Albany, Calif.
Everything feels out of whack this week, especially since the
Belmont Stakes* has been displaced by 164 miles. Sorry. Make that 163 3/4.
Forget about a Triple Crown. How about a double? Counting
Justify’s simultaneous coronation and farewell in 2018, there have been 18
different winners of the last 18 U.S. classics.
So without a horse on the verge of instant recognition by
mainstream America, why not move the Belmont* up where Red Smith said you take
a left turn onto Union Avenue and go back 100 years? Actually, no one can seem
to find where Smith actually wrote that. It seems the foundation for this
column is getting more rickety by the word.
No live Triple Crown chance. No final quarter-mile to test a
would-be champion. No air-quality panic like we had on Long Island last year.
Heck, I cannot even replicate the illegal right-hand turn that earned me a
traffic ticket from the fine people of Nassau County.
Instead of adding to my personal streak of 50 consecutive Triple
Crown races that were not masked in a global pandemic, I flew west to cover the
final days of Golden Gate Fields, write a piece for next week about the future
of California racing and then start a 2 1/2-week vacation.
This was my own time machine. I got into an airplane,
actually two, flew west and landed back in 1959.
At long last, I set foot this week where the bay comes to
play. At least that is what the faded sign says at the entrance on Gilman Drive.
Long gone is the time-and-temperature board beyond the backstretch next to I-80,
literally a familiar signpost for Northern Californians stuck in traffic on the
way to the Bay Bridge.
For years, for decades, that was as close as I got to Golden
Gate Fields. No excuses, either, especially since I was born across the bay in
San Rafael, and I grew up farther north in Chico.
In the ’70s and ’80s, I made hundreds of trips past the
track without setting foot inside. Even when I covered Super Bowl 50, the last
time I spent much time in the area, I did not make the side trip.
And now I have, and my first weekend at Golden Gate Fields
will be everyone’s last.
I feel like a knowledgeable outsider, the guy who has been
in so many flight simulators that getting into a real cockpit and grabbing the
throttle should be second nature. I watched so many episodes of the “Golden
Gate Report” with the late Sam Spear that I already knew every nook and cranny
of this track.
Well, not quite. When I arrived Wednesday, the GPS took me
to the wrong entrance. I doubt that would have happened had I bothered to show
up back in the days of folded maps in the glove compartment.
Once I found my way to the horsemen’s entrance, it was easy
to find a parking space down the knoll from the familiar-looking grandstand. Wednesdays
used to be busy with races back in the day. Not anymore.
A dark-green shack stands near the outer rail where the
homestretch becomes the clubhouse turn and where the backside begins on the
Albany-Berkeley city line. Dennis Anderson, the attentive guard, popped out to see
who this stranger was. I, interloper.
I was off and running with my game-worn story about driving
past the track a zillion times, perennially headed to Candlestick Park or the
Coliseum or a weekend in The City, always with capital letters in these parts,
but never once setting foot on the racetrack property. I can recite the whole
yarn now like a waiter repeating the specials.
As I shared experiences about places like Tracy and French
Camp and even far away Oroville, Anderson realized I was not some carpetbagger
from back east. I got the feeling this 82-year-old former jockey who still exercises
horses every morning had a B.S. needle that would not be hard for some poseur
to peg.
He did not sound very dour about the impending doom that
faces this track that has been around since the year before he was born. As
happens every year at this time, Anderson will be doing similar work next
weekend about 35 miles east in Pleasanton. The difference now is that instead
of going for just a couple weeks of races at the Alameda County Fair, he and what
remains of Northern California racing will be back there this fall, too, to see
what the shaky future holds in their makeshift new hub.
I was back again Thursday for what seemed like a routine morning
of training on the pitch-black Tapeta surface. Routine for a track that has
lost a lot of its regulars, both horses and humans. Once The Stronach Group fessed
up last summer that it was closing the joint, the exodus began. First it was a
trickle. Then it accelerated to the point that there were not enough horses to
run even three days of racing most weeks.
There was a Chicken Little style rumor that they would not
even make it to this weekend, that my trip would be a complete waste of time,
that the sky was falling before the last overnight could be written. The withering
nature of other people’s gossip never ceases to gnash. For what it is worth,
they will be running Friday and Saturday and Sunday with a whopping total of
140 horses for 21 races.
For those who still go about day-to-day work here, they
speak dutifully of how sad it is and how they wish it did not happen and how they
did not want to leave. But the feeling of resignation that was so palpable
three years ago at Arlington Park does not seem as obvious to me this week at
Golden Gate.
My career has been peppered with closings. When I was at
ESPN Radio, I felt like I was the guy who would hang condemnation notices on iconic
sports venues. I produced audio features on the closing of Chicago Stadium and
Boston Garden and Maple Leaf Gardens. When I lived and worked in New York, I witnessed
the final days of Yankee Stadium and Shea Stadium and Giants Stadium and, yes,
the old Meadowlands grandstand that was much nicer than that new, sub-compact version
that faces the sun on Hambletonian day.
Come to think of it, I was there for the last running of the
Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe at the old Longchamp. Trust me, when I travel abroad,
I carry on almost everything, but I check my scythe.
Having been there and done that for the final days of so
many sports palaces, and since I am at a point where I get the senior rate on
pretty much everything, maybe I have developed a veneer like that of a tour
guide in New York who has come to ignore the OMG stares of visitors getting
their first looks at buildings taller than trees.
It may hit me at some point this weekend when races actually
happen, and then Sunday at around 5:30 p.m. local time, when they won’t
anymore. It really smacked me at Arlington when I walked out for the last time and
looked up at the sleek architecture of that beautiful grandstand as the sun set
on a beautiful night in the early autumn of ’21.
The grandstand at Golden Gate Fields is not as pretty or
inspiring. It ain’t Pimlico, either, thank goodness. It has good bones, even if
the paint is worn and the big panes of glass that form the facades on the north
and south ends look like they have not been cleaned since the nearby baseball
teams were winning World Series.
One of those baseball teams will be the last ones to lock up
and take the keys out of the East Bay. The A’s go to Sacramento next year,
supposedly on their way to Las Vegas. The Raiders preceded them into the desert.
The Warriors found their way back across the water four years ago. Those of us
of a certain age remember, too, the Seals getting the puck out of the area and
moving to Cleveland and then merging with Minnesota and finally landing in Dallas.
In truth, Golden Gate Fields was the first major-league
venue in the East Bay. It sure major was when Citation showed up in 1950 and
when Silky Sullivan made a name for himself as the deepest of deep closers in
1957 and when John Henry set a course record in 1984.
The bay stopped coming to play long ago, although it
happened gradually. Simulcast wagering cracked the exit door ajar. Racing’s
retreat from its peak days led to the dwindling of foal crops led to fewer
faces led to fewer places to showcase California breeding led to dwindling of
foal crops led to this chicken-and-egg narrative.
There is no slot-machine revenue to help racetracks in
California, and casinos owned by Native American tribes certainly are not
coming to the rescue of their gaming-dollar rivals. Historic horse-racing
machines have been mentioned as a possible lifeline, too late it seems for this
half of the state.
So these 140 acres will be abandoned by this time next week,
when it seems the last of the horses will be shipped to Pleasanton or somewhere
else to keep on keeping on.
The future for the land seems uncertain. The scuttlebutt
among more than few of the denizens is that the soil has been so polluted that
it would cost too much to clean it up and turn it into, well, anything.
Considering the property’s pre-racing past as a dynamite factory and a wartime
dry dock for battleships, there may be a lot more than horse manure in this
story.
One wonders what might have been if the Stronach Group did
not run both Golden Gate and Santa Anita. What if the two tracks had separate owners?
As with any business from corporate conglomerates to franchised coffee houses, downsizing
is inevitable with any consolidation. For better or worse, getting out of the
racing business in Northern California and Maryland means Stronach will be down
to Santa Anita and Gulfstream Park.
Even if a ragtag coalition born of county fairs can make a
go of racing year-round at Pleasanton, it will not be the same. Just ask anyone
in Chicagoland who still worships the game but does so at the altar of
Hawthorne. A cathedral like Arlington Park it ain’t.
There will be something poignant about spending Saturday
watching the Belmont Stakes* on TV from 3,000 miles away instead of in the flesh.
I will be at one old track to see the race unfold at another track that is even
older.
Here’s to aging. As I may be reminded this weekend, it sure
beats the alternative.
Ron
Flatter’s column returns July 5, appearing Friday mornings at Horse Racing Nation. Comments below
are welcomed, encouraged and may be used in the feedback segment of the Ron
Flatter Racing Pod, which also is posted every Friday.