HORSE RACING : ACRS Head: From Hero to Goat

Last year, the American Championship Racing Series left the launching pad like a rocket.

Everyone connected with the 10-race national tour seemed happy.

Racing was happy because it gained hard-to-come-by television exposure, with most of the races carried nationally by ABC.

The tracks were happy because it gave some of their established stakes a sharper focus, horses crisscrossing the country to compete for points that might lead to $1.5 million in bonuses. Besides the money bet on the races at the track, the off-track handle reached $40.9 million.

Horsemen were happy because they had a chance to earn an additional $1.5 million.

Turf writers were happy because it gave them something to sink their teeth into between the Triple Crown, early in the season, and the Breeders’ Cup races, at the end.

Now, in 1992, the ACRS is two-thirds finished and hardly anyone is happy.

Oaklawn Park in Hot Springs, Ark., which supplied a race for the series the first two years, has said that it won’t participate next year. The rift between Charles Cella, the hard-nosed owner of Oaklawn, and Barry Weisbord, the president of the series, was so acrimonious that when they appeared at the Hollywood Gold Cup last Saturday, someone joked that their guns be checked at the door.

The Santa Anita Handicap, an important part of the championship series for these two years, probably won’t be included next year. Santa Anita, which apparently has its own agenda, is still bristling about some remarks made by Weisbord at its expense in the Newark Star-Ledger a couple of months ago.

Rockingham Park in Salem, N.H., strapped for cash, suddenly canceled its series race, forcing Weisbord into revising a schedule that supposedly was cast in granite. The change made virtually everybody unhappy: ABC, which for a time was faced with losing a race it had planned to cover; trainers at Belmont Park, who had their Fourth of July fixture, the Suburban Handicap, delayed two weeks; and John and Betty Mabee, the owners of Best Pal, who have every right to think that their injured gelding might lose out on the $750,000 first-place bonus because the new schedule favors East Coast horses and two in particular--Strike The Gold and Sultry Song.

A year ago, there were honors for Weisbord all around.

Now Weisbord is under fire and the future of the championship series is in doubt. Weisbord reportedly has called on David Vance, vice president for Edward J. DeBartolo Sr.’s racing interests in Ohio, Oklahoma and Louisiana and a trustee of the New York Racing Assn., as a peacemaker.

Vance, son of a Pulitzer Prize winner, an executive in the early days of the American Basketball Assn. and a campaigner who helped John Y. Brown get elected governor of Kentucky, is a formidable presence, but it may be too late. Weisbord has poured more oil on burning waters, and, in particular, his California connections are hanging by a thread.

“Santa Anita has expressed some doubts about the whole product, and it has to do with selfishness,” Weisbord told a Newark, N.J., reporter in April. “ . . . Probably Santa Anita would love that (the top California horses) don’t race anywhere else but Santa Anita. But we feel that if a Michael Jordan played all 82 games in Chicago, the sport wouldn’t be as popular. What we say to Santa Anita is that in order for Santa Anita to become much more valuable, horse racing has to become more prestigious nationally, not regionally. Santa Anita is regional. Success has led them to be more selfish.”

John Mabee is not a horseman who Weisbord needs tugging against him. Besides racing Best Pal, Mabee is the board chairman at Del Mar, which this year will be running the $1-million Pacific Classic, the final race in the championship series.

And Weisbord didn’t know it when he was criticizing Santa Anita, but an idea being kicked around there is a series of high-profile races within California, using the state’s five major tracks: Santa Anita, Hollywood Park, Del Mar, Bay Meadows and Golden Gate Fields.

Although such a series would have the impact of a maraschino cherry being dropped into a punch bowl nationally, it might do flip-flops for California racing.

Weisbord erred several ways when he replaced Rockingham’s New England Classic with the Suburban, now scheduled for July 18.

The switch enabled Sultry Song to come to Hollywood Park and gain points by winning the Gold Cup, and now he will be able to run for more points in the Suburban.

Strike The Gold, who trails Best Pal by only three points in the bonus standings, was going to skip Rockingham and run in the Suburban, even before it became a championship series race. If either Strike The Gold or Sultry Song wins the $750,000 bonus because of points gained from the Suburban and the Gold Cup, the horse will become an equine Roger Maris.

“The Suburban switch was poorly handled,” said trainer Wayne Lukas, the championship series’ biggest supporter with 15 starters in the 16 races over the past two years. “It would be like a basketball conference changing the schedule after the season had started.”

Weisbord said that pressure from television and bonus considerations forced him to find a substitute race after Rockingham backed out. Without off-track betting on a full schedule of nine races, there reportedly might have been a $300,000 shortfall in the series’ $1.5-million bonus.

Last week, an embroiled Weisbord went to the Seattle meeting of the Thoroughbred Racing Assns., the trade group that represents about 50 tracks. Healing wounds was on his agenda, but instead he came away further disenchanted by a sport that thrives on shooting itself in the foot.

“Racing is crazy,” Weisbord said later. “There were actually tracks up there that suggested that television might not be any good for racing.”

On Saturday, at the Hollywood Gold Cup, Weisbord met Pete Rozelle, the retired commissioner of the NFL.

“He told me I was doing a good job,” Weisbord said. “Coming from a guy who understands what television can do for a sport, I needed that.”

Horse Racing Notes

Reversing himself, trainer Ron McAnally decided to enter Tight Spot in Saturday’s $200,000 American Handicap at Hollywood Park. McAnally was disappointed with the weights for the 1 1/8-mile grass race. Only five horses are entered, with favored Golden Pheasant drawing the rail. He will be ridden by Gary Stevens and will carry 123 pounds. Outside Golden Pheasant come Prudent Manner, 114 pounds, Chris McCarron; Tight Spot, 126, Laffit Pincay; Bold Russian, 116, Eddie Delahoussaye; and Man From Eldorado, 112, Kent Desormeaux. McAnally also trains Prudent Manner. . . . If Tight Spot runs, he will have a chance to be the first repeat winner in the American since Bold Tropic in 1980-81.

The same day that Pine Bluff was retired because of a torn ligament, Furiously, another top 3-year-old training at Belmont Park, was injured. Furiously, undefeated in three starts, had been expected to run Sunday in the Dwyer Stakes, but he is sidelined indefinitely with what may only be a bruise to his right front foot. X-rays of the injury were negative. . . . Only four horses--Three Peat, Big Sur, Speakerphone and Glimmering Crest--were expected to challenge Furiously in the Dwyer, but the field may grow with him out.