Monday Morning Message with Jason Beem Dec. 30, 2024

A good Monday morning to you all! Hope everyone had a good holiday weekend as we wind down 2024. In Thursday's column I’ll write my New Year’s resolutions, and we’ll be recapping 2024 on my podcast on both Tuesday and Wednesday’s shows. So very much looking forward to that. 

I wanted to mention Freehold Raceway which carded its last races this past weekend. The New Jersey harness track was there for 170 years, and I believe was the oldest racetrack in the country, but maybe that was just on the harness side. Regardless, an incredible piece and place in equine sports history is now gone, joining a list of tracks that continues to grow as more and more have shuttered over the years. 

It’s crazy to think about the number of tracks that have closed in the last several years. Obviously some track closures can affect us more personally based on how much time we spent there, how many memories we made there, or it was just geographically closest to us. 

Just this weekend while visiting Gulfstream, I was talking to a couple of people about how much they miss Calder and Hialeah. These tracks are all important to somebody, and usually important to many people. I’ll never understand the appeal of slot machines, and when I see tracks like Pompano Park where there’s just slot machines now and no racetrack, I just shake my head. They just seem so soulless without the racing. But commerce in the end wins. 

I feel bad for the locals who used to enjoy going to Freehold. I went there once and spent maybe an hour just walking around. It was a dark day while I was working at Monmouth, and to be honest, I don’t remember a lot about it. I know there was a really good pizza place down the street called Federici’s. And that Freehold was adjacent to a shopping mall. But other than that, I didn’t know much of it. 

This weekend watching a lot of the tributes to the old track, a few stuck out to me that echoed a tone I’d encountered on the last day at Pompano Park. I saw two tweets that both basically said something to the effect of “If all these people that showed up for the last day had been coming out for the previous few years, they wouldn’t be shutting down.” I remember the last day at Pompano hearing a guy saying the same thing to his grandfather as they walked up the steps of the new little grandstand area. 

I thought then exactly what I thought when I read these people’s tweets. You can’t blame people for not coming out over the years. You have to EARN your customers. You have to put out a product that they want to seek out. You have to make the facility desirable to spend big amounts of time in. And the price of the product has to make them want to consume it. That’s all on us in the racing industry. Their not coming is not something to blame on them. It’s to blame on us. 

Of course everyone shows up for the last day; it’s their last chance to go to someplace that obviously meant something to them at some point. And sure, sometimes we take things for granted that they’ll always be there, and maybe we don’t go enough. But it’s not incumbent on the customers to keep certain tracks afloat. It’s incumbent on us who work in racing to make them want to be there. 

I’m very sorry to the people who loved Freehold, and of course to the people who plied their trade there.