by Bob Carson

Editor’s Note: The USTA website is pleased to present freelance writer Bob Carson and his popular “Outside the Box” features. This monthly series is a menu of outlandish proposals presented with a wink — but the purpose behind them is serious. The views contained in this column are that of the author alone, and do not necessarily represent the opinions or views of the United States Trotting Association.

Bob Carson

Solutions for a tiny harness track in Timbuktu do not work for a megalopolis. Proposals for a slots fueled racetrack may not play well at a non-slots track. Still, decisions must be made and priorities must be set.

Here is a question.

If you owned a harness racetrack, or if you controlled a state racing program, and you had a million dollars for “promotion,” would you prioritize improving racing attendance or improving the video feed of your races? Do not hop on the fence and choose both; you have to lean hard one way or the other.

And your answer is?

Once upon a time, I sat with the commissioner of an independent professional baseball league, a sporting product that depends on live attendance. Our topic was the viability of an existing league franchise.

He said, “It’s fairly straightforward, take one of those old metal high school compasses, the ones with the pointed edge and a pencil clipped into the other part, gosh, those things should have been classified as deadly weapons. Anyway, stick the point where your ballpark will be, then open up the end with the pencil to a driving distance of 35 minutes and make a circle.

“Calculate the people inside of that circle. Figure that of those demographics in your circle, you can hope that a few may venture out to a couple of games. Factor in bad weather, income levels, and the percentage of people who even enjoy baseball games, etc. Most of the time, your potential audience is depressingly small, plus new life styles and technology make the pool much smaller.”

I just pulled up the national racing schedule today for harness racing. There are 10 racetracks with live cards. Pull out an old roadmap, stick the protractor in those racetracks, and draw the circles. Since our big market tracks are not racing today, the potential audiences are, indeed, depressingly small.

Stick your hand in your pocket and pull out your phone or your I-pad, the potential audience is…well…the entire world.

Once upon a time, I was on a local television show, some teenage rock and roll silliness that, at the time, seemed deadly serious. This show, that appeared on channel three every Friday, was must see TV. For us viewers, the perception was that the show originated in a huge studio with a massive crowd. It all seemed so enthralling.

Reality proved much different and quite deflating. The studio was barely larger than a High School classroom, the audience was a couple of dozen teenagers, and the decorations were cheesy.

In the dressing room, which was really a bathroom, I rubbed shoulders with The Shadows of Knight. When the show was aired, the audience saw and heard “Gloria” as an epic, energetic masterpiece, performed by “stars” in front of swooning hordes of fans. The guys I met in the bathroom were normal, nervous, pimply chaps who lip-synced in front of three cameras and looked like they might follow this gig by bagging groceries at Stack and Sell.

The event that aired on our televisions each Friday was, to a large degree, illusionary. But it was financially viable, they drew an audience, and they had customers.

The magic of entertainment and sports are tricky. Just as my TV experience was a downer, a few months later another rock and roll event was unforgettable and hooked those of us holding bic lighters at the finale as lifelong fans. In harness horse racing, the tricky formula is similar.

Should you take a new fan to the racetrack where the crowd is a scruffy dozen, the roar during the homestrech dash is a solo curse and the ambience is that of a truck stop at 2 a.m. — you have a hard sell. Another time, you take another potential fan and the track is alive and animated — you have a chance to convert a visitor into a fan or gambler.

In real life, experiences at your local racetrack are hit or miss. In a video presentation, what the viewer sees and experiences can be manipulated.

Full grandstands and energy are what we all desire. We all agree that beachheads where real life dynamics are favorable should be mandatory. If your demographics and promotion efforts can bring in crowds at a place like the Meadowlands, by all means, it is full steam ahead on the attendance front.

We all wish that vibrant was the perfect adjective for describing a racetrack evening. But we all know that the big event magic is sporadic at best. In some forlorn outposts of harness horse racing, massive, magical crowds are non-existent.

There are reasons that people do not storm our gates on Tuesday nights — but as Yogi said, “If people are not gonna come, we can’t stop ‘em.”

So what do you do?

Maybe we should do what I witnessed in that tiny TV studio in Cleveland — make the picture that the viewer sees on his or her device reflect an inflated reality. Maybe we should make a determined effort to ensure that what gamblers and visitors observe on their devices has a touch of that old time video magic by making our product more attractive in many ways.

We could do this. We should start tomorrow. If you have a racetrack product, you should immediately arrange to send it to the world in high definition. Any economic argument should be blunted with the concept that in the near future if you do not have a crisp picture you will lose your existing audience of gamblers and fail to find either new fans or new gamblers.

Good producers of sporting productions can make a hundred people appear to be thousands. They do not show empty seats. They puddle those who are at the event into close quarters. They show close-ups. We must show people, not just horses. As much as we love trotting and pacing horses, viewers empathize with faces of humans. We must also shorten the time between races.

There are bags and bags of tricks in a sporting broadcast and we should stoop to all of them. The excuse that we cannot keep up energy for a long program is nonsense. Guess how much “action” takes place in a football game? An average professional football game lasts 3 hours and 12 minutes, but if you tally up the time when the ball is actually in play, the action amounts to a mere 11 minutes. On the other hand, a harness horse program of 12 races has plenty of “action.”

The bulk of sporting events are on devices and the bulk of these presentations are padding, fluff, hype, and emotional cues. Live attendance is often just a perk.

Yeah, all this hype and production value stuff feels uncomfortable. Creating a studio sport out of harness racing feels like selling out to us purists. Most of us crave sitting in full grandstands, socializing and watching the amazing fields of horses. We love the minutiae, appreciate the complexity of a well-reasoned wager and understand the difficulty of just getting a horse onto the racetrack.

But the metal compass with a sharp point and the pencil clipped into the other end tells a harsh tale as the world turns.