And across the screen they run!

Televised races inspire off-track betting mania

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Posted: Friday June 05, 1998 04:03 PM

I'm going to the race track on Saturday afternoon to bet the Belmont Stakes. No, I'm not going to New York. I'm going to my local neighborhood race track, which is located about three miles from my house.

It's sort of a tradition. I go with a couple of friends for most of these Triple Crown races and we bet our brains out and watch the race on television and we get buried.

The problem isn't so much the Triple Crown races -- although Real Quiet has not been kind to our efforts this year -- it is all the other races. Are you aware of this thing called simulcasting? Maybe 10 years ago you'd go to the track for the Triple Crown event and there would be maybe 11 live races, plus the televised Derby or Preakness or Belmont. Now you go to the track and you can bet every horse race in the galaxy.

Televisions are everywhere. Each one seems to be from a different track. Belmont. Suffolk. Penn National. Hialeah. Hollywood Park. Bay Meadows. Louisiana Downs. The quarter horses from somewhere. The trotters from somewhere else. A race seems to begin every three or five minutes from somewhere. It's betting madness.

You have the three horse in the fifth at one place, the five horse in the third at another and a trifecta box at a third track. A guy is always blowing a trumpet somewhere for some post parade. An announcer always is announcing, sometimes in an English accent. A knot of fans is always in front of some screen cheering for some obscure longshot at some obscure place.

I read all the time that horse racing is dying. I don't know about that, but if it is, it's also killing my friends and me in the process.

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