October 7, 2007
<NYT_HEADLINE version="1.0" type=" ">The Dogs Are Running, but Who’s Watching? </NYT_HEADLINE>
<NYT_BYLINE version="1.0" type=" ">By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
</NYT_BYLINE><NYT_TEXT>Al and Paul Van Heuvel convene one day a week at the Derby Lane greyhound track in St. Petersburg, Fla., to have some laughs, drink beer out of paper cups and bet on the dogs.
“It’s a good day out,” said Paul, 65, studying a program before the third race on a weekday afternoon. “It’s a beautiful track. The people are nice.”
The Van Heuvels, brothers who have retired, sat at a prime table in the trackside pavilion near the betting windows, but they could have settled down about anywhere. Only a few dozen other patrons were scattered about for the 14-race matinee at the venerable track.
Upstairs, however, the action was hot and heavy in the poker room. Nearly all 50 tables were crowded with players hunkered over games of Texas Hold ’em and seven-card stud, mostly ignoring the lithe animals chasing a mechanical rabbit around the quarter-mile dirt track outside.
Industry people say the scene is typical at most dog tracks in the United States as live greyhound racing keeps losing ground in the competition for the casual gambler who has more choices than ever: state lotteries, legal poker rooms, off-track simulcast races and flashy casinos. The sport of queens is no longer getting the royal treatment.
“The new generation is into video games, they like instant gratification,” said Richard B. Winning, a part owner of Derby Lane and the president of the American Greyhound Track Operators Association. “They don’t want to sit with a program and figure out how to handicap a dog.”
More than 50 tracks nationwide raced dogs at the sport’s peak in the 1980s, when horse and dog tracks were about the only place to gamble legally outside of Las Vegas and Atlantic City.
Now, only about 35 sites feature live racing, and most are propped up with revenue from card rooms, slot machines and wagering on video simulcasts of higher-stakes races at other tracks.
“The sport is culling itself down,” said John Filipelli, who owns one of the 20 kennels that supply racing dogs to Derby Lane. “Racetracks are closing because they can’t compete. What I can see happening eventually is just a few tracks open,” attached to casinos.
Florida’s greyhound parks have catered to tourists and retirees since the 1920s, one of those picture-postcard pastimes that managed to survive the theme park invasion that began in the 1970s.
Derby Lane, the oldest continuously operating dog track in the world, opened in 1925 and attracted the likes of the Yankees’ legends Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig, frequent visitors when the team trained in St. Petersburg. Old photographs show the grandstand and trackside area teeming with men in snazzy suits and women in long dresses.
Florida remains the center of greyhound racing, home to 13 tracks operating at least part of the year.
After three big years in the late 1980s in which Florida tracks reported more than $1 billion annually in wagering on live races, interest began to wane. Wagering at the state’s tracks slipped to $188.5 million for the 12 months ended June 30, down from $196.3 million the previous year, according to state statistics.
Conversely, the popularity of poker has exploded, with gross receipts at track card rooms rising about 19 percent during the last year.
Winning says Florida’s experience is typical of what is happening in the industry, which is heavily regulated and taxed in all 14 states where dogs race.
“It’s not just the greyhounds — it’s the horses, too,” Winning said. “We’ve all come down, but we’ve all come down together.”
Once drawing around 10,000 people for weekend night races at the height of the tourist season, Derby Lane attracts a few thousand for the same performances now, and fewer on weekdays and in the summertime.
Across the bay from Derby Lane, poor attendance led the Tampa Greyhound Track to end live racing in August after 75 years. The track, in one of Tampa’s worst neighborhoods, took a hit in 2004 when the opulent Seminole Hard Rock Hotel & Casino opened up 10 miles away.
On Florida’s east coast, the struggling Melbourne Greyhound Park, which was damaged in the 2004 hurricanes, cut most of its racing program this year, while poker tables continue to hum. Racing schedules at the Jacksonville area’s three tracks have been combined at one of the sites. Tracks in the Orlando and Miami areas and in Key West have been closed since the early 1990s.
At least a half-dozen more dog tracks in Connecticut, Wisconsin, Oregon and Kansas have shut down in the past decade, while others have gone to only simulcast racing.
The industry has also endured bashing from animal-rights groups that say commercial dog racing is cruel and that many retired and slow dogs are destroyed.
“It has made a major difference,” said Susan Netboy, the founder of the Greyhound Protection League. “It has educated a lot of people who had no idea what they were supporting when they spent their hard-earned dollars at the track. We put a lot of pressure on the industry as a whole.”
The racing industry counters that dogs are well treated and that aggressive efforts in the last two decades to place retired and unwanted animals in good homes — along with fewer breedings because of the declining popularity of the sport — have resulted in far fewer dogs being destroyed.
Winning said the future of dog racing depended on the willingness of state legislatures to allow tracks to compete by adding slot machines and other forms of gambling as the operators see fit.
Slots and other electronic gambling machines are already propping up dog tracks in West Virginia, Iowa, Rhode Island, Alabama and Arkansas.
In Florida, only one dog track, near Fort Lauderdale, has added slots since voters approved them in Broward County.
As a result, the Seminole Tribe of Florida started pushing the state to give it exclusive rights to expanded Las Vegas-style gambling at its six casinos. If that happens, Winning says, most dogs tracks will be left farther behind.
“I’m losing customers every day to the Indians over there,” he said, referring to the Tampa casino a half-hour’s drive from the St. Petersburg track. “How do you compete with that?”
<NYT_HEADLINE version="1.0" type=" ">The Dogs Are Running, but Who’s Watching? </NYT_HEADLINE>
<NYT_BYLINE version="1.0" type=" ">By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
</NYT_BYLINE><NYT_TEXT>Al and Paul Van Heuvel convene one day a week at the Derby Lane greyhound track in St. Petersburg, Fla., to have some laughs, drink beer out of paper cups and bet on the dogs.
“It’s a good day out,” said Paul, 65, studying a program before the third race on a weekday afternoon. “It’s a beautiful track. The people are nice.”
The Van Heuvels, brothers who have retired, sat at a prime table in the trackside pavilion near the betting windows, but they could have settled down about anywhere. Only a few dozen other patrons were scattered about for the 14-race matinee at the venerable track.
Upstairs, however, the action was hot and heavy in the poker room. Nearly all 50 tables were crowded with players hunkered over games of Texas Hold ’em and seven-card stud, mostly ignoring the lithe animals chasing a mechanical rabbit around the quarter-mile dirt track outside.
Industry people say the scene is typical at most dog tracks in the United States as live greyhound racing keeps losing ground in the competition for the casual gambler who has more choices than ever: state lotteries, legal poker rooms, off-track simulcast races and flashy casinos. The sport of queens is no longer getting the royal treatment.
“The new generation is into video games, they like instant gratification,” said Richard B. Winning, a part owner of Derby Lane and the president of the American Greyhound Track Operators Association. “They don’t want to sit with a program and figure out how to handicap a dog.”
More than 50 tracks nationwide raced dogs at the sport’s peak in the 1980s, when horse and dog tracks were about the only place to gamble legally outside of Las Vegas and Atlantic City.
Now, only about 35 sites feature live racing, and most are propped up with revenue from card rooms, slot machines and wagering on video simulcasts of higher-stakes races at other tracks.
“The sport is culling itself down,” said John Filipelli, who owns one of the 20 kennels that supply racing dogs to Derby Lane. “Racetracks are closing because they can’t compete. What I can see happening eventually is just a few tracks open,” attached to casinos.
Florida’s greyhound parks have catered to tourists and retirees since the 1920s, one of those picture-postcard pastimes that managed to survive the theme park invasion that began in the 1970s.
Derby Lane, the oldest continuously operating dog track in the world, opened in 1925 and attracted the likes of the Yankees’ legends Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig, frequent visitors when the team trained in St. Petersburg. Old photographs show the grandstand and trackside area teeming with men in snazzy suits and women in long dresses.
Florida remains the center of greyhound racing, home to 13 tracks operating at least part of the year.
After three big years in the late 1980s in which Florida tracks reported more than $1 billion annually in wagering on live races, interest began to wane. Wagering at the state’s tracks slipped to $188.5 million for the 12 months ended June 30, down from $196.3 million the previous year, according to state statistics.
Conversely, the popularity of poker has exploded, with gross receipts at track card rooms rising about 19 percent during the last year.
Winning says Florida’s experience is typical of what is happening in the industry, which is heavily regulated and taxed in all 14 states where dogs race.
“It’s not just the greyhounds — it’s the horses, too,” Winning said. “We’ve all come down, but we’ve all come down together.”
Once drawing around 10,000 people for weekend night races at the height of the tourist season, Derby Lane attracts a few thousand for the same performances now, and fewer on weekdays and in the summertime.
Across the bay from Derby Lane, poor attendance led the Tampa Greyhound Track to end live racing in August after 75 years. The track, in one of Tampa’s worst neighborhoods, took a hit in 2004 when the opulent Seminole Hard Rock Hotel & Casino opened up 10 miles away.
On Florida’s east coast, the struggling Melbourne Greyhound Park, which was damaged in the 2004 hurricanes, cut most of its racing program this year, while poker tables continue to hum. Racing schedules at the Jacksonville area’s three tracks have been combined at one of the sites. Tracks in the Orlando and Miami areas and in Key West have been closed since the early 1990s.
At least a half-dozen more dog tracks in Connecticut, Wisconsin, Oregon and Kansas have shut down in the past decade, while others have gone to only simulcast racing.
The industry has also endured bashing from animal-rights groups that say commercial dog racing is cruel and that many retired and slow dogs are destroyed.
“It has made a major difference,” said Susan Netboy, the founder of the Greyhound Protection League. “It has educated a lot of people who had no idea what they were supporting when they spent their hard-earned dollars at the track. We put a lot of pressure on the industry as a whole.”
The racing industry counters that dogs are well treated and that aggressive efforts in the last two decades to place retired and unwanted animals in good homes — along with fewer breedings because of the declining popularity of the sport — have resulted in far fewer dogs being destroyed.
Winning said the future of dog racing depended on the willingness of state legislatures to allow tracks to compete by adding slot machines and other forms of gambling as the operators see fit.
Slots and other electronic gambling machines are already propping up dog tracks in West Virginia, Iowa, Rhode Island, Alabama and Arkansas.
In Florida, only one dog track, near Fort Lauderdale, has added slots since voters approved them in Broward County.
As a result, the Seminole Tribe of Florida started pushing the state to give it exclusive rights to expanded Las Vegas-style gambling at its six casinos. If that happens, Winning says, most dogs tracks will be left farther behind.
“I’m losing customers every day to the Indians over there,” he said, referring to the Tampa casino a half-hour’s drive from the St. Petersburg track. “How do you compete with that?”
