Gregg Doyel of CBSSports.com has made a crusade against Twitter, and I cannot say I blame him. What is Twitter other than 140 characters of bumbling idiocy masquerading as “tweets?”
Okay, I have a Twitter account, or had, not sure anymore. I beat the fad by six months because a friend asked me to set up an account. I never used it. I’m not a hypocrite.
But for all Twitter is, it serves its purposes. It promotes news sources and the like, and blah, blah, blah.
by Burton DeWitt – special to CBSSports.com.
Don’t kid yourself; you don’t care about horse racing. At the very least, you don’t care about it 362 days a year.
You might, might, watch the Kentucky Derby. Fine.
If you don’t have plans, heck, you might, might, even watch the Preakness.
And if, but only if, the Kentucky Derby and Preakness winners are the same, you’ll watch the Belmont Stakes. You’ll cheer for that horse, hoping he’ll win the Triple Crown.
Then, then, then what? When he loses? You’ll just forget his name.
Everyone has his theory as to why horse racing has become irrelevant: it does not transplant well to television; it’s a sport for degenerates; it’s too dangerous; the tracks are poorly managed.
And you know what, each theory has a bit of truth.
But it is not the real problem.
Some things disappear. Vanish. Just go away.
Sure, there are reasons, explanations, scapegoats, but the simple fact is that things disappear.
Unfortunately, down that same path more things might disappear.
This might as well be the end. This might as well be a funeral.
For the past two decades, every horse racing news out of Maryland was one of contraction. Whether it was the end of the Pimlico Special, the fabled stakes race that once pitted Seabiscuit versus War Admiral in a march race, or purse cuts or requests not to have race dates at Pimlico, it has been a near-constant struggle.
Eleven. Currently, that’s the most important number in American horse racing. There have been eleven Triple Crown winners spread out over 59 years.
However, since the dawn of television, which for arguments sake was 1952, there have only been three horses that could claim all three legs.
For any American who could not get to Louisville, Ky., Baltimore, or Elmont, N.Y., the first time he or she saw a champion horse was in 1952 when CBS affiliate WHAS covered the Kentucky Derby and the signal was broadcast across the country. Hill Gail won the race as the favorite, but an injury kept him out of the Preakness Stakes and Belmont Stakes. He never won another major stakes in his career.
There will be a lot of gambling done on Belmont Stakes Day: millions of dollars will be won and lost at tracks all across the country. But the biggest gamble will be taken by the sport itself. Barely a month after the death of Eight Belles, racing will go all-in, betting on the injured hoof of Big Brown and hoping for the big score every bettor wishes for.
The satisfaction of that score has already diminished; Big Brown’s story is not as heartwarming as local legend Smarty Jones’s, nor is his trainer a big ol’ teddy bear you can root for. There are no Frances Genters to accept the trophy if he wins; Big Brown is owned by what is basically a hedge fund of investors. And then there is the issue of his sore feet; the quarter-crack he currently has may not be a big deal to his connections, nor to his doctors, but it is a news story that scares the bejeezus out of most of the folks that will tune in to ABC on Saturday.
What if he breaks down?
It’s hard to believe only eight years ago Charismatic took 31-1 odds into the gate and emerged as the Kentucky Derby champion. And two weeks later, he took 8-1 odds and won the Preakness.
Sadly, the colt broke his leg in the stretch in his next race, the Belmont Stakes, finishing a close third, and was thus denied being the first Triple Crown winner in 21 years.
A car crash at 40 MPH can cause serious injury, or even be fatal. When L. C. Tornado broke down last week, it was a grim reminder of the gruesome side of Horseracing.