Standardbred racehorses, once the stars of one of the most popular sports in the Chicago area, are now an endangered species.
In 2016, for the first time in the 71-year history of betting on harness races in Illinois, the sport had only one track operating in the Chicago market area. That track was Hawthorne Race Course, where the standardbreds raced 22 nights in January and February and 81 nights during a May-September summer season.
For 2017, the Illinois Racing Board has granted Hawthorne’s request to conduct only the summer races.
The reduction marks a low point for the sport, which has its origins in the ancient battle chariot races of an empire that spanned modern-day Iraq, Syria and Turkey. The modern version of the sport involves horses racing at a specific gait while pulling a two-wheeled cart called a “sulky” for the driver.
In Illinois, parimutuel betting on the sport was legalized in 1946 and was popular entertainment for decades.
The all-time high was a combined total of 516 programs in 1995 at Hawthorne, Maywood Park in Melrose Park, Balmoral Park in Crete and Sportsman’s Park in Cicero.
But the milestone meeting took place in the summer of 1979 at Sportsman’s. During that 99-night stand, the average daily attendance was 13,136, exceeding the daily average at the concurrent daytime summer thoroughbred meeting at Arlington Park by more than 2,000 fans. The average amount bet daily at Sportsman’s was an Illinois record of $1.6 million.
Back in 1946, that sort of handle was unfathomable.
The ownership group made up of prominent New York and Chicago investors said they needed a nightly wagering average of $100,000 at Maywood Park to make a success of their $350,000 investment in the venture. After $154,977 was bet on the eight races on opening night, they had high hopes.
“Night harness racing with pari-mutuel betting and other big league fixtures provides all the thrills of the thorobred sport, including upsets,” the Tribune’s James Segreti wrote in his opening-night story, using the Tribune’s phonetic spelling style of the time.
The modern era of harness racing had begun in 1940 when George Morton Levy obtained legislative approval to conduct parimutuel wagering on the sport in New York and inaugurated night racing at Roosevelt Raceway, a converted auto speedway on Long Island.
After World War II ended and the postwar economy was booming, nighttime sports attractions were in short supply.
In Chicago, the White Sox had just begun hosting night baseball games in 1939, but the Cubs played only nontelevised day games at home. The Bulls were nonexistent, and the Blackhawks weren’t on television.
So the new sport’s trotters and pacers raced onto the scene in the mid-’40s and filled the void.
Sportsman’s, which had been the exclusive domain of the thoroughbreds, made its harness racing debut July 18, 1949, and the sport was an instant success. The attendance of 11,789 and the betting handle of $237,812 were the highest first-night totals for an inaugural meeting in North American harness history.
Sportsman’s swiftly became one of the country’s leading tracks and a magnet for the sport’s most outstanding performers. Described by Chicago Herald-American racing writer Elmer Polzin as “racing’s greatest trotting mare,” Proximity was pitted against the male superstar Demon Hanover in two heats of the Sportsman’s Park Trot on July 28, 1950, and she finished first and second to break a career earnings record for a mare that had stood since 1877.
While Sportsman’s was the premier location, other Chicago harness tracks were gaining national stature.
After moving its thoroughbred meeting to Arlington Park, Washington Park became a harness track in 1962 and within a few years drew a crowd of more than 30,000, setting the state’s all-time standardbred attendance record.
Sportsman’s Park’s next-door neighbor is Hawthorne, which is the state’s oldest thoroughbred track and introduced harness racing in the spring of 1970.
Aurora Downs Racetrack fell on hard times and went out of business in 1976, and Washington Park Race Track in Homewood was destroyed by fire in 1977 and never rebuilt.
Despite those setbacks, harness tracks remained Chicagoland entertainment destinations.
Sportsman’s brought in recording stars such as Ike and Tina Turner, The Captain and Tennille, and Blood, Sweat & Tears for concerts as an added attraction to the racing program, and heavyweight champion Muhammad Ali won an exhibition harness race at Maywood Park.
Despite the ever-increasing proliferation of other nighttime sports on television, harness racing continued to have an ardent fan base in Illinois.
Attesting to its popularity, in 1987, when cable TV was in its infancy, Mike Paradise and Eleanor Flavin began a 5 p.m. hourlong harness racing show on SportsVision that continued for eight years. And Super Night, an 11-race extravaganza for Illinois-breds, with more than a million dollars in purse money, was introduced at Sportsman’s on Sept. 16, 1989, and it became one of the biggest racing events in the Midwest.
But the 1990s would turn out to be the start of a recession for standardbred racing in Illinois that turned into a Great Depression because of intense competition for the gambling dollar.
As casino gambling arrived in Illinois, Wisconsin and Indiana in a big way, betting and purses plunged at the Chicago-area tracks.
Sportsman’s had its last night of harness racing Oct. 10, 1997, prefacing the ill-fated attempt to remake the track into a combination thoroughbred/auto racing facility, and the prestigious American-National races and Super Night were moved to Balmoral.
By 2012, video gaming machines at bars, restaurants and truck stops were legalized in Illinois, cutting deeper into harness racing’s popularity.
But the ultimate undoing of harness racing in the Chicago area is tied to an alleged “pay-to-play” scheme that involved campaign contributions to now-imprisoned Gov. Rod Blagojevich for legislation benefiting the racetracks. The U.S. Court of Appeals in 2014 ordered the racetracks to pay several local casinos $77.8 million in restitution. Balmoral and Maywood sought bankruptcy protection. A court later sharply reduced the judgment, but the racetracks were already on the way out.
Races were conducted in 2015, but the Illinois Racing Board denied requests for 2016 dates and the tracks were forced out of business.
Neil Milbert is a freelance writer who covered horse racing as a Tribune staff writer from 1970-2008.
