Eclipse Fete Is Trying to Stay in Light

A black-tie dinner in the ballroom of the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, with tickets costing $200 each. John Forsythe as the master of ceremonies. Hotel rooms that start at $200 a night for phone-booth size and go up drastically. Parking is extra, and that can add $25 or more a day to the bill.

These racing people sure know how to throw a party.

But there are signs all over the place that it is a party that more and more tracks are finding too expensive to attend. For a long time, the price has been too high for the $2 bettor--the guy who supports the game the other 364 days of the year.

When horse-of-the-year Ferdinand and other champion horses, owners, jockeys and trainers were honored at the Eclipse Awards dinner Friday night, it was the worst turnout ever for this annual affair. The Waldorf ballroom, which can accommodate 1,300, had about 400 empty seats.

At meetings this week of the Thoroughbred Racing Assns.--a trade group representing most of the major tracks in the United States and Canada--two tracks were removed from the rolls because they couldn’t pay their bills.

One was the Birmingham (Ala.) Turf Club, an $80-million facility that opened last year, lost an estimated $13 million and is having difficulty opening this month for a second season. Birmingham owes the TRA about $80,000 in dues and assessments.

Erie Downs, a small track in Northwest Pennsylvania, owes the TRA a much smaller sum and has also been dropped by the group.

Phone calls to the Birmingham track last week went unanswered. It’s not that calls weren’t returned, it’s that no one was even picking up the phone to take a message. There reportedly are only six people working at the track, which was supposed to open Feb. 18, and two of those--watchmen in the barn area--are not being paid.

Frank De Francis, president of two Maryland tracks--Pimlico and Laurel--said that all of racing suffers when a track like Birmingham falters.

“It gives the entire sport a bad name,” De Francis said. “They spent about $170 million building Garden State Park (in New Jersey) and they’re having a tough time, too.

“They spent far too much money in Alabama, in virgin territory for racing and in a town with less than a million people. New facilities should be comparable to the best existing buildings in the area where they’re being built. You wouldn’t build a million-dollar hotel just to impress people in a town if the best existing hotel in that town only cost half that much. And it’s the same way with anything, whether it’s a theater or a race track.”

The Eclipse Awards dinner became an anticlimax this year because it was decided to announce the results of the horse-of-the-year voting a week ago instead of Friday night.

With Ferdinand, Theatrical and Alysheba involved in a close vote, there would have been high drama at the banquet as the envelope was opened Oscar-style.

Instead, Ferdinand’s victory was announced last week before a small gathering at Aqueduct, with ESPN televising the event just after noon, Eastern time.

For years, racing has been eager to get the announcement of its most prestigious award on national television--much like the Heisman Trophy sponsors have done--but last week’s telecast was the best it has been able to do.

Having the horse of the year announced at the Eclipse dinner, with live television coverage, would ensure a capacity crowd and give the sport maximum national exposure as well. But racing has been unable to put together such a package.

Maybe by next year, there will be renewed interest in the Eclipse Awards dinner. Oklahoma is starting pari-mutuel racing in September, and the sport is also on the drawing board in Texas and Iowa.