Some of NYRA's problems are self-induced, and others are rooted in forces beyond their control. There's no denying that NYRA was run in shoddy fashion for years. Going way back, their biggest gaffe was their resistance to off track betting, which, of course, set up a situation where scuzzy, hole-in-the-wall OTB parlors shaped the image of racing in an incredibly negative way. I mean, if you paid a high-end advertising outfit big bucks to come up with a campaign to turn people off to racing, and they showed you something that resembled a standard OTB parlor, you'd pat them on the back and thank them for a job well done.

More recently, senior management either knew about and ignored, or didn't know about (either one is bad) of the teller scandal. To sum up that beauty, tellers bet on races, in violation of state law, then were allowed to short their cash drawers (and use the cash to cover betting losses, run their own loan-sharking shops, etc), and then, finally, were allowed to use those shortages to cheat on their federal taxes. In the meantime, someone or some group in senior management began improperly using money from the horsemen's purse account to, I think, cover general expenses. There was some sort of investigation into the way NYRA handled bidding on contracts during this time as well. When the state AG and the Feds started investigating these matters, the policy of NYRA senior management was to stonewall, obfuscate, and generally act in a belligerent and condescending manner toward the investigating authorities and the press. And all the while, NYRA's Board of Trustees, charged with oversight of the organization, apparently had their heads planted so far up their behinds that they had either no clue or no interest that any of this was going on.

So, despite the fact that I think Barry Schwartz does have the interests of the player in mind, and the fact that I quite like the racing product at Belmont and Saratoga, NYRA definitely deserves plenty of the blame for their current fate.

The forces beyond their control have probably been talked about here before, but obviously the competition from other gambling sources is the one that has put the biggest dent into their handle, and when you ask "Is it that nobody (without slots) can make money running racetracks these days?", I have to wonder if the ubiquity of this competition makes the answer to that question "no". You can hardly walk through a convenience or grocery store these days without tripping over a lottery device of some type, and then of course there are the casinos, all over the place, starring the much-loved one-armed bandits. Me and my racing-loving friends scoff at slot machines, but they're very popular with the masses, and it's easy to see why; they require no brain power to use, they let you experience the sensation of winning with regularity, you know they haven't been pumped full of illegal, performance-enhancing meds, and you know they're not in cahoots with the machine next door plotting against you. I've read that handle in NY is, after adjusting for inflation, about 1/3 of what it was thirty years ago, and even exemplary management from NYRA in that time wouldn't have managed to limit the damage caused by the explosion in other forms of betting.

Anyway, that's one man's take on why NYRA has hit the skids and is in real jeopardy of losing the franchise.



Post Edited (05-20-04 00:53)