He knew it was a mistake, could see the writing on the side of the stable. But hardheaded as he was, the Horseman just couldn’t hang it up. He’d been training and racing horses down at Fairmount Park for 20 years, and he wasn’t ready to walk away from the friendships and the competition and the winning just because the track had hit a rough patch. It just wasn’t the kind of job that was easy to quit. It wasn’t like he’d been stuck behind a desk in an office with bad fluorescent lighting, staring at an inbox that never seemed to empty. He’d been racing horses, for crying out loud, outside where people threw their hat in the air when their pony won and pulled it lower on their head when it lost, where the air was lousy with the smell of cut grass and cigar smoke and dirt.
So about three years ago, when the governor killed a bill that would have let racetracks have slot machines and would have given the horse trainers and owners a chance to keep making a living, when he could have gotten out while the gettin’ was still sorta good, he stayed put. The realist in him knew that things were only going to get worse from there, but the optimist in him still believed that the boys in Springfield would get their act together and come through for him and everyone else down at Fairmount.
But they didn’t. And the Horseman waited.
Depending on how you look at it, this is a make-or-break year for Fairmount Park. The racing schedule at the racetrack just west of Collinsville has been shrinking for a decade, and this year’s meet, which opens on April 18, will be the shortest it’s ever been: 60 days. In 1999, back when the track still had harness racing, the meet was more than 200 days long; just a couple of years ago, the horses ran for more than 100 days. Add to that the fact that purses are as small as they’ve ever been—the lowest purse is $4,400, of which the trainer of a winning horse would take home just $264—and it’s hard to feel good about things in Fairmount City.
Brian Zander won’t call this a make-or-break year. Instead, Fairmount’s president says it will be an “interesting” year, and he talks about how the track could adapt to an even shorter schedule, if need be. It’s not what he wants, because it would put a lot of people out of work, but the horses would still run.
Ask a lot of the 60 or so horsemen who train and race horses at Fairmount, though, and they’ll say that calling this a make-or-break year might even be a little generous. “We’ve been hoping for the last couple years that something would happen, but this is it,” says Gerald Butler, who owns Butler Racing Stables with his wife, Stacy. “We can’t stick around here anymore. We don’t like living paycheck to paycheck.”
Butler, 52, has been training horses at Fairmount about 25 years, and he made a decent living doing it until the early ’90s, when riverboat gambling became legal in Illinois and gamblers started taking their money elsewhere. And in the last couple of years, his overhead has more than doubled, making it even harder to pay the bills. He’s going to wait until the middle of this season before deciding whether to move to Indiana, where he knows he can make a better living.
Jerry Hammond doesn’t have that luxury. He’s been telling himself things would get better for the last 12 years, but he’s pushing 70 now, so it’s just too late to start over elsewhere. He’s not making any money—despite winning 50 races last year, he only cleared about $20,000 after expenses—but he’s not ready to give it up, either. “I’ve been weighing whether to get out, but what am I going to do?” he says. “I got to do something. I don’t want to lay down and die yet.”
For the first 10 years or so, it looked like the Horseman had made the right choice by getting into horse racing. It was exciting, the owners he worked for were great and he had more than his fair share of success doing it. Enough to keep going and live comfortably, at least; enough to raise a family. Enough to hold out hope that after things got bad, they’d get better, even though he didn’t have any other reason to believe they would.
He’d actually been pretty lucky. He didn’t start training horses until he was 40; he’d been slogging along at an insurance company up until then. He’d been traveling the country with his cutting horses in his spare time, but it wasn’t until he owned his first racehorse that the future really came into focus. This was what he wanted to do. This made sense. So he decided to try training. It was like pouring gas on a competitive fire that he thought had gone out years before. He started with three, then three became six, and six became a dozen, and before he knew it, he was training 60 horses.
And it was great. Until the riverboats started luring everyone away. It was easier to gamble at the boats—you didn’t have to handicap a slot machine—so the people started coming to the tracks less. And the purses got smaller, and then feed prices went up, and hay prices went up. And things got tough.
He’d travel, racing the better horses in Chicago and Kentucky and Indiana because you could make more money there, but after a while, even that got to be hard. Driving sixty or seventy thousand miles a year is rough—even when you’re young. But he loved it, loved the friends he’d made down at the track. So he stayed, and he started laying off his gallop boys and groomers just to stay afloat.
And the Horseman kept waiting.
“I think, in all sincerity, that if something doesn’t happen this year, it’s going to be awfully hard to convince people who have been here all their lives not to move to Indiana,” says Lanny Brooks, executive director of the Illinois Horseman’s Benevolent & Protective Association. He estimates that of the 60 trainers at Fairmount, 80 percent are struggling. “And it will be hard to replace the ones who leave.”
Those trainers will go to Indiana because this year, new legislation will make it possible for that state’s two tracks, Indiana Downs and Hoosier Park, to have slot machines on-site—slot machines that will generate money to be put toward their purse accounts. Indiana joins other nearby states like Iowa, Kansas and Arkansas in passing slot machines–at–racetracks bills. Rick Moore, the general manager of racing at Hoosier Park, won’t talk dollars and cents when it comes to the effect the slots will have, but he predicts that it will be “significant.” Trainers at Fairmount expect purses in Indiana to double.
There’s been talk of adding slots at Fairmount for a couple of years, but no action—just like there’s been talk of a windfall payout to the track that would come from a tax levied on the next casino to be built in Illinois. (Of course, they’ve been talking about that for almost a decade, and it could still be a couple of years before it actually happens.) And then there was the bill Gov. Blagojevich signed two years ago that required the four biggest boats in the state to pay an “impact fee” to racetracks in the state, but the casinos sued, and it’s been held up in court ever since.
Trainers at Fairmount have been given all kinds of reasons to believe that things will get better soon, but soon never seems to come. “You have to be an optimist to stay in it,” Hammond says. “We’ve had promises, but we never have got anything.”
“We can’t sit around and listen to somebody say, ‘Well, this is going to happen, this is going to happen,’” Butler says. “That’s what we’ve been going through for the last five or 10 years, and nothing has happened.”
The Horseman did the best he could to right the ship—most of the trainers did—but in the end, what could he really do? This was bigger than him. The casinos? They knew how to play this game, knew how to navigate Springfield. They had paid lobbyists. The trainers? Guys like them knew how to raise and race horses, but they didn’t know anything about getting a bill passed. They didn’t even have enough money to support the legislators who could fight for them. And besides, they didn’t get into the sport to be businessmen. If you let yourself get caught up in that stuff, the horses would become “capital equipment” and winning would become “revenue generation.”
But in the end, he almost had to start thinking that way because the money just wasn’t there anymore. It was all he could do to get by, so he had to watch the bottom line. And another year came and went without any help from the legislature, nor any sign of the subsidies and the bailouts that were supposed to save him and the rest of his friends at Fairmount, and he finally decided that they’d never come. Not in his lifetime.
So the Horseman stopped waiting. Last September at the end of the meet, after 20 years at Fairmount, he did what he knew he should have done three years ago. He retired. He’d looked at the numbers again and again, trying to figure out a way to make it work—maybe he could go out of state, where a guy could actually make a living racing horses these days—but they just didn’t add up. He was 60. He had enough money put away to retire. It was time to walk away.
Probably because he doesn’t have a choice, Brooks is staying positive about the future of Fairmount. When he talks about this season, he acknowledges that, yes, it’s going to be shorter, but he’s also confident that it’s going to be “strong.” He’ll admit that it’s a “pivotal” year, but then he quickly follows that up by saying things like, “We’re going to run a good 60-day meet.” He even makes sure to point out that the later start should guarantee better weather. “So we’ll have that going for us,” he says.
Like it has been for a while now, though, Brooks’ focus is on next year. In February he drove to the pipe fitters’ union hall in Spanish Lake, where Govs. Blunt and Blagojevich signed the new Mississippi River bridge agreement, not because he’s excited about what it will do to reduce traffic on the Poplar Street Bridge, but because he’s excited about what it might do for purses at Fairmount: Illinois still needs to raise $49 million to pay for its share of the bridge, and Brooks is hoping that could lead to a gaming bill that might finally offer the salvation that southern Illinois’ horsemen have been waiting for. “It could be slots at tracks, it could be an impact fee at the casinos—any number of things,” he says, his voice rising a little at the thought of it. “But we’ve been here before.”
It’s another faint light at the end of the tunnel, another solution, another reason to keep going, which, depending on how you look at it, could be a good thing or a bad thing. If there’s one thing horsemen in southern Illinois don’t need, it’s any more reason to keep holding out hope for help that won’t actually come.
The Horseman probably won’t go back to Fairmount anytime soon, even just to watch a race. It’s just too hard. This isn’t one of those things where he can be a spectator. Because he doesn’t do anything half-assed. It wasn’t just a job. It wasn’t something he could turn off at the end of the day. It was something that he became, and for 20 years he didn’t know how to be anything else. So when you love something like he loved horse racing, you don’t go teasing yourself by watching other people do it. The break has to be clean.
That’s exactly the way it was 40 years ago when he tore his rotator cuff and had to leave baseball. He’d been playing in the Atlanta Braves’ farm system and was so close to making it to the bigs, and then just like that, he had to walk away. That one hurt so bad, it was two or three years before he could even bring himself to watch a game on TV, much less go to the park. He had to tell himself baseball didn’t exist.
So how’s this for irony? The Horseman who used to be a Ballplayer has been spending a lot of his time in Atlanta lately, working with his son as a private baseball instructor. It’s not really a new chapter in his life, just an option he’s looking into. He might even scout talent for a ball club or two. He’s taking it easy this time, though, seeing how things play out. He’s still trying to decide how much time he wants to set aside for fishing. But this time, there’s no right or wrong decision.
