THOROUGHBRED RACING / BILL CHRISTINE : DeBartolo Made Shrewd Moves as Owner of Tracks and Teams

When he was an undergraduate at Notre Dame, studying civil engineering in the late 1920s, Ed DeBartolo was already a gambler.

“You know those dark, conservative business suits he always wore?” one of DeBartolo’s classmates once said. “He wore them all the time when we were in school. And he never took off the coat. Not even when he got down on his knees to shoot craps in the dormitory, which we did frequently.”

Many of the gambles paid off for Edward J. DeBartolo Sr., the multimillionaire who was 85 when he died this week. But not all. The Pittsburgh Penguins, the hockey team, turned out to be a bad investment, even though they won a Stanley Cup during DeBartolo’s stewardship.

Several years ago, I visited DeBartolo at his offices in Youngstown, Ohio, and the subject of the Penguins came up.

“That building in Pittsburgh,” I said. “What does it hold, something like 17,000?”

“Something like that,” DeBartolo said.

“How much do you need to break even?”

“At least 20,000.”

DeBartolo sold the Penguins a few years later.

Interviews with the insular DeBartolo were not easy to come by. I had known him slightly, from days in Pittsburgh and through horse racing, but I still needed an intermediary to get through the door. George Jones, then the general manager of DeBartolo’s Thistledown track in Cleveland, arranged the meeting.

DeBartolo’s other tracks were Remington Park in Oklahoma City, Okla., which he built and paid for in cash at a cost of $100 million, and Louisiana Downs near Shreveport, which he bought at a fire sale when it was only a year old.

He got involved in racing in the 1960s, partly because he liked to bet horses, mainly because he was a real estate developer and saw the property surrounding the Cleveland tracks as a safety net in the event the racing business turned sour.

Long before he bought the San Francisco 49ers, DeBartolo said he could have bought the Cleveland Browns for $3.8 million. He had several million not working at the time, but instead he bought Randall Park and Thistledown, tracks that were across the street from one another, for $5.1 million.

Later, he moved the Randall racing dates to Thistledown and converted the Randall property into a hotel and one of his giant shopping malls. Owning the Browns would have been more fun, but since he wound up with the 49ers, anyway, DeBartolo never regretted the route he took with his millions.

He flirted several times with buying a baseball team, and at the time I talked to him in Youngstown, he was eyeing the Pittsburgh Pirates, a franchise in distress. The closest DeBartolo came to owning a baseball team was in 1980, when he made a firm offer of $20 million--a figure that sounds like pin money now--for the Chicago White Sox.

The deal might have gone through, but Bowie Kuhn, then commissioner of baseball, convinced most of the club owners that they should be uncomfortable that DeBartolo made part of his living at racetracks.

George Steinbrenner of the New York Yankees was a partner in Tampa Bay Downs, a small track in Florida, and John Galbreath, owner of the Pirates, was a prominent shareholder at Churchill Downs, but Kuhn said that they had been grandfathered into the lodge.

For several months, Kuhn discredited DeBartolo’s offer for the White Sox, and I thought that he said some awful things about racing, painting the whole sport with one tawdry brush. Racing sat back and did nothing, either in support of DeBartolo or in defense of the game. DeBartolo was given an Eclipse Award years later, in 1988, but when he really needed support, his colleagues weren’t there.

DeBartolo had told Kuhn that he would sell the tracks if he got the White Sox, but the commissioner didn’t believe him. Usually, DeBartolo spoke so softly that you had to crook an ear to hear, but he yelled at Kuhn during a fiery meeting at the Pittsburgh airport, and Kuhn said later that the developer lost all chance that day.

Still, there was one last vote on the sale, at a meeting of the owners in Dallas. The day before, for the first time, DeBartolo called the offices of the Thoroughbred Racing Assns. in New York.

“When are you guys going to give me some help on this?” he said.

Telegrams supporting DeBartolo went out to all of the owners that afternoon, but racing had waited too long, and perhaps DeBartolo’s bid was doomed, anyway. The vote against him was one-sided.

In May 1988, DeBartolo was where he usually was at that time of year, at Churchill Downs for the Kentucky Derby. Before the first race, there was a bizarre mix-up at a betting window, resulting in a $20,000 place bet on the wrong horse. Churchill Downs officials arbitrarily took the money out of the place pool, canceling a bet on the horse that won the race.

Afterward, there were reports that the messenger with the $20,000 had made the bet on behalf of DeBartolo. Jerry Lawrence, then the vice president of Churchill, discounted that. Lawrence is as honest as the day is 24 hours long, but maybe he didn’t have all the information. For most of his life, without taking off his coat, Ed DeBartolo was accustomed to the big gambles.

*

Horse Racing Notes

No negotiations are scheduled by the Thoroughbred Racing Assns. tracks and the Jockeys’ Guild, with their three-year contract for health and accident insurance running out a week from Saturday and many jockeys expected to be absent on Jan. 1 unless there’s a new contract. Without a contract, the tracks plan to take out their own accident coverage for the jockeys. “But at that time, we are under no obligation to pay the guild for coverage, nor do we intend to do so,” said Brian McGrath, commissioner of the TRA. Under the contract that expires soon, the tracks paid $2.3 million toward jockeys’ insurance in 1992-93, and the guild supplemented that amount by paying $1.3 million. In California and five other states, jockeys are covered by workers’ compensation, which is funded by horse owners.

Exchange, first in the Matriarch on Nov. 27 and winner of eight of 12 starts on grass, heads the 13-horse field for Saturday’s $100,000 Dahlia Handicap at Hollywood Park. Here’s the lineup, in post-position order, for the 1 1/16-mile turf race: Dior’s Angel, Exchange, Miss Turkana, Vinista, Fantastic Kim, Lyin To The Moon, Starlight Way, Skimble, Wende, Shir Dar, Queens Court Queen, Desert Orchid and Gold Splash. Exchange will carry 123 pounds, at least five more than any opponent. . . . There’s a first post Saturday of 11:15 a.m. . . . In another race on the card, Cool Air carries high weight of 124 pounds in the $55,000 Safely Kept Handicap.