Stronach Keeping His Plans on Track

Shortly after Bobby Frankel won this year’s Santa Anita Handicap with Milwaukee Brew, the Hall of Fame trainer marveled at the lack of interference from the horse’s owner, Frank Stronach.

“It’s an easy job,” Frankel said. “They send me the horses, and then nobody calls. Even in the paddock, [Stronach] wasn’t interested in me. All he wanted to do was meet Gary Tanaka [the owner of another horse]. I feel like an orphan.”

Frankel might be an exception, since laissez-faire is not Stronach’s style, but maybe the owner of Santa Anita is ignoring his California trainer because he’s too busy signing off on racetrack deals or trying to put together more. The Canadian industrialist recently added another track, buying Lone Star Park near Dallas for $80 million.

Should other operators want to peddle their tracks to Stronach, $80 million is a good starting figure. There’s something about that number that appeals to this wheeler-dealer. Santa Anita, the jewel in a company that now owns nine thoroughbred tracks, one harness track and a greyhound facility, cost him $126 million, but Golden Gate Fields, Gulfstream Park and now Lone Star were all acquired for outlays of about $80 million. Stronach was even prepared to pay $80 million for Los Alamitos but was turned down.

Since Stronach began his plunge, outdistancing Churchill Downs and other suitors in coming away with Santa Anita at the end of 1998, he has turned the game upside down, but he has yet to turn it around. At Gulfstream, where they ran the $1-million Florida Derby two weeks ago, horsemen and bettors are staggering toward the finish of the longest and, arguably, most tumultuous season.

Since the 90-day meet began, there has been a horse shortage, a familiar national problem that has given Gulfstream a taste of reality. The closing of the stable area at Hialeah, the faded relic of South Florida’s halcyon days, is partly responsible. For whatever reasons, many afternoons the cards are unattractive and betting is off about $1 million a day.

A weekend concert series, which Gulfstream promotes more than its racing, has hardly helped. It’s Cyndi Lauper one day, Three Dog Night another, and although Gregg Allman and other acts might draw thousands of people to a backyard concert park, they are not bettors in the true sense. Their contribution to the handle is paltry.

What the concert-goers do mostly is clog the traffic in and out of the track. One day, Irv Cowan, the owner of champion filly Hollywood Wildcat and a serious player, was 90 minutes getting in.

“Can you imagine how much they lost out on handle while I was sitting in my car?” Cowan said to friends.

Another day, Shug McGaughey, a prominent trainer, was caught in a similar traffic snarl.

“Hey,” he pleaded to one of the city cops, “I got a horse to saddle in the next race and I got to get in there. Any way you can get me through?”

“You got a horse to saddle?” asked the incredulous cop. “Are they running horses in there today too?”

Concerts with horseracing are not new. Del Mar has been mixing the two for several years. Some track executives believe that just getting a younger crowd to visit the grounds gives the tracks a shot at expanding their market. More than 20 years ago, the New York tracks hired one Ted Demmon, a whiz-bang from the fast-food ranks, to hype business. Demmon immediately launched a series of post-race concerts and outre promotions.

One fall at Belmont Park, Demmon outdid himself. The cast of “Dallas,” the enormously successful TV soap opera, was on hiatus because of an actors’ strike and Demmon hired, for a reported $40,000, Larry Hagman, who played J.R. Ewing, the nefarious linchpin of the show. Before, between and during races, Belmont was a whirligig of Demmon-inspired “Dallas” knockoffs. There was a “Who Shot J.R.?” contest; there was a J.R. look-alike competition; and Hagman, astride a Tennessee walker, even led the horses in a post parade.

The sawed-off Demmon bounced around Belmont, dressed in Western garb and wearing a cowboy hat bigger than he was. Several of his lieutenants wore matching hats.

“They paid $5,000 for those hats,” the head of one of Belmont’s budget-strapped departments grumbled. “Can you imagine me going to Jim Heffernan [president of the track] and asking for $5,000 to buy cowboy hats?”

Not any more than imagining Frank Stronach writing a check to pay Styx for a concert on Florida Derby day. Good thing for the Gulfstream coffers that Styx didn’t ask for $80 million. Stronach’s just in love with that figure.