Racing Selling the Turtle

March Madness is upon us. This thing with the non-paid semi-pro student athletes has grown leaps and bounds the last ten or twenty years. That's no secret I guess; all you have to do is search "bracketology" on google and the results will blow your mind.

What CBS and the NCAA et al have done is allowed the event to flourish. If you're gambling it, gamble away. If you are playing in an office pool, here's a printable bracket. If you want to partner up and offer ten billion dollars for a perfect bracket, knock yourself out, advertise away, it helps us. If you want to watch on TV, online, on smart phones or tablets, here's a link.

By allowing an ecosystem to flourish, its flourished. They aren't worried about the disparate A, B and C, they worry about the topline ABC's.

Racing, as we all know, doesn't work like that.

The first time something looks like it may flourish, racing tries to shut it down or tax it mercilessly, because it might 'hurt the high margin betting pools.'

Betfair looks interesting - they don't pay enough.

Contests look interesting - we need to shut them down.

And my current favorite (keep in mind, this TDN article was published in 2017, not decades ago):

When racing encounters a new avenue to grow the sport in a big tent way - online, with "brackets", with new mediums to bet - it immediately turtles. Then it complains it has to pay to be on TV, can't attract new owners, and wagering is tanking because not enough people are interested in the sport.

You can't grow the tent if you're too frightened to pitch one.

Sam McKee

By now we've all heard about the tragic passing of Sam McKee. It's been a tough time for harness racing, because Sam was, well Sam.

People who knew Sam well will tell stories and talk about him in ways I can not. But I will share, from my perspective, what I find remarkable in the hours since we received this terrible news.

When someone passes with a public persona, or who most know from their professional life, the immediate condolences all have a theme.

If a hockey player passes, people reminisce and pay homage about his hockey playing career. 

If a baseball player passes, he was a great first basemen, or catcher, or clutch-hitter.

If a businessman passes, she was a great CEO.

If a musician passes, she wrote great songs.

After the initial condolence, then sometimes people talk about the person, and his or her life. 

When Sam McKee passed, it was the exact opposite. The initial thoughts on social media and elsewhere were all about Sam as a person.

"He helped me when I needed a push"

"He made phone calls for me to help my career"

"I didn't know him, but he seemed like such a nice person"

"I met him once and he treated me like I was the most important guy in the world"

"I never met him, but he smiled all the time and that put a smile on my face"

"I met him once and I could not believe how much I enjoyed it"

That stuck out to me. Sam was the best race announcer in the harness racing world, and you'd never even know it.

I think that proves - beyond a shadow of a doubt - he lived life well and he was a good man.

Rest in peace Sam. We'll miss your race calls, and the Jug will never be the same. But we'll miss who you were as a person a thousand times more.

They say that everything happens for a reason, but i'm having a real hard time coming to terms with this. Sam we will miss you like no other pic.twitter.com/sKTtCDNYuP

— Marc A. Guilfoil (@marc_guilfoil) March 9, 2017

When Racing's Core is Not Sound, the Ancillary Goes Bad First

Back in the early 1990's I got my first real job. I was a pretty much an office gofer for a mining consortium.

One day a gentleman came in the office for a meeting. He had just returned from a trip to Russia. This fellow was there at the behest of the Russian government, to get his opinion on their state-owned zinc and copper mine in the southwest of the country. The story he told was very interesting - especially to a fresh out of school business major, who learned most of this man's craft in a textbook.

He had already studied the numbers and they weren't good. The mine was producing zinc at a cost per ton that was 25% higher than the revenue per ton. The only reason it was running was because the government was printing cash for the shortfall. However, because the industry in eastern Europe was not using modern western engineering, management techniques and technology - which could make a difference -  he still held out hope they could be helped.

While being driven to the mine and smelter by men with furry hats (who he was sure were in the KGB) he began to notice something odd: The closer he got to the mine, the fewer plants and trees he saw.  The terrain grew more and more bleak. When he arrived he figured out why. The smelter was an environmental mess; it was spewing really bad stuff everywhere. The city was equally decrepit; the living conditions poor.

Norlisk Mine, Russia

The mine itself was pretty much a disaster. There was no money placed into training and health and safety. The techniques that were being used in the plant could be found in a Dickens novel. Western filtering of heavy metals and arsenic - byproducts of a smelting process - were non-existent.  Injury rates were high, morale low. Management simply came in, punched their time clock, and went home.

He advised the government there was no hope for this mine unless millions were spent, or the price of zinc skyrocketed. It was too far gone in its present form.

What I took from his story was, yes, a failing business can be kept open for business if you have access to capital. But when all the capital is being used to bridge the revenue gap, there can be no growth. There's simply no money left over for ancillary (non-core) parts of the business. So, the workers are hurt, the management is not engaged, the environment that people and their family are living in each day, gets destroyed. How can your core business possibly grow?

This is something racing is faced with, over and over again, this century; whether it's California, who are focused on shuffling the pie, or harness racing, which simply trudges along.

If you examine either article, you see that these entities are still producing zinc (purses), but everything else has suffered. Harness racing is losing market share, because nothing is being spent on the ancillary to grow market share.  In California, almost everything has been done to prop up purses, but because the ancillary (backstretch monies, workers comp, marketing, new ownership programs, etc) receives a fixed percentage of a falling handle number, it's all getting killed.

California racing can not grow unless it has a growing core, and harness racing can't grow unless it has the same. When the core isn't sound, the fringes suffer first, and most savagely.