THOROUGHBRED RACING : New Idea for Jockey Drug Program

John Giovanni, the national manager of the Jockeys’ Guild, was in San Francisco last week, attending a racing convention and the Eclipse Awards, but his mind kept wandering because of the out-of-town headlines he was reading.

Giovanni, a former rider, read the story about R. D. Hubbard’s victory in the power struggle at Hollywood Park and shook his head.

“It says both sides spent about $8 million in the proxy fight,” Giovanni said. “Boy, what the guild could do with just a fraction of that amount. We’ve got 65 jockeys around the country who are permanently disabled and need help. Some of them are paraplegics.”

Another day, Giovanni saw a story from Chicago that said a federal appeals court had upheld another court’s decision to ban random drug testing of jockeys and other racing personnel in Illinois.

Racing’s drug rules are a state-to-state hodgepodge. In New Jersey, there is liberal random testing, which Giovanni says is “a joke.” In Illinois, now, there will be no random testing, unless the racing board successfully appeals last week’s ruling. In California, there is a middle ground. The stewards can ask jockeys to test here if there is “probable cause.”

Asked about the court decision in Illinois, Giovanni said: “I have mixed feelings. I am opposed to random testing of riders, but for a reason that you might not imagine. By and large, random testing doesn’t do much good. A better preventive would be to take the money spent on testing and use it to educate the handful of people in the jockeys’ rooms who come in contact with the riders on a regular basis.

“Law-enforcement people are experts at spotting drug users. They know what to look for, and so should the officials in the jocks’ rooms. I’m talking about the jock-room custodians, the clerk of scales, people like that. These people live with the jockeys every day, so they know what they’re usually like.

“If they were taught the right way, by law-enforcement people who specialize in drug work, they’d be able to spot a rider when something’s going on. That’s when we want to stop drug users, before they get on a horse and endanger the lives of everybody else in the race.

“I can’t begin to tell you what it’s like to be sitting up in the starting gate and looking over at another rider who’s staring into space.”

Hollywood Park’s proxy expenses exceeded $9 million and may go as high as $10 million. These totals include the amount that Hubbard must be reimbursed for winning the battle.

One of the contracts that Hubbard inherits from the Marje Everett era belongs to Don Robbins, the track’s executive vice president and general manager.

Robbins has a deal that runs into 1995. Some of the details of his contract were mentioned in court depositions taken during the proxy battle.

Robbins’ annual salary is more than $230,000. Through a stock arrangement, he was able to obtain several thousand shares in the track without paying for them. If Hubbard removed Robbins, “with or without cause,” according to the wording of the contract, the general manager would receive whichever is higher--the balance of his salary for the next four years, which would be close to $1 million, or triple his annual salary.

There’s also a clause in Robbins’ contract saying he must receive a five-year renewal in 1995 or a payoff of $500,000.

Robbins’ contract is one of the most generous in racing, but apparently the deal he made with Everett had nothing to do with Hubbard keeping him.

“I’ve heard good things about Don Robbins, and he’ll get a good chance to show us what he can do,” Hubbard said. “You can’t judge people who worked under Marje, because they were restricted in what they were allowed to do.”