Horse Racing / Bill Christine : Oklahoma Reconsiders Fingerprinting, Monitoring Journalists

The Oklahoma Horse Racing Commission is having a sale on fingerprinting--$35 a set, which is down from the usual cost of $60.

These cut-rate prints are available only to journalists, those turf reporters and broadcasters who want to cover Remington Park, the Oklahoma City track that is the newest addition to Ed DeBartolo’s racing empire.

Newspapers in Dallas and Oklahoma City do not see the marked-down fingerprints as a bargain. They don’t want their reporters to be fingerprinted at all.

No other state has such a requirement for turf reporters, and the newspapers are also uncomfortable with the idea that their reporters are, in effect, being licensed by a state agency. Newspapers have long viewed licenses that can be unilaterally revoked as an infringement on the First Amendment to the Constitution.

Journalists can still do part of their job in Oklahoma without being fingerprinted. They can sit in the press box by being routinely issued credentials by Remington Park, but the track cannot issue badges for reporters to visit the barn area and interview trainers. Those must come from the racing commission, which has its fingerprinting rule.

A turf reporter can also visit the barns if he’s accompanied by a track official, but this is an awkward arrangement. Before a major stakes race, the reporters would probably outnumber the available escorts; a journalist seeking to interview several trainers over a widely scattered backstretch area would find it difficult to haul a track publicist around; and there are no newsmen who enjoy an interview with an outsider looking over their shoulders.

The Oklahoma Horse Racing Commission also has a problem with newspaper telephones in the press box. It has asked newspapers regularly covering Remington Park to sign a waiver enabling the commission to monitor phone conversations.

Several news organizations--including the Daily Racing Form and the Daily Oklahoman in Oklahoma City--have balked at these requirements and the commission, bombarded with complaints from visiting press as well, is going to reconsider its policies at a meeting today.

Gordon Hare, executive director of the racing commission, doesn’t believe that there is anything wrong with these policies. Hare says that Remington Park hired a linemaker--who establishes odds that are printed in the daily program--who was implicated in a scandal involving out-of-state bookmakers when he worked at Louisiana Downs, and that this is the kind of people the commission’s rules are designed to expose. Louisiana Downs is also one of DeBartolo’s tracks.

Remington Park has been caught in the middle of the disagreements between the commission and the media, and has generally been anti-commission. Dave Vance, the track’s general manager, is a former newspaperman whose father won the Pulitzer Prize. On the telephone issue, Vance pointed out to the commission that if he can call anywhere in the world on his private phone, why should turf reporters’ conversations be subject to surveillance?

“The guy who was doing our morning line had done a good job for 9 years at Louisiana Downs,” said Keith Chamblin, a Remington Park spokesman. “In that bookmaking thing, he was never charged or found guilty of anything. The commission seems to be overzealous about all this. They have the attitude that everybody is guilty until proved innocent.”

The commission’s tactics have been inspired by the embarrassment Oklahoma racing officials suffered last year, when 17 quarter horses were found to have been drugged with buprenorphine, a powerful stimulant that later had widespread use in other states.

“We’re talking about a high-stakes business here,” Hare said. “We’re trying to dissipate the cloud that frequently hangs over racing, and we don’t feel that the media is beyond reproach.

“I get the argument that Churchill Downs issues hundreds of backstretch press credentials every year for the Kentucky Derby and doesn’t have any problems, but I think there’s a perfectly good example at that track of how traditional practices aren’t necessarily the right thing to do.

“In another race on Derby day this year, a horse ran under the wrong name, with the wrong information about his past performances in the Racing Form, and all of that would have been avoided if the track hadn’t let him run without a lip tattoo (racing’s way of identifying horses). Now Kentucky is changing its policy--horses can’t run there unless they’re tattooed.”

And for now, turf reporters in Oklahoma can’t run to the barn area unless they’re fingerprinted. It’s not a tradition, it’s a precedent.

Angel Cordero, who has decided not to appeal a 10-day suspension he received but didn’t serve during the Saratoga meeting, is doing the days now at Belmont Park season and will be out through next Wednesday. Cordero was able to win his 13th Saratoga riding title by postponing the suspension.

A few days before the suspension, Cordero gave just one more example of his riding style. In the stretch of an allowance race at Belmont, Cordero knocked the whip from the hand of Jean Cruguet, whose horse was closing in on Cordero’s mount from the outside. But Cruguet didn’t claim foul.

Off the track, Cordero has won a round in court with his former wife, who sought to have her $36,000-a-year alimony payment raised to $78,000. At the time of their divorce in 1986, Cordero agreed to give his wife $36,000 a year for 10 years.

Some of California’s top jockeys go on vacation while Fairplex Park runs the Los Angeles County Fair between the close of Del Mar and the opening of the Oak Tree meeting at Santa Anita, but Laffit Pincay cleaned up last weekend simply by making a 2-day trip to Canterbury Downs in suburban Minneapolis. Riding horses trained by Wayne Lukas--Lea Lucinda, Slew City Slew and Texian--Pincay won three stakes and just missed a fourth by a nose. His share of the winning purses came to about $27,000.

Handicappers fret when horses wear front leg bandages, but sometimes they are meaningless, instead of a tip-off that a runner has bad legs.

For example, when Lou Rondinello trained for Darby Dan Farm, most of his horses had front leg wraps. Private Terms wore wraps in all his races this year, and was undefeated before he ran poorly in the Kentucky Derby.

The other day, Sham Say, the only bandaged filly or mare among 11 entrants in the Ruffian Handicap, won the Belmont Park stake by three-quarters of a length.

Sham Say, by the way, is the second wise purchase this year by C.N. Ray, the Paris (Ky.) owner-breeder. Sham Say cost Ray $1 million. His Mill Native, an $800,000 purchase, won the Arlington Million last month.

Horse Racing Notes

Thirteen people and five horses will be inducted into the year-old California Racing Hall of Fame at a charity dinner-dance Sunday night at Santa Anita. The inductees are jockeys Laffit Pincay, Johnny Adams and Jack Westrope; breeders George Pope, Connie Ring and Lucky Baldwin; owner Fred Hooper; trainers Red McDaniel, Farrell Jones and Buster Millerick; executives Bing Crosby, Mervyn Le Roy and Col. F. W. Koester; and horses Morvich, Ancient Title, Emperor of Norfolk, Determine and Fleet Nasrullah. . . . . Some of the best 2-year-olds in the country will run Saturday in the 7-furlong Cowdin at Belmont Park. The field will include Easy Goer, Mercedes Won, Winners Laugh and Is It True.