Death of the NY Post

[FrankD.]

WOW,

I just read on DRF where the Post has fired effective immediately their entire racing staff and will cease any further in house racing coverage including tomorrows Belmont Stakes.

One thing about being old is being able to tell the back in the day stories and consistent references to events from 30 years ago like they were yesterday.
The death of the Post\'s racing pages hits home here big time.

My Dad ran the daily operations for 3 NY terminals for Adirondack Trailways in Albany, Kingston and the Port Authority back in the 70\'s. In those days the NY papers along with the racing form came up to Albany via an evening bus. As a rapid Yankee and Jet fan as a kid before ESPN I could not wait to read the Post\'s sports section to keep tabs on my teams.My Dad would bring home the Post for me from work and I could not wait to devour it. When my Grandfather first took me to the Spa in 1973 to see Secretariat get beat in the Whitney; almost every day of my life since except for a stint in Chicago in the 80\'s I\'ve read the Posts racing coverage daily. Piesen & Kerrison, my jug head trotter days before I knew better,Yonkers & Roosevelt, Monticello and the out of town tracks, 2 plus pages of racing coverage per day.

I\'m one of the few dinosaurs left who read newspapers; my 530 AM treks to the corner Stewarts store to pick up the local Gazette, Post, USA Today and Racing Form as well as the Sunday NY Times to the tune of $80 something bucks a week.

Double WOW, no more Post racing coverage!!!

Good luck,

Frank D.

[PapaChach]

Wait I think I\'m getting old, too...

My first \"real\" job (not coincidentally obtained shortly before getting married) worked in downtown Albany in the mid-90\'s. There was a pizza place down there, can\'t remember the name of it, want to say Pizzeria 54 or something like that - you could smoke in there back then. Every day at lunch time would get the Post, News, Times, and Times-Union, go to the pizza joint, wolf down a couple of slices and two or three cigs (there\'s a healthy lunch, pizza and ciagrettes, washed down w/a big glass of Coke) and scan the papers. On Fridays I\'d also get the Saturday Form and that would get opened first, couldn\'t wait to see what was running the next day. Can still remember like yesterday summer of \'96, reading the stories about the Yankees, thinking something special was happening.

Twenty years later, the ONLY thing I buy dead-tree edition anymore is the Form. Sometimes use Formulator and/or TG, but still need that paper Form (love writing TG #s and stats in the margins, wish they\'d do away w/those comments on the side).

Anyway, thanks for provoking a trip down Memory Lane. The dead tree media is pretty much done for. No match for the internet. Speaking of which, to at least make some sort of TG connection here, back in around \'99 when I first heard of performance figs, and in relative infancy of internet, poked around this site and the other folks\' site. Thought this site was much better and so assumed the product was better, never tried the other place...

[toppled]

I spent many lunch hours there.  The one thing I didn\'t like is they would take your order, you\'d pay for it & then they\'d send an employee to deliver the orders. The problem was if you ordered 1st & someone else ordered the same thing & was closer to the employee when she called out the order, they\'d get it instead of you & you\'d sit there waiting a long time, sometimes not until your order became unique.  I ended up going to Jonathan\'s more often because of that.

[richiebee]

While it is OK to lament the end of racing coverage in the Post with personal
memories, the person most affected is Ed Fountaine, a solid columnist who
previously covered racing for The Bloodhorse. Hope a similar fate does not await
fellow Staten Islander Jerry Bossert, who does a good job covering NYRA in the
Daily News.

I never understood the Post\'s racing coverage over the last few years...so much
space devoted to entries and results from obscure flat and harness tracks, long
after the most curmudgeonly alta kokker knew that the best place for information
such as this was online. The Post would have been better off to eliminate all of
this filler (especially after the demise of OTB), cover NYRA racing exclusively,
and let Fountaine do more feature/investigative writing, which was his strong point.

[Topcat]

Eddie\'s long been very, very good, but never worked for B-H . . . moved from DRF to the Post . . .

[richiebee]

Thanks for the correction, Topcat. Don\'t know who I am confusing him with, or maybe
I\'m just confused. In any case the timing sucked, was almost vengeful, and I hope he
catches on somewhere, unless of course he wants to retire.

[Topcat]

richiebee Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Thanks for the correction, Topcat. Don\'t know who
> I am confusing him with, or maybe
> I\'m just confused. In any case the timing sucked,
> was almost vengeful, and I hope he
> catches on somewhere, unless of course he wants to
> retire.


Steve Haskin spent quite a few productive years at DRF before he made his move -- to the Blood-Horse.   Still there, doing good work.