People come to harness racing to watch people they know, like Phil Sidney’s Groves (above), with three-year-old ClevelandTopRookie race against the best in the world. (Press Pros Feature Photos)
Proving that less can be more, the crowd and the atmosphere of Thursday’s Little Brown Jug belied its physical contrast in size to other, bigger, major sporting events…and more from the Delaware fair.
Delaware, OH – Country song writer Whisperin’ Bill Anderson once penned a tune and lyrics entitled When Two Worlds Collide, and it sold a million records. It’s been a crooner’s standard for years. If you’re interested, the best of them all was BJ Thomas’s rendition.
But I digress.
Anderson’s song could well be used as the theme for the Little Brown Jug, for eighty years one of equine racing’s standardbred benchmark races, and overshadowed by the thoroughbred industry and the much bigger events like its Triple Crown – the Kentucky Derby, the Preakness, and the Belmont Stakes.
Publisher Sonny Fulks writes OHSAA and Ohio State sports for Press Pros Magazine.com.
For in fact, the Little Brown Jug IS one of the Triple Crown races for pacing horses, along with the Cane Stakes (the Meadowlands), and the Messenger Stakes, run at Yonkers Raceway in Yonkers, New York.
But in size, compared to the crowds, and the purses, the ‘Jug’ amounts to about one-third of the size to the Kentucky Derby. A horse named Sovereignty won the Kentucky Derby this past May and earned $3.1 million dollars. A horse named Louprint won the Little Brown Jug on Thursday and took home $250,000, give or take.
“But,” says Mount Vernon driver Chris Page in a recent Press Pros feature column, ” The ‘Jug’ is our Kentucky Derby in my estimation. It’s the race I wanted to win the most when I was a little kid, and the race that meant the most to me when I start out in racing.”
But that’s the ‘standardbred’ in him talking, compared to the ultra-profiled world of thoroughbreds. It was recently announced that the famous Hambletonian event, one of the three Triple Crown races for trotters, is up for bid to be hosted beyond the 2026 race. The Hambletonian has been hosted by The Meadowlands, New Jersey track since 1981, after spending the previous 23 years at the Du Quoin, Illinois state fairgrounds. Contrasting the two worlds, there has been no such talk of the Preakness or the Belmont Stakes being up for bid.
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And a OHHA representative told me Thursday that a representative of the Hambletonian was on record as saying, “We wish we had a fairground [like Delaware] to host the race again.”
The reason? Any number, I would assume for the sake of business, but the passion of the local crowd of nearly 50,000 for the ‘Jug’ was unmistakable – a lot of true horse people, or people with a knowledge of a local owner, trainer, or driver involved with the race. Ohio, you see, is a standardbred hotbed in the world of harness racing.
Locally, Botkins head basketball coach Phil Groves was there Thursday with his three-year-old ClevelandTopRookie, driven by New Zealand’s Dexter Dunne in the third race. Groves’ horse finished second, and out of the headlines. But a lot of the crowd knew Phil Groves, or knew about Phil Groves, his horse, and showed up to see him run. Yes, it was a county fair with its colloquial atmosphere, but the sport of harness racing owes its heritage to county fairs and local people in agriculture racing to compare their horses going back as far as 1825.
Tracks like The Meadowlands, Scioto Downs, and the Red Mile, in Lexington, are known as pari-mutuel tracks, there for gaming alone (there are no Tilt-A-Whirls), and lack the appeal and relationship to the general public that the county fairs can boast. At least one reason, I’m certain, that one would say, “I wish we had the fairgrounds back.”
Mount Vernon, Ohio’s Chris Page driving one of his four winners during Thursday’s conclusion to the Little Brown Jug meet.
More than a few – a few thousand, I suspect – were very aware on Thursday of the week that local driver Chris Page had with this year’s Little Brown Jug. Over the course of the week-long meet he won 15 races, including four on Thursday.
“He’s a local kid who became a big-name driver,” said a volunteer from Delaware driving a golf cart Thursday to assist race patrons. “He’s actually from Mount Vernon, but Delaware people sorta’ call him their own. They went nuts when he won the big race a couple of years ago. When he’s driving people come out to watch and root for him. He’s a good kid, a good guy, and has a good family. Just regular people.”
The question about popularity of racing, priority of racing, and the fact of adding racing to our Press Pros inventory has been asked about throughout the summer. And with the Little Brown Jug in the rear-view mirror now we can share that every racing feature posted from the beginning of June has topped the previous racing post in readership, right up through Thursday night’s post of Hal McCoy’s account of Louprint winning the 80th annual Little Brown Jug. For the summer (June through September 15), there have been more than a million page views for OHHA racing, with hundreds of internet shares of those stories.
“In the good ol’ days they used to fill Scioto Downs for racing,” says OHHA executive director Frank Fraas. “Even President Franklin Roosevelt visited the tracks back then. But in recent years the casinos have cut into the gate and it’s just easier to watch racing on TV with off-track betting.”
“Now the only time the local papers write about racing is when there’s bad news,” said another Scioto driver this summer. “People went to work the next day and talked about the races the night before. Now there’s little or no coverage for racing.”
“You want to perform in front of a crowd,” adds Page. “But let’s face it, now we depend on casinos. That’s where the people go.”
At least…that’s where they go instead of the pari-mutuel tracks. Thursday, it was hard to convince anyone stuck in the traffic on route 23 trying to get to the fairgrounds that there was a casino within a hundred miles.
It’s a fact, as Page, Fraas, and others bound to the sport of harness racing admit, that there’s simply more money behind thoroughbreds and the industry of thoroughbred racing than there is trotters and pacers and the standardbred industry. It’s no different than the example of the Professional Golfers Association and the Professional Bowlers Association.
“We don’t have any John Galbreaths in harness racing, or at least not enough of them,” says veteran driver Donnie Irvine, who in his 70s is still active as a trainer.
You wouldn’t have known…if you were at the Delaware fairgrounds watching the Little Brown Jug on Thursday. The governor, himself, was there, and people hardly cared. 40,000 people were there to see the horses, support the drivers, and a few friends who had a dog in the fight.
The good people still matter in Delaware, and at the fairs.
And congratulations……
Our long-time photographer and friend to many through representing Press Pros, Julie McMaken Wright, is getting married this weekend, to another long-time friend (at least to her), Robbie Daniel. Interestingly, they have requested the weekend off.
We wish nothing but the best, and happiness, to two great people…and to Julie, who’s second only to Hal McCoy as the longest-serving associate at Press Pros.
And devoted? She slugged out 12 hours of harness racing coverage Thursday in the heat and humidity…the dust and the debris of 50,000 people…and all those horses, and what horses leave behind. Trust it, Robbie’s getting his money’s worth.
May their time together be just like Hal McCoy…hall of fame!
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