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I THE MECHANIZATION OF RACING j By SALVATOR. j L -.. I had the pleasure of inspecting the new Keeneland racing plant at Lexington, Ky., shortly before the inaugural meeting was to open, while on a visit to the Blue Grass region, and was charmed and delighted with it, though the finishing touches of beautifica-tion were still to be applied. Throngs of workmen were busy everywhere in and outside the grandstand, clubhouse, stables and other structures, under the direction of Hal Price Headley, president of the Keeneland Association, and Maj. Louie Beard, who have been tireless in their efforts to promote the success of the undertaking. As I gazed about I became aware that something unique in all America had been created and was about to be started upon a career which, it is hoped, will be as lengthy as that of the old Lexington Association which it replaces. And that, as is well known, was founded over a century ago. Souvenirs of its historic background also grace the new plant in the shape of the old gates, which have been moved over to Keeneland, where they will serve at once as monuments of a storied past and of what, the visitor feels sure, will be a brilliant future. Keeneland, in my opinion, when it has fully blossomed out and assumed its final shape and form and atmosphere, will be the most attractive place in America, with the possible exception of Saratoga, for the man to go racing who loves racing for its own sake. Everything about it has been conceived and constructed with that end in view. This is at once apparent to the obcrvant eye the absolute difference from the run-of-mine latter day "Downs" or other similar undertaking with its hasty assemblage of steel and concrete commercialized and get-the-money layout. And in conversing with Mr. Headley, he emphasized this feature very decidedly. "We hope and expect to conduct our meetings here," he remarked, "with success from both the sporting and the financial angles. But in everything we are doing we are endeavoring to serve sport first, in the belief that thereby success will follow at the box-office. And for that reason we are not following the new fad of mechanizing everything to the limit. On the contrary, the reverse will be the case. We-may be old-fashioned in our ideas, but it is not our idea that many of the new gadgets are necessary, and we are going to dispense with them. NO "EYE IN THE SKY." "We arc installing no eye in the sky and never intend to. For hundreds of years racing got along without anything of that kind and very well, too. There will also be no loud speakers at Keeneland dinning into the ears of the spectators that they have only two minutes left to get their money down. There will be no mechanical music bawled out so loud that it fairly deafens the occupants of the grandstand. We will dispense -with everything possible along those lines. Another of our old-fashioned ideas is that racing i3 primarily an affair of men and horses and that machines don!t belong in it except in as inconspicuous a way as can be contrived. "We think this can be done and we are going to try it. We believe in so doing that we will please our public and will throw around our sport a real sporting atmosphere of the kind that one today finds so little of at many race tracks." Major Beard, who was standing by, nodded assent, and a hearty one, to everything that Mr. Headley had uttered. I confess that nothing I have heard in a long while pleased me more. For In recent seasons there has been steadily growing in my mind the conviction that the mechanization of racing was being overdone, and that, in the popular catch phrase, "something ought to be done about it" Otherwise it will at no ery remote time assume the dominant role on the turf and remove it from the real sporting category altogether. An acquaintance of mine, W. R., who is of a somewhat ironic turn of mind, broached this subject to mc the other day. Said he: "3D3CHANICAL HORSES." "Well, it seems to me theres only one thing left to be done nowadays In order to standardize the sport. That is to install mechanical horses and jockeys. They have a machine to start em with and another to tell how they finish. You bet by machine. A machine tells you what kind of odds you are getting. Another is used to tell you what horse is ahead all the way around the race track, and then to tell you what horse won. And then provided you hold the right ticket you are paid off by a machine. They use a machine to call the horses to the post and the jockeys are weighed in before the race and out after it by a machine. The time the horses make is taken by a machine. They run machines around the track to smooth it out between races. "Everything is geared to the machine angle. Its all cogs and wheels and pulleys and levers and tackle and bearings and engineering. They pull this and punch that and drop the other contrivance, beginning with the turnstiles at the gates that the patrons are checked through. "When I look back at the way they used to run things at the race tracks before this mechanical mania took hold of them I am struck by the difference, not only in the way in which things are run, but the atmosphere that the machines have given the sport. The sporting flavor is being rapidly strained out of it. Sport, you know, is essentially human something that men Invented for their own amusement and that they produced on their own. Racing grew into a sport because in the days when machines of even the simplest kinds were In their Infancy, horses and men were inseparable and no man who was anybody did much of anything without the aid of a horse. The turf was the playground where horses and men played together and had the grandest time in the world. "At our moderne mechanized race tracks theres so little of this spirit left that you cant see very much with the naked eye. And at the way in which things are going, it wont be long before the live horses and jockeys will be replaced with mechanical ones, made in factories and rigged up in a dingus so that they can be propelled around the tracks in specified ways and so geared that the result will be a matter of uncer-tanty, perhaps. "After which it wont be long till the mil-lenium. The happy days will be here and the famous technocracy" ought to keep Tt going forever and aye. But if Im still on earth you neednt look for me at the races, any more. About that time Ill be going fishing."
