John Pricci

HALLANDALE, Fla. - Dear Frank,

No matter what’s happened since Gulfstream Park reopened for the long awaited 2006 racing season, you’ve accomplished something no one else in the game has: You tried something new.

Amidst an industry replete with hand-wringing lamentation, you acted on a vision for racing’s future. Your enemies will predict failure based on a track record of your company’s bottom-line performance. You shouldn’t care. Stay the course and in time you might be proven right. But you probably will fail because of your insistence on going it alone.

You need help and you already don’t listen to the help you have. You say you love a full plate. Fine. But listen to staff, well-meaning customers, and the horsemen and women who put on the show. You never know when you might learn something. A handicapper by trade, I can tell you that when you stop learning in this game time has come to find another pastime.

Whether or not your plan works long term is anyone’s guess. That’s not knowable. I just hope you don’t run out of money before specter becomes reality in real time. I recently spent more than a week in South Florida and took in four programs, including the Sunshine Millions and Donn cards, two terrific days of racing. Not even torrential rains could dampen the overall quality of the Donn day program.

Even after all that, I still don’t know what to think of the place. I think you’re on the right track in South Florida. Of course, if you think the same approach would work at a venue such as, say, Saratoga, you’re just not on the same planet with the rest of us and need to read no further. You say you don’t read newspapers, which explains the lack of a functioning press box at Gulfstream. But every powerful autocrat I know does, no matter what he says.

I’m a traditionalist who on his first day at a thoroughbred track saw Kelso run down All Hands who had a five length lead at the sixteenth pole of the 1961 Metropolitan Mile, a race you can appreciate having won it last year with the sensational Ghostzapper. If only your tracks did as well as your breeding and racing stock. But I digress.

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Let’s start with things that are good, a much shorter list. I greatly admire your attempt to attract a younger demographic. The place is absolutely stunning. For veterans, the tropical colors and architecture are reminiscent of Del Mar. Once inside, there are enough bells and whistles for every new jack that grew up on video gaming.

Never mind that the majority of your customers are blue hairs like myself. New jacks can’t know what it was like to get hooked on a horse like Kelso, nor can they slow down sufficiently to appreciate the nuance of a Belmont Park on a summer’s day. You at least have tried to stop them in their tracks. But by doing so, you took away the grassy outdoors, the reason visitors flocked to the old Gulfstream.

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The surfaces are first rate. The main track is not your father’s Gulfstream and a huge improvement over that old one-dimensional speed highway. A widened turf course, reminiscent of Arlington’s, is a thousand times better than the previous 7-furlong bull-ring. The backstretch facilities are improved, too, even if some of the new barns are positioned too close to the backstretch. Resultantly, some horses become nervous and get off their feed. That’s what happened to Bordonaro in the run-up to the Sunshine Millions Sprint. He was good enough to win, anyway.