Nowhere was there any joy.  Nor was there any lightness, no happiness, nothing to cheer for, no one to really care about. 

          As the program progressed, the female characters were shallow stereotypes swimming upstream (when there are really a lot of powerful women in racing today); the two main trainers became somewhat more sympathetic but the Dustin Hoffman character only got worse.  There were two condoned murders and Hoffman was ‘rewarded’ by winning the big race.

          Do we really want racing to be associated with dead horses, organized crime, beatings, people who can’t say ‘damn’ instead of ‘f—k’, and dreary sets filled with people who look like they need to shower and whose sole purpose in life is to gamble?  For every tender moment with a horse there was a card dealt, a person killed or beaten, a horse hurt.

          Yes, there are jerks in every business, crooks in every enterprise, risks in every sport.  But when organized crime is associated with horses all I can remember is the infamous ‘head in the bed’ scene in the first Godfather movie.  I have never understood making heroes out of people who bully others like Don Corelone or Tony Soprano.  We don’t like these people very much and frankly we don’t want them at the racetrack.

          “Luck” didn’t fail because of PETA (though we think those people’s ignorance of the sport knows no bounds) but because the people who wrote, produced and filmed the show were so busy making it ‘gritty and real’ they forgot to give it any heart.  When an old timer like yours truly can’t get invested in a program about racing, how are you going to get anyone new interested? 

          We have a few words for those who wrote and produced this depressing ‘love letter to the sport’:  Zenyatta, Secretariat, Smarty Jones, Silky Sullivan.  These are the stars of our sport.

          Yes, it took people to bring them into the spotlight, but when all is said and done, it is the horses themselves who will always be the stars. When people fail to recognize that then we have taken the horse out of horse racing and that is when we fall on our face.  This is what has been wrong for a very long time and when we follow a gift like Zenyatta with something like “Luck” we do what racing is very good at – shooting itself in the foot.

          If we bring federal regulation on ourselves, this is the kind of thing we have to blame for it.  The very people who make their living at the races were unable to create a story that brought the vibrant beauty of the races – the color, the action, the courage – and yes, the true love of horses - to life.  That’s pretty darn sad.

          The next time – if there is a next time – why don’t the writers open the story with the birth of a foal or a Carl Nafzger-Mrs. Genter moment instead of a Mafia type getting out of prison?  A little beauty never hurt anyone; in fact it’s been known to create fans.

March 2012