Sports Eye Tries to Lure Bettors
Sports Eye Inc., the New York publisher of past-performance information whose debut in California led to a multimillion-dollar lawsuit in the 1980s, is doing business in the state again.
When the Santa Anita meet opened Dec. 26, a few copies of Sports Eye’s Daily Racing Program were seen at the track. Unlike the Daily Racing Form, which is more than 100 years old and has been the prime source of horse information in California for decades, Sports Eye’s publication does not include any articles or columns about the sport. Jack Cohen, who owns Sports Eye, maintains that the average race goer has a cursory interest, at best, in racing news.
Cohen said that Santa Anita officials and other California track operators have told him that he will not be permitted to sell Sports Eye at their tracks. The Racing Form is available on- and off-track and at the many satellite betting locations.
Cohen said that Sports Eye was available at a few of these satellites, including Del Mar, and was also being sold at about 100 Southern California liquor stores, where the Racing Form can also be purchased.
Sports Eye’s past-performance records look much like those in the Racing Form and include the popular Beyer speed figures. But whereas the Form goes back up to 12 races, Sports Eye lists a maximum of eight races. The supplier of Sports Eye’s information is Equibase, which published past performances of its own for seven years before its field crews began supplying information for the Racing Form in 1998.
At 8x10 inches, Sports Eye’s publication is smaller than the tabloid-size Racing Form. Cohen is hoping that bettors will be attracted to his publication’s lower price. Sports Eye costs $3, including sales tax. The Form sells for $4 on-track and slightly more off-track because of tax.
Sports Eye, based in Port Washington, N.Y., has been in business in various forms since 1964. Its main customer base used to be at Eastern harness-racing tracks.
“We’ve always been looking at other sources of revenue,” Cohen said. “Harness racing has been going downhill ever since ‘Ben-Hur.’ ”
In the 1980s, besides publishing harness-racing past performances, Sports Eye put out a weekly thoroughbred publication called Thoroughbred Racing Action. For years, Sports Eye has taken on the Racing Form on the East Coast with a thick, pamphlet-sized past-performance publication, which includes less information than the Form but more tracks.
Cohen is also hoping to sell a national version of the Daily Racing Program at the Las Vegas racebooks, where bettors sometimes need to buy more than one edition of the Form to handicap races at multiple tracks. The California edition of the Daily Racing Program includes out-of-state tracks that simulcast their races to California, plus Santa Anita, Golden Gate Fields and the quarter horse track in Los Alamitos. The Racing Form’s past performances exclude Los Alamitos.
The Racing Form has a history of successfully blunting competition. In 1991, Robert Maxwell, the British publisher who also owned the New York Daily News, started the Racing Times, which used Equibase past performances and featured many writers and columnists who had previously worked for the Form. Maxwell’s empire collapsed when he was lost at sea, and the Racing Times folded in February 1992.
When Cohen tried to take on the Racing Form in California in the early 1980s, Hollywood Park barred his publication from the track and refused press credentials to Sports Eye’s gatherers of past-performance information.
One day, Jay Woodward, a former race-chart caller for the Form, was ejected from the Hollywood Park Turf Club when he was caught describing races into a tape recorder.
Cohen filed an antitrust suit against Hollywood Park and the Racing Form, which was then owned by the late Walter Annenberg, who had been President Nixon’s U.S. ambassador to Britain. The out-of-court settlement reportedly was $10 million, with the Form absorbing $7 million.
In an interview this week, Cohen wouldn’t confirm those amounts.
“The ambassador was very generous,” he said. “He knew we had him where we wanted him.”
