by John Berry
A few months ago, in a Mane Attraction column, it was suggested that harness racing take some hints from Damola Adamolekun.
Adamolekun is the 36-year-old Nigerian-American businessman and, by the way, genius, who guided Red Lobster out from the cloud of bankruptcy, reviving a struggling chain into popularity and profitability.
His road to repaving the company was simple — listen to your customers and use their suggestions to heed their complaints and stop the erosion of guests.
Indeed, Adamolekun is doing just that — modernizing and succeeding.
Of course, that suggestion has never been in any plan for harness racing, except for the breeders, who concentrated on one thing that fans and owners alike like — speed.
While standardbred sales have been better than ever these days, our fan base has been like “withering heights” — withering from its heights of years and decades ago.
Wagering is down, despite the ease in which punters can place a bet from their couch or wheel chair, with those betting stats siphoning down to per race average, and, even, race days.
Blame it on whatever you’d like, the lottery, sports betting, prop betting, poker popularity, casinos, you name it, we have an excuse for it.
One of my close buddies, Gary, (I call him “Mr. 72” because of his prowess on the golf course), thinks harness racing should take some lessons from golf.
Mr. 72 recently corralled me and said, “I loved your idea to speed things up in a column last month.
“Maybe they can learn something from the game of golf.”
My reply was, “Golf? That’s probably the most boring game of all — four-five hours to complete a round — one swing every three or four minutes.”
Mr. 72 replied, “As you know, I’m over at simulcasting every day when I’m not at the [golf] club and, if you want a description of boredom, try [horse] racing with races 20, 25, 30-minutes apart.
“That’s boring!
“You folks might want to learn something from golf.”
An hour later, we were watching golf on TV as he said, “It’s 5:11 [p.m.] and we are going to watch golf for 10 minutes.”
In those 10 minutes, we saw 12 different golfers in action plus a time-out for advertisers showing seven different ads for products ranging from golf supplies to cold meds.
“JB, like you suggested in that story a couple of months ago, you can form regions and put regional post times at three or four tracks in a region [depending on race dates].”
We suggested as possibilities, New York-Massachusetts, Ohio-Indiana, Ohio-Kentucky, Indiana-Kentucky, Pennsylvania-New York, New York-Massachusetts, Massachusetts-Maine — there are more possible ones — but you could have races nine or 10 minutes apart.
“It’s a no-brainer,” Mr. 72 said. “Just take a lesson or two from golf and keep the momentum flowing, race after race after race.
“Us players want action, not drags. Drags are the worst things for us because we are gamblers and don’t want to wait an extra seven, eight, nine minutes for the action.”
Harness racing might want to take a Damola Adamolekun stance and, for a change, listen to your fans.
This, idea, too, will, most likely, be thrown in the trash can with all of the others as Mr. 72 reminded me that “You can’t help someone [or something] that refuses to be helped.”
My HRU thought on this is similar. You can lead a horse to water but you can’t make it drink!
But, if you hold its head under water long enough, it’ll either drink or learn to breathe through its eyes.
But Mr. 72 wasn’t done spilling his thoughts.
“Gamblers want continuous action,” he said. “We are impatient and want immediate action. We are impassioned, impetuous.”
It was right then that a new factor hit — the I-M factor — since Mr. 72’s descriptive words all began with the letters I-M, the thought evolving to the I’M factor—short for “I AM.”
Our leaders should really pay attention to the “I’M” factor in our sport.
Yes, the bettors are I’Mpatient, want I’Mmediate action, I’Mpassioned, I’Mpetuous, I’Mportant and have a negative I’Mpression about our sport these days. They are I’Mpressionable, want I’Mprovement to feed their I’Mpulsions and have I’Mputable feelings they have built up over the last years when this sport acted like they needed them.
In other words, all the bettors are saying to the tracks “I’M” somebody and would like to be treated like a customer you need to stay in business (even though they probably don’t think so these days).
Many fans have suggested many things that have fallen on deaf ears but, truly, harness racing
needs a facelift to modernize and bring fans back and create new ones in the process.
With legislatures and casinos — thus far — supporting our industry on crutches, it’s not unreasonable or impossible to make harness racing more attractive and exciting.
Here are some ideas.
Think time trials are outdated?
Not with prop bets flourishing throughout the land.
They could be based on success — Yes or No — and time with the possibilities way beyond imagination.
Action could be as quickly as in baseball’s next pitch or football’s next play.
How about draws for the 10 leading drivers in two races per card, or the 10 leading trainers in a race.
Make it interesting, more interesting for the players.
Think the takeout is too high?
You’re not alone with casinos holding between, say, 3 per cent and 9 per cent.
With the crutches holding us up, reduce takeout to single digits, as well, especially on track.
Heck, it will make little difference as we all have witnessed stakes events with purses from $15,000 to $400,000 with the handle for those races just a few thousand “two-dollar-bills.”
Create a television channel just for harness racing. A 24-hour channel covering racing throughout the world, yes, we have harness racing in many countries, Europe, France, Scandinavia, Finland, Ireland, Australia, and New Zealand.
We have plenty of great talent to host and erase the stigma of having our sport playing second fiddle to the T-breds on their dedicated station.
There are dozens more valid ideas to bring us into the future if we can get somebodies to take the “bull(dog)” by the horns!
We must start acting like a major sport and not just a tag-along one that can get a few minutes of air-time between a 10-claimer on the T-bred schedule, shown two minutes after it has been contested.
No room to go over all of the scandals in sports these days where players and others don’t seem to be satisfied with their multi-million dollar-salaries and need that extra five or seven grand by fooling around with a pitch, a pass, or missing a free throw.
If harness racing can visibly clean up the improprieties and create a universal set of rules in the U.S. and/or North America, for medications, fines and suspensions — one for all and all for one — it will be, then, possible to claim bragging rights for harness racing again.
You can bet on it.
May The Horse Be With You!