In Today's Thoroughbred Daily News (for December 9)

[Rich Curtis]

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.