"I'm still uncomfortable being here on Sunday," says Cella, one of the grand old men of racing, the fourth generation of the St. Louis family that built the Orpheum vaudeville circuit and five horse-racing tracks. Cella is as Old School as they come, still donning his checked British sporting jacket and his Scottish golf cap when going to the track.

"I take it you were one of the last holdouts against Sunday racing?" I say.

"I was the last holdout on Sunday racing, the last holdout on exotic wagering, the last holdout on making the drug Lasix legal for the horses. I'm the last holdout on everything. I may be the last believer that this is a beautiful sport with pageantry and majesty and that it's more than gambling and that it should be celebrated first-hand, not through a TV screen."

And if you've ever been to Oaklawn, you know exactly what he means. To me Oaklawn is a haunted place, full of quirky history and illustrious equestrians long dead, their names whispered through the pines of the faded 19th-century spa resort of Hot Springs, Arkansas. There are only three resort-style tracks left in America— Saratoga Springs in upstate New York, Del Mar in southern California, and Oaklawn— but Oaklawn is by far my favorite. The place reeks of racing's earliest days, the seven centuries of thoroughbred racing that predated this one, when it was truly the sport of the privileged upper class who lived by the codes of gentlemen.

Maybe the best horses don't come here anymore. Maybe the leading jockeys are riding out the winter at the Fair Grounds or Gulfstream or Santa Anita. Maybe the jaunty Damon Runyon characters from Chicago don't make the trip south anymore. Maybe the Arkansas Derby is not the can't-miss one-of-a-kind prep race for the Kentucky Derby it once was. But the grounds are still impeccably groomed. (Since the season begins in February, Cella has the infield grass painted green— "just until the apple blossoms pop and it turns glorious," he says.) The red-coated post riders are superb horsemen. ("Do you notice that at these other tracks they always have horses rearing and refusing to go into the gate?" says Cella. "We don't have that. We hire people who know horses.") And most important, the crowds at Oaklawn are among the largest in the country— averaging 13,000 for the entire 52-day racing season— with a feverish enthusiasm normally reserved for stadium sports.

The Oaklawn Club, where I've spent most of the day, is one of the most elegant jockey clubs in the country, where the men still wear jackets and the smooth effortless waiters have been working there for years. Yet there are only about 40 reservations taken on this weekend afternoon and the muted conversation bounces and enchoes across the multi-tiered canyon of empty tables. "We love our track," says Jockey Club member Cheryl Millard, celebrating her 50th wedding anniversary with a day at the races. She and her husband, a retired Little Rock surgeon, have spent the entire racing season in Hot Springs for the past two decades, living out of a condo near the track. "We just hope we can save Oaklawn."

What? Save Oaklawn?

How could such an historic track, I wonder, be in need of "saving"? After all, it survived Prohibition, two world wars, several political attempts to close it, competition from local Mafia casinos for 30 years, and more or less constant assaults by powerful Baptist church leaders. Yet it was considered for years the only place that leading horsemen would race their stock in the winter, and one of the four or five tracks outside New York that were considered among the elite.

Obviously times have changed, but when I go downstairs to ask General Manager Eric Jackson about it, he forces a wry grin and sighs. "Well," he says, "we would have been a lot happier if Mississippi hadn't invented casinos."

Jackson grew up in Hot Springs, became Director of Operations in 1978 and General Manager in 1987, so he saw Oaklawn's ten greatest glory years and then the slow steady erosion of the betting public beginning in the mid-eighties. "If you wanted to make a bet in February," he says, "we used to be the only game in town. Then came racing in Texas and Oklahoma, a number of state lotteries, and finally casinos in Mississippi and Louisiana. Suddenly you could make a bet anywhere and we were just one among more betting choices than you could imagine."

But surely, I insist, the guy who loves the leisurely and refined spirit of the horse track and the guy who loves dice are not the same bettor. And surely, I further insist, the smaller tracks in Louisiana, Texas and Oklahoma can't really compete with the grandeur of Oaklawn. He sighs again, as though instructing a child.

"Here at Oaklawn, maybe 20 per cent were serious horseplayers. The rest are recreational gamblers, and those gamblers went to the casinos in Tunica. You have to understand that we were a track where racing was thought of as a sport and a friendly recreational outing. Our show pool was the highest in the country— around 30 per cent. So people were coming to the track, betting two dollars to show on the favorite, and enjoying themselves. Now the show pool is around 4 per cent, like everywhere else."

Warming to his subject, Jackson moves over to an easel in his elegant wood-panelled office and begins to scrawl figures. "Look at this," he says. "In 1983 our handle was $170 million, and we were so proud of ourselves. We thought we had really done something that year. Now. In the year 2000, in the state of Mississippi, the gambling take was . . . $35 billion! I'm going to have to get my calculator to figure that out." He punches a few buttons and laughs uproariously. "Here— they're 205 times bigger than we are!"

The culprit, of course, is Tunica, Mississippi, the little town 40 miles south of Memphis that was the seat of the poorest county in America in 1990, but today is the third largest gambling destination, after Las Vegas and Atlantic City, with 11 casinos and 26 million visitors a year. About 5 million of those are Arkansans, most of whom live within a two-hour drive of the casinos.

"In 1992," says Jackson, "there were six hotel rooms in Tunica. Now there are 8000."

It's been obvious for several years now that horse racing is under siege. "Yonkers, Atlantic City, Garden State— they're all out of business," says Jackson. "Ak-Sar-Ben closed. Southland Greyhound Park in West Memphis, which at one time was the most successful track in the country, lost 70 per cent of its business. Because there are all sorts of other gambling opportunities available to the customer."

And does this mean, I ask with alarm, that even Oaklawn is endangered?

"No," he says, and you can tell he means it, "because Charles Cella is a fighter. Let me tell you something about this man. Our purses haven't gone down at all. Our most famous stakes race, the Arkansas Derby, is still $500,000. And we still average $200,000 a day in purses. That's not a super-track but it ain't shabby. But the only reason the purses haven't gone down is that Charles has taken $3.5 million out of his own pocket to keep them where they are. I don't know anywhere else that's ever happened, where a Racing Association has overpaid the purses. It's maybe the most remarkable thing I've ever seen. If this race track were owned by General Motors, and I said 'Let's overpay the purses by $3.5 million,' I would be fired rather quickly."

Yet obviously Cella can't do that forever. The surviving American tracks have persevered in two ways— by convincing state legislatures to allow slot machines at the track, and by offering year-round pari-mutuel betting through simulcasting with other tracks. (Philadelphia Park, for example, offers betting on up to 40 tracks on any given day. Louisiana Downs in Bossier City has a thousand slot machines. The Fair Grounds in New Orleans offers 750 video poker machines, which has allowed it to surpass Oaklawn in racing purses for the first time in many years.) But Arkansas is a different political animal. Three times Arkansas voters have refused to approve limited slot machines in Hot Springs, mainly because of the combined might of the Baptist church and casino interests in Tunica and Shreveport.

"We're left with simulcasting," says Jackson, "and now 80 per cent of our income is from simulcasting and only 20 per cent from live racing."

But last week Jackson and Cella played what may turn out to be their ultimate trump card. When first-day visitors arrived at Oaklawn, they discovered part of the south grandstand had been transformed into what looked like a slot-machine casino. But look closer. It is a slot machine and it's not a slot machine. It's something called "Instant Racing," and it was developed over a three-year-period through a partnership between Oaklawn and Amtote, the Maryland company that manufactures tote-board technology.

"America is obviously in love with electronic gaming," said Jackson, "and so we came up with this idea: wouldn't it be great if we could present horse racing in an electronic format? It looks and feels and smells like a slot machine, but it's pari- mutuel betting. We use graphical data from the Racing Form, and we've collected 50,000 filmed races, digitized them, and added skill elements from the Form. You can play at your own speed, and you're paid from common pools. The takeout is 10 per cent. It's already legal because pari-mutuel betting is legal. And one of the best parts is that, every time the old race is played on the machine, a portion of that money goes back to the original track where the race was actually run."

Could such a machine save live racing in the states where slot machines are illegal?

"Well, we hope so," says Jackson. "Of course, at Oaklawn we also believe that there are other reasons live racing will survive. There's that intangible bond between the human and the horse. You can't underestimate it."

It's ironic that Charles Cella, one of the last traditionalists in the sport of kings, has turned to electronic gimmickry to save his track, but it's not uncharacteristic of the man. It was Cella who, in 1999, disqualified the winning horse from the Arkansas Derby after the jockey was seen tossing an electrical-shock device into the infield. The resulting lawsuits went on for two years, but the Arkansas Supreme Court ultimately vindicated Cella and Oaklawn, upholding their five-year suspension of jockey Billy Patin and their refusal to award the owner of the gelding, Valhol, the $300,000 first prize.

I return to Cella's VIP suite just in time to see Craig Perret drive home on Gatewood to win the one-mile Crabapple Stakes, with female jockey Cindy Noll a close second on Remington Rock. And it gives me a chance to ask Cella about the disputed Derby race of 1999.

"I hadn't seen one of those shockers in 30 years," he says. "It was just an unbelievable thing."

And speaking of unbelievable things, I ask him what he thinks of his new non-slot-machine slot machine.

"I'm the doubting Thomas, of course. I don't know about it. But we'll see."

After one day of use, the 50 new machines maxed out with a daily win rate of $120 per machine in six hours of play. That compares to a Vegas slot machine average of $75 in 24 hours of play.

I like those numbers. That sounds like an 8-to-5 favorite to me. My money is on Oaklawn Park.
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© Copyright 2001 United Press International and Joe Bob Briggs