Beating the Odds : Owner is betting millions that Los Alamitos Race Course will succeed.

Edward C. Allred goes to Los Alamitos Race Course almost every night, sitting in a private lounge five floors above the dirt track that first captivated him 37 years ago when he was a penniless college student.

Horse player, breeder and co-owner of Los Alamitos, Allred is the racetrack’s biggest fan--and its guardian angel.

With his personal fortune, Allred has kept alive Orange County’s only horse track during racing’s long, bumpy ride. In return, Los Alamitos has provided the reclusive Allred, a medical doctor, a place to race his 400 quarter horses and a retreat from his other, no less risky but profitable business: Family Planning Associates Medical Group, a large provider of abortions.

Now, even as horse ovals around the country continue to close under an avalanche of competing gambling outlets, Allred, 59, is making his biggest wager on the track. He is buying out two partners who control the remaining 50% of Los Alamitos and pouring $4 million in a white-tablecloth restaurant and lounge in the track’s aging grandstands.

The Vessels Club, named after the family that launched Los Alamitos in 1951, is expected to open later this fall. Allred hopes it will draw upscale, corporate customers as well as serve as a social center for horse owners and their families and friends.

“If a man owns horses and he can’t bring his wife here to a nice place to eat and a clean bathroom, she’s probably going to beat up on him,” says Allred, a big, affable man whose face lights up like a child’s when he watches a horse race.

“We think there’s demand” for the Vessels Club, Allred adds, noting that it will be mostly nonsmoking. “Whether it’s worth $4 million we don’t know. . . We’re not expecting miracles.”

Neither is anybody else. The racing industry nationwide has been in a slump for decades, and it has worsened in recent years with the spread of casinos, state lotteries and a plethora of entertainment alternatives.

Another major problem is that racing patrons literally are dying off and new ones aren’t replacing them. “There are entry barriers,” says I. Nelson Rose, a professor at Whittier Law School and an authority on gambling. “It costs money, it takes time to get there and you have to learn to handicap.”

At Los Alamitos, average daily attendance has fallen to about 7,000 from a peak of 9,000 in the early 1970s, though the decline is actually sharper if the track excludes those who come to Los Alamitos to bet solely on televised races from other tracks.

It has been doubly hard for Los Alamitos because it mainly runs quarter horses, which are less popular than thoroughbreds. Los Alamitos also is surrounded by three of the nation’s premier thoroughbred tracks in Santa Anita, Hollywood Park and Del Mar, all of which are refurbishing or adding side attractions to boost their sagging attendance. Hollywood Park, for example, last year opened a card club casino next to the track.

Technology also has changed racing dramatically.

Through satellite broadcasts, more fans at Los Alamitos are watching television monitors and betting on races from other tracks, and more money bet on Los Alamitos races is coming from bettors at off-track outlets.

Last year, bettors plopped down on average $1.1 million a night on live races at Los Alamitos--about the same as in 1980 when there was no satellite wagering. But nearly two-thirds of the money wagered last year on Los Alamitos races was made in betting parlors in places such as Northern California and Las Vegas, which get a cut from Los Alamitos.

Satellite wagering also means fans in Los Alamitos can bet on races from Nebraska, Louisiana, Canada and even Hong Kong. The Hong Kong races run until 2:30 a.m., but there’s a good turnout for it, especially among Asian Americans, says Dick Feinberg, general manager at Los Alamitos.

“You can see how excited people get in here watching TV,” Feinberg says, pointing to throngs standing in front of monitors showing a dizzying selection of races every 15 minutes from around the nation. “It’s amazing.”

But while off-track wagering has increased the menu and traveling convenience for bettors, it hasn’t helped the attendance for live racing at Los Alamitos. More and more, bettors are going to Los Alamitos to wager on off-track races, not the live racing portion. That’s a worrisome trend.

Los Alamitos rakes in nine cents per every dollar bet by its fans on live races at the track. But that cut shrinks to as little as two cents per dollar on satellite races because of commissions to other tracks. (Overall, 80 to 84 cents of a dollar wagered on all races is returned to the bettors. Part of the rest goes to purses to pay winning horse owners and to state taxes.)

Even so, Los Alamitos makes money during the day as a satellite wagering facility but struggles at night with live racing. The reason: It doesn’t generate enough patrons to pay the hefty expense of running races, which includes everything from paying horse owners, crews to start and clock races, and equipment to take care of the five-eighths-mile track.

Allred says satellite wagering at Los Alamitos has been earning a profit of $2 million a year. But he acknowledges that he has lost so much money in live racing that over the past five years, the track as a whole has been only “marginally profitable” for him.

Given those numbers, Allred has thought about operating the track solely as a satellite wagering facility. But even if he wanted to, he couldn’t; state law requires tracks like his to have live racing if it wants satellite wagering.

Despite past troubles, Allred sees better days ahead. Last year, for the first time, Allred says he made a profit on the live quarter-horse racing meet--he figures maybe $100,000.

But that’s a paltry amount when set against the $16.5 million that Allred invested in 1990 to buy his share of the track. By the end of this summer, he’ll have sunk another $14 million to acquire the remaining 50% from two Northern California businessmen who have grown weary of the sport and business.

One of the partners, Chris Bardis of Sacramento, says Los Alamitos wasn’t as profitable as he had hoped. Bardis, 59, whose main business is home-building, was an enthusiast of harness racing, which Los Alamitos runs about 14 weeks a year.

“I’m really tired of racing, I really don’t need the headaches,” Bardis said.

It’s different for Allred, Bardis added. “He loves what he’s doing.”

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Clearly, horse racing is more than simply a business for Allred. Though he too faces the same headaches--contending with state lawmakers, stubborn horsemen and the volatile gambling industry itself--Allred puts up with it all because he loves quarter-horse racing and Los Alamitos.

It’s a love affair that began 37 years ago. Allred was 22, a law student at USC, when he read in the newspaper one day that a horse owned by the Allred brothers was racing. There was no relation, but curious, Allred went to the track.

“There were cowboys out there from Arizona, Texas and Oklahoma,” he recalled of that day. “It was colorful, friendly. I made friends immediately. And the speed and the quickness of the horses. Everything about it just struck my fancy.”

Allred, who grew up poor with an alcoholic stepfather, never finished law school. Instead he enrolled at Loma Linda University School of Medicine and became a doctor.

In the late ‘60s, he founded Family Planning Associates, now a 600-employee company that includes doctors, hospitals and surgical centers. It is the largest provider of abortions in the state.

Over the years, he and his clinics have been targets of anti-abortion protesters, which explains why Allred guards his privacy. Allred this year moved from his longtime home in Long Beach to south Orange County, though he wouldn’t be more specific.

Allred doesn’t like talking about his medical business. But he doesn’t cower either: “It’s been a good business,” he says firmly. “I believe in it. I’m committed to it, and I’m not going to back off because some people don’t like it.”

Allred, who is separated from his wife and has no children, made his millions from his medical business, and that’s enabled him to pursue his two hobbies, horse racing and golf. Allred has been running his horses at the track since 1978, many bred from his 330-acre quarter-horse ranch in San Luis Obispo. Hollywood Park Chairman R.D. Hubbard is his closest friend and golfing buddy, and with him Allred has ventures in a golf course and another racetrack in the Southwest.

Allred has since put most of his assets into Los Alamitos. Tallying the buyout of his partners and the Vessels Club and other capital improvements in recent years, Allred figures he will have invested some $35 million in the track by the end of the year.

Allred’s efforts haven’t gone unnoticed. Track insiders like Chuck Treece, who has been a groom, jockey and trainer in his 20 years at Los Alamitos, was worried about the track’s existence five years ago. “Right now,” Treece says, “it’s on the upswing. It’s got a future.”

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Allred thinks so too, but his biggest fear is casinos, which are on the march nationwide.

Whether in riverboats or on Native American reservations, casinos have devastated horse tracks around the nation. “You put a casino near a racetrack, and immediately you lose 25% of the business,” observes Rose, the Whittier Law professor.

Such concerns are why Allred and his partners at Los Alamitos tried two years ago to build its own casino-like card club next to the track. But voters in Cypress soundly rejected that proposal. Allred, still stung from that defeat, says he has completely abandoned the plan.

It’s unclear how much a card club would have helped Los Alamitos. But Don Robbins, president of Hollywood Park, says betting on racing at his track has increased by 5% since Hollywood Park Casino opened about a year ago.

“It’s been a win-win thing for racing,” Robbins says. Last year, publicly traded Hollywood Park Inc., which includes a couple of smaller tracks, made a profit of $4.5 million on $115 million of revenue.

Robbins thinks Los Alamitos has just as good a chance of surviving, if not prospering, as any of the other track in the region, especially with a benefactor like Allred.

“If it weren’t for Doc Allred, I don’t think Los Alamitos would be a racetrack today,” Robbins says. “It’s Doc Allred’s love for quarter-horse racing that’s enabled it to survive.”

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In the end, though, it’s the racing fans who will decide--fans such as Tom Rogers and Eddie Tsuruta.

Rogers and Tsuruta, both 57, have been coming to Los Alamitos together every Saturday for the past five years. The two men represent the core bettors at the track; they are older and typically bet $200 to $300 each a night.

Sitting in the track’s newly furnished Garden Room, Rogers says he’s pleased with what’s happened at Los Alamitos in recent years. “It’s been improving constantly,” says the Rowland Heights resident. “There are more TVs, the tables and chairs are new. . . . Everything’s much better.”

Tsuruta studies the Racing Form, wearing thick glasses and a T-shirt that displays the colors and words of Foxwoods Casino, a popular Native American casino on the East Coast. A produce man who lives in Hacienda Heights, Tsuruta loves the action at Los Alamitos. Last year, he says he won $25,000 on a $2 ticket. But he also remembers the fun he had on a visit to the Native American casino.

“Would I still come here if there was a casino nearby?” he asks aloud. After a long pause, he answers: “It’s a tough question.”

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Profile: Dr. Edward C. Allred

* Education: B.A., history and biology, La Sierra College, 1959; M.D., Loma Linda University School of Medicine, 1964

* Age: 59

* Medical career: Interned at Pasadena’s Huntington Memorial Hospital, 1964-1965; entered private medical practice upon discharge from Army Medical Corps, 1967; founder and medical director, Family Planning Associates Medical Group, 1967 to present

* Racing background: President/CEO and co-owner, Los Alamitos Race Course, 1990 to present; board of directors, Horsemen’s Quarter Horse Racing Assn., 1971 to present

* Hobbies: Horse breeding and racing, golf

* Honors: Combat Medic Medal for service in South Vietnam, 1967

Source: Edward C. Allred

Researched by JANICE L. JONES / Los Angeles Times

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Key Dates in Los Alamitos History

1951: Frank Vessels Sr. opens track after hosting “betless” Sunday afternoon quarter horse races on his ranch for several years

1968: Night races begin under newly installed lights

1972: Harness racing added

1983: Hollywood Park Operating Co. acquires track, 100 acres of adjacent land for $58 million

1990: Allred acquires 50% ownership of the race track for $16 million

1990: $10 million renovation project begins

1993: Cypress voters reject track’s bid to open casino-like card club

1993: Thoroughbred racing added

1994: First overseas simulcasting begins with Hong Kong races; Canadian races added later

1995: $4-million Vessels Club restaurant and lounge renovation begins; opening set for fall

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Source: Los Alamitos Racecourse

Researched by JANICE L. JONES / Los Angeles Times

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Los Alamitos Makes a Comeback

After hitting a five-year low in 1992, attendance and track handle--the amount of money bet--have both nearly doubled. Data for quarter horse racing only: (see newspaper for chart)

Source: Los Alamitos Race Course

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Know Your Breeds

Three major breeds race at Los Alamitos:

* Quarter horse: Mixed breed, bred to race shorter distances (300 to 870 yards).

* Thoroughbred: Pure bloodline with lineage traceable to ancient England. Bred for longer distances (1/2-2 miles).

* Standardbred: Trotting horse for harness racing evolved from Morgan and thoroughbred lines. Driver rides behind in a sulky or one-man cart. Further categorized as trotter or pacer, depending on gait.

The Money Flow

The split of money wagered at Los Alamitos varies. Straight bets return more to bettors than exotic bets and the track gets more for bets made at the track than at remote facilities. How a $1 straight bet breaks down at the track:

Bettors: $0.84

Track: $0.09

Purse: $0.06

State taxes: $0.01

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Source: Los Alamitos Race Course

Researched by JANICE L. JONES / Los Angeles Times