in a Mane Attraction column<\/a>,\u00a0it was suggested that harness racing take some hints from Damola Adamolekun.<\/p>\nAdamolekun 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.<\/p>\n
His road to repaving the company was simple \u2014 listen to your customers and use their suggestions to heed their complaints and stop the erosion of guests.<\/p>\n
Indeed, Adamolekun is doing just that \u2014 modernizing and succeeding.<\/p>\n
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 \u2014 speed.<\/p>\n
While standardbred sales have been better than ever these days, our fan base has been like \u201cwithering heights\u201d \u2014 withering from its heights of years and decades ago.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Blame it on whatever you\u2019d like, the lottery, sports betting, prop betting, poker popularity, casinos, you name it, we have an excuse for it.<\/p>\n
One of my close buddies, Gary, (I call him \u201cMr. 72\u201d because of his prowess on the golf course),\u00a0thinks harness racing should take some lessons from\u00a0golf.<\/p>\n
Mr. 72 recently corralled me and said, \u201cI loved your idea to speed things up in a column last month.<\/p>\n
\u201cMaybe they can learn something from the game of golf.\u201d<\/p>\n
My reply was, \u201cGolf? That\u2019s probably the most boring game of all \u2014 four-five hours to complete a round \u2014 one swing every three or four minutes.\u201d<\/p>\n
Mr. 72 replied, \u201cAs you know, I\u2019m over at simulcasting every day when I\u2019m not at the [golf] club and, if you want a description of boredom, try [horse] racing with races 20, 25, 30-minutes apart.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat\u2019s boring!<\/p>\n
\u201cYou folks might want to learn something from golf.\u201d<\/p>\n
An hour later, we were watching golf on TV as he said, \u201cIt\u2019s 5:11 [p.m.] and we are going to watch golf for 10 minutes.\u201d<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
\u201cJB, 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].\u201d<\/p>\n
We suggested as possibilities, New York-Massachusetts, Ohio-Indiana, Ohio-Kentucky, Indiana-Kentucky, Pennsylvania-New York, New York-Massachusetts, Massachusetts-Maine \u2014 there are more possible ones \u2014 but you could have races nine or 10 minutes apart.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s a no-brainer,\u201d Mr. 72 said. \u201cJust take a lesson or two from golf and keep the momentum flowing, race after race after race.<\/p>\n
\u201cUs players want action, not drags. Drags are the worst things for us because we are gamblers and don\u2019t want to wait an extra seven, eight, nine minutes for the action.\u201d<\/p>\n
Harness racing might want to take a Damola Adamolekun stance and, for a change, listen to your fans.<\/p>\n
This, idea, too, will, most likely, be thrown in the trash can with all of the others as Mr. 72 reminded me that \u201cYou can\u2019t help someone [or something] that refuses to be helped.\u201d<\/p>\n
My HRU thought on this is similar. You can lead a horse to water but you can\u2019t make it drink!<\/p>\n
But, if you hold its head under water long enough, it\u2019ll either drink or learn to breathe through its eyes.<\/p>\n
But Mr. 72 wasn\u2019t done spilling his thoughts.<\/p>\n
\u201cGamblers want continuous action,\u201d he said. \u201cWe are impatient and want immediate action. We are impassioned, impetuous.\u201d<\/p>\n
It was right then that a new factor hit \u2014 the I-M factor \u2014 since Mr. 72\u2019s descriptive words all began with the letters I-M, the thought evolving to the I\u2019M factor\u2014short for \u201cI AM.\u201d<\/p>\n
Our leaders should really pay attention to the \u201cI\u2019M\u201d factor in our sport.<\/p>\n
Yes, the bettors are I\u2019Mpatient, want I\u2019Mmediate action, I\u2019Mpassioned, I\u2019Mpetuous, I\u2019Mportant and have a negative I\u2019Mpression about our sport these days. They are I\u2019Mpressionable, want I\u2019Mprovement to feed their I\u2019Mpulsions and have I\u2019Mputable feelings they have built up over the last years when this sport acted like they needed them.<\/p>\n
In other words, all the bettors are saying to the tracks \u201cI\u2019M\u201d somebody and would like to be treated like a customer you need to stay in business (even though they probably don\u2019t think so these days).<\/p>\n
Many fans have suggested many things that have fallen on deaf ears but, truly, harness racing<\/p>\n
needs a facelift to modernize and bring fans back and create new ones in the process.<\/p>\n
With legislatures and casinos \u2014 thus far \u2014 supporting our industry on crutches, it\u2019s not unreasonable or impossible to make harness racing more attractive and exciting.<\/p>\n
Here are some ideas.<\/p>\n
Think time trials are outdated?<\/p>\n
Not with prop bets flourishing throughout the land.<\/p>\n
They could be based on success \u2014 Yes or No \u2014 and time with the possibilities way beyond imagination.<\/p>\n
Action could be as quickly as in baseball\u2019s next pitch or football\u2019s next play.<\/p>\n
How about draws for the 10 leading drivers in two races per card, or the 10 leading trainers in a race.<\/p>\n
Make it interesting, more interesting for the players.<\/p>\n
Think the takeout is too high?<\/p>\n
You\u2019re not alone with casinos holding between, say, 3 per cent and 9 per cent.<\/p>\n
With the crutches holding us up, reduce takeout to single digits, as well, especially on track.<\/p>\n
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 \u201ctwo-dollar-bills.\u201d<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
There are dozens more valid ideas to bring us into the future if we can get somebodies to take the \u201cbull(dog)\u201d by the horns!<\/p>\n
We must start acting like a\u00a0major sport\u00a0and 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.<\/p>\n
No room to go over all of the scandals in sports these days where players and others don\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n
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 \u2014 one for all and all for one \u2014 it will be, then, possible to claim bragging rights for harness racing again.<\/p>\n
You can bet on it.<\/p>\n
May The Horse Be With You!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"by John Berry A few months ago,\u00a0in a Mane Attraction column,\u00a0it was suggested that harness racing take some…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":286288,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[443],"tags":[49,48,622,82],"class_list":["post-286287","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-golf","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-golf","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/286287","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=286287"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/286287\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/286288"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=286287"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=286287"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=286287"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}