PopcornJackTerry

I don’t know very much about horse racing. I mean, I probably know as much as most people do, but a lot of people knowing a little about something is not the same thing as a few people knowing a lot about it. Basically what I know is that jockeys have to be really small, horses have to have nonsensical names and there has to be a special cocktail made exclusively for the race that everyone sips while talking to each other and ignoring the race in the background. Beyond that-what their bloodlines are, who runs better in the mud, how their behavior before a race indicates how they’ll run-all of it eludes me. Even when I bet on a race (usually only the big three, and mostly only the first two. People tend to dismiss the Belmont if there isn’t a Triple Crown possibility.) I do it the same way I buy lottery tickets: I give someone my money and let them pick a number for me. And for the record, I’m just as successful betting on horses as I am at winning lotteries.

I had a chance years ago to learn more about horse racing. I was living in Queens and my roommate and I were out watching college basketball. There was an older gentleman a few seats down from us and we haltingly got talking about the games-it started when he asked us if we knew who had won a previous game-and soon the conversation was freely flowing . Turns out he had been born and raised in the neighborhood and was telling us stories about what it was like growing up there. When we asked what he did for a living now he hemmed and hawed until he finally said that he “kept the book for a couple of local families, wink, wink.” The first words out of my mouth were “Don’t quote me on that basketball score.” (I didn’t want anyone getting their thumbs broken on my account!) He told us that we worked every Friday and Saturday at a bar around the corner and if we ever wanted to learn about the ponies and place some money down to come see him.

He was a character straight out of central casting, and had he been born in sunny Southern California and not Astoria, Queens, instead of places like Belmont and Aqueduct he’d be working tracks like Santa Anita or Hollywood Park, tracks with a similar lineage and history to a certain extent. Most of the horse racing venues in the country were built a long time ago, seventy years or more in the past, when horse racing was considered the sport of kings. In America the closest we had to royalty back then were the stars of the still emerging silver screen, people like Joan Crawford, Bob Hope and Milton Berle. They were all there, part of the 40,000 people present when track chairman Jack Warner opened Hollywood Park on June 10, 1938. Tomorrow, December 22, it’s safe to say that they won’t be there, but instead Dick Van Patten and Mel Brooks, among others, will be there to take their place.

You see, tomorrow is the last day of racing Hollywood Park.

These days if people here about horse racing and the tracks, it is mostly in the context of new reports as states try to find ways to continue making them economically viable by adding “racinos”-race track casinos featuring slot machines, video poker, etc-to increase the gambling action. Let’s face it, most of the allure of horse racing is that you can bet on it. For the longest time, horse racing was the only thing you could gamble on nationwide. There was Vegas and then Atlantic City, and Jai Alai was popular in Miami and New England, but horse racing was everywhere. Then states began doing lotteries, Indian casinos started opening up, this thing called the internet game along and, what was supposed to help the tracks, off track betting, ended up allowing people to gamble on many different tracks at once without visiting any of them.

Tracks close every year and in a sense Hollywood park is no different from any number of anonymous other places that will shut their doors this years. What makes this one so special that it deserved a three page spread in the Sunday Sports section of a newspaper based 3,000 miles from the track is that old Hollywood connection. (In a bit of triangulation the story of a California park was written in New York and read about in Key West. That’s one long traveled story.) Mel Brooks happened to be at the track when the story was being written. he was quoted as saying “It’s like the Ambassador Hotel, the Brown Derby. It’s all very sad when happy places like this close down.”

It is a natural instinct expressed by humans as well as most animals to mourn the loss of a peer. But it is a distinctly human trait to mourn the loss of a physical structure. We connect our emotions with places that affected us in some way, and just as happy as we might be to see the school we hated get torn down, we feel a sense of longing and melancholy when some place we treasured, some place that affected us, whether it was a place that helped make us who we are or was just a happy place that provided an escape for a while, gets replaced. In a sense we feel like a part of us is getting torn down. Part of our past is being taken away from us. So we get angry. We protest. We demand that it be saved as a way to honor the past.

Tours of historical places are all based on one common theme: the fact that you get to walk the same place that some important historical figure walked. I was lucky enough earlier this year, after performing a wedding at the Hemingway House, to actually sit in the same desk that Ernest sat at. I’m not gonna lie, it was balls cool. (And of course I have no photo of it.) Part of that allure is that we can believe that the ghosts of those people are still there, that we can somehow be in their presence. It allows us to have a connection with people we admire, people we may have known and lost, people we always wish we knew.

I think it’s important to have places to go to that allow that connection to the past, although I hold that belief on a gradient scale. There is no word what they are going to do with the property, although the last track that the company closed, in 2005, was converted into mixed use commercial/residential. I understand the reasoning of property value and the owner’s right to make money. Is it a historic place? Sure. But this is Hollywood, a place where history was made every five feet and it is all an ephemeral history at best.

The ghosts of the past are around us all as much or as little as we want them to be. Some people choose a ghost from before their time and live to honor them. Others find the ghosts of those closest to them and keep them close, letting them guide how they live their life. And there are those who reject all of them and seek out a life unencumbered by that which has come before them. There’s an old saying (and if it isn’t, it should be): Learn from the past, look to the future, live for today. For some of us, we need a place from the past that we can go to so that we can continue to learn from it. Me, I’ve learn to take some of my past with me, warts and all. Some days it’s heavy baggage, and I know that at some point I’ll leave more of it behind than I already have, but I know that I will always have needed it to get to where I am now and to get me to where I am going.

Because the bugler is playing “Call to the Post” and it’s time for me to get in the gate.

(Incidentally it turned out that our bookmaking friend lived directly across the street from us in Queens. After he left I turned to my friend and said “If we ever see two well dressed guys carrying a seven foot rolled up carper out of that house and putting it in the trunk of a car, we are moving THAT DAY!”)