An $80-Million Patch of Heaven

Dear Bing:

How’s the golf game? Pretty nice up there, huh? Flat greens and wide fairways with no bunkers, rough, water or wind?

Sounds like heaven.

You’ve probably been warned to stay away from The Big Guy. He usually shoots 18. No, not on a par-five. He shot an 18 for the whole course. Stick with St. Pete, but get strokes.

Hopefully, the postal service will find a way to get this to you, because I wanted to update you on that playpen you and your chums put together in that idyllic valley in Del Mar.

You know, the Del Mar Thoroughbred Club.

The name itself is probably a little more pompous than you originally intended. To you, as I understand it, the place was as much a card room and cabaret as a race track. You had races with parties attached, or maybe it was vice versa.

In that sense, it was not much different Wednesday when Del Mar opened its 53rd season. You had beach parties in front of the grandstand, beer parties in the clubhouse and tea parties in the Turf Club. The place is one gigantic 19th hole, if you know what I mean.

The Turf Club might be a bit stuffier than you remembered. The men walking in there looked as stiff as department store mannequins, and the women looked as if they were on their way to a garden party in Bel Air. I’d pass on a Pick Six payoff just to get the cosmetic concession in that place.

You liked things a little looser and more carefree. It would be hard to imagine a millionaire legend who had fewer airs about him than you did. All you really needed was a smile, a song and maybe an easy dogleg.

Your little track is doing its darndest to maintain a Crosbyesque feeling about it. Maintaining a quaint feel isn’t easy in 1992 if you’re not talking a cabin 500 miles northwest of Anchorage.

As a matter of fact, the thoroughbred club and the fairgrounds are spending $80 million to fend off the cookie-cutter modernization that permeates the hillsides looking down on the backstretch. It costs a lot of money to keep things simple these days.

Phase One of this project opened with opening day Wednesday. They couldn’t get it all done at once so they rebuilt the grandstand first. This was a nice sense of priority, taking care of the $2 bettor first. After all, these people really built the place, right?

The grandstand is nice, six stories high but broken up by enough balconies to keep it from looking like a monolith. Some of the balconies are large enough for one of Elizabeth Taylor’s wedding receptions and a couple are so small and private that Juliet would be comfortable awaiting her Romeo.

Rather than give the place the look of one of the so-called modern-day stadiums, the facility was built to fit the motif of California missions. You can’t look like an equestrian Riverfront Stadium if Father Serra is the lead architect, so to speak.

I should whisper this next revelation because it flies in the face of what I have been saying, but you should know that they have put sky boxes under the roof on the sixth level. I guess nothing can be built without the darned things these days. One of these days, we’ll come upon a McDonalds with sky boxes.

What you get, thus, on the sixth level is a mixture of media types with their sleeves rolled up and waiters with dinner jackets serving socialites with bonnets out of Rodeo Drive. I saw so many fancy hats I kept expecting to step out of the press box and trip over the Easter bunny. I’m not used to looking to my left as I write and seeing linen tablecloths and bouquets.

As interesting as the mix of sweaty writers and bejeweled socialites is the presence of both the old and the new in terms of seating.

The new grandstand halts rather abruptly, as though its eastern end was shorn by an earthquake or maybe hit by an iceberg. It just stops, girders and concrete jagged and bare. It looks like one of those partially completed buildings on the road from Rosarito Beach to Ensenada.

You’d find the Turf Club and clubhouse areas quite familiar. These are the way they were, single-decked with the old roof reminiscent of a minor league baseball park somewhere in Iowa.

You see the old and the new together and what you do is you appreciate both. The old is so simple and so casual and it has been so nice for so long. However, the new has been designed with taste and charm I am sure you would applaud.

Now, Bing, a couple of things never change.

I lose.

I cashed one ticket, Calypsonian in the first. The tote board said he paid $177 to win, but I guess that must have been an opening day glitch. He went off at 5-2.

And they played your song.

Yes, the surf still meets the turf at a very nice place. All it took was $80 million to make it the same, only better.