GOING, GOING ...

               The Phoenix horse track Turf Paradise halted its “live” season and shut down all operations on March 16, but to regulars of its Players Club race book, including me, the season effectively ended several weeks before. That was when TV simulcasts and betting on the races at Santa Anita Park in California and Gulfstream Park in Florida, hosts of the nation’s best winter seasons, were cut off to the track and its satellite sites, leaving a menu that was thin, to say the least.

               The cause of the shutdown was a dispute between the company doing the televising and the racing authorities in several states, including Arizona. The beef, which continues, is over money, of course, but a principle of sorts also supposedly is involved, namely the provider’s contention that entities that are OTB only, conducting little or no actual racing, should pay more for their feeds than bricks-and-mortar tracks.

 It’s an issue that’s of zero concern to race goers, but that seems to make no difference to the people immediately involved. The TV provider, Monarch Content Management, is owned by Frank Stronach, the Canadian zillionaire who also owns the Santa Anita, Gulfstream, Golden Gate Fields, Laurel and Pimlico tracks. If anyone should be interested in promoting racing generally it’s he. Ditto, locally, for the people calling the shots at the AZ tracks.

If either group had chanced to look around the Players Club right after the cutoff, it would have seen that business was down by about half from previous levels, which themselves were less than robust. Then the virus orders kicked in and the total shutdown now enters its third month. I think it’s safe to say that some of the people who are locked out won’t come back when business reopens. Once broken, a habit can be tough to resume.

If ever there were a sport that doesn’t need self-inflicted wounds, it’s horse racing. Time was when it was among America’s Big Three sporting enterprises, along with baseball and boxing. Now it’s not on any such list, a nonentity that most people notice but one day a year-- Kentucky Derby day.

Racing has much to recommend it. It’s long in color and tradition, and few things match the excitement of a neck-to-neck homestretch duel, especially when you have a few bucks riding on one of the necks. At the same time the sport is an acquired taste, the serious pursuit of which requires the sort of study that’s out of favor (way, way out) these days. Its clientele is aged and aging, a trend that shows no sign of turning. If it weren’t for the tax revenues the sport provides to the 38 U.S. states that permit it, it’d be much reduced from its current state.

But racing suffers particularly from problems of its own making. One is the recurring concern over equine safety that reached a recent-year peak in the winter of 2018-19, when 30 horses died from race-related injuries within a few weeks at Santa Anita. A lengthy investigation into the cause of the outbreak produced no firm conclusions, and the spotlight dimmed, but a remedy was there all along: synthetic track surfaces. These mixes of sand, synthetic fibers, rubber and wax have been in use for more than a dozen years at Arlington Park near Chicago and Woodbine in Toronto, with fatality rates consistently coming in at about half the usual rate of two for every 1,000 starts. It is, in fact, a solution in search of anyone willing to apply it.

Safety, as well as the integrity of the sport, also is involved in the recurring scandals over the use of illicit drugs that hype equine performance or keep ailing horses on the tracks. In March a Federal indictment was returned against 27 individuals, including seven trainers and 11 veterinarians, for a long-running scheme to illegally “dope” more than 100 horses in a half-dozen states. One of the trainers named is Jason Servis, whose colt, Maximum Security, crossed the finish line first in the 2019 Kentucky Derby only to lose it to a stewards’ ruling. Maximum Security went on to win four of his next five starts and $12 million in prize money.

At least equally disturbing was the  report that Justify, the 2018 Triple Crown winner, had tested positive for the banned drug scopolamine, a bronchial dilator and heart stimulant, after he won the Santa Anita Derby that year, but that California authorities sat on the information, allowing the colt to qualify for the Triple Crown races. Taking up the matter in closed-door meetings later in the year, the California Racing Board gave the horse a pass on grounds that an active ingredient in the drug might have been naturally ingested in jimson weed, which can get into horse feeds and bedding. It never revealed the positive test. The New York Times article that exposed the episode quoted experts as saying that nibbling the weed wouldn’t produce nearly the concentration of the drug that was found in Justify’s system.

 Justify’s trainer, as well as that of American Pharaoh, which won the Triple Crown in 2015, was Bob Baffert, for two decades the sport’s most-prominent personage. While he’s outspoken on many issues, Baffert has been mum on this one. It well might be concluded that the “too big to fail” dictum applies here.

 At the center of racing’s woes is the hodgepodge of rules and rulers that govern it; it shares with boxing the distinction being the sport that needs the most regulation but gets the least. Each state that permits it has its own governing board, and these differ greatly in honesty and competence.  It might have used the suspensions of this virus period to get its house in order, but no such thing is occurring. Meantime, the number of people who care continues to diminish.

BOOKISH

               Six weeks into our confinement and, unhappily, the end looks about as far away it was when we began. The news is grindingly repetitious and except for that nonevent the NFL Draft nothing much has been happening in sports. Deprived of the present we must retreat into the past with entertainments like ESPN’s many-part rehash of the 1998 Chicago Bulls’ championship season. I was around for that, and while as a Chicagoan I cheered the Bulls, as a reporter I was obliged to keep some distance. That became easier after watching the internal squabbles of that great basketball team, reminding us that except for their otherworldly skills our sports idols are human.

               The nice thing about the past is that there is plenty of it, always permitting our further exploration. This led again to my wonderful sports library, collected largely from freebies accumulated in my years as a columnist and book reviewer. The 500-odd volumes that line my office walls look more impressive than they should because I haven’t read nearly all of them. A plus about these trying times is that they’ve allowed me to do some catching up.

               One book that I previously only scanned is “PROPHET OF THE SANDLOTS;  JOURNEYS OF A MAJOR LEAGUE SCOUT,” by Mark Winegardner, published in 1990.  It’s a record of a year’s travel by the author with Tony Lucadello, a former minor-league infielder who was a 46-year scout (1943-89) with, first, the Chicago Cubs and then the Philadelphia Phillies. In that span he signed 52 future major-leaguers, including the Hall of Famers Mike Schmidt and Fergie Jenkins. The number would be 53 if it included Ernie Banks; the scout wouldn’t count him because the future Mr. Cub was a young pro in the Negro leagues when he first saw him, but Banks always credited Lucadello with bringing his star to light.

               The book is a look at baseball as it was, not is. Lucadello made his rounds of the Midwestern high school, American Legion and college fields without the radar gun or stopwatch no scout would be without in the current, data-driven age. He prided himself on being a “projector,” someone who could foretell how the teenagers he watched would look three to five years hence, when they were of age to aspire to the Bigs.

 To say that Lucadello went his own way would be an understatement. He was a loner, keeping to himself on the Motel 6-Denny’s circuit baseball scouts still travel. He was a bit of a secret agent, too, the better to keep his evaluations from opposition eyes. One thing he didn’t keep secret was his tenet, uttered only partly in jest, that 87% of baseball was played below the waist. By that he meant that the hips, legs and feet are what generate the power, speed and balance that made major leaguers.  He looked for youngsters who might be puppies in high school but full-grown German Shepherds down the road.  His observations on the game are as pertinent now as they were when the book was written 30 years ago.

               “SECOND WIND; THE MEMOIRS OF AN OPINIONATED MAN,” is an unusual kind of jockography, first because its subject is the star basketball center Bill Russell, an unusual kind of athlete, and its coauthor is Taylor Branch, a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian whose intellectual credentials are a cut above the sort of writers who usually write such works. Published in 1979, when Russell was 45 years old (he’s 86 now), it contains a lot of  forgettable material about the games he played but some truly fascinating stuff about his early life and later struggles with celebrity that all great athletes face but rarely address, in print or, probably, with themselves.

               Russell’s perspective was unique, partly because, unlike the big majority of his NBA peers, he wasn’t a growing-up-entitled natural athlete but a self-made one. A gangly, clumsy teen in Oakland, California, he was the 15-and-a-half man on a 15-man jayvee team in high school, splitting the team’s 15^th and last uniform, and the scant playing time that went with, with another student. He made the varsity as a junior off his height and jumping ability, but wasn’t all-anything, and got his hoops scholarship to the University of San Francisco (his only offer) by virtue of his performance on a summer-league team that he made by accident. At USF, with teammate and long-time cohort K.C. Jones, he painstakingly built the defensive and offensive moves that fueled his epic career.

              Russell had a prickly personality; he eschewed giving autographs and receiving honors, even insisting that his jersey-retirement ceremony with the Boston Celtics be held in an empty Boston Garden with only ex-teammates present. He reminded strongly of another Boston sports idol, the baseball great Ted Williams, who was portrayed in a memorable John Updike New Yorker piece as a perfectionist “quixotically desiring to sever [his] game from the paid spectatorship and publicity that surrounds it.”

Russell resisted being defined by his sport, considering fans’ cheers as hypocritical and ultimately destructive to his self-image. “I’ve tried to handle my ego the way I would any other part of my character: to acknowledge it but not let it control me or make me into something I don’t like,” he wrote. The man-against-himself theme, rare in sports, makes this book worthwhile.

 A little levity is especially valuable these days and there’s that aplenty in “GOLF DREAMS” by the aforementioned John Updike. Published in 1996, it contains 30 pieces on the sport by the late, world-class man of letters. Updike was a champion writer but a so-so golfer, an 18-handicapper (I once read). Indeed, he was living proof of the adage that one never will be good at any game one takes up as an adult.

 Like most duffers, Updike is both torn and fascinated by the fact that a gloriously perfect shot or two can transform any ordinary round, pulling the golfer back to the links despite abundant evidence that his time might be better spent elsewhere. “Golf is not a hobby… hobbies take place in the cellar and smell of airplane glue,” he writes. Rather, it’s a “trip” that can “so transforms one’s somatic sense” that it can “debunk the fabric of mundane reality.” 

A couple of pieces alone make the book worthwhile. “Drinking from a Cup Made Cinchy” mocks golf instruction by comparing tea-drinking mechanics with those of the golf swing. In “Farrell’s Caddy,” a fictional player follows the muttered advice of a boozy, taciturn Scottish bag-toter to leave his wife and back off from a business merger as well as transform his swing.  There’s a good trifecta if there ever was one.