The Sports Curmudgeon®

January 8th has not been a kind day to noted Italian figures in history. Explorer Marco Polo died on this date in 1324; artist Giotto di Bondone died on this date in 1337; astronomer Galileo Galilei died on this date in 1642. Better to think of this day in modern American terms since today is National Bubble Bath Day. However, if you are of Italian extraction, be careful not to drown in your bubble bath today…

Two recurring themes here have been the negative effect of the economy on sports and the serious decline of horseracing in the US. Those themes come together today. The total handle wagered on US horse racing in 2008 was $13.66B, which seems like a whole lot of money except that it is down $1.06B from 2007. Even worse are the figures from December 2008 when compared to December 2007. The drop in handle for December – as the economic woes began to spread – was almost 20% nationwide.

Things are bad all over but they are staggeringly bad in Maryland where the 2008 handle was down a total of $208M – or about 20% of the national decline. The tracks in Maryland have been – and continue to be – on the wane. I said about two years ago that the Preakness Stakes ought not to be run at Pimlico ever again because the track is a dump. Trust me; they have not gotten better in the current circumstances. Magna Entertainment owns the Maryland tracks and it will take a miracle and/or some Enron-like accounting legerdemain to keep Magna solvent for another year. The recent referendum in Maryland approving slot machines might turn Laurel Park into a casino but it might be too little too late.

And so, you might think that the moguls of racing are doing whatever they can to hold onto their current customers - - and you would be incorrect in that assumption. In a spat between the some track owners and the Las Vegas casinos, the tracks may shut down the racing feeds to the Las Vegas casinos. Surely, not everyone in Las Vegas plays the horses - - but some do and most of the people in Vegas are not averse to gambling. Given that the casinos pay to take the feeds, this is like found money for the tracks; it does not increase their cost of doing business in any measurable way. However, they want higher fees from the casinos and are willing to shut out customers rather than settle for the current fees.

Memo to Track Owners: Some revenue is better than zero revenue.

On top of these woes, there is a problem at Santa Anita – a major racetrack in Los Angeles. California passed a law mandating that all tracks convert their dirt surfaces to new synthetic surfaces. Santa Anita did that and had flooding/water retention problems a couple of years ago and had to close the track for a while because it had turned to a bog. Last year they ripped up the old synthetic track and put down a new one made by a different company at a cost of more than $10M. Now, they have raced on the track for a couple of weeks and have had five horses break down - - three of them fatal breakdowns. Remember, the California law was passed to protect horses from injuries.

Trainers are very concerned; track ownership has to be very concerned; the Australian company that makes and installs the synthetic tracks is very concerned. Everyone ought to be concerned. The racing industry does not need any more negative publicity about racing fatalities and it surely does not need to lose racing dates at one of the premier tracks in the country.

By the way, the Breeders’ Cup races will be at Santa Anita again this year in October…

Over the holidays, I managed to get a glimpse of NBA TV. I do not get this channel on my cable system and I probably would not watch a lot of it if I did get it. But I happened to see a studio-type show with Ahmad Rashad, Chris Webber and Gary Payton; I have no idea if it was live or a taped re-run. After watching for 5 – 10 minutes of what passed for banter/analysis/hijinx amongst these three folks, I wanted to run screaming from the room to my Mommy to get her to make them stop. I never thought I would type a sentence of the following kind:

This program makes Cold Pizza look like Meet The Press.

Speaking of the NBA, I am sure that everyone is thrilled to know that the dunk contest and the three-point shooting contest on All-Star Weekend will be telecast in 3-D this year. Eighty theaters around the country will carry the events in 3-D on Valentine’s Day. So, make your reservations with your significant other and spend the evening in a theater wearing goofy glasses so you can watch this stuff in this special way. If your significant other goes along with this dumb idea, do not do anything to annoy him/her; he/she is a rare find; most people would not put up with that kind of silliness.

The Oklahoma City Thunder is a bad basketball team. For a while there, when its record was 2-22, some folks thought the Thunder might make a run at the Sixers’ record for futility in 1973 when the Sixers posted a season record of 9-73. But the Thunder have rallied and now sport a record of 5-31; they will have to get back to a far greater level of fecklessness if they hope to have a shot at the record.

Back in 1973, the Sixers were 4-47 when they fired their first-year coach, Roy Rubin and replaced him with Kevin Loughery. The new coach led the team to a 5-26 record which is horrid but compared to what went before that, he looked like the second coming of Red Auerbach. For the season, the Sixers were outscored on average by over 12 points per game. There were only 17 teams in the NBA then and – not surprisingly – the Sixers were 17th in the league in home attendance averaging less than 4500 folks per game.

A good friend of mine from college was the beat reporter covering the Sixers for a Philly paper in 1973. With him, I got to see a handful of those games; and indeed, the team was dreadful. The Thunder may be a bad team in 2008, but they have a “Collegiate Player of the Year” on their roster (Kevin Durant); go look up the roster of the Sixers in that dismal year and you will find no similar talent. Absent the entire team being abducted by space aliens and the team having to play out the year with D-League replacements, I do not think the Thunder can plumb the depths of ineptitude of the 1973 version of the Sixers.

Finally, here is a comment from Greg Cote in the Miami Herald regarding the naming of the new NBA franchise in Oklahoma City:

“Oklahoma City’s new NBA franchise has chosen Thunder as its nickname. That narrowly beat the runnerup nickname: Tumbleweed.”

But don’t get me wrong, I love sports…