I have always looked back on my years as a Thoroughbred racing enthusiast and racetrack operator with great affection and personal business satisfaction. I feel very strongly about my many positive experiences in the industry, and particularly with Nick Nicholson, who was President of Keeneland for the years when I was President of the Daily Racing Form and then President and CEO at the New York Racing Association.
Indeed, in 2019, around seven years after I left NYRA, I wrote this TRC column - Keeneland, a unique and powerful force for the industry. I admit I am a bit biased, but I think you might enjoy it.
Keeneland was always a special place for me - for two entirely different reasons. The first is straightforward: It is one of the most successful businesses in Thoroughbred racing. It is the best track in the country for visiting the paddock and saddling area, and to bet and watch a race. I hope that I have outlined my view of Keeneland’s accomplishments successfully in the 2019 article.
The second reason is far more subtle - it helped me expand my human and management skills while employed in the industry.
Tradition of innovation
People think, and often speak, of the many important traditions at Keeneland. However, a quote from Nick Nicholson in a Blood-Horse video produced for the 75th anniversary in 2011, presented an enlightened point of view. “I think that Keeneland’s tradition is to be innovative,” he says. “We’ve tried to do that. We’re absolutely convinced that you cannot grow the sport - you cannot grow the fanbase — unless you are true to some threshold fundamentals. The game has to have integrity; it’s got to be an honest game.
“You have to be able to justify that you care about the safety of the horse. You can’t say that Keeneland was built for the horse and not care for the safety of the horse.”
Nicholson was absolutely right, and I saw him live that in the many business dealings that we had and other issues, problems and opportunities that we shared in the 12 years we worked together on Keeneland, NYRA and racing industry issues.
The first opportunity that I had to meet and work with him was when he was Executive Vice President and Executive Director of the Jockey Club. He was loaned by the Jockey Club to successfully launch the National Thoroughbred Racing Association (NTRA), which they did in 1998, and he was its first Chief Operating Officer.
I had left the book-publishing business in 1996 and worked diligently with Steve Crist and the principals of Alpine Equity Partners (AEP), Richard Goldstein and Bruce Greenwald, to purchase the Daily Racing Form (DRF) over the summer 1998. Our team worked collaboratively with Nicholson and his team while they were putting together the many new issues facing the NTRA.
In late 1999, Nicholson was recruited as the sixth President of the Keeneland Association. He started in his new position on January 15, 2000.
I had been working full time with Steve Crist at DRF since the acquisition. The Racing Form had offices in California, Arizona and New Jersey at the time of our DRF acquisition. AEP had decided to consolidate our business/editorial operations in New York City. Crist was upgrading the editorial team, enhancing the editorial product and launching a transactional website. I was working on finding a consolidated office in lower Manhattan, building relationships with the tracks and enhancing sales and creating accounting and human resources departments.
I was promoted to the position of CEO of DRF on January 1, 2000, and ran the business side, with Crist managing the editorial and publishing functions.
I started planning an extensive series of meetings with racetracks for the first quarter of the year, and my very first meeting was with Nick Nicholson at Keeneland in early February.
Pressing issues
We had a very engaging meeting in his office, and then his CFO joined us at a restaurant not far from Keeneland. There was a lot to discuss with Nicholson’s early thoughts on Keeneland, and how the NTRA was going to insinuate itself into the recently created racing conglomerates Magna, Churchill, Penn Gaming and the powerful independents such as NYRA, Del Mar, Oaklawn and Monmouth. After dinner, we walked to our cars and Nicholson and I kept talking until he suggested that wereturn to the bar, get warm, have a drink and talk further.
When we got back to the restaurant, he said Keeneland was running out of space in the main building and the area that was occupied by the library was desperately needed for additional offices for both the racing and sales operations. We then touched on a number of pressing issues for the Daily Racing Form.
The Racing Form had a substantial amount of valuable historical racing material that consisted of almost every daily DRF edition dating back to the first publication in 1896. DRF had two major problems with these newspapers/publications. All 5,000 copies of books, newspapers and magazines were sitting in offices, conference rooms etc in the Phoenix office with no temperature and humidity controls and, as a result, some of the older issues were starting to deteriorate. However, the DRF could not store these valuable publications at any reasonable cost in Manhattan. We had no practical use for them, and they would continue to deteriorate and with no access for scholars, authors and historians.
I told Nicholson it would take almost a full tractor trailer truck to transport the DRF material from Phoenix to Lexington. We would need to get them into proper storage while the library could be built. Further, I told him that the DRF would donate them to Keeneland and they could use them in any manner they chose. He needed to discuss this further and seek approval from the Keeneland board.
Interesting proposition
I felt very energized as a 20-plus year book publisher in trying to find these materials a proper home.
Things went smoothly from there. Within the next two weeks, Nicholson was able to secure approvals to ship and store the material from Phoenix. Clearly, he had convinced Keeneland this was an interesting proposition.
The published materials arrived and went into storage in Lexington in early April 2000. It was planned for most of the DRF material to be housed in a beautifully constructed basement level, with a sophisticated fire prevention system where the oxygen can be immediately withdrawn from the room and no damage would threaten the publications. Keeneland retained the same architectural firm that had built any building at Keeneland in the last 50 years and the exterior stone and materials were carefully chosen. The Keeneland Library was finished in the early summer and Keeneland held the grand opening on July 15, 2002
In December 2002, the NTRA announced that the new Keeneland library, one of the world’s largest public-access repositories for information related to Thoroughbred horseracing and the Thoroughbred breed, has been selected to receive a Special Eclipse Award for 2002.
Perhaps the best-known book containing information researched at the Keeneland Library is Laura Hillenbrand’s national bestseller, Seabiscuit: An American Legend.
Jockeys’ health initiative
A little known but important initiative Keeneland started was the Jockey Health Information System. In 2008, Keeneland along with the Jockeys’ Guild and the Jockey Club developed the system, which creates a sophisticated medical history for all jockeys that is immediately available online if an injury occurs on track. This allows the ambulance transporting the jockey to the hospital to send an injured jockey’s medical records over the internet to an area hospital for review before he or she arrives.
I had left DRF in July 2004 and was hired at NYRA in November. Nicholson had kept me apprised of this initiative at NYRA, and we were able to implement the Jockey Health Information System shortly after the launch at Keeneland. This was important because at that time NYRA was racing 250 days a year at three different racetracks, utilizing six different hospitals depending on the severity of the injury. No rider is allowed to participate at a Jockey Health Information System track until the jockey has provided his/her medical records to the racing office so that all jockey medical records are immediately available as needed.
This program has also proved to be helpful for a rider to know that the track is looking out for their health and best interests.
Another important track safety initiative was the development of the National Safety and Integrity Alliance accreditation in 2009. I was one of three NTRA board directors who interviewed the final candidates to run this new initiative. It set out to develop a racetrack accreditation program that involves six areas - injury reporting and prevention, a safer racing environment, aftercare of retired racehorses, uniform medication testing and penalties, safety research, and wagering security.
Keeneland and NYRA were two of the first tracks accredited and both continue to participate and collaborate as industry leaders in this initiative. NTRA track board members were helpful in structuring the program.
An important business initiative that Nicholson personally assisted NYRA on was advising a sophisticated settlement system for the reconciliation of all wagering activities with any contracted track, OTB, account wagering company etc. Keeneland had sought out the California Horse Racing Information Management System (CHRIMS) to provide them with detailed settlement and payment reconciliation for all licensed entities that are wagering on Keeneland.
This provides the track with detailed wagering records by bet types. It also generates a report for each category of bet on the track’s wagering menu and shows whether the track’s customers are winning or losing compared to the statutory percentage takeout for each bet type.
CHRIMS was set up in 1989 to service only California racetracks. Keeneland was one of the first non-California tracks to take advantage of the sophisticated detail that is available to evaluate all aspects of the wagering and settlement processes. At NYRA, I discovered that we had a ‘home-grown’ system that was barely able to settle bets with a wagering account and had no tools to help NYRA truly evaluate all the detailed performances of bet types. Nicholson provided me with some detailed reports from CHRIMS that NYRA’s system never could have generated.
Enduring relationship
To be honest, it was embarrassing. Keeneland was running around 36 days a year and NYRA was running 250 days, with an average daily handle multiple times larger than Keeneland.
Nicholson also put me directly in touch with Mark Thurman, the CEO and President of CHRIMS, as well as a new related company in 2012 called Pari-Global Solutions. Thanks to Keeneland and Nicholson, I developed a strong enduring business relationship with CHRIMS and Thurman. They built a new settlement system for NYRA, a new complete purchasing system and increased financial reporting in a number of areas.
In addition to a national portfolio of tracks, CHRIMS and Pari Global Solutions handles all of the major U.S. account wagering businesses: Ebet, Elite Turf Club, NYRA Bets, TVG, Twin Spires, Watch and Wager and Xpressbet.
One of the most forward looking and important organizations in American racing today is the Thoroughbred Aftercare Alliance (TAA). It was founded in 2012, and Keeneland, the Breeders’ Cup and the Jockey Club provided the funding to launch it.
Concerned horsemen
When news broke early this decade of poor situations for multiple retired racehorses, concerned horsemen came together to create the TAA to raise the standard of racehorse aftercare.
Organized by Jack Wolf, of Starlight Racing, the first meeting to start the process of creating the TAA took place during Belmont Stakes weekend in 2011, with the group then meeting again at Keeneland that fall. I personally attended a meeting at Belmont Park and, in addition to Jack Wolf, I recall Mike Repole and Rick Violette all taking active roles in the initial Belmont stages.
NYRA had just gotten out of bankruptcy in late 2008 and, unfortunately, had no funds to devote to the initiative - money from the Aqueduct casino did not start flowing to NYRA until very late 2011. In February 2012, the creation of TAA was announced with some major names in racing taking part in supporting its early efforts.
“We got instant seed money support from the Jockey Club, from Keeneland, from Breeders’ Cup and that helped us get off the ground,” TAA President Mike Meuser said about the formation of the alliance.
One very significant individual in the launch and the continued growth is Stacie Clark-Rogers, who was an original board member and assumed the leadership/management position as Operations Consultant. She and her TAA team have done a brilliant job in engaging people and organizations throughout the racing industry. Please take a moment to click here.
The TAA is a great example of the racing industry working collaboratively when it wants to.
Incentive offers
I could go on, but Nick Nicholson said it best: “I think that Keeneland’s tradition is to be innovative. We’ve tried to do that.”
One final brief story that demonstrates further that Nicholson is collaborative and a team player.
In the mid-2000s, as account wagering was growing and embraced by some larger companies, Keeneland discovered what every racetrack in the country learned at that time: If your racetrack had some strong simulcast locations but did not have its own account wagering business to service them, account wagering companies then and up until this very day send recruiters to tracks and simulcast operations to recruit customers with incentive offers.
To combat this, Keeneland decided to bid out an account wagering white label contract to a group of six ADWs, including at least two companies outside the U.S. Nicholson invited three U.S. track operators who were NTRA Board members to come to Keeneland for two days and sit in on the six account wagering presentations and assess them.
We were all good friends and the group included Craig Fravel, who was then President at Del Mar, Ron Charles, President of Santa Anita and manager of all Stronach tracks, and me, Charlie Hayward, President of NYRA. The presentations were professional, the deliberations spirited, and Nicholson felt he could make the final selection decision of the vendor with great confidence.
Threshold fundamentals
I learned a lot from my racing management experience at both NYRA and the Daily Racing Form.
The Thoroughbred racing business has been struggling as wagering dollars have been declining for almost two decades. The economic model of Thoroughbred racing revenues today is not sustainable if account wagering companies that have very little capital tied up in their racing business operations can make more money than the racetracks and owners. ADW operations with scale can substantially make more money on most races than the racetracks and owners combined.
I refer back to an earlier quote from Nick Nicholson on the occasion of Keeneland’s 75th anniversary.
“We’re absolutely convinced that you cannot grow the sport - you cannot grow the fanbase — unless you are true to some threshold fundamentals. The game has to have integrity; it’s got to be an honest game.”
I learned a great deal about collaboration, integrity and honesty by watching the conduct of people who care about the greater good. And conversely those who don’t.
Barry Irwin wrote this superb column in the Paulick Report last week. I think we will learn a great deal about the conduct of people as the plans are being developed and rolled out for the Horseracing Integrity and Safety Authority. I guess the cheaters think if they say enough bad things about good people, they will prevail. Don’t count on it.