There was an inconvenient coincidence to what happened
Wednesday in Florida. Gulfstream Park had an expiration date slapped on it exactly
100 years to the day after the Miami Jockey Club started racing Thoroughbreds at
Hialeah Park.

The coincidence of the centenary was underscored on X this
week by Barbara Livingston, the photographer from Daily Racing Form who
owns the collection of her legendary antecedent Jim Raftery. She shared a few of
the tens of thousands of gorgeous Turfotos-branded images Raftery shot through
the years as the official photographer at Hialeah.

In the throng of well-heeled people who showed up on that
earlier 1/25/25 afternoon, it is unlikely even a single soul would have had the
thought bubble that read, “In exactly 100 years, this grand sport will be put on
its last legs in Florida.” The stilts on the pink flamingos seemed to be no
match.

Flash forward to Wednesday, when about 100 horsemen were
called to the Sport of Kings hall at Gulfstream Park to hear that racing at the
track might limp only as far as 2028 before it is put out of the Stronach Group’s
economic misery.

“It can’t end like this” was Jerry Seinfeld’s plea in the
middle of a fictitious plane crash that wasn’t from the finale of his TV show. That
line and that mood fit here, and they feel even worse. Considering how bad that
episode was, that is saying something.

I have been in contact with a dozen people who were plugged
in to that meeting. Most are trainers who were there, all concerned about their
livelihoods being tied to what they felt was a dubious promise by Stronach to
keep Gulfstream Park open if and only if the state legislature unshackles the
racing and slot-machine licenses that depend on one another.

One, however, offered an interesting thought that has gained
traction since Stronach emissaries Keith Brackpool and Stephen Screnci
delivered the terminal diagnosis Wednesday.

“We’re not dead in the water. We’ve got some bargaining
angles, too,” the trainer said. Like so many I had on the phone this week, he thought
out loud in exchange for my keeping his name private.

The thought was that Brackpool and Screnci put their chip on
the table. Don’t fight the decoupling of horses and slots, let us be free to
expand the casino, build a hotel on the north end of the property, maybe take
in a partner and, gulp, try to sell most of the 245 acres. In poker terms, if
you see our chip, we will race three more years and perhaps have more money to
pump into purses.

“I called their bluff on it,” another horseman said Wednesday.
“And then it just got into long-winded s—.”

Cutting through that solid waste, the trainer with whom I
spoke about trying to establish a negotiating position said he could not offer
specifics on what the countermove might be. He did know one thing that it is
not.

“What they want is they don’t want us to oppose them,” he
said. “What I don’t like is they also want us to help them if they need it.
That’s really not fair. It’s bad enough we’ve got to not oppose them, but why
should we have to fight for them?”

Sun Tzu wrote about 2,500 years ago, “The supreme art of war
is to subdue the enemy without fighting.” In other words, if you can’t beat ’em,
then let them add slots. That essentially was the position that Florida Thoroughbred
Horsemen’s Association executive director Herb Oster took when he explained
signing on to Stronach’s decoupling plan.

“They voted not to fight them,” the trainer said about the
FTHA’s position. “That’s all they voted for. They didn’t vote to fight for
them. They just voted not to fight.”

We have seen this before, 3,000 miles west.

“It’s a classic case of the Stronach Group playbook,” said Los
Angeles Times turf writer John Cherwa, who exhaustively covers every twist
and turn of the company’s treading of water in California. “Remember, when they
closed Golden Gate, they were asking for more (legislative) concessions with
simulcast money.”

Cherwa pointed out that Craig Fravel, who left Stronach last
summer less than two months after Golden Gate Fields was shuttered, made a
pronouncement to the California Horse Racing Board that sounded a lot like what
Brackpool said in Florida this week.

“He wrote in a letter that (paraphrasing) ‘if you didn’t
give us what we wanted, we’re going to shut down Santa Anita,’ ” Cherwa said. “I
don’t know why this should be of any surprise to anyone. These strong-armed
tactics have been in place before.”

As was the case in California, this becomes a chess game in
Florida. If Stronach just said check, how does the racing industry avoid
hearing the word mate?

OK, it is chess and poker for the purposes of this exercise.
If there is a hole card that the horsemen have not played yet, the trainer with
whom I spoke Wednesday night said it might be further up the assembly line.

“The breeders have a stronger hand than we do,” he said. “They’ve
got more to lose than we do. They’re the ones who are strong in Tallahassee,
and they’re going to fight it.”

With an entire sport getting white knuckles gripping a
steering wheel on what feels like an out-of-control big rig into the Atlantic,
the destination here really should be Florida’s capital city.

We all learned how a bill becomes a law. We also learned
that most of them do not. A lot of them get too much attention in a media
industry that suckles on spoon-fed publicity. Seriously, does anyone really
believe the Ohio state legislature is going to pass a law banning flag planting
on the 50-yard line at The Ohio State?

The bill to decouple racing and slots at Gulfstream has been
posted. That is it. It has not gone to a committee or a vote or a full chamber
or the other chamber or the governor.

If the Stronach Group really covets decoupling, it would
want it sooner than later. If it shut down racing without getting what it wants
out of the halls of the state capitol, that would be like a kidnapper rubbing
out a hostage before the ransom was paid.

To that end, time might be on the side of the
horsemen, even if it means they, like the Stronach Group, may wait interminably
to reap any of the benefits that were dangled Wednesday like a carrot on a stick.

“It’ll be down the road,” the trainer said. “Probably by the
time the casino is paid for, by the time they make X amount of dollars a year, then
we’d be privy to some of the money. But at the moment, we don’t see any upside
like any immediate money. Everybody is (talking) about 2028. It’s going to take
them, what, seven years to get everything underway.”

It is not a simple tale. As I stubbornly tried to make it
so, I asked this horseman at the end of our conversation to rate the future of racing
in South Florida on a 0-10 scale with zero being total pessimism and 10 being
cockeyed optimism.

“I’d say right in the middle,” he said. “Five.”

There is that five again, like the ones in 1/5/25. Isn’t it
ironic, don’t you think? Better to drift into Alanis Morissette than into Zager
and Evans. Look ’em up. Hopefully, horse racing does not go the way of that
forgotten duo. Besides, we have to take these things one century at a time.

Ron Flatter’s column appears Friday mornings at Horse
Racing Nation. Comments below and at RonFlatterRacingPod@gmail.com are welcomed,
encouraged and may be used in the feedback segment of the Ron Flatter Racing
Pod, which also is posted every Friday.