For a business hanging onto life only because of the state bailout called slot machines, Maryland's thoroughbred horse industry holds a strange and refined sense of entitlement.
The Maryland Jockey Club and the Maryland Thoroughbred Horsemen's Association pushed to shut off the TV signal that broadcast off-site thoroughbred races at Rosecroft Raceway, a harness track in Prince George's County.
Rosecroft closed as a result. The last wagers came Saturday night on simulcasts of harness and quarter-horse racing, which don't attract enough bettors to support the place.
Rosecroft hasn't had regular "live" races since 2008. In a bum economy, live races didn't pull in enough revenue to pay the cost of holding them. Rosecroft needs the thoroughbred simulcast for any hope of making a go.
True, the track hasn't paid thoroughbred interests the fee for the signal ($5.9 million annually) since late 2008. It sought protection from creditors under Chapter 11 of the bankruptcy code a year ago. The simulcasts stopped at about the same time.
"We had a deal. We had a contract," says Richard Hoffberger, president of the Maryland thoroughbred group. "Two years into the deal, Rosecroft said, 'We're not gonna pay you.' "
But there's a lot of that going around.
The Jockey Club and Magna Entertainment, firmly allied with the thoroughbred interests, entered bankruptcy proceedings before Rosecroft did. Their unsecured creditors won't get anywhere close to all their money back.
So it's a stretch for the thoroughbred crowd to act all proper and offended. There are piles of unpaid racing bills. Everybody's waiting for the dammed-up money from slot machines, which was supposed to save standardbred harness racing and thoroughbred racing alike.
It's just that Rosecroft is closer to the glue factory than anybody else, and the Jockey Club and the Thoroughbred Horsemen's Association seem to be counting on the slots delay to finish it off.
Without Rosecroft there to take a cut of the slots proceeds earmarked for track improvements and racing purses when the casinos start opening this year, the Jockey Club's Pimlico Race Course and Laurel Park and everybody else could have more for themselves.
"They knew how to put the chokehold on us," says Tom Cooke, president of the Cloverleaf Standardbred Owners Association, which controls Rosecroft. "It took longer than they expected, but they knew that cutting the [simulcast] signal would be the coup de grace to standardbred racing in Maryland."
Not exactly. Harness racing at Ocean Downs racetrack on the Eastern Shore, due to get a slots operation, should be fine.
Even so, when Hoffberger told The Washington Post two years ago that slot machines would put "Maryland racing on a level playing field with our surrounding states," apparently he wasn't talking about all of Maryland racing.
The Rosecroft interests want to cut the simulcast fee from $5.9 million to $2 million.
Now it has become a political issue. Former Republican Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr., trying to regain the post from Gov. Martin O'Malley, blames the Democratic-majority General Assembly's failure to approve slots when he was governor and what he calls O'Malley's "bungled implementation" of a "flawed plan."
Last week, O'Malley appointed Secretary of State John P. McDonough to try to negotiate a deal between Rosecroft and the thoroughbred crowd.
"Shuttle diplomacy," McDonough called it Monday, although no shuttling has taken place. Talks are said to be waiting on the return to town of Alan Foreman, lawyer for the Maryland Thoroughbred Horsemen's Association.
But Foreman's clients don't seem ready to throw any bones to O'Malley, the governor who's trying to save their sorry industry. Keep the fight before a judge, where it belongs, says Hoffberger.
"I don't understand why everybody's in such a tilly about it," he says. "You're a reporter. Go to the court. The governor's not going to negotiate a court case."
Probably not. But if it wasn't clear already that slots aren't about saving Maryland horse racing, Rosecroft's demise ought to do it.