Posts Tagged ‘william farish’

The past week was all about closed-door industry committee meetings in Saratoga Springs, N.Y., designed to save racing from itself.

Such is the nature of an industry that is run by a handful of self-appointed “leaders,” who then like to show off their might during a thunderous display of power at the annual Jockey Club Round Table on Sunday morning. Tut-tut. The Round Table, hosted by Jockey Club chairman Dinny Phipps, is preceded the night before by a sumptuous feast (called Dinny’s Din-Din by some) for Jockey Club members and selected guests at the National Museum of Racing, where dozens of aging white men are able to determine whether or not their tuxedos still fit them from a year earlier.

Speaking of the National Museum of Racing, the Paulick Report began its week pointing out some of the cracks in that aging, inertia-driven institution, such as a dismal financial record that had the charity watchdog Web site CharityNavigator.com give it zero stars on a four-star ranking system. But the Paulick Report also gives the museum a zero on creativity and less than a zero on transparency and candor.

Try this exercise: See if you can find out who the trustees of the National Museum of Racing are. Check the Web site: not there. Call  communications director Mike Kane and ask: when the Paulick Report did that a few months ago, we were told (on orders from the museum director) that those names could not be disclosed. Which begs the question: Why? What are the trustees of the National Museum of Racing afraid of, and why are they trying to hide from the public? Perhaps they don’t feel as though they should be accountable to anyone.

Accountability? That would be a new one for Dinny Phipps, the Jockey Club chairman and de facto strongman of the New York Racing Association. It’s been more than 25 years since Phipps carried the official title of chairman of the board of trustees of the NYRA, but he’s still numero uno in clubhouse box assignments at Saratoga and Belmont Park, and that says a lot. So do his behind the scenes power plays on behalf of NYRA and the Jockey Club, which continue to be incestuously intertwined.

Phipps hasn’t been satisfied just being the boss of New York racing. According to Fred Pope, the Lexington, Ky., advertising executive who created the National Thoroughbred Association, Phipps managed to put the dagger into that effort to give racing “major league” status and instead transformed it into a trade association that neutralized the power that Thoroughbred owners were attempting to seize NTA through the (just as team owners in the NFL, NBA, MLB, or golfers in the PGA Tour have done).

But it’s all about control for Phipps and his Jockey Club vice chairman William S. Farish. Whether it’s Jockey Club president Alan Marzelli bullying NTRA executives on when to hold meetings and who to invite, or surrogates for Phipps and Farish populating industry boards and leadership positions, they want to make certain nothing moves forward without their stamp of approval. Their sphere of control includes such institutions as the Breeders’ Cup, Keeneland, the National Thoroughbred Racing Association, Thoroughbred Owners and Breeders Association and its American Graded Stakes Committee, Bloodhorse magazine, and, of course, the New York Racing Association, among other groups.

There is growing awareness among industry stakeholders that this control may be contributing to the decline of the sport. Efforts have been made to derail the mighty Jockey Club and bring new leaders and fresh ideas to the forefront, but those efforts have been turned back…for now.

Will those who want change continue to fight, or will they fall like others before them to the mighty clutches of power that a handful of people wield  in the Thoroughred racing and breeding industry? 

That’s a question the Paulick Report cannot answer.

Copyright © 2008, The Paulick Report

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What you won’t hear in the report is how the tentacles of the Jockey Club and some of its individual members strategically reach into various organizations and businesses in an effort to exert control throughout the Thoroughbred industry.

To quote from the book, “The Right Blood: America’s Aristocrats in Thoroughbred Racing,” by Carole Case: “This is a story about money and power, and about a particular group of rich and powerful Americans—the men (and a very few women) of the Jockey Club. With its founding in New York City at the turn of the twentieth century, the Club took the reins of Thoroughbred racing in the United States, and it has never entirely let them go. For more than a century, then, the Jockey Club has dominated horseracing in this country.”

For better or worse, the Jockey Club, which has been ruled since 1982 by chairman Dinny Phipps and vice chairman William S. Farish, has considerable power over the Breeders’ Cup, Keeneland, National Thoroughbred Racing Association, the Thoroughbred Owners and Breeders Association and its American Graded Stakes Committee, Bloodhorse magazine, and the New York Racing Association, among others.

Here’s a quick rundown.

– William Farish’s son, Bill, is the board chairman of the Breeders’ Cup, which before its governance was changed a few years ago, had been tightly controlled by the senior Farish and his longtime friend and horse business partner G. Watts Humphrey. The battle over control of the Breeders’ Cup board has been detailed by previous articles in the Paulick Report..

– The senior Farish replaced Ted Bassett in 2006 as one of the three trustees who oversees Keeneland’s operations. Keeeland’s president, Nick Nicholson, is a former executive with the Jockey Club. There is some speculation that one of the senior Farish’s goals is to expand Keeneland to the point where it can bid to become a permanent host for the Breeders’ Cup, making it the Augusta National of the racing industry.. An expansion is on the drawing board now, with Keeneland making a possible Breeders’ Cup bid as early as 2011.

– The NTRA board is populated by several Jockey Club members, including Humphrey and Robert Clay, plus Jockey Club president Marzelli, and three racetrack executives — Nicholson of Keeneland, Bob Elliston of Turfway Park (owned in part by Keeneland), and Charles Hayward of the New York Racing Association, which has been controlled by Phipps for more than 30 years. At one point, the NTRA and Jockey Club shared office space in New York.

– The Thoroughbred Owners and Breeders Association has had some semblance of independence from the Jockey Club in recent years, through its chairman, Bill Casner, who is not a Jockey Club member but has been asked to speak at Sunday’s Round Table. Casner was recently succeeded by Reynolds Bell, currently a steward of the Jockey Club and a bloodstock agent whose major client is Farish’s Lane’s End Farm. Dell Hancock, whose family’s Claiborne Farm boards the Phipps family mares, served as chair of the American Graded Stakes Committee until recently being succeeded by Peter Willmot. Steve Duncker, currently the board chairman of NYRA, was a previous Graded Stakes Commiteee chair.

– Stuart Janney is chairman of Bloodhorse magazine, whose board also includes Bill Farish, G. Watts Humphrey, D.G. Van Clief, and Antony Beck—all Jockey Club members with the exception of Beck, who is very close friends with Bill Farish. Janney is a Jockey Club steward, a cousin of Dinny Phipps, and chairman of Bessemer Trust, the company founded by Phipps’ great-grandfather. He succeeded Humphrey as chairman, who in turn succeeded Bayard Sharp, Farish’s late father-in-law.

– The New York Racing Association’s close relationship with the Jockey Club is no secret. Its tracks serve as playgrounds for many Jockey Club members, most notably Dinny Phipps, who has the most desired finish line boxes at the NYRA tracks. The Jockey Club even has offices at the New York tracks. The Jockey Club once officially ruled New York racing, but lost its official control when a horseman named Jule Fink went to court after being denied an owner’s license. NYRA’s board is populated with Jockey Club members, and its chairman, Steve Duncker, like most chairman before him, is a member of the Club as well.

The tentacles clearly reach into breed associations, regulatory agencies and other organizations throughout racing and breeding.

What isn’t clear is why the Jockey Club, led by its chairman and vice chairman, wants so desperately to control the industry, and what they plan to do with that control.

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Fred Pope just won’t give up.

For more than 16 years, since he first used advertising space in Bloodhorse magazine to publish an article entitled “Whose Game Is it?” Pope has been trying to convince Thoroughbred owners that they can control their own destiny in racing.

Pope is a Lexington, Ky., advertising agent who for many years was closely associated with Gainesway Farm and its founding owner, John Gaines. Both men loved the power of ideas and both wanted to see Thoroughbred racing grow out of a parochial, tradition-steeped existence that encouraged inertia over creativity. Gaines started the Breeders’ Cup, which he had hoped would become a vehicle to market the sport to a wide audience that currently does not participate in racing. He went to his grave disappointed that his big dream was not fulfilled, even though the Breeders’ Cup has been widely hailed as racing’s best innovation of the 20^th century.
 
Pope saw the power of the event, which at the very least gave racing the championship day it never had. The Breeders’ Cup has evolved from a one-day on-track experience with a relatively large television viewing audience to a two-day event in which racing fans throughout the country can participate through simulcast betting at their local track, OTB or via account wagering. The television audience has plunged in numbers over the 25-year history of the Breeders’ Cup, even as handle has grown substantially.

The bottom line is that the Breeders’ Cup may capture the attention of most racing fans for a weekend, but it isn’t creating very many new enthusiasts for the sport.

Pope believed racing needed more than just one big weekend in the fall to help the sport grow, so he began trying to find ways to define a “major leagues” for racing. He kept going back to the fact that the racehorse owners, the people who own the “talent,” should be in control of the game. “Control” means licensing, scheduling of major races, marketing regulations, contractual agreements over distribution and revenue. It’s the kind of control defined by the most successful major league sports, including the National Football League (controlled by the team owners) or the PGA Tour (controlled by the players).

After studying various sports and how the team owners or players exert control, Pope formed the National Thoroughbred Association, which would create a major league for horse racing by, among other things, reversing what he called the upside-down revenue model currently in place for simulcasting, which now accounts for nearly 90% of wagering. The upside-down model, in brief, pays five times more to the business handling a wager (the simulcast outlet or account wagering company where a bet is made) than it pays to the track and horsemen who puts on the race on which the wager is made.

One of the first people Pope convinced that his idea would work was John Gaines, who along with Pope started convincing some of the most powerful owners in the business to get on-board. Eventually more than 100 owners signed up, each contributing $50,000 to the NTA as seed money, and the NTA was off and running in the summer of 1996. A board of directors was formed and Robert Clay was elected president of the NTA.

In early 1997, as the NTA’s plans continued to be formulated, Jockey Club chairman Dinny Phipps got involved and called Clay and a few others to a private meeting in Palm Beach, Fla. Neither Phipps nor William S Farish, the Jockey Club’s vice chairman, supported the NTA. Farish was also the chairman of the board of publicly traded Churchill Downs and a major consignor of yearlings at Keeneland. The latter role led Farish to have ambivalent feelings about the NTA, he told Gaines privately, because “I have to sell yearlings” to many of the people who had signed up in support of the NTA or who sat on its board of directors.

Clay was almost breathless in his enthusiasm for the “all hands together” approach that Phipps proposed during the Palm Beach meeting, that called for the Jockey Club, Breeders’ Cup and Keeneland to get involved. Other groups eventually were also brought in, including racetracks, and what had been an owner-driven initiative was now, for lack of a better term, a fustercluck of industry organizations which, by their nature, could never paddle in the same direction.

As Pope said during a talk he gave to a group of equine attorneys last year, “The NTRA looked like the NTA, sounded like the NTA, and promoted itself with the terms such as ‘Commissioner’ and ‘league office’ but without the basic elements of a Major League. It was a fake major league.

“The NTRA could not package, price, or distribute the sport. It did not have the rights from the racehorse owners, it did not have rights from the racetracks, nor did it seek to change simulcast pricing. Instead of the proven Major League sports structure, the NTRA tried to include not just all of Thoroughbred racing, but also included all of the Thoroughbred industry, as well as other horse breeds and dog racing industries.

“Instead of a real Major League structure, the NTRA presented a fantasy structure selling the premise that if everyone would close their eyes, join hands and sing Koombaya, then Thoroughbred racing would be restored The political operators had everyone drinking the NTRA Kool-aid.

“If Mr. Phipps thought stopping the major league NTA, to start another trade association, then in my opinion he is incompetent. If he did it only to stop the NTA, then he and people who helped him are guilty of something more sinister and owe the industry an apology. Although Mr. Phipps is the acknowledged head of the industry, I have never read about his vision for Thoroughbred racing. Every time someone else has put forward an idea, he has moved to stop it. To the point now, no one has offered anything new in the last ten years.”

Pope made those comments in May 2007. Since then, the industry’s prognosis has gone from bad to worse. This year alone we’ve we had the death of Eight Belles at the Kentucky Derby, the admission by trainer Rick Dutrow that Kentucky Derby winner Big Brown raced on anabolic steroids, medication positives for the trainers of the Horse of the Year, the Kentucky Derby winner and the Kentucky Oaks winner, the possible implosion of Magna Entertainment (the largest racetrack owner in the country), ongoing disputes over simulcasting and account wagering, and Congressional hearings that made the industry’s leaders look incompetent.

I think we are right next to a calamity,” Pope told the Paulick Report.

For that reason, he’s not giving up on the same basic premise that started in 1992 with the question “Whose Game Is It?”

Last month, Pope published an op-ed piece in the Thoroughbred Daily News discussing racing’s upside-down distribution model and the need for owners to get involved. That article got a lot of horse owners talking about the need for change.

I’m afraid we are seeing the total collapse of the economic model that’s in place right now,” Pope told the Paulick Report. “The objective of the NTA was to change from a simulcast buyer’s market to a seller’s market. It’s finally coming to fruition in some very bad ways, and it’s only a matter of how much damage has been done.

In the Aug. 16 issue of Bloodhorse magazine, Pope has repeated that message and has called for Congress to change one word in the Interstate Horseracing Act that will empower owners across the nation.

We have a long list of national organizations, but not a national racehorse owners association,” Pope wrote in a magazine that, coincidentally, is owned by the national Thoroughbred Owners and Breeders Association. Several organizations say they speak for racehorse owners; however, they are actually controlled by breeders, tracks, or trainers. It seems everyone wants to speak for racehorse owners, except racehorse owners.

Currently, the Interstate Horseracing Act gives simulcast approval to what it calls “horsemen,” which has been defined as owners and trainers. Pope wants the word “horsemen” to be changed to “racehorse owners,” mandating that the owners step and get involved in key decisions relating to simulcasting contracts.

One problem is that horse owners, to paraphrase what Robert Clay said many years ago, didn’t join the country club to cut the grass. They joined so they could play golf

Jess Jackson is one owner who believes in Pope’s idea, and that can be viewed as a blessing or as a curse. Jackson is a powerful individual whose written testimony before the Congressional hearing in June included a lengthy article written by Pope. He has access to members of Congress that many others might not have. He is respected and appreciated by some in the industry for what he has done in the area of auction reform, but there are others who may automatically get on the other side of the fence from Jackson on any given issue because they don’t like his tactics.

That shouldn’t be the case. This issue is too important. Racing is in far worse shape than it was in 1996 when Pope and more than 100 owners stepped up to make a difference, only to be shot down by Dinny Phipps and his sycophantic followers.

The idea then was to grow the business by having owners take control of the sport and create a new business model for simulcast distribution. The reality today is that the various parties are fighting over scraps. The focus needs to return to growth, and there is only way for that to occur.

Racehorse owners must support change to the status quo.

Copyright © 2008, The Paulick Report

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For those who have never attended, there is no “round table” at this annual throat-clearing exercise for many of the industry poobahs, and there is not really any discussion, either. It’s a precisely orchestrated show that leaves nary a stanza for improvisation, and there is no question about who the conductor is waving the baton. According to several individuals who have spoken at past Round Tables, Dinny Phipps goes over every speech with a fine-tooth comb, cutting out things he doesn’t like and adding points he wants to have made.

The Round Table is one of the projects of the Jockey Club that Phipps has overseen since becoming the breed registry’s chairman in 1982. That same year, William S. Farish became the Jockey Club’s vice chairman. That’s 26 years running as a two-man team, 

But let’s not look ahead to Sunday’s festivities just yet. Let’s go back in time to a day when Dinny Phipps wasn’t trying to save the entire Thoroughbred industry; he was merely applying his business skills, enthusiasm and charisma to New York racing.

Some people who confuse wealth and power with vision and business intelligence might say that Dinny Phipps was born to lead. He is a member of one of America’s wealthiest families. His great-grandfather, Henry Phipps, was Andrew Carnegie’s partner in what became known as U.S. Steel, and he was the founder of Bessemer Trust, for which Dinny Phipps has served as chairman. As if that wasn’t enough, Dinny Phipps’ grandfather, Henry Carnegie Phipps, married into another of America’s wealthiest families, that of Darius Ogden Mills, who struck it rich in the California Gold Rush. At one time, the Phipps family owned roughly one-third of the exclusive island enclave of Palm Beach, Fla., where Dinny Phipps officially resides (Florida has no personal income tax).

Dinny Phipps followed his grandmother (Mrs. Henry Carnegie Phipps of the Wheatley Stable) and his father, Ogden Phipps, into Thoroughbred racing. Phipps and his father also were skilled at “court tennis” (some call it real tennis), a game that also found popularity with royalty in 16^th and 17^th century France and England. Ogden Phipps was a mover and shaker in New York racing, serving for years as a trustee of the New York Racing Association and also as chairman of the Jockey Club.

Dinny Phipps was made a member of the Jockey Club in 1965, when he was just 24 years old. In 1971, at the age of 30, he was appointed to the board of trustees of the New York Racing Association. It was the same year the first Off-Track Betting shop opened in New York, a development that sent on-track business at the NYRA tracks into a long and steady decline.

Young Phipps wasn’t entirely a chip off the old block. Whitney Tower, writing in Sports Illustrated, said most members of the Phipps family went out of their way to avoid publicity. Tower wrote in 1965: “Until Dinny slightly altered the family pattern by hobnobbing in track press boxes and frequenting Toots Shor’s (a midtown Manhattan bar and grill frequented by celebrities and athletes), none considered the press anything more than a necessary evil of the modern age."

Tower, whose sense of humor could be wicked, also wrote of the young (and still growing) Phipps’ court tennis skills in the 1965 article that featured the Phipps family’s Bold Lad, an early season Kentucky Derby contender. “Dinny, who, like Bold Lad, has never missed an oat in his life (weight, 275 pounds), is defending amateur doubles champ with Northrup Know, after playing No. 2 on both the tennis and squash teams at Yale.”

Phipps was moved up to a newly created position of vice chairman of the NYRA board in 1974. The chairman, Jack Dreyfus, bred and raced under the name Hobeau Farm and was best known as the creator of the mutual fund through his financial company, the Dreyfus Fund. Dreyfus also spoke willingly about his bouts with clinical depression and became a vocal proponent of a drug he was given to treat the problem.

In an extraordinary editorial in the Feb. 16, 1976, Bloodhorse magazine, editor Kent Hollingsworth called for Dreyfus’ ouster as NYRA’s chairman.

‘The roof is leaking,” Hollingsworth wrote of NYRA and its three racetracks, Aqueduct, Belmont Park, and Saratoga. “In other sports when the trend is downward, the coach or manager is fired. … (Dreyfus) has lost the confidence of a growing number of New York owners and trainers and cooperation of management and horsemen is absolutely essential to reverse the downward trend of New York racing.”

Hollingsworth then endorsed Phipps to become the new chairman.

“Young Dinny Phipps, vice chairman of NYRA, has the support of most New York owners and trainers. As chairman, Phipps would be more accessible, and greater cooperation with horsemen could be attained. Also, the vacant slot for a director of racing needs filling now, by a man who has the experience and rapport with both management and New York horsemen. … The NYRA needs new – not just new, but better – direction. It needs it now, for all of racing cannot afford to have New York racing continue downward.”

Five months later, in July 1976 Dreyfus stepped down and Dinny Phipps was appointed NYRA’s chairman. “I hope I can fulfill the duties of this office with the same energy, foresight and creativity displayed by Jack Dreyfus,” Phipps was quoted in the Bloodhorse. “Working under him has been a valuable experience.” The Bloodhorse article gave no professional or business background  on Phipps, only saying that he was the son of Ogden Phipps.

By today’s standards, on-track business looked pretty good when Phipps took over. Aqueduct’s early-season meeting had average on-track attendance of 20,722, Belmont Park’s summer meeting averaged 24,387, and its fall meeting averaged 20,363. Saratoga had a daily average of 18,894.

But there were serious problems, and they would only get worse. By the time Phipps left in 1983, those same numbers were 13,340 at Aqueduct, 19,530 at Belmont summer and 16,735 for Belmont’s fall meeting. Saratoga was the lone bright spot, increasing to 26,644 by 1983.

Phipps spoke before New York legislators after his appointment, saying: “Thoroughbred racing in New York State, once a growth industry, has fallen on evil days, and a period of crisis is clearly upon us. And this has happened, purely and simply, because growth has stopped. … There may be those who will argue that concern for on-track growth is misplaced in the era of OTB and who anticipate the day when tracks will operate primarily to serve off-track clientele. If this day comes, we believe it will mark the end of both OTB and the tracks. We do not believe that OTB can flourish and prosper in a climate of ever-declining interest in on-track racing. The tracks make customers for OTB, not the other way around.”

But under the headline “Better Days Ahead,” a story in Bloodhorse magazine in November 1976 quoted Phipps telling the American Trainers Association that NYRA was going to “make an all-out effort” to improve conditions.  

The efforts went unnoticed by Sports Illustrated the following June after Seattle Slew clinched the Triple Crown with a win in the Belmont Stakes. “The 70,000 people who showed up at Belmont Park Saturday did so despite the best efforts of the New York Racing Association to keep the race a secret,” the Scorecard item read. “No wonder the NYRA is in trouble. … NYRA chairman Dinny Phipps needed a bang-up selling job. So, the week of the Kentucky Derby, just one month before the Belmont, Phipps hired a marketing expert and gave him the title vice-president in charge of marketing. It seemed like a smart move.

"But new VP Ted Demmon admits that the only thing he knew about horses is which end the tail is on. “His previous job was marketing vice-president for Hardee’s, the ‘hurry on down to’ hamburger joints, where he was also in charge of product development. While Phipps hasn’t yet assigned him that job, someone at the NYRA should have told Demmon that a man named Billy Turner has just spent a year developing the hottest product the NYRA could have hoped for. Yet just three days before Seattle Slew was to become the first undefeated Triple Crown winner in the history of racing, the television ads in New York were still inviting people to come out to beautiful Belmont Park, where, just maybe, some afternoon they might see another Secretariat.”

At the end of 1977, his first full year as chairman, Phipps was scarcely mentioned in Bloodhorse’s annual index of articles. The few references included the fact he had commissioned artist Richard Stone Reeves to paint a portrait of Bold Ruler, that he was awarded the P.A.B. Widener Trophy in Kentucky, that he was re-elected as a director of the Grayson Foundation and that he and his wife had a son born in July (sort of like those stud news items that announce when a major stallion’s first foal is born).

But things were happening at NYRA. In September 1977, Thomas FitzGerald was forced out as NYRA president and James Heffernan was brought in to replace him. There were labor problems with mutual clerks, and a TV deal was struck to show some major races on CBS.

The major emphasis after Phipps took over as NYRA chairman was to convince then-Gov. Hugh Carey to push for a reduction in takeout in hopes that it would stimulate handle and on-track attendance. Independent research commissioned by NYRA, the Pugh-Roberts Study, showed business would go up between 12-15%. How hard did Phipps work on this? “We put in two hours every working day just on this one thing,” said Phipps, who even made two trips to the state capital in Albany. Eventually, a 20-month takeout reduction experiment was approved, and Phipps became the toast of racing. 

The New York Turf Writers named him “the man who did the most for New York racing.” In February 1979, Phipps was given the Eclipse Award of Merit by a committee representing Daily Racing Form, the National Turf Writers Association and the Thoroughbred Racing Associations.

Hollingsworth, Bloodhorse’s editor, remained one of Phipps’ biggest supporters, writing of NYRA: “The management is tops; NYRA board chairman O.M. (Dinny) Phipps is young, innovative, responsive, with a competent staff of experienced professionals that knows what should be done and does it.”

Six months after giving Phipps the Eclipse Award of Merit, however, the presenters might have wanted to call for a “do-over.” Business at the Belmont summer meeting was down in attendance and up only slightly in handle after the takeout reduction, falling well short of the Pugh-Roberts Projections. NYRA’s overall year-to-date business was even more dismal, with attendance dropping 13% and betting off 8.4% through the first seven months of 1979.

“Despite reduced takeout and million-dollar promotion campaign, no light has appeared yet at the end of the tunnel,” Bloodhorse’s New York correspondent William Rudy wrote. “Nor was the atmosphere a happy one. Horesmen were irate over what they termed general ineptitude in the racing department, and a new organization, the New York Thoroughbred Horsemen’s Benevolent Association, was formed with Jack Gaver president and Joe Trovato and Murray Garren vice presidents. The group issued a statement that said: “You must be able to communicate with the NYRA if you have a problem or disagree with existing policies. … The fact is that the NYRA now is pretty much a closed shop at top levels.”

The critical Bloodhorse article said NYRA’s board members were mostly yes men who “all go along with decisions made. … Members are often informed at board meetings of actions already taken. There is, on occasion, dissent from former NYRA chairman Jack Dreyfus Jr., a gentleman who seems inhibited by a feeling he should not criticize his successors.”

For his work, Phipps was rewarded with re-election as chairman in May 1980, a year that ended just as poorly as the previous year: Belmont attendance was down 8.2% and 3.8% in handle, while Aqueduct’s late-season meeting dropped 13% in atteance and 8% in handle.

The following year, former treasurer Jerry McKeon replaced Heffernan as NYRA president. The legislature began looking at the 1985 expiration of NYRA’s franchise and invited racing people to speak at a hearing of a joint legislative task force in Albany. Penny Chenery, who raced Secretariat, expressed her displeasure over the actions of the board and management of NYRA, telling legislators: “If you gentlemen perceive as I do a lack of responsiveness on the part of NYRA, I urge you to require of the board of trustees responsibility for the performance of the NYRA and its CEO,.”

After nearly 6 ½ years as NYRA chairman, Phipps resigned the post in January 1983, and he was succeeded by Thomas Bancroft, who also failed to reverse the slides at Aqueduct and Belmont that accelerated during the Phipps era (Saratoga was an exception). 

Phipps has remained on the NYRA board, and some have likened his stepping down in 1983 to the recent replacement of president Vladimir Putin in Russia, who was constitutionally prohibited from running for a third consecutive term. Just as Putin has not stepped aside after being nominally replaced by Dimitri Medvedev as president (Putin remains “prime minister”), high-placed industry sources say that Phipps continues to call many of the shots in New York racing from behind the scenes.

In that is the case, Dinny Phipps, if nothing else, is a master of the power play.

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 The final numbers sent a mixed message to the market, as the gross receipts declined by 9.8% but average rose 16.2% and median price increased by 10.8% from last year’s opening session. Most  troublesome was the steep buyback rate of 30.6%, a sharp rise from last year’s 21.9% not sold on the first night.

Though Ferguson was the night’s leading buyer, the highest priced offering Monday, a Storm Cat filly from the Hill ‘n’ Dale Sales Agency consignment, was purchased by Team Valor International for $1,500,000.   The Vanlandingham mare Totemic, a graded stakes winner and dam of three stakes winners, including Fountain of Youth Stakes winner Lil’s Lad, produced the filly.

The only other $1-million yearling on the night was an A.P. Indy colt out of the Broad Brush mare Pyramid Lake, purchased for $1,200,000 by William Farish of Lane’s End Farm, where A.P. Indy stands at stud. The colt is out of a half-sister to European Horse of the Year Peintre Celebre and was consigned by Hunter Valley Farm, agent.

 Following Ferguson as the first session’s top buyer was Team Valor, the partnership run by Barry Irwin that has been very active at this sale in recent years. Team Valor bought three yearlings for $2,120,000. Third-leading buyer was Legends Racing, a newly formed partnership that is teaming with trainers D. Wayne Lukas, Nick Zito and Bob Baffert to pick out and train its horses, which bought three for $1,205,000, including a $700,000 colt by first-year sire Rock Hard Ten out of Tapstress, a Desert Wine mare. The colt was consigned by Gainesway, agent. The only other yearling by Rock Hard Ten offered Monday night was a colt out of Serena’s Sister, by Rahy,  that Maverick Racing bought for $450,000 from Bridlewood Farm, with Denali Stud as agent.

Missing from the list of buyers on the first night was Demi O’Byrne, agent for the Coolmore operation of John Magnier.

Totals for Monday were 59 head sold from 85 offered (with 30.6% not sold) for $17,915,000, an average price of $303,644 and median of $230,000. Last year’s numbers from the first night were 76 sold from 96 offered (21.9% RNA) for $19,867,000, an average of $261,408 and median of $207,500.

(Note: The statistics reported above were amended by Fasig-Tipton to reflect an additional sale of Hip 93, originally listed as RNA but changed to sold for $245,000 to BTA Stable. The adjusted final figures are 60 sold for $18,160,000; $302,667 average and $235,000 median.)

“If I were in Keeneland’s shoes,” another breeder said in reference to the sale of Fasig-Tipton, “I’d be a little nervous right now.”

By Ray Paulick

Copyright ©2008, The Paulick Report