AT FAIRPLEX PARK THE PACE IS SLOW : Harness Operation Struggles, as Does the Sport Itself

Two postcard scenes from a late autumn morning at Fairplex Park in Pomona:

--Howard Parker is driving off the track, guiding his sulky through the gate leading to the barn area. In his arms is his year-old son, Gregory, wearing a blue-and-white helmet like his father’s. Gregory is the fourth generation of the Parker family to be introduced to harness racing.

--Not far away, Mary Madland is leaning against a brown-and-gold tack box at her barn, watching four of her horses cool down on the hot walker. “This one here set a world record for 5 1/2 furlongs,” she says, pointing out Todd N, the New Zealand-bred pacer that trainer-driver James Lackey took around the Fairplex oval in 1:18 2/5 last June 21. “I just bought him, so I’m kind of excited about that. I’d love to have the record myself with the same horse.”

At the race track, any race track, hope always springs eternal. Tomorrow will always be better than today, so why not introduce a new generation to the sport? Why not believe that records can be broken? Anything is possible.

Howard Parker and Mary Madland certainly believe. What else can they do? They’ve been around horses and racing as long as they can remember. It’s in the blood.

“My mother’s always had harness horses, and my father rodeoed professionally,” the 26-year-old Madland says. “I showed gaited horses and then I got into this when I was 20. I started driving when I was about 21.”

The 28-year-old Parker’s background is much the same.

“My grandfather was a leading trainer-driver at Saratoga for a lot of years,” he says. “My father’s been a very prominent trainer-driver in the Delaware Valley and now at the Meadowlands (in New Jersey). My brother’s been one of the leading drivers in the country the last three or four years, racing at the Meadowlands.”

It’s in the blood.

Parker and Madland both train and drive the horses in their stables. Parker, originally from Wilmington, Del., has a string of 12 horses in his barn. Madland, born in Visalia, Calif., but raised in Porterville, has 10, plus 8 more at other tracks.

Both are capable, successful and committed to making their careers in Southern California. The problem is, harness racing in this area appears to be as hobbled as its horses.

Only two Southland tracks--Los Alamitos Race Course in Cypress and Fairplex Park--offer harness racing. But Los Alamitos appears to be losing its audience, and Fairplex has not yet attracted one.

Complicating matters, the horse racing public, and consequently the wagering dollar, is currently being split three ways. Thoroughbreds are running at Hollywood Park in the afternoons, in direct competition with the harness horses at Fairplex Park, and the quarter horses are running nights at Los Alamitos.

On the first weekend of this tripleheader, Friday through Sunday, Nov. 7-9, this is what happened:

--At Hollywood Park, 61,719 fans showed up and bet a total of $12,782,740.

--At Los Alamitos, 25,028 fans showed up and bet a total of $2,846,390.

--At Fairplex Park, 8,061 fans showed up and bet a total of $726,180.

The Los Alamitos figures were unusually high because a Saturday night promotion, in which 10 pickup trucks were given away, drew 17,577 to the track. The next night, attendance was 2,741.

All the same, of the 94,808 racing fans that weekend, only 8.5% chose harness racing. And of the $16,355,310 wagered that weekend, only 4.4% was bet on harness horses.

Studies have shown that there are few crossover fans--thoroughbred fans stick to thoroughbreds, for example, and quarter horse fans to quarter horses--and that makes life difficult for the harness folk.

That’s especially so for trainer-drivers such as Madland, who, as a woman, already has had to struggle to gain acceptance in the male-dominated racing world.

“I had to climb the ladder, but I’m OK now,” she says. “I’ve made the top. I’m with the guys now. It really wasn’t that tough, though. If you can hold your own, you’re OK.

“If you go out there and really can’t compete as an equal, you’re going to get stepped on. But they do that to men also. If you go out there and can’t handle what’s going on, you’re out of there.”

The question, however, is can her sport survive?

“Right now, it’s really hard to attract qualified investors to the industry,” Madland says. “It’s in a really hard transitory state right now. It’s kind of hit the bottom and it’s coming back up. I’m sticking in it, although I think it’s going to take another year for it to turn around.

“I’m risking a lot of money and basically my career by staying here and sticking with it. But this is my home, the weather’s great and I love where I live (Newport Beach).”

Parker, too, wants to make a go of it here. He came to California six years ago, wanting to branch out on his own after having worked for his father, Jack.

Asked why he doesn’t return to the East Coast or the Midwest, where harness racing’s crowds--and purses--are much bigger, Parker shrugs, then grins.

“There are a lot of Parkers back there, you know,” he says.

Image and credibility. That’s what it’s about. Harness racing scandals over the years have so eroded public confidence in the sport that its credibility is virtually nil. Deserved or not, its image, therefore, is less than complimentary.

That, Parker believes, is the biggest hurdle the sport has to overcome. Despite its reputation, he insists that harness racing has cleaned up its act but that a lack of understanding on the part of the public continues to hurt it.

For example, he said, what a novice fan might view as a questionable tactic in a race--for instance, slowing down a horse or keeping position behind another instead of passing--is merely strategy on the part of the driver. The driver is not purposely trying to lose or, as Parker put it, “stiffing the horse.”

“Because we have to do this and because there’s times we have to lean back to slow one up a little bit to get him behind another horse and so on, we get the reputation of stiffing horses,” Parker said. “And it’s an unfortunate thing. All it is is strategic. People don’t understand.

“As soon as they lose their two dollars (the minimum bet), they don’t think they got out-raced or out-paced. They think they got stiffed. There’s probably nothing we can do about that.

“The thing is, if we’re such great gamblers, we should all have Rolls-Royces and Mercedeses and Ferraris. Well, there’s mine right there, that brown pick-up.”

Parker’s anger is partly the result of frustration. As long as racing fans believe harness races are fixed, they will continue to avoid them. That leads to a vicious cycle: Low attendance means low handle, low handle means low purses, low purses mean fewer high-quality drivers and horses, and that, in turn, dissuades the public from attending.

The only way out, Parker and others believe, is to convince the fans that the races are for real. That they are truly competitive and that there is no shady business involved.

“We have to win races,” Parker said. “That’s how we stay in business, by winning races. If you go out there and stiff horses and all that, you don’t stay in business.

“You get the occasional guy that’s a gambler, and he’ll play around a little bit. These guys, they’re always broke. The people that are successful are the ones who go out there trying to win races. If the public would understand how hard we try to get to that winner’s circle--not just for them but for us, to stay in business--I think that would be a big plus.

“It’s just the bad reputation that we have that’s carrying our sport down and I think it’s very undeserved.”

Ralph M. Hinds, the president of the Los Angeles County Fair Assn. as well as its subsidiary, Fairplex Racing, Inc., acknowledges that harness racing needs a better image.

“That’s a problem--to develop some credibility for the game itself,” he said.

“We’ve told our drivers and owners and trainers that we will tolerate absolutely nothing in the way of games-playing on the backstretch. We want our races to be absolutely 100% creditable. If anybody has any ideas of doing anything other than that, they will be asked to leave and will not be permitted back on the track.

“I think that the horsemen generally support that kind of position. They want to see clean racing and they know that some things have happened in the past that have created a negative reputation for them.

“They don’t want to see that continue because their sport will die if it does.”

That harness racing is in trouble is without question. Every 1986 figure tells a story, each more dismal than the one before.

--At the Los Alamitos winter meeting, which ran from Feb. 4 to April 19, average attendance was 4,325, down 17.9% from the year before. The average handle was $754,573, down 8.5% from 1985’s figure.

--At the inaugural Fairplex Park meeting, April 22 to June 21, average attendance was 2,810 and the average total bet each night was $363,524.

--At the 46-day Los Alamitos summer meeting that ended Oct. 11, figures were the worst yet. Average attendance was 3,309, down an astonishing 41% from the same meeting the year before. The average handle, too, dropped precipitously, down 40% to $529,469.

--Finally, in the first week of the current six-week fall meeting at Fairplex Park, an average of 2,474 fans came to the Pomona track and wagered a daily average of $240,588.

Clearly, something is amiss. Fairplex Park can claim that this is its first year, that it has yet to build a following. But Los Alamitos?

The idea has been raised that the Hollywood Park Operating Co., which owns Los Alamitos, would just as soon see harness racing end altogether, but Hinds sees no logic in that.

“It’s obvious that they’re not doing as well as they once did,” Hinds said. “I don’t know why. I hear the rumors just like you do, that Hollywood Park’s not interested in harness and they’re doing whatever they can to kill the sport. But that doesn’t make a lot of sense.

“Why would you put the money into it? Why would you buy Los Alamitos and then try to run it into the ground? It’s not for me to try to second guess what Hollywood Park Operating Co. is doing, but from a business standpoint, (trying to kill the sport) doesn’t make any sense.

“But I would like to see Hollywood Park promote harness much heavier. I would like to see them do more to try to develop the sport at Los Alamitos.

“And that’s from a selfish basis because if harness gets more press, more advertising, does better at Los Alamitos, it’s going to help Fairplex Park. The reverse is true. The more we do here, the more it’ll help Los Alamitos.”

So far, however, it appears to be a one-way street. Possibly even a dead end.

As for the inaugural Fairplex spring meeting, Hinds said that officials might have been too optimistic when they projected crowds of up to 10,000 and an average handle of around $500,000.

“We were disappointed,” he admitted. “We had hoped to do better. But I think once we got over the initial surprise that it wasn’t as good as we hoped it would be, then I think we were positive about the meeting.

“Other than the fact that the attendance wasn’t what we’d hoped and the handle wasn’t what we’d hoped, the program turned out well. It was good racing, and people seemed to accept the facilities well. We were obviously pleased enough to continue with it.”

Why was it not as big a success as had been hoped?

“It’s hard to put your finger really on the problem,” Hinds said. “But I think that we generally agree that we didn’t attract the harness patron from Los Alamitos. . . . Those people really didn’t come out and support our meet the way we felt they would.”

Instead, Fairplex Park attracted many people from the Pomona-Riverside area, people who had not necessarily been exposed to harness racing before.

“That’s positive, but it means that we’re going to have to look at a different base (audience) than harness has had at the other tracks,” Hinds said. “We’re going to have to convert people to racing. . . . When you do that, your per capita (betting) is going to be pretty low and it’s going to take awhile to get that off the ground.”

Still, Fairplex Park is trying. Madland, Parker and others praise of the track’s efforts.

“It’s run exquisitely,” Madland said. “It’s probably the best-run track I’ve been at as far as maintenance and care and the personal involvement of Ralph (Hinds) and the track crew.”

Added Parker: “It’s a beautiful facility. They do a real good job keeping the barn area clean and nice. The track man is very conscientious, he tries hard. Ralph Hinds has done a tremendous job trying to promote it. It’s too bad. If the other facilities like Los Alamitos and Hollywood Park tried as hard as these people do, they would do fantastic.”

What of the future? If none of the three big thoroughbred tracks--Santa Anita, Hollywood Park and Del Mar--want harness racing, and Los Alamitos continues to flounder, how far is tiny Fairplex Park willing to go to keep the sport alive in Southern California?

“A lot is going to depend upon what happens with the harness industry,” Hinds said. “I think the harness industry is probably in better shape than the quarter horse people. And I say that only because the harness industry has a much bigger investment. There are a lot of standard-bred farms in California, the breeding industry is significant.

“As a result of that, we’re going to see people in California continue to put their money into harness and continue to push for harness. But I think it’s going to be an uphill struggle.

“I think that racing generally is having its problems, and when you take a breed, such as the standard-bred, and harness racing, which has suffered one blow after another in California, I think it’s difficult for us to look at it and feel real good about the future of harness.”

Next year will be the decisive year, Hinds said. The California Horse Racing Board has indicated that it will restore some semblance of order to harness scheduling next season, with Los Alamitos perhaps running from late December to April and Fairplex Park from late April to August.

“I think that the dates the horse racing board is talking about for the latter part of 1986 and in 1987 could be very positive,” Hinds said. “They would give us a good transition between the two (tracks) that we didn’t have this year and it would allow us to run 14 weeks straight which would help our marketing program immensely.

“So we have a lot of positives that we didn’t have going for us last season. I don’t think we’re going to go in and set the world on fire with handle in our next meet, but I think we’ll do a little better than we did last time.”

“If we do well enough in the spring, we’ll be in harness to stay. But that will be the test.”

Hinds has some definite ideas on what it will take to make harness racing succeed at Fairplex Park.

“I think what you need first of all is good racing,” he said. “You need good horses and you need some drivers and trainers that people recognize as stars in the industry. Some horses that are stars.

“I look at our (Los Angeles County) Fair (thoroughbred) meet a number of years ago. As soon as we were able to develop the purses and they started to bring in some horses of a higher quality and some better jockeys, the whole program has done well. I think that’s true of harness.

“The (harness) program is somewhat mediocre, basically because we haven’t gotten stars. They’re all on the East Coast.”

Purses are the key. In the first week of the current Fairplex meeting, purses ranged between $1,200 and $5,000 a race.

“There’s no doubt about it,” Hinds said. “You can’t compete with a Meadowlands when you’re only paying out a $1,200 or $1,500 purse, but you have to start somewhere. It’s difficult.”

Madland believes that California drivers and horses are better than Hinds indicates and that there are other factors inhibiting harness racing’s return to health.

“Just repetition,” she said. “Our dates have been switched around so many times. People don’t know when and where and why we’re racing. We’ve had so much negative publicity.

“We have some super drivers out here and some great horses. We have some great horses out here that you could take back East and they would double in value. Some of them would triple. But for a lot of investors, this is their home and they enjoy the sport and so they stick with it here.”

And one final word from Parker on Fairplex’s future.

“The crowds are picking up,” he said. “They’re getting a little more people out here all the time. So I’m optimistic that they’ll at least break even and give us a place to race for a little while anyway.”

For a little while.