The Hall of Fame is located about 20 miles from Jerry Hollendorfer’s hometown. This would be eerie, and altogether appropriate, except for the fact that the Hall of Fame in question honors professional football players and coaches, and not a Thoroughbred trainer whose high school athletic career is a thing of the distant past.

Next Wednesday, at a luncheon being hosted by the mayor of Los Angeles and Breeders’ Cup, Santa Anita is expected to be named the host site for the 2012 Cup races. Politicians and Cup officials will surely hail the announcement that Santa Anita will be the host for the third time in five years as wonderful news.

To my mind, it will be a sad day for American racing and for a Breeders’ Cup organization that has lost its way and abandoned the ideals it established nearly 30 years ago.

Eddie Gregson made the same mark on the summertime season at Del Mar that he made at every other outpost on the California circuit, only more so.

Welcome to the Del Mar digs of the most under-appreciated racehorse in North America.

She lives in stall 12A of Barn GG, a corner room thickly bedded with golden straw and hard by the barn breezeway. Her view includes a wash rack and a lonely, malnourished bottle brush tree. The walls of her stall are composed of vintage adobe bricks originally laid in 1937. The tooth-raked dutch door of her stall is tied open with blue twine.

In pop culture, “the day the music died” can either refer to Jan. 3, 1959, and the plane crash that killed Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and The Big Bopper, or to Dec. 8, 1980, when John Lennon was shot and killed.

But I think we can all agree that “the day pro football was saved” was July 25, 2011, when the NFL owners and players reached a 10-year agreement that ended the lockout, ensuring that we will have our favorite betting sport this year and for the next decade.

It had been about four years since Melody Conlon went down hard near the three-eighths pole at Hollywood Park trying to stay on board a wrong-way runaway. She fractured three cervical vertabrae for her trouble and underwent emergency surgery the next day, but after awhile she was back in the saddle, on a limited basis, getting the feel of the Thoroughbreds she trained.

The name Lou Pena will ring few bells on the Thoroughbred side of aisle, but the harness crowd knows him well, particularly in the last two years. And the news involving him over the weekend carries significance for all of racing.

After devoting much of his life to gambling on horses and poker, Sheldon Finkelstein is accustomed to dealing with the vicissitudes of fortune. He understands that bad breaks are part of life. But nothing could have prepared him for the jolt he received in May.

Some horses get caught up in their own stories. Kinsale King is one of them.

From the moment he came bounding down the stretch at Santa Anita in October 2009 to win at odds of 61-1, Kinsale King has been a horse of high drama. The fact that it happened on Halloween Eve only added fizz to the drink. Was it a trick? Who cares? It was definitely a treat for Dr. Patrick Francis Sheehy, his veteran owner, and fledgling trainer Carl O’Callaghan.

Do not be misled by the cultural snobs. Just because San Diego is about as far away as you can get from New York City in the continental U.S. without being at sea is no reason to think it is not a metropolis of sophisticated delights.

Sure, there’s not much out here in the way of pro sports teams, unless the Padres are your idea of a pro sports team. The last time San Diego rose to any serious amount of national attention was in 1996 when the Republican party held its national convention in “America’s Finest City” and nominated Bob Dole for President. How did that work out?