It Takes A Pro To Win Races Playfair Champ Speaks Out For Area Owners, Trainers

Hobby horseman.

Bruce Wagar bristles at the implication.

The way some people throw it around, hobby horseman is a denigration. It means amateur.

An amateur in Spokane.

Wagar, 1995’s top trainer at Playfair Race Course, is hardly amateur. Racing is only one source of his income, but if it’s a hobby for him, it’s a hobby for every owner, trainer and breeder who doesn’t have to win to eat.

That’s a pretty significant segment of the game, whatever side of the state you’re sitting on.

When the executive secretary of the Washington Horse Racing Commission said this month that “The state has maintained in a crisis situation the best regional racing and breeding industry in the country,” he could have been pointing at Bruce Wagar and people like him.

Dale and Kim Wright. Dan McCanna. Fred Hepton. Helen Morgan. Sam Tilden.

They’re some of the Inland Northwest owners and trainers who defied the doom and gloom of expectations by completing another season at Playfair.

It’s not simple work. Politics is as crucial as post position.

“We’ve lived year to year since 1989,” said Wagar, who, since the end of the season, has cared for 19 race horses on his 40-acre farm in Greenacres.

“Hobby horsemen,” he sniffs with barely contained contempt. “These people are serious.”

Serious enough that Wagar turns over estimated annual revenues of $50,000 to $70,000 while generating $80,000 to $90,0000 a year in purses.

With fewer racing days and declining on-site attendance, horse racing here is a shrinking industry. Although it still has a strong rippling effect on a battered job market, racing’s hardest hit are those in the trenches.

The Bruce Wagars.

The latest hit is the later-than-anticipated June opening of Emerald Downs in Auburn, the facility orchestrated and bankrolled by Emerald president Ron Crockett.

The track is widely hailed as the salvation of the racing and breeding industry in Washington state. The West Side has gone without a track since the 1992 closure of Longacres in Renton.

But the late June opening of Emerald Downs comes with a negative. It’s pushed Playfair’s fall season off the calendar.

It’s not supposed to happen again. Emerald Downs is expected to operate from April through September - presumably leaving Spokane that narrow window from October until the snow flies.

But with the state firmly against overlapping seasons, and with Auburn taking the early fall dates in ‘96, the management at Playfair has yet to ask for its dates.

Bruce Wagar is suitably unimpressed.

“I’m going to say it,” he said. “I think Ron Crockett would love to see Playfair close. I think he’d love to have the only show in the state and then he’d have complete control.”

Wagar says if the Spokane track goes dark, he’ll head south before he’ll go west.

“If Playfair doesn’t run, I’ll get my horses fit some way or another and go to Phoenix next winter,” he said. “I’ll be retired by then. My daughter Annette is my assistant trainer. She’s flexible, she can go with us. My wife (Joyce) would go. We’d take a few head, come home, turn them out for the summer and run for the winter.

“I’m not interested in going to Auburn. I see what Crockett’s done to the total industry (read that to mean racing at Playfair) and I don’t think it’s good. He’s one entity controlling the racing commission, the HBPA, the legislation.

“That’s not right. People on the West Side may think he’s God but I don’t, not sitting over here in the situation I’m in. He’s sure not the savior of the program over here.”

Wagar’s “situation” is the loss of Playfair’s warm-weather race days, the shorter seasons and the state’s rejection of Playfair’s annual request for dual-carding. Dual-carding means combining races from one track by day with Playfair by night.

The argument has flared across the state since Longacres closed.

“There’ll be some effort (again) to get dual-carding here, but my feeling is that Crockett will never let it happen,” Wagar said. “Dual-carding is successful all over the country. All over the world. The people who run this state are short-sighted because of the need to build the track in Auburn. It’s like they’ve had blinkers on.”

With that off his chest, Wagar reflected on a season of strong performance, his 31st year in horse racing. With 30 wins in Playfair’s 48-day season - the shortest since 1970 - he turned a frustrating summer into a championship year.

“Financially, we did as well as we did last year, winning as many races with fewer starts, but that still doesn’t mean we shouldn’t have the opportunity to run our horses more,” he said. “We tried Yakima (in the summer) and it didn’t work. Hauling over there was not fun. The only thing I did do was get a few starts for my horses, which made them fit.

Playfair’s management, led by Spokane businessman Stan Horton, has another year on a lease with track owner Jack Pring. Wagar says he has no idea who’ll take the lead if Horton steps down.

He only knows it won’t be him. Wagar and other local horsemen, headed by Joe Rizzuto, leased Playfair for two seasons, starting in 1989.

“We got our noses bent,” Wagar said. “The clients that we represented out of our stable lost about $80,000. Some had one share, some two shares. Totally, we (local owners and trainers) were in it for about $250,000.

“Joe came in with the biggest share. He was the operating manager. He made sure when the bailout came he got his money back.”

Wagar said he wasn’t as fortunate. He bought one share of Eastern Washington Racing, Inc., at $5,000.

The five grand is history, he said, but the lesson is fresh.

“No way would I do it again,” Wagar said.

His place in the game is on the backstretch as one of the region’s consistently successful owner/ trainers.

He works through the frustrating downsizing of Spokane horse racing. When the track was converted from basically a highly promoted summer place to a scaled-down cold-weather setting, Wagar shuddered.

The closure of sections of the grandstands, including the box seats, this year bothered him.

“I want the betting public to be happy,” he said. “This year, when I walked through the crowd, I had old friends ask me what was happening to the place. What are they doing to it? It was depressing.”

Still, Wagar’s second training title (his first came in ‘88) left him enthused.

“It’s either be enthused or get out,” he said.

His clients - horse owners who Wagar calls the backbone of his success - see him as outspoken, tough, fair, independent.

One of his pet formulas is to get a horse in condition and run him as low on the claiming ladder as it takes to be competitive. If the horse fires - and Wagar’s often do - the competition has two options.

Claim them or watch them win.

It’s what he calls poking it “right down their throats.

“It all depends on the stock,” he said. “You can’t go any farther than your horses will take you.”

And how far might that be?

Turf Paradise in Phoenix looks pretty good right now.

The business is losing some of its permanence. Even opinion changes by the hour.

Wagar and Auburn, for example.

“I wouldn’t disqualify myself from trying to to run Auburn if I had two or three nice horses and I could get stalls,” he conceded at the close of a long lunch. “If you have two or three good horses, you can do anything you want.”

So Auburn is an option?

“I won’t go over there and sit,” Wagar replies.

That we can count on.

Bruce Wagar is too much the professional for that.

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: 2 photos (1 color)