The business-as-usual approach Fair Grounds took Wednesday
to running horses only hours after a terror attack barely two miles away had me
perplexed. It was not that the races went ahead in the face of deadly tragedy
in the French Quarter of New Orleans. It was my own reaction that baffled me.

We have borne witness to this sort of atrocity far too often.
After senselessness brings us to a standstill, we struggle with when it is appropriate
to move forward from the sudden elegy to resume living.

Fair Grounds races on after French Quarter terror attack.

Images flicker in my mind from 1963, when I was only 4 and wondering
why my mom and dad cried about a young man who was murdered in Dallas. There
was 1972, when I was 13 and forever separated from innocence when a movement bent
on genocide brutalized the Olympics in Munich. There would be the shooting of
Reagan and the atrocities of 9/11 and so on and so on.

Each and every time, a decision had to be made about whether
it was right to play games or throw balls or run races.

“I don’t know the answer of when you should postpone or
cancel events based on a very tragic event,” John Cherwa said on my podcast
this week. This is a man who, in addition to covering racing for the Los
Angeles Times, has been to more Olympics than a flagbearer from Greece.

Since we are close in age, he wound his way through many of the
flashpoints I just did.

“You know what?” he said. “There is no right answer. It’s
all situational.”

So it was Wednesday afternoon, when Fair Grounds ran its card
as scheduled. The first post came only 9 1/2 hours after that ISIS sympathizer
drove his rented pickup truck through a Bourbon Street crowd, murdering 14
innocent bystanders and injuring dozens of others before police killed him in a
shootout.

“You don’t let a terrorist stop your daily life. That’s
their goal,” said trainer Neil Pessin, a second-generation man about horses who
is woven into the fabric of the New Orleans racing community. “If you do that,
you’re playing into exactly what they want. That’s their whole deal is to
disorient everybody, to make everybody change plans, to do something different.
So I was all for racing and for the football game going on.”

That football game, however, was pushed back more than 19
hours from Wednesday night to Thursday afternoon. That was because there were more lives at risk
there, what with 70,000 seats in the Superdome that had to be inspected to make
sure there were not any bombs left behind.

Pessin was more matter of fact about the comparison between
running races and pausing football.

“I don’t think Fair Grounds is a major target, because
honestly and truly, we don’t get a lot of people here,” he said on my podcast. “Even for the
live racing, we still don’t have mass crowds unless it’s a big day.”

Pessin spoke when some others in the New Orleans racing
family were still too rattled about what happened Wednesday morning to talk
about it.

“All my friends are good,” one person texted me, “but there
was a (friend’s) kid killed who just graduated last year from high school. Just
awful.”

Adrianne DeVaux, a budding trainer who works in the stable of her sister
Cherie DeVaux, got married on New Year’s Eve and celebrated with family and friends
at what could have been a new ground zero.

“We were standing with everyone we love right where a bomb
was supposed to go off the moment this photo was taken,” she wrote on an X post
showing the newlyweds. “It makes you really think about how quickly something
can change.”

It would have been understandable for anyone who was that
close to the tragedy to have wanted Wednesday off, but Pessin said that was not
the case from what he saw on the backside at dawn or the frontside in the
afternoon.

“It was a very somber mood but a mood of continuing on and
doing our regular routine,” he said. “I don’t know of anybody on the racetrack
who was not for racing that day.”

Which brings me back to my own uncertainty. We all have been
touched without notice in some way by horrible news. And we all have watched as
some flyover media type from far, far away decides it was right or wrong to go
ahead or not go ahead with something that already was planned.

In this case, while I was a most interested observer and had
my privately ambivalent opinion, how the horsemen and horsewomen of Fair Grounds
decided to keep on keeping on was none of my damn business. I did not need to
play the role of carpetbagger.

Cherwa agreed.

“New Orleans did what they thought they needed to do,” he
said. “Fair Grounds did what they thought they wanted to do. It’s all up to second
guessing, but I don’t want to do that second guessing.”

Even hindsight can be blurry. NFL commissioner Pete Rozelle
rued his decision to play on in 1963 only three days after the killing of John
F. Kennedy. Where that call was questioned, the postponing and subsequent
playing of the Army-Navy game two weeks later was lauded, partly because widow Jacqueline
Kennedy encouraged it.

After one day to mourn the 12 hostages killed when
the Israel delegation was attacked in Munich more than 52 years ago, autocratic
Olympic czar Avery Brundage said “the Games must go on.” Even though his
iron-fisted decision was endorsed by the government in Israel, it remains a
bitter source of debate more than a half-century later. The new movie “September
5” even seizes on this.

When Ronald Reagan was shot in 1981, the Oscars were postponed
one night, but the championship game of the Final Four went on as scheduled six
hours later. When Indiana and North Carolina tipped off in Philadelphia, Reagan
was in surgery in Washington.

After 9/11, baseball went on hold for a week, and football
was not going to follow the Rozelle template. Commissioner Paul Tagliabue
pushed week 2 back to week 18, and the Super Bowl was played for the first time
in February, coincidentally in New Orleans.

Not many races were scheduled Tuesday, Sept. 11, 2001,
but they all were canceled. Four tracks went ahead with their cards the next
day. A total of 26 were up and running that Friday.

Right, wrong or neither, those decisions were made on the
fly with a unique set of circumstances each time. Sometimes, however, there are
compelling differences.

Two years ago this month, exercise rider Daniel Quintero
died in a training accident at Tampa Bay Downs. Five hours later, on the very
surface where his life ended, racing went ahead. That was different. It was not
a matter of standing up to terrorism or a question of public safety. It was callous disregard for a 19-year-old life that was cut short on the very ground
where it was decided the show must go on.

Churchill Downs Inc., which owns Fair Grounds, did not make any
big, formal announcement about what happened in New Orleans. I am sure race
caller John G. Dooley would have had something appropriate to say Wednesday,
and TV host Joe Kristufek posted a social-media message that struck the right
tone.

Thoughts and prayers. That is a phrase often used as a crutch
to prop up an uneasy reaction to tragedy. They were very real this time, though. I
know they were for me.

As for whether it was right or wrong to go ahead with racing
Wednesday or postpone the Sugar Bowl until Thursday or even reconsider historic
precedents, I go back to a personal memory from 9/11. I was the production
manager at ESPN Radio in Connecticut, where we suspended our national programming
for most of the day. Sometime that afternoon, I got a call from a network bureaucrat
representing the sales team in New York.

“What are you going to do about all the commercials we’ve
missed today?” was what was said to me. Actually barked. “Did you ever stop to
discuss those?”

“Seriously?” I said. “I’ll tell you what. Please refer me to
the page in the procedures manual about what to do when two large airplanes fly
into a matched pair of New York skyscrapers. Once I read it, we can talk after
that.”

Condition books only go so far.

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.