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CALIFORNIA THOROUGHBRED TRAINERS
Del Mar Rising
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BOUT 55 years ago, when this mere lad just became a teenager, I first ventured onto a racetrack backstretch, at Del Mar. A whole new world of horses opened up to me, which before then had been confined to low-level competition with saddle horses and a little jumping. A trainer named Ellen Crabtree also rode show horses, but she loved the races, lived at the Del Mar beach, and needed a gullible boy to do what she told him with a couple of yearlings she purchased at the old Del Mar sale. They weren’t at the track yet, of course, but she wanted me to see what it was all about. Del Mar in those days – late 1950s and early ’60s – was in some ways a lot more fun than it is today. The charm of the original adobe walls surrounding the grounds, the adobe barns, the almost black and very fast main track surface where local hero Crazy Kid set a six furlong world record in 1962, combined with the ocean “spa” where trainers stood their horses in the surf, bareback, to make turf meeting surf literally true. Movie stars abounded. Real ones. The weather was great all the time, as it is today. It was the same distance from the population centers of Southern California as it is now. Tourists poured into San Diego and La Jolla nearby from Arizona and Texas, not to mention Los Angeles, as they do today. Some of them came to the races. Yet business at the track in those days was slow, very slow, especially in comparison to the major tracks in Los Angeles, Hollywood Park and Santa Anita. Del Mar raced its traditional seven weeks each summer, six days each week, for meetings of 42 days and then 43, when they crammed in another one beginning in 1970. These days, when “knowledgeable” people say that “anyone could run Del Mar” – all they have to do is open the gates and business will boom – they don’t really know what they’re talking about. All the great things about Del Mar were there
08 TRAINERMAGAZINE.com ISSUE 29
By Alan F. Balch CTT Executive Director
“Under the leadership of Mabee, Hirsch, and Harper, Del Mar began to assemble a team to demonstrate that Del Mar could compete regionally and nationally with anyone else in racing” back in those days, in abundance, and many things were even greater than now. But Santa Anita’s daily average attendance over 55 days in 1965 was 31,155, and its average handle was $2.8 million. Del Mar’s average handle that same year was barely $1 million, and would even sink below the million mark for each of the last four years of the ’60s. So, there were many things that were different, then to now, beginning with the quality of the racing and the quality of the management and marketing at Del Mar. After two long and highly competitive meetings at Santa Anita and Hollywood Park each year, horsemen and their horses needed a rest. And what better place to rehab than at Del Mar? Top stables went East (or stayed East) for the remainder of the year, or raced sparingly at Del Mar. When Oak Tree Racing Association began its tiny meeting at Santa Anita in the late ’60s, Del Mar was stuck both after and before heavily promoted and bankrolled racing in Los Angeles. What changed? The Del Mar Thoroughbred Club was formed and granted its first 20-year lease to operate the track in 1970. Although it’s a for-
profit organization, terms of its leases assured that all profits generated by its operations are paid in the form of rent to its landlord, the 22nd District Agricultural Association of the State of California, which in turn uses those funds primarily for facility upgrades and maintenance of the grounds. Founders and horsemen John Mabee and Clement Hirsch hired Joe Harper – himself from a notable racing family – away from Oak Tree Racing Association in the early 1970s, and Del Mar began its climb to the greatness we know today. Commitment to enhanced quality in racing and public as well as backstretch facilities have paid handsome dividends to the sport in California, although racing elsewhere in California has begun to suffer almost immeasurably by comparison. Management and marketing quality also make a difference, a big difference, in results. Under the leadership of Mabee, Hirsch, and Harper, Del Mar began to assemble a team to demonstrate that Del Mar could compete regionally and nationally with anyone else in racing – attendance and handle responded, with ten straight years of increased business, and by 1989 – another ten years later – Del Mar had become the nation’s leading track in average handle, at $7.3 million. All this was accomplished before the old and “charming” grandstand and clubhouse were demolished, to be replaced with the modernized structure beginning after the 1991 meeting . . . and by then, Del Mar had moved into the nation’s top spot in both average attendance and handle, where it is now among the perennial leaders. Del Mar has also survived the Great Regression in the American economy, better than virtually any other track. Exceptional management planning, based on objective statistical evidence, resulted in Del Mar anticipating the contraction in horse supply, reducing its race days by one per week beginning in 2009, yet growing its daily average purses at the same time, now to a record $687,000 per day in 2012, with total handle on a par with its highest year ever. Can this be sustained? With the closure of Hollywood Park at the end of 2013, and the enormous expansion of race dates at Santa Anita, it’s a big question. The quality of management, marketing, planning, regulation, and racing, elsewhere in California – other than Del Mar – is at a historically low ebb in terms of both funding and sophistication, leading numerous stables to look elsewhere for opportunity for the first time in history. Can Del Mar exist at its high level should the rest of California racing sink into mediocrity and then obscurity? Only time will tell. n