It Isn’t So Easy to Please Everybody : But That Is Hollypark Racing Secretary Eual Wyatt’s Job

Considering the task he has agreed to undertake, it’s a good thing that Eual Wyatt has a sense of humor.

Wyatt, 47, is the racing secretary at Hollywood Park, a race track sorely in need of new ideas and enthusiasm, as Marje Everett, the track’s chief executive officer, admits.

As racing secretary, Wyatt will play a pivotal role in the Inglewood track’s attempt to reverse its slumping fortunes. It is his job to “write” the 657 races that make up the 73-day spring-summer meeting now under way. He decides which races are to be run on which days for which types of horses.

On the surface, this might seem to be a relatively simple undertaking. It isn’t.

“What the job is, is to present a product, the best product that you can, out there on the race track,” he said. “That’s what the job is.”

Then he paused and smiled.

“How you do that, I wonder myself sometimes.”

The main problem, apart from merely the logistical aspect of having to deal with hundreds of thoroughbreds of every description, comes in trying to please more than one master.

“I’ve always thought you had three segments to satisfy,” Wyatt said. “You’ve got the horsemen to satisfy. If they’re not happy, they’re not going to participate the way they should, or the way they want to, and you’re not going to get the best product out there.

“You’ve got to satisfy the public by doing the best you can and giving them what they’re entitled to, which is the best you can put out there.

“And of course, you’ve got to satisfy management.

“So you’re working with three aspects, and I guess there are occasions when you’ve got to satisfy the media, because the media is sometimes critical.”

Then there is the lesser problem of working in two time frames--the present and the future. Wyatt completed the so-called “condition” book for Hollywood Park’s 35 spring-summer stakes well before the meeting began, but he still must work three to four weeks in advance on the other races on each day’s card.

The trainers have a significant input, and Wyatt has to maintain close communications with every barn.

“You have to communicate with them to find out what’s on their mind, what they’re looking for and what horses are ready and what horses are coming up,” he said. “The more communication you have with the horsemen, the better idea you have of what would work, what could work and what they’re looking for.”

How does he pick which races will be run on which days?

“As a general matter, it’s basic to space them so that they can work off of one another,” he said. “Horses raising up (in class), horses dropping down. And you try to get your best races on the weekend, obviously.

“You try for a balanced card. A balance of maidens, a balance of filly and mare races, a balance of distance races and sprints. It doesn’t always come out that way, but that’s kind of what you’re shooting for. Balance with some variety to it.”

Given that the same horses, jockeys and trainers who competed in the recently concluded Santa Anita meeting are competing at Hollywood Park, it would seem logical that the Inglewood track have similar success.

“Not necessarily,” Wyatt said. “Every meeting is different.”

Just the timing, for example, can make a difference.

“We run into a lot heavier competition than Santa Anita runs into in terms of other race tracks,” Wyatt said. “A race track that runs in the winter, nationwide, runs against fewer (other) race tracks because they’re not racing in the Midwest, they’re not in serious racing, or in the highest peak of stakes programs, in New York or Monmouth Park (N.J.), for example.

“As the spring starts and the summer progresses, the competition for the best horses gets very keen throughout the country. That’s the time of year that we are (racing). We’re in a more highly competitive situation with the horses.”

Wyatt knew the odds coming in, but agreed anyway to return to Hollywood Park full time. For six years in the late 1970s and early ‘80s, he had split his time between Hollywood Park and the Meadowlands in East Rutherford, N.J., serving as racing secretary at both.

“Southern California racing is the best racing, and I just wanted to be a part of it,” he said.

Then, too, Wyatt was born in Los Angeles, the son of trainer Eual (Peachy) Wyatt, who led the Inglewood track in victories at Hollywood Park’s inaugural meeting in 1938. Horses have always been a part of Wyatt’s life.

He worked his way up the ranks on the back side of various tracks--he was the trainer of Forward Pass when the 1968 Kentucky Derby winner won his first stakes race--and eventually into a racing office position by the time he was 30.

He has been a racing secretary since 1975 and has served or currently serves on several national racing committees, including the Breeders’ Cup committee, the Arlington Million selection committee and the stakes grading committee.

“I guess it’s like anything that anybody does,” he said when asked whether he enjoys his job. “When you feel like you’ve done something that has come out like you planned it and it works well, you get a lot of satisfaction from it.”