Sport of Governors

HORSE RACING

The Roosevelt Raceway management did all it could to make the customers comfortable. Crews worked around the clock to clear 7 in. of snow from the track and the 250-acre parking lot (at a cost of $10,000); 146 infra-red heaters burned above the seats, and low-pressure blowers swirled lukewarm air around the feet of the standees in back.

The heaters hardly took the edge off the bitter 26DEG cold. But nothing could deter the horseplayers from their appointed rounds last week. And out they came for the opening of New York's 1964 harness-racing season -- 35,000 strong, only 1,000 less than for the closing '63 session last Dec. 7. At that, 15,000 bet-famished, fresh-money fans were turned away because there was no room in the parking lot.

It was the earliest opening for the trots in New York's history. In state after state the racing season, both trots and flats, is stretching into a year-round proposition. Maryland's Bowie race track opened Jan. 17, and advertised the fact by flying planes over Florida's winter tracks with banners reading COME TO BOWIE. Rhode Island's Lincoln Downs opened last week, and New York's Aqueduct will open March 16.

The horseplaying virus is just one of the reasons. State governments set the racing seasons, and the states are discovering that the percentage they slice off the tracks' takes looms mighty large in the annual budget. At Roosevelt's frosty first night last week, a grand total of $2,350,342 passed through the mutuel machines, netting the sovereign State of New York a tidy $235,000 in tax revenues -- and moving New York's Republican Congressman Paul A. Fino to sigh: "Horse-racing is no longer the sport of kings -- it's the sport of Governors."

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