Wanted: Real, Live Bettors : ‘Convenience Stores’ Are Emptying Tracks and Draining the Excitement From Racing

Jack Gorman sits alone near the top of the grandstand at Santa Anita. He stows his jacket and bag of snacks on the seat to his left. His Racing Form, charts and a newspaper are arrayed to his right. His long legs dangle over the seat in front of him as he leafs through the daily program.

It is 40 minutes to post time for the first race as Gorman scans the stands for signs of intelligent life. The nearest person is more than a dozen rows away, and that’s just the way he likes it.

“My own private racetrack,” he says, spreading his arms in a loving embrace.

Playing the horses can be a solitary romance. It is cerebral entertainment, interrupted every half-hour or so by a burst of ferocious action. You bet against the crowd, not the house. And sometimes the crowd can get on your nerves--especially if they win and you lose.

Not anymore. The loud, shoulder-to-shoulder racetrack throngs of the 1960s and ‘70s are long gone. They have dwindled to a loyal band of gamblers and fans who still want their game in three-dimensional flesh and blood. They need horses to cheer and jockeys to jeer. More and more they look around and see . . . nobody.

“We sit in the loge seats in the Turf Club at Santa Anita,” said Helen Watts, who has been a Southland racing fan with her husband, William, for more than 30 years. “There are some days when we are the only ones sitting in the whole section. After a while we start to wonder, ‘What’s wrong with us?’ ”

What’s wrong is that the Southern California bettor has finally gotten his wish. Horse racing has become the convenience store of the sports marketplace, spreading itself over more ground than the wildfires of ’93. Off-track sites, called satellites, range from the Sycuan Indian casino southeast of San Diego to the Earl Warren Fairgrounds in Santa Barbara.

Six years ago, when the off-track network made its modest debut during Hollywood Park’s fall meeting, fans at the three satellite sites--Del Mar, Ventura and San Bernardino--represented only 20% of the total attendance.

Today, 50% to 60% of racing’s customers get their product via television at nearly 20 off-track facilities. The fan who actually goes out of his way to see a live racehorse is becoming a rare bird.

Compared to the live-action tracks, the satellites are laboratories of claustrophobic activity. Fans cluster in smaller spaces, always oriented toward a bank of television screens. Marshall McLuhan’s “cool medium” feeds them two-dimensional messages, and everyone sees the races from the same point of view. The arena has been converted into a sports bar.

In the meantime, the real arenas are depressingly empty.

Over the last 10 years, the average on-track attendance at the two major L.A. area tracks has declined by more than half. Santa Anita averaged 14,641 last winter, compared with 32,014 in 1983. Hollywood Park’s 12,573 daily average of last summer is a far cry from its 1983 level of 28,891.

Santa Anita opens again Sunday, and for one brief, shining moment a huge crowd probably will be on hand to see live races. The opener lands on a weekend and follows an unusual five-day break after the end of the Hollywood meeting--factors that should make for a healthy gate.

But soon the familiar pattern will return: About 7,000-8,000 people show up on a weekday, rattling around inside the vast emporium like BBs in an oil drum. It has been awhile since either the Clippers or the Kings drew that poorly.

At the same time, the total number of people playing the ponies on any given day has not changed appreciably. Santa Anita survived poor weather and several administrative snafus to draw 2.5 million betting customers throughout Southern California last winter, better than any pre-1980 figure. Hollywood’s 1993 summer total of 2.2 million regional bettors exceeded all but a few of the meets before the off-track era began in 1987.

As off-track betting has systematically gutted on-track attendance, track operators have been faced with a stark conclusion: The live product can’t compete with televised convenience. As a result, the live crowd has become little more than a studio audience for the off-track television network. The fans lining the walking ring could be extras from Central Casting. Their cheers and groans supply background noise for the commentary of television analysts, whose primary viewers are miles and miles from the nearest racehorse.

Even the live racing patrons are becoming more and more removed from the action. Mark Stephens, Santa Anita’s director of marketing, estimates that as much as half the live crowd watches on closed-circuit monitors.

“That shocks me,” Stephens said. “Who would come to the races and then watch them all on TV? That tells me right away that 50% of the people could care less how they see it. They’re more interested in the gaming aspect.”

A small segment of the racing industry continues to cling to the idea that fast horses are worth watching, and that betting only makes it better. The theory has been tested by accident, usually during a tote system failure, when most of the fans stick around only in hopes that someone will fix the machines.

There is always an exception to prove the rule. On May 23, 1977, a strike at Belmont Park in New York shut down all on-site betting operations. The races went on as scheduled to service the off-track betting network. Admission to Belmont was free, and 7,514 fans showed up at the track. The attraction? Reigning horse of the year Forego was making his first start of the season.

Clearly, a certain number of people will head for the track every day. Late last October, when the flames from the Altadena fire filled the air above Santa Anita with smoke and ash, 7,710 fans were present. The next day, as the fire spread eastward and Foothill Freeway off-ramps were closed, Santa Anita canceled racing. Several hundred people who did not get the word arrived anyway, ready to risk lung damage to play the pick six.

These are racing’s loyalists.

Meanwhile, the profile of the typical racetrack patron has not changed for decades. He is a middle-aged, white male. He is retired, semi-retired or laid off. And in contemporary Southern California, he would rather sandblast his garage door than commute 50 miles to do anything. Off-track betting was made for this guy.

In the meantime, racetrack marketers are compelled to target new demographic groups. Santa Anita’s most recent customer survey shows that the strong majority of their patrons for live racing are white men between the ages of 35 and 64. Men outnumber women at the track, 73% to 27%.

“We’re looking for a younger, more female crowd, as well as large groups out for a special day,” Stephens said. “And we’ve found that when you see them at all, they are at live racing, not at satellites.”

In past decades, the surveys didn’t matter. At its zenith, Hollywood Park lured an average of 34,516 people to 55 daytime programs during the 1965 summer season. That same year, the Dodgers, on their way to winning a World Series, averaged 32,738 for 78 home dates.

Santa Anita was riding high as recently as 1985, when the track averaged almost 33,000 a day over 89 programs. The record Santa Anita on-track crowd of 85,527, set in 1985, has withstood six years of cumulative on- and off-track totals.

In 1993, the single largest live racing crowd in California has been 55,130 for the Breeders’ Cup races at Santa Anita on Nov. 6.

Those who long for the days of big crowds are feeling more than simple nostalgia. They sense a growing apathy toward all levels of investment in horse racing.

“Small crowds for live racing are costing the business in ways I don’t think they realize,” trainer Eddie Gregson said. “Horse owners come into this game for the fun of it. They have egos, and they like to hear a big crowd screaming for their horse when it runs. When they see nothing but empty seats, they get turned off in a hurry. It’s not such a big deal anymore.”

Rick Baedeker, vice president of marketing and public relations at Hollywood Park, agrees to some extent.

“Everybody wants to be part of a winner,” Baedeker said. “They love sitting at Dodger Stadium with a sellout crowd. Conversely, if you’re watching the Padres and there’s only 2,800 people in the place, you feel like an idiot.”

Tracks have attempted to shoehorn fans into smaller areas to create the illusion of larger crowds. Part of Hollywood Park is cordoned off during live racing, and Santa Anita management has toyed with the idea of opening only the Turf Club, clubhouse and box seat section on weekdays.

“These behemoth facilities were built to handle weekend crowds of 50,000, and they are very hard to downsize,” Stephens said. “But there are always people who like sitting off in the corner with nobody around.”

Rather than draining the blood out of on-track attendance, the satellites were supposed to create new patronage in far-flung regions, while providing better service to existing customers.

The regulars held up their end of the bargain. Their numbers have not generally decreased. Fresh fans, on the other hand, have not been lured by off-track expansion.

“I know of very few instances where people have been attracted by off-track betting who now go to on-track racing,” said Dan Smith, Del Mar’s director of marketing and media. “But the reverse is very true, where on-track patrons become off-track patrons.”

It is not surprising that the bloom has worn off the satellite phenomenon. The emphasis has shifted back to the live gate as the key to expanding fan base. Even the looming opportunities of interactive TV and home betting fail to excite many racing marketers. A Del Mar survey taken through the 1993 season revealed that 52% of the customers never bothered to bet at the local satellite facility during the off-season.

“I don’t really want a television solution to the problem,” Baedeker said. “The strength of the game, what makes it so appealing, is the beauty of the thoroughbred and the thrill of that contest. And if you reduce it to television, you are losing a lot of it.”

In the meantime, the sport is in jeopardy of alienating its most loyal audience--the fans who demand the real thing and thrive on loud, exciting crowds. At the current rate of erosion, the only people in the stands for live racing soon will be horse owners, trainers, agents and stable help, along with the hard-core gamblers who live in the neighborhood, and those few cranky loners perched in the rafters.

“That’s why the Breeders’ Cup was so great,” said Helen Watts, who saw her Santa Anita Turf Club crammed last month. “It was like the old days again.”