To Save Southland Horse Racing, Kill Hollywood Park

“Love in the ruins,” Henri says.

What he loves is horse racing. And right now, the two of us are sitting in the sun-dappled bleachers at Santa Anita. Not exactly the ruins, but I can see what he means.

The joint is almost empty.

Henri comes here three times a week. He’s 72, retired and takes the bus to the track because they won’t let him drive a car anymore. Bad heart. So he walks carefully to his usual spot and takes up his vigil.

Inside, where they serve the beer and sandwiches, there’s a small crowd. But out here, the fans are less than sparse.

Of course, it’s a satellite day here. The races actually run at Hollywood Park and Golden Gate Fields near San Francisco, with the action getting simulcast at Santa Anita on huge TV monitors. You don’t get big crowds for a satellite day.

Still, Henri says, there’s not much of a crowd at Santa Anita when the horseflesh is tangible. Or Hollywood Park. Or anywhere else.

“The stands are usually three-quarters empty,” he says. “There’s just this bunch of senior citizens who still come. And each year a few more of us die.”

No one knows what’s happened to horse racing. There’s lots of theories. Some say the state lotteries sucked it dry. Some say it’s the nature of horse race betting itself, which demands more skill and effort than modern gamblers are willing to expend.

“If you picture all betting games arranged like a triangle, then slot machines would form the bottom layer,” says Greg Betinelli, a marketing manager at Santa Anita. “All you gotta do is pull that arm.”

“The second layer would be games like blackjack and poker. At the very top, you’d have craps and horse racing. They are complicated and intimidating.”

For that very reason, casinos thrive on slots, not craps. And the racetracks have begun to hurt. The attendance numbers tell it all. In 1985, Santa Anita drew an average 33,000 people on race day. Last year, it drew an average 12,300.

By my rough calculation, that’s a loss of roughly two-thirds of Santa Anita’s race day attendance. And the picture’s not much rosier at Hollywood Park or Del Mar.

Keep in mind that Southern California is the biggest horse racing market in the country. Bigger than Kentucky or Maryland or New York or Florida. We have three huge tracks, each of them costing millions of dollars per year to maintain.

Something has got to give. Satellite betting has helped some but hasn’t come close to offsetting the losses of live fans at the track. The answer appears to be contained in the word usually reserved for banking and the aerospace industries: consolidation.

One of Southern California’s tracks is gonna die and its race days absorbed by the others. The question is: which?

No one can say yet. But Del Mar likely will be spared because of its proximity to the Orange County/San Diego markets. That leaves Hollywood Park and Santa Anita fighting over the primary L.A. market. One of those two likely will be the victim.

So I have a modest proposal: Let’s all agree to kill Hollywood Park and save Santa Anita. It’s the right thing to do.

The reasons are manifold. Hollywood Park, with its more central location, could be re-purped more easily. Football, music concerts, what-have-you.

Also, Hollywood Park has slipped further down the scale in terms of upkeep and maintenance. In other words, there’s less to lose.

Finally, we should save Santa Anita because it’s simply the best we’ve got, and the place where much of modern horse racing was invented. Santa Anita was the first to use the automated starting gate, the photo finish and the electrical timer.

It reeks with history. The track is a descendant, in many ways, of Lucky Baldwin, one of the most outrageous nabobs ever to hit California. Baldwin made his fortune at the Comstock Lode’s Ophir mine and then came here to buy half the San Gabriel Valley, start the horse racing tradition and marry a succession of 16-year-old wives.

In the middle of the Depression, long after Baldwin’s death, the track mounted the richest turf race in history with a $100,000 purse. So big was this event that it attracted Clark Gable, Carol Lombard, Mae West, Fred Astaire and 45,000 other fans.

A horse named Azucar won the race, whose conclusion was described thusly by The Times: “Hearts thumped violently. Brows throbbed. The goose pimples crept up one’s neck. Men’s hands shook as with palsy. Women fainted.”

Sitting in the stands, acres of empty seats around him, Henri can remember races like that. But they are only memories.

On this particular day, he sits in the splendor of Santa Anita and watches the TV monitor. The horses are coming home at Golden Gate Fields, 400 miles away. He has a bet on the No. 3 horse.

The monitor shows the horses stretching themselves out, reaching for the finish line.

“C’mon, 3. . . ,” says Henri. He speaks quietly. In all the park, there’s no other sound.