![]() The smells were a bit different, but just as memorable. ![]() ![]() I was dragged to the dog tracks as a kid in Tijuana. It's a mix of smoke, cheap beer, nachos gone bad and various horse fluids. You don't have to bet more than a couple bucks, but if you're a serious player, you need serious money. There's always some one-legged guy with a growth on his lip who smells of Aqua Velva. When your nag finishes 10th out of 11 horses, you do it all over again. You gather in all this information, head to the window, totally confident you've figured it all out. There's this perfect amount of time between races. Smarty Jones will finish third and horse racing will continue to struggle.ĭon't get me wrong (I do that enough on my own, thank you), I've spent many glorious afternoons at the track or in sports books betting the ponies. Never mind that Rock Hard Ten will ruin everything by winning the Belmont. I am here to mull the possibility that horse racing can be saved. The Giants are dead! That was me last week. He must be a bad guy and the program is clearly out of control. Carl Pascarella, Visa's president, would do the honors after the race.A major college football coach condones sex, rock and roll and drinking to lure top players. The bonus does not come from Visa, but it is the payout from an insurance policy that is paid for by Triple Crown Productions with the credit card company's sponsorship payments. If Smarty Jones wins the Belmont, Visa USA, the title sponsor of the Triple Crown, will finally be able to give away the $5 million bonus it has promised since attaching its name to the races in the mid-1990's. The postponed start moved the race farther from any sports competition on television and toward a time when more viewers are home. Eastern, 12 or 13 minutes later than planned, 20 minutes later than a few years ago and nearly an hour later than when ABC carried it. The race did not start until about 6:25 p.m. On Saturday, the telecast had the benefit of delays caused by Imperialism needing a new shoe at the last minute and Rock Hard Ten's mulish resistance to filing into the starting gate. ''He's captured the public's imagination.'' ''In tough times, people look for stories that uplift and this is a feel-good story,'' Ken Schanzer, the president of NBC Sports, said. Smarty himself smashed his skull against a gate last year. Smarty Jones's co-owner, Roy Chapman, a car dealer, is an elderly man in a wheelchair who needs oxygen for his emphysema his jockey, Stewart Elliott, had raced in relative obscurity at Philadelphia Park and has a criminal record and his trainer, John Servis, a novice to the Triple Crown, replaced Robert Camac, who planned the mating of the horse's parents before being shot to death. But this horse runs in the slop, he runs on a fast track.'' Funny Cide was a one-dimensional horse in a lot of ways. But with Smarty Jones, it started happening before the Derby. ''It didn't really happen until after the Preakness last year, then people got into it. ''It took a while for the Funny Cide thing to get going,'' David Michaels, the producer of NBC's Triple Crown coverage, said yesterday in a telephone interview. But of the six horses who have won the two races in the past eight years, the difference in the ratings for Smarty's back-to-back victories is the slimmest. The Kentucky Derby always rates higher than the Preakness. Each rating point equals 754,274 television homes. Eastern, the rating peaked at a 9.8, up 27 percent from 2003. The pro-Smarty Jones factors may explain why his victory in the Preakness produced an overnight Nielsen rating of 7.2, which was 29 percent higher than Funny Cide's winning run last year and the best for the race in 14 years. You could better compare him to Seattle Slew, who wasn't respected at first.'' NBC's Tom Hammond, the host of the Triple Crown telecasts, said: ''There is no parallel.
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