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MORRISSEY SILENCES TRAINERS Offers to Let Horsemen Act as His Assistant at Post. Grants Privilege to Owners of Handling Their Own Horses at Start of Races. Mechanical Aids Used. AURORA, 111., April 18 John Morrissey, who will make his Chicago debut in the exacting role of starter when the Aurora spring meeting opens the local season on May 1, is one of Americas youngest racing officials, but he apparently settled the oldest feud on the turf that between the trainers of race horses and the assistant starters who line them up in the stall gate when he arrived yesterday. "Trainers have been complaining for years that the assistant starters so manhandle their horses in lining them up in the gate that they fail to show their best efforts," he said. "Well, maybe theyre right. At Aurora any trainer who feels that his horse needs special handling in the starting gate will have the privilege of coming out on the track and backing the horse into the stall himself." Strangely enough not as many trainers as might be expected were jubilant over the Morrissey offer. Ever since the Australian barrier came into use many years ago, and particularly since it has been replaced by the starting gate, the tactics of the assistant starters have furnished convenient excuses for trainers whose- horses did not run up to expectations. Under the Morrissey system the responsibility for seeing that their horses get off to an even break will fall squarely upon the trainers, and it is a burden that few of them seem willing to assume. Racegoers who know their way around the race track have never held opinions so hostile against assistant starters as have the trainers. They have admitted that the job is physically the most difficult in racing a starter usually keeps a ground crew of six on his pay roll, for instance, because although only five men are needed, one is usually in the hospital from having been stepped upon or kicked by an unruly post actor. The chief objection that trainers have made in the past has been against the mechanical aids that the starting crew has often been forced to employ to handle fractious post horses. Among these are such devices as "twitches," "nose ropes" and "war bridles," which are varyingly severe methods of handling an unruly horses head. All of them have proven effective in the past in forcing bad post actors to line up with the fields opposing them, but the effect upon the horses race is a matter in which the assistant starters and the ground crew are in violent disagreement. Among the interesting features latent in starter Morrisseys offer to permit any trainer to start his own horse are such questions as whether a trainer will permit the use of mechanical aids and whether he will protest against such disciplinary action as the ordering of a horse to be placed outside the starting gate. But at any rate, it seems obvious that the son of the veteran starter, Harry Morrissey, has taken the play away from the group .which has made the position of starter one from which racing men have shied for many years.
