Future Forum: Guilt, Innocence, and the Death Penalty 
Sports
Trailing the Field
Horse racing was an odds–on favorite to succeed in Texas, so why has it been such a sucker bet? Greed, ignorance, latent puritanism, bad marketing, bad timing, bad laws, and bad luck.
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Timing was crucial in another respect as well: Call it the Big D factor. By all accounts, the first major track to open in Texas should have been in the Dallas area, since it is both a big sports town and a known quantity within racing circles. Yet rather than cooperate, major players in North Texas bitterly battled for a class 1 license, and in the meantime Trinity Meadows, a small track west of Fort Worth, opened ahead of everybody and further complicated matters. It was as bad as a bunch of wildcatters feuding over a mineral lease, and it got even worse when Trinity’s owner, a litigious Ohioan with dreams of parlaying the track into a casino, told Dallas turfwriter Gary West, “Who anointed the horse? It could just as well be pigs racing out there.”
It was up to Houston, then, to launch the first class 1 track in Texas, but Sam Houston Park—an $85 million facility on the far northwest edge of town—had its own set of problems. Foremost was a financial plan that would have been one of the great sweetheart deals in Harris County history: Had the state attorney general’s office not intervened, it would have netted investors more than a tenfold return on their money within a few years. Eventually Sam Houston’s original licensees, including former Houston Astros owner John McMullen, turned for advice to the late John Connally, who brokered a deal with financier Charles Hurwitz, the head of the mineral, lumber, and real estate conglomerate Maxxam. The track’s original management team, kept on by Hurwitz, targeted the city’s high rollers, selling luxury boxes in the clubhouse and charging $25 for grandstand admission on opening night, and they were overwhelmed by requests for stall space by Thoroughbred trainers from other tracks. Reportedly, though, track officials were so confident of success they didn’t bother with the marketing, education, or outreach necessary to land the ordinary kind of patrons who keep a track going. What’s more, Sam Houston had been built along a new toll road northwest of the city, in a remote, sparsely populated area that most Houstonians were not familiar with.
The opening night crowd of 16,000 in April 1994 was considerably smaller than had been expected. But even worse was the handle: The bettors were acting more like skinflints than high rollers. As it turned out, most of the crowd didn’t know beans about racing or betting. There had been no racing in the state for more than fifty years, after all, and you can hardly learn the intricacies of the sport by watching the Kentucky Derby on TV. “I knew we were in trouble,” recalls one Sam Houston official, “when this lady came up to me and went on and on about a Queen Ella. She kept saying, ‘I’ve seen the governor and the mayor, but where is this Queen Ella I’ve been hearing about?’” The official finally realized the confused patron was referring to the “quinella,” a type of bet involving the first two finishers in a race.
Neither the size of the crowd nor the betting handle improved over the rest of the season, and the purses awarded to the winning horses, taken as a percentage from the handle, began to decrease accordingly. Sam Houston’s trainers, particularly those with better horses, began to make plans to leave. And as the quality of the fields in the races decreased, they became even less attractive to horseplayers. Sunk by the amount of money it was losing, the track filed for bankruptcy protection in April 1995.
For the folks at Retama Park, who were building a track outside San Antonio, Sam Houston’s failure was a sobering but instructive lesson, and they determined not to make the same mistakes. Track publicists made forays to shopping malls and civic and business groups, promoting racing and educating the public about it. And when the track opened last summer, patrons were greeted by friendly “betting buddies,” employees trained to help them learn their way around the track and the tote board. Nevertheless, the big lake in the center of the track became an omen for Retama Park’s future. Because of faulty engineering, the lake never filled, and it remained simply a big hole in the middle of the racetrack, an unforeseen flaw in the field of dreams. The problem was that the demographics for a big–spending racing public in San Antonio weren’t there. “We just never found the heavy hitters,” says Keith Kleine. People were betting, on average, less than $50 during a trip to the races, as opposed to more than $100 at most viable tracks. What’s more, the devaluation of the peso and the economic crisis in Mexico cut down drastically on the number of patrons from south of the border, whom track officials had been counting on.
Ironically, as Retama made preparations last fall to shut down its quarter–horse meet ahead of schedule, and as plans to reorganize its debt fell through, the financing and power plays in Dallas were finally resolved, principally because of the Trammell Crow family’s entry into the fray. Partners of the Lone Star Turf Club, minus certain ousted members, announced that they would break ground in Grand Prairie for a simulcasting parlor (simulcasting was legalized in 1991) to be opened this spring, with live racing under way by the end of the year.
If this seems like a ray of hope for racing, the optimism is probably warranted. Dallas may have been the scene of the most frustrating and byzantine of the class 1 track battles, but it also remains the most promising site for racing. It is also good news that a number of Texans who have invested in farms and breeding and racing stock still want racing in Texas to succeed. “Lots of my owners are willing to go the extra mile if we can just see a little farther down the road,” says trainer Tommie Morgan of Rockdale, who kept a string of horses at Retama. Likewise, a number of nationally prominent Texans, including Helen Alexander, would like to race here once the purses make it worth their while. Yet another bright spot is a recent upturn in the handle at Sam Houston, which has become home to a new group of horseplayers, including a coterie of Chinese Americans who come to the track late at night to bet on races simulcast from Hong Kong.
Of course, the problems that have beset racing in Texas since its inception haven’t gone away. There is still an anti–gambling contingent in the Legislature that is reluctant to make concessions. There is still the Legislature’s refusal to approve off–track betting, as though lawmakers still want to rein in the pastime they’ve legalized. (“It’s like when we used to have blue laws,” says Joe Straus, Jr. “They would have aisles roped off so you could buy nails but you couldn’t buy a hammer.”) There is still the problem of competition among tracks for the best racing dates. There is still the problem of a public locked into the lottery, lured away by casino gambling in Louisiana, or simply distracted by leisure activities with more bells and whistles.
But it’s hard to count out any pursuit in Texas that involves two things so dear to Texans: horses and risk. And there may actually be a positive side too to the lack of veteran horseplayers at the tracks in Texas, since one of the major problems in racing is the aging of its hard–core fans. When I visited Sam Houston and Retama last year, I found the crowds fresh–faced and wholesome, a far cry from the grizzled regulars with nicotine–stained fingertips and marked–up Racing Forms who hover around the betting windows at tracks elsewhere. In the long run, the sight of all those young people and families at the racetrack should be heartening to industry forecasters.
One day at Retama, I saw a toddler perched on his daddy’s shoulder as the man headed for the betting window. Leaning over toward his father’s ear, he called out, in a tiny but insistent voice, “I want the ten horsie.” If racing officials can just hang in there a few years, that little boy, and others like him, could be the sport’s future.
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