A Night at the Dogs

Question: With the Miami Dolphins playing in the Orange Bowl, the world's best thoroughbreds running at Hialeah, and big-time college sports crowding the calendar, what is Florida's biggest spectator sport? Answer: Dog racing. The turnstiles spin merrily year-round at one or more of the state's 17 tracks (there are only 23 others in the rest of the U.S.). Despite the dearth of glamour and the shortage of champions that stand out from the pack, huge numbers of gamblers want to wager on the greyhounds that futilely chase an ersatz rabbit around an oval of either five-sixteenths or three-eighths of a mile.

If Florida is dog racing's capital, its White House is the West Flagler Kennel Club in Miami. That neon and plastic Churchill Downs for dogs attracted more than a million fans last season, outdrawing the Dolphins or Hialeah. Many of the breed improvers now come and go without ever seeing a live dog. Instead, they sit in sybaritic comfort in "The Great Racing Theater," a new, cavernous 5,000-seat trackside auditorium where bettors can watch the tote board and the race on a 40-ft. closed-circuit TV screen. It is more convenient to put down late bets that way. Between races they study Vince De Marco's 75-c- greyhound tip sheet. When the mechanical rabbit takes off on its mad whirl around the track, the fans become possessed. Cries of "Come on, you goddam dog!" echo through the auditorium.

Presiding over this six-night-a-week hound happening is Isadore Hecht, 60, West Flagler's owner. The former tomato grower and banana importer bought the track 20 years ago when it handled just $14 million in bets during a 13-week season. Hecht modernized the plant and produced a greyhound gold mine. In 1972 the track handled $63 million in bets (8% went to management) in a 16-week meeting. Every night Hecht can be found in a posh suite of offices perched at one end of the track. There he can monitor the betting windows on TV or close the curtains and lock the office door by pressing a button by his desk. "There's a few things you aren't going to stop people from doing," he philosophizes while sitting behind an inch-high stack of $100 bills. "Smoking, drinking, and maybe sometimes placing a bet." For Hecht, an evening at West Flagler "is an evening of fun. That's what we call it, an evening of fun."

Like a Las Vegas casino, West Flagler keeps the price of admission minimal. The best grandstand seats cost 750 or 500, and one section is free. But in an "evening of fun," the average fan bets $72. Some of the more affluent, like Businessman Jose Martinez, can afford to lose repeatedly when they "wheel a Quiniela" for $6--track talk for placing a bet on three combinations of three competitors picked to win, place and show. "You never know," says Martinez. "You can have the best dog in the race and sometimes she won't run."

Nonetheless, relatively consistent winning is possible for shrewd bettors. Dogs are graded according to their recent records (A, B, C or D). Because each race is restricted to a single class, fans are usually protected from gross mismatches. Tip sheets give not only the dogs' won-loss history, but how each animal has done against particular rivals. With a little luck, a studious and conservative gambler can keep in the black. There is scant danger of fixed races because the dogs are put in an elaborate security area called "the lockout room" well before each run. While in lockout, their color, markings and even toenail tint are compared with the characteristics listed on the dogs' birth certificates, thus assuring that ringers cannot run under false names.

Trained Killers. The dogs that make or break an evening are a pampered group, brought up on a princely diet of beef, horsemeat and vitamin supplements. They run at speeds up to 45 m.p.h. Like major league pitchers, dogs are rested for at least four days between contests. During that respite, they spend two hours a day in open walking pens and five minutes on a treadmill called a walking machine. Most dogs are retired after two years of racing.

The Secretariat of racing dogs was Rocking Ship, winner of 53 races out of the 86 he ran. His lifetime earnings approached $100,000 (the average purse is $1,000), and like the great thoroughbreds, Rocking Ship would have been sent to stud farm if he had not been killed, apparently by snake bite, last fall.

For all the familiar trappings of sport, though, dog racing does have a darker side. The dogs are trained as killers. To reinforce the greyhounds' hunting instinct--the breed was first imported from England and Ireland to kill jack rabbits that were destroying crops --their training usually concentrates on the pursuit and killing of real rabbits. These bloody sessions, called coursings, are still run publicly in Abilene, Kans., every year. In Florida, however, they will be banned for training or public racing at the end of this year. The reason: one bloodthirsty promoter put live white rabbits--Easter bunnies--on his track last year to bring in fans.

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