracks and did simple things like cleaning the windows overlooking the track that had been soiled for years.  He was also a marketing wizard who brought the idea of promoting the tracks which was virtually unheard of in the past.

The biggest promotion of the year before Frank was Bowie’s New Year’s Day brunch which forced fans to line up for up to an hour since they would only offer it at one concession stand.

Since the death of Frank in the early 1990’s, the tracks have been in turmoil. Charles Town and Delaware Park added slots in the mid 90’s which began to attract Maryland based horses.  The Maryland Jockey Club produced some of the worst marketing I’ve ever seen and could never figure out a way to get the thousands of Preakness Day fans to come to the races the rest of the year.

Instead of trying to improve racing as a whole, all attention was spent year after year trying to get slots.  For more than a decade this was a debacle and further led to a decline.  Eventually Pennsylvania added slots eroding more business.

By the time slots were passed in Maryland, the fiasco grew larger when Laurel failed to get a casino to help fund its overall business.  In the past, the tracks argued for slots to increase purses which would lead to more betting.  In reality, that isn’t so true and what the tracks need is the revenue from slots to directly support the entire operation.

With no slots at the track and no real direct revenue to subsidize the track operations, the current law is unlikely to save Maryland racing.  A stopgap law which does give the tracks some extra cash for operations will only maintain the status quo unless something major is passed.

When I moved from Laurel to Delaware Park to take over marketing, we actually attracted more fans most days going head to head despite our much smaller market.  Fans grew tired of paying top dollar and getting nothing in return.

The internal battles of Maryland racing are as much a reason for their decline as the lottery, slots, year round racing and an unresponsive legislature.

Conflicts of interest among union leaders, track management and owners and even politicians have helped destroyed a once proud industry.

There are many proposals to fix the situation in Maryland but unless they embrace the realities of a new era in racing, they will not succeed.  There is no need for two tracks and there is no need for a year round schedule.  Horsemen will once again have to become gypsies and be part of a circuit for enough business to be had to support live racing, unless the state wants to subsidize racing further.

The tracks need to embrace modern technology and realize most of the day to day betting will not be done at the track.  A sustained quality marketing campaign must be created to attract new and younger fans to racing and build them for the future.  Track owners must hire management dedicated to building a new era, not lining their pockets for themselves.

The success of the Preakness must be bottled and used to boost business the rest of the year.  Track owners cannot be simply rewarded with free casinos to line their pockets without investing in racing, but the state cannot sit by and let tracks die because of casinos and the lottery that they legislated.