richiebee Wrote:
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> Just finished "Not By a Long Shot", a recently
> published non fiction piece
> centered around New England racing in general and
> focusing on the 2000 racing
> season at Suffolk Downs.
>
> Author TD Thornton was Director of Media Relations
> for Suffolk at the time.
>
> I particularly enjoyed Thornton's retelling of the
> saga of Anthony P. "Fat
> Tony" Ciulla, who was fixing races up and down the
> east coast in the 1970s.
> If you have access to back issues of Sports
> Illustrated, the SI article
> published in November of 1978 "Confessions of a
> Master Race Fixer"
> is a great piece of journalism which reported on a
> very dark side of racing,
> and called into question the honesty of some of
> the higher profile riders on
> the New York circuit at the time.
>
> Thornton reports in "Not By a Long Shot" that in
> 1974 Mike Hole turned down
> offers of $5,000 and $10,000 to "hold" a horse at
> Saratoga; Hole was found dead
> in his car 18 months later in what was
> conveniently labeled a suicide.
>
> In discussing how on the racetrack things are not
> always as they seem, Thornton
> quotes JFK: "The great enemy of truth is very
> often not the lie-- deliberate,
> contrived and dishonest, but the myth--
> persistent, persuasive and unrealistic."

I see you decided we needed cheering up. What the track compares favorably to in my opinion is most corporations, governments, religionists, etc. I will get the read, though. And it was some of my favorite riders. I have an old story about harness racing that illustrates human or at least my nature. One time at SPT park in the summer of 64, I threw down my program in disgust and swore off the stupid, dishonest basturds! Even went to my mom's and declared, never again a harness race. The next summer, '65, a guy named Eddie, who trained a mare named Glad Rags, gave my friend, Bobby Haddad, 8 horses that summer. 7 of them won, and one that was 8/1 ran second a neck. One of them was a 5/1 debut that turned out to be the ILL harness horse of the year. I loved harness racing that year. There's a little Enron in a lot of us. That's why we live longer now, to get rid of it before we check out.