From today\'s Thoroughbred Daily News:
Publishers note: While this beautifully written column
by owner/trainer Peter Kleinhans was specifically written
about harness racing and is being published with
the permission of Harness Racing Update, where it
originally appeared, we thought that the sentiments
expressed were so applicable to the current state of the
Thoroughbred industry as to be very relevant to our
audience. We hope you enjoy.
FAREWELL MY LOVE; A FAN AND HORSEMEN
REFLECTS ON THE SADNESS THAT IS THE
MEADOWLANDS SITUATION
By Peter Kleinhans
\"Don\'t let the past remind us of what we are not now.\"
-Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young, \"Suite Judy Blue
Eyes\"
Like most 15-year-old boys, I thought about girls a
lot.
My imagination was host to countless rescues, seductions,
weddings, and other cringe-worthy embarrassments.
I was fully aware of the irony that the hero
of these dreams was capable of pulling girls from underneath
the oncoming wheels of recklessly-driven cars,
but that the dreamer of these dreams couldn\'t even
muster the courage to ask one of them out on a date.
But as I pitied myself about my haplessness with girls
that year, my first true love--my first real emotional
relationship, was already beginning. It sung siren songs
to me from the pages of Sports Eye as I rode the New
York City subway back and forth to school each day,
reading tales--the race charts--of Afton Gallant, Fight
The Foe, and Embassy Effort, horses I never met but
whose very names became legend to me. It taught me
to love the smell of stale air and smoke in the dirty
14th Street OTB office, where I would place $2 show
bets, trying to look 18 and legal. It gave me a brief
peek into its secret world through Channel 9\'s \"Racing
From Yonkers\" and \"Racing from Roosevelt,\"
life-changing shows for me, produced by Stan
Bergstein. It enchanted me so that I had to admit that
the corny theme song from the Yonkers show, \"I Believe
in Yonkers,\" was actually somewhat true in my
case. But most of all I fell in love with that Mecca
across the river. The place where Cam Fella beat It\'s
Fritz in the ultimate contest between speedball and
grinder. The place where every level of the grandstand
beat with its own pulse. Where horses stacked eight
wide from last and charged past the field. Where
Hilarion shocked in the Pace, and where Probe and Park
Avenue Joe dead-heated in the Hambo. Where the food
and the festivity of Pegasus made racing seem like the
center of the world\'s attention. Where the sky over the
swamp glowed with hope, opportunity, anticipation.
Where the action was. The Meadowlands.
But the Meadowlands of 2011 does not look like the
Meadowlands of 1976, when 42,133 fans swarmed
the gates on opening day. It does not look like the
Meadowlands of 1980, when Niatross destroyed the
field in the Pace, the first million-dollar purse in the
history of horse racing of any breed. It does not look
like the Meadowlands of the 1987 New Jersey Classic,
where Jate Lobell flashed his fluid brilliance. Indeed, it
doesn\'t even look like Hambletonian Day 2010, when a
gorgeous day lured 26,712 for a glimpse of what had
once been. The Meadowlands of 2011, on the contrary,
looks like what a non-slot enhanced harness track looks
like these days (in the rare cases where a slotless track
is still running). Nine- or 10-race cards, with fields full
(when we\'re lucky) of a motley assortment of $8,000
claimers and mediocre conditioned horses. Crowds of
2,000 or so, which are rarely reported (the certainty of
racing\'s inexorable decline can be traced from the night
Yonkers Raceway first listed its attendance as \"N/A\").
Of the fans who are still at the track, most are watching
the Thoroughbred simulcasts; the energy is stale.
Meanwhile, on the track, the racing is dominated by
trainers whose uncannily consistent 10-length-move-upoff-
the-claim statistics turn even casual fans into detectives
concerned more with \"who has the juice\" than
with normal handicapping approaches. When the
night\'s first race is run, with no dramatic build-up, no
sense that what is happening is important or has real
value, nothing changes in the air; the announcer is
practically inaudible, and the race going on might as
well be the fifth at Delta Downs, a world and a bayou
away.
As everyone knows, even this diminished Meadowlands
is in jeopardy of vanishing, something lovesick
harness fans like myself are having a difficult time
processing in a rational manner. The feeling of betrayal
is palpable, and brings to mind a heart-rending sequence
from John Updike\'s Pulitzer Prize-winning masterpiece
Rabbit At Rest. Updike\'s protagonist Harry
Angstrom is driving down Route 95 from Pennsylvania
to Florida, alone and aging, listening to oldies, reflecting
on feelings of loss. He recalls how the downtown he
had grown up in had been anchored by a large department
store named Kroll\'s:
He can remember standing as a child in the cold with
his mother gazing into this world of tinselled toys as
real as any other, the air biting at his cheeks, the sound
of the Salvation Army bells begging, the smell of the
hot soft pretzels sold on Weiser Square those years, the
feeling around him of adult hurrying--bundled-up bodies
pushing into Kroll\'s where you could buy the best of
everything from drapes to beds, toys to pots, china to
silver.
Kroll\'s was the kind of place we all know, or wish we
knew, a kind of home, so central to our identities and
to those of the people around us that it feels like part of
the family.
The kind of place where memories are formed and
shared, and to which memories adhere. The kind of
place we count on to be there, fixed and steady, while
everything else in our lives swirls with uncertainty.
So when the system just upped one summer and
decided to close Kroll\'s down, just because shoppers
had stopped coming in because the downtown had
become frightening to white people, Rabbit realized the
world was not solid and benign, it was a shabby set of
temporary arrangements rigged up for the time being,
all for the sake of the money. You just passed through,
and they milked you for what you were worth, mostly
when you were young and gullible. If Kroll\'s could go,
the courthouse could go, the banks could go. When the
money stopped, they could close down God Himself.
For many of us in harness racing, the Meadowlands is
our Kroll\'s. It\'s not as if everyone in harness racing has
been based at the Meadowlands, or that everyone has
even raced at the Meadowlands. But the Meadowlands
is always there, with its classic summer stakes schedule
and even its signature set of Winter Late Closing
series, its consistently cutting-edge driving colony, its
Saturday night photo finishes, its beautifully produced
simulcast broadcast. No racing aficionado\'s dreams are
complete without at least a cameo appearance by the
Big M.
Without the Meadowlands, what is harness racing? A
collection of speed-biased small tracks racing for
slot-machine-enhanced purse money, in front of no
one? Stakes races, thrown to the wind, retaining their
names, maybe, but with no sense of history or heritage?
Consider the fall of the mighty Messenger Stakes,
still a leg of the Triple Crown, but which since becoming
unmoored from harness racing\'s first shuttered
version of Kroll\'s--Roosevelt Raceway--has drifted from
track to track with no connection to its storied past.
Imagine the same cheapening effect taking its toll on
the Titan Cup, the Peter Haughton Memorial; indeed the
Hambletonian.
Walk into a barn at the Meadowlands and the horses-
-bless them--are as wonderful as ever; they do their
daily work with a generosity so pure it still takes our
breath away, and after their work is done, their bodies
still steam in the cold winter air. They still dive into
their feed tubs with abandon, they still nicker at the
sound of a visitor with the curiosity and excitement of
the innocent. Handle, takeout, slot machines, commission
reports: these are nothing to our Standardbred
companions. But it\'s tougher for us humans. Many of
us genuinely love horses, but what we are in love with
is the game. And that game will never be the same.
On the same lonely drive down route 95 to Florida,
Harry Angstrom hears a song from his teenage years,
reminding him of the first girl he had ever kissed, an
echo from the unforgettable time in his life when girls,
and everything else, were new and inexhaustibly exciting,
when being 15 seemed like a permanent condition.
The song reaches Harry over the airwaves from 40
years in the past, but seems close enough to touch:
Vaya con Dios, my love. Oh my. It hurts. The emotion
packed into these phrases buried in some d j.\'s
dusty racks of 78s like the cotton wadding in bullets,
like those seeds that come to life after a thousand
years in some pyramid. Though the stars recycle themselves
and remake all the heavy atoms Creation needs,
Harry will never be that person again, that boy with
that girl, his fingertips grazing the soft insides of her
thighs, a few atoms rubbing off; a few molecules.
The demise of the Meadowlands speaks to all of us in
harness racing. For some, there is no time to waste on
nostalgia: jobs and survival are at stake; the track is the
hub of a $1 billion/year industry that employs a huge
number of people in multiple capacities. For some comes
the simple realization that the seat in the grandstand
that we thought of as our seat for 20 years was
never really ours to begin with. And for many of us, it
is a simple, yet extraordinarily difficult reminder of the
obvious: nothing lasts forever.
In 1642, there was a night that Shakespeare\'s Globe
Theater held its final performance. In 1957, there was a
day that the Dodgers played their final game in Brooklyn\'s
Ebbetts Field. One day or night, probably sooner
rather than later, the gate will roll and the starter will
say \"Go\" to a field of 10 impossibly beautiful horses,
their polished coats reflecting the light at a thousand
angles. They will fly around the track, these miracles of
modern breeding, and 10 brilliantly talented drivers will
try to get them to the wire first. The numbers will go
up on the tote board, and then the OFFICIAL sign, and
then the payoffs. They will shimmer there for a moment,
perhaps acquiring the magical cast we save for
only those most intense moments of our lives, like our
first kiss. And then the lights will go out.