Trying to Get a Handle on the Problem

It is the third Saturday in May, and at the corner of Park Heights and Belvedere here, they will, as they have for years, put lipstick on a pig.

It is Preakness Day, the Preakness being the second leg of horse racing’s Triple Crown. This will be the 131st running. There will be a crowd approaching 120,000. Two television networks, ESPN and NBC, will hype it before and pay breathless homage to it during and after.

If Kentucky Derby winner Barbaro wins, the Preakness will have, for the seventh time in 10 years, sent the sport into an understandable tizzy, what with a potential Triple Crown winner at the Belmont three Saturdays hence.

All this will happen at the venerable Pimlico racetrack, where there is as much history as there are coats of paint. Pimlico passed old on its way to ancient decades ago. They could apply for national monument status, but they can’t afford the termite service.

None of this will be evident to the millions of TV viewers today. Baltimore has worked hard to make its leg of the Triple Crown both beloved locally and important nationally. The city, and the people who have spent so many years making the race what it is today -- namely the De Francis family and now-retired promotional genius Chick Lang -- deserve praise and credit. If God is a $2 bettor, the Preakness will get a day of blue skies and sunshine.

But when it is over, the clouds that have been on the horizon for several years will still be hovering.

Like Hollywood Park and Santa Anita in Southern California, Pimlico needs slot machines. Like those tracks, Pimlico’s regular racing sessions now have smaller fields, smaller purses and certainly smaller on-site attendance and betting revenue. Slot machines increase revenue, which contributes to larger purses, better fields and more people wanting to be there to bet.

Unlike the California tracks, Pimlico does not face a powerful Indian casino lobby in its quest to get slot machines. Its battles appear to be more political.

Also, territorial.

Maryland is bordered on two sides by states that have slots and horse racing, Delaware and West Virginia. Racing is flourishing in both, partly because Maryland trainers race more horses there for bigger purses and Maryland breeders move some operations to those states.

Now there is a new player, Pennsylvania, which recently gained the right to run slot-racing combination facilities, leaving Maryland slotless and surrounded.

“They are the sleeping giant,” said Billy Boniface, president of the Maryland Horse Breeders Assn. “Right now, at Philadelphia Park, they are running about $100,000 a day in purses. This time next year, that will be $500,000.”

Boniface, like so many others in racing here, remains upbeat about the future, theorizing that, once Maryland taxpayers see large chunks of their tax base going across state lines, they will pressure the politicians into legalizing slots.

Gov. Robert Ehrlich, a Republican, has pushed for them as a solution to the state’s deficit -- a deficit he fixed without them -- and even took the forum to the winners’ circle of the Preakness and national TV two years ago. But a Democratic legislature has blocked slots in Maryland, and some of the neighborhoods around Pimlico have given lawmakers reason to pause.

Several times, Mount Washington mothers paraded their children, dressed in T-shirts that read: “Tots Against Slots.” It was an irresistible photo op.

After several years of this, Baltimore has become slot-machine obsessive.

At an awards breakfast here Thursday, Ehrlich was referred to, affectionately, as “Governor Slots.”

Kenny Mayne of ESPN joked that George Washington was a member of the Maryland Jockey Club and would have installed slots, if there’d been the right technology.

“But they hadn’t perfected the Phillips head screwdriver yet,” he said.

Columnist John Eisenberg, writing in the Baltimore Sun that Barbaro’s trainer, Michael Matz, had moved his horse to Maryland from Delaware, called that “Revenge of the slot-deprived.”

Into the midst of all this has ridden a new sheriff, Canadian businessman and prominent horse owner Frank Stronach. He owns Santa Anita and several other tracks, is considered by many to be the most important person in racing, and added a piece of the Triple Crown to his empire when he took over 51% of Pimlico from the De Francis family in 2002.

He said here Friday that the issue was more complex than just getting the state to allow slot machines at racetracks.

“Of course we would take slots, but that’s not the real answer,” he said. “That would only overcome the neglect.”

Stronach has long maintained that the racing industry was poorly run.

“The way [tracks] were run, it looked like they’d all go under,” he said, pointing to a drab-looking gray chair next to him as an example. “Can we compete with Las Vegas like this?”

He said that slots were crucial both for his Pimlico operation and at Santa Anita, but added that the real issue was lack of free enterprise, that state governments’ dictating how and when you can race has been the real killer for the sport.

“The American enterprise system is the best in the world,” Stronach said. “It thrives on competition, competition, competition. The states need to give us the freedom to operate.”

The obvious question was, how long does somebody in Stronach’s situation wait -- wait for slots, wait for state government to loosen restrictions, wait for a time when it is economically sensible to tear down and upgrade the decay at the corner of Park Heights and Belvedere?

“We hope the Preakness will be here forever,” he said. “But you can’t expect anybody to just lose money. There can’t be conditions where you are surrounded by slots, where the playing field isn’t level.”

So, you might say that the future of the Preakness here is about as predictable as the result of pulling a lever.

In the face of all this, hope springs eternal, from at least one source, the soon-to-turn-80 Lang, longtime general manager of the track here and as venerable as the facilities he once ran.

“The future of Maryland racing is not in question,” Lang said. “We are like the name of the first winner of the Preakness.”

In 1873, a horse won the Preakness by 10 lengths. It was named Survivor.