Times still tough at Hawthorne, but economic help is on the horizon

STICKNEY, Ill. – In some respects, this is just another moribund fall-winter meeting at Hawthorne Racecourse. Purses for the meet, which begins Thursday, are going to average about $106,000 per day, hardly a kingly sum in the sport of kings, and even during October, when racing not many years ago was conducted five days per week, the local race week tops out at three.

And yet when racing secretary Allen Plever said this week that “there’s a lot of enthusiasm out there,” he wasn’t just proffering some wild marketing spin. Think what you want about the long-term wisdom of coupling racing with casinos, but here at Hawthorne it was that or extinction.

The Illinois gambling expansion law that passed in June granted Hawthorne permission to operate a casino with 1,200 positions, and the track plans to begin construction on that project in February. By 2021, the racino money should be flowing into the Hawthorne purse account, and Hawthorne horsemen that have endured lean year after lean year will be relatively flush with cash.

The construction project precludes Hawthorne from running a spring meeting in 2020, and that has a salutary affect on this meet, as well. The purse account is overpaid, but with money trickling back into it next year without having the expense of a spring meeting, concerns about holding down purse costs this fall and winter aren’t as desperate, Plever said.

“It’ll be a balancing act,” Plever said, regarding the number and type of races per day. “We’re not going to run nine races if we’re going to end up giving away $160,000.”

Be it hope for the future, three-day race weeks in October that should help maximize the Hawthorne horse population, or some combination of factors, Thursday’s opening card filled like gangbusters with nine races attracting at least 11 horses each. The weather should hold through opening day and the turf course is ready for action, but rain is forecast this weekend and how deep into the meet Hawthorne can run grass races always is subject to Mother Nature’s whims.

The stakes schedule, which once included the half-million-dollar Hawthorne Gold Cup, consists of eight $50,000 Illinois-bred races, but at least that’s something. Hawthorne’s spring meeting included a grand total of zero stakes races.

Standard post time is 3:10 p.m. Central, and race days during October and most of November are Thursday, Friday, and Saturday before Thursdays fall away the last week of November and early December. By then, the casino construction will be even nearer, and the faster the future comes for folks at Hawthorne, the better.