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Charles Bidwill III, the nitwit scion of the same family that has mismanaged the NFL’s Cardinals for the last 75 years, thought it would be a good idea to convert Sportsman’s to a combination horse racing/auto racing facility. He spent $60 million to lay down an asphalt racetrack and built an enormous grandstand for the auto racing crowd.
Horseplayers hated it. Once a cozy seven-eights of a mile oval, Sportsman’s suddenly looked like a prison yard. The first year barbed wire blocked the view of the track. The horses were running on a cushion of dirt spread over the auto racing surface, which caused leg-snapping breakdowns. In Sportsman’s final season, the spring of 2002, track superintendents sometime spent an hour trying to get the surface ready before calling off the races. One Saturday I watched a horse belly-flop in the stretch, then heard a fuming trainer declare, “That’s it. We’re scratching.” The rest of the day’s races were cancelled.
