Ask The Experts

Back in the days before the powers controlling California racing elected to screw around with the racing surfaces Harrington was unbelievable.  You could cap out a card, by for starters, eliminating all C or C+ workers.  Weeks would go by without a C+ worker winning.  And when they did win most of the time either the horse was a turf horse with a dirt work or the horse worked subsequently and Harrington didn\'t catch the work.  Back then all you had to do is download Harrington and pick up the Simo book from Joyce at the Yankee Clipper on John Street.  Harrington would tell you who could not win and the Thorograph would tell you who among the remaining contenders could win.  From there it was simply a matter of going through the card and seeing what horizontal sequences made sense. That would finance a plethora of ill conceived plays throughout the country. Once Del Mar went to plastic the party ended.  The other two tracks were also required to go synthetic and the works became an extremely unreliable predictor of how a horse would perform in the afternoon.  The subsequent switch back to dirt did not \"restore order\". Sometimes it seems as if C+ is the new B+.  I have opinions as to why this is, but I have no proof.

So Coburn did not come off like Robert E. Lee with some quote for the ages after Chrome hung in the lane.  Big deal.  These guys put up their money.  Moreover, they turned down, from where I stand, what would have been a huge payday.. Evidently they wanted to keep Sherman as trainer, and, in all probability, to campaign a horse that looked to be the best three year old in training. They could have went the route of the original owners of War Emblem, Big Brown, Hansen and dozens of others. Instead they took a shot.  The last I looked David Groth still heads up Catskill OTB more then a decade after that scandal.  The public was never informed why Oscar turned back into a two percent trainer.  Hundreds of incidents of past posting have never been explained.  Published workouts are by and large a joke.  Nobody cared when Croll claimed that Dr. Alex Harthill drugged Holy Bull.  Con Errico was sentenced to ten years.  What about the guys he paid.  And it wasn\'t just Amy.  But Coburn is the problem. There was more written about him then any of the real scandals that plagued this game.