Down the Straight at 40 m.p.h.

Talk about greyhound racing to a horseman, and his lip curls in contempt. "Outdoor roulette. The numbers game --for gamblers and rubes," he sneers, recalling the days when Al Capone and Frank Nitti ran the action and anything went: switching dogs, doping them, filling them full of water to slow them down, sticking thorns in their feet. Some of the old flamboyance still persists in Britain, where the whole country was buzzing last week over the dognapping of Hi Joe, the favorite for next June's Greyhound Derby. But in the U.S. these days, dog racing is almost respectable--and booming as never before.

Over the past ten years, the number of tracks has grown to 32 in seven states,* attendance has climbed 40% to 10 million a year, and the pari-mutuel handle is expected to top $500 million in 1965. At least half of that will be bet in Florida, where 16 tracks (four in Miami alone) outdraw the horses by a margin of 2 to 1. Florida dogmen classify their sport as "nighttime entertainment." The big tracks run eleven 5/16-mile to 9/16-mile races an evening (purses: up to $80,000), provide extras like free parking, bar service, "lead-outs" in white dinner jackets to parade the dogs to the post, and fanfares from 4-ft. trumpets. The fans like it so much that they pour $700,000 a night into the pari-mutuel machines.

Muzzles & Meatballs. The tracks make such a big deal out of keeping the sport clean that racing hounds even have the color of their toenails recorded for identification. During race meetings, the dogs are kenneled at the track, are constantly muzzled, fed nothing but a carefully supervised diet of vegetables, vitamins, horse meat and beef. On race days, they are confined to guarded cages to make sure that nobody throws them a "meatball"--a wad of hamburger laced with a stimulant or depressant--and they are given postrace drug tests, just like horses. The tests are so exacting, in fact, that one trainer almost lost his license because he fed his dogs chocolate syrup for extra energy. Caffeine from the syrup showed up in the hounds' urine.

Dog breeders insist that hounds are even easier to handicap than horses. For one thing, there is no jockey to worry about. Greyhounds reach speeds up to 40 m.p.h. on the straightaway. They compete without regard to sex, and the winningest dog of all time was a little brindled bitch named Indy Ann, who racked up 137 victories in the mid-1950s. Buying a hound is somewhat cheaper than buying a race horse (promising pups sell for $1,000 up), and far less chancy: unlike the ponies, greyhounds breed so true that handlers can predict the habits of a pup with a fair degree of accuracy. "If you breed two good rail runners," says Florida Trainer Oscar Duke, "at least six out of eight pups will be rail runners too."

Trick & Zip. Greyhounds usually start racing at the age of 18 months, after anywhere from four to six months of training. Explains one handler: "You begin by tying a live, kicking rabbit to the end of a pole. You swing the pole around, keeping the rabbit just ahead of the pup. He gets real anxious, and finally you let him catch the rabbit." Next, the dog graduates to chasing a plastic bunny --like Swifty, the mechanical rabbit at the track. Bad habits show up early, and they are often impossible to correct. The classic case is a greyhound named Terris Foot, who competed in hurdle races and always led the pack up to the final jump--where he always fell down. His handler decided to try him in a flat race. Terris Foot kept right on jumping, and when he reached the spot where the last nonexistent hurdle would have been, he fell down.

Brains, most handlers insist, are the key to a hound's success in topflight competition. In the starting box, unable to see, dull-witted dogs tend to relax; the smart ones stay tense and ready. Says Florida Trainer F. B. Stutz: "They learn to listen for the sound of the rabbit coming up behind the boxes. They gauge just how much the noise has to fade before the lure is far enough away to trip the doors, and they're ready to jump when those doors open."

Experienced hounds know their job so well, says Stutz, that Swifty could be "a box of Wheaties--they'd chase anything." And in the scramble of a race, smart greyhounds are not above resorting to trickery to win. "I had me a little dog who didn't like passing on the outside," recalls Trainer Oscar Duke. "Just as plain as anything, he'd sneak up on the dog ahead of him and throw his haunches into him. The other dog would pull out for a second, and mine would zip right through the hole."

* Arizona, Arkansas, Colorado, Florida, Massachusetts, Oregon, South Dakota.

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