view raw text
JOSEPH A. MURPHY IN FORCIBLE PLEA. Urges That New Orleans Racing Be Either Completely Divorced from Politics or Abandoned. New Orleans, La.. April 19. — Joseph A. Murphy, under whose capable management racing was restored in 1915 as one of the big attractions of the New Orleans winter season, has written the Times -Picavune as follows from Baltimore under date of April 13: "Is there not in the entire state of Louisiana a man big enough to bring order out of chaos in the racing situation? Has anyone given the matter serious consideration enough to know what it all means, not to racing alone, but to the good name of New Orleans? Do they realize that the state of Louisiana has no thoroughbred horses, practically no jockeys or trainers and few owners: that it has only one racing official of national reputation; that thoroughbred racing in all its machinery must be brought to the city of New Orleans, and that it draws tiie best class of people from the States and Canada. Do they realize that the press of the north is full of the present controversy, and that the millionaire owners of all sections are looking on bewildered that a set of representative business men should be fighting over something, like dogs over a bone? "Thoroughbred racing is drawing to it men who control the financial destinies of this country. They saw in the revival of racing at New Orleans the dawn of a new era for the sport. They saw business men banded together, standing shoulder to shoulder for the uplift of the sport, and they thought the millennium had been reached. Then they stood back and saw the gloss come off. These millionaire owners had given me their personal promise that they would race with us from year to year. They would even build their own stables and spend part of the winter at New Orleans. They would have met the merchants of the city, would have become interested in its commercial development, and there would have been no trouble to get financial aid for any project. "Those who came last winter, however, saw a sinister aspect to the whole situation. They saw people representing powerful interests that were directly benefited by the racing sit back and let me practically fight the battle out alone. They saw them permit men. under the sanctity of the cloth, with an insatiable lust for notoriety, brand us, men of honor whose reputations had stood the test of public scrutiny for years, as crooks and profligates; and our wives and daughters, with names unsullied as Ceasars wife, as things unclean, and we made no protest. They saw creep from the shadows of the hideous underworld influences that made me fight every inch of the road to preserve inviolate my pledge to the people of Louisiana that I would keep the racing lean. And now they wonder if the business integrity of New Orleans has sunk to so low a level that a storm of protest would not arise at the mere suggestion that a quasi-public institution would, through its own attorneys, enter into an honorable agreement with the citizens of another state and then seek by some tawdry subterfuge to repudiate it. "As to my contract. I have no concern. I went to New Orleans at the invitation of the Business Mens Bacing Association. I insisted on no pledge until it could be demonstrated that I could accomplish the things that I was asked to do. It will be found that my contract, drawn by the attorneys of the association themselves, was not spread on the minutes until half of the meeting of 1915 had been run. "That any set of men could believe that they could, for the purpose of prostituting a splendid sport, get control of the Business Mens Bacing Association and put men at the helm to do their bidding, is unbelievable. If the association should, unhappily, fall under the control of such men, I have an abiding faith that tliolo Sam lias not been so derelict that he has not provided adequate measures to force a corporation of a state to fulfill its obligations to the citizens of another. But I am only a pawn in the game. The good name of New Orleans is in the balance. "I am a newspaper man by profession, a racing official by occupation. I can go back to a profession that I left with honor. But New Orleans must preserve its reputation for business integrity or retrograde. Either the big interests directly benefited modern Neros fiddling while Borne burns should take hold of the racing, divorce it absolutely from politics and see that it is conducted as a clean, high -class sport, in which the millionaires of Canada and the Cnited States could l e invited to participate, and that it did not simply deteriorate into a seething caldron of intrigue and jealousy, or they should destroy the sport entirely. "Is there not a Moses in the entire state of Louisiana :"
