Northampton Ends Racing
It’s the end of an era: The Massachusetts fair circuit is gone.
Citing competition from casinos and declining handle, Three County Fair president Alan Jacque said on Tuesday that racing is being eliminated from the fair’s program after 150 years. The Northampton fair was the last of six Massachusetts fairs to offer any sort of horseracing.
I came along too late to enjoy the fairs’ larcenous heyday, but Bill Finley remembers well the days when races were fixed and horses stiffed:
In 1983, I was on hand to witness how shamelessly crooked racing at the fairs could be. Right out of college and working my first job in racing, I was assigned to the fairs by the Daily Racing Form to work as a chart taker and was not too thrilled to learn that I would be making less than $200 a week. What I didn’t count on was that my stint at Marshfield was going to present me with the greatest betting opportunity of my life.
Because there was no press box there, we had to work from a card table behind a bay of mutuel windows. I sat in front of a mechanical board that showed how much had been bet on each exacta combination, information that was not made available to the public. By watching what exacta combinations were taking an inordinate amount of money, I was, essentially, in on the fix. I cleaned up, once cashing, I kid you not, after standing in the same line as a jockey.
More can be read about Massachusetts fair shenanigans in Andrew Beyer’s “My $50,000 Year at the Races.” Lured by the promise of grinding out $1,000 a day just by following the “smart money,” Beyer takes a break from playing the New York circuit to visit Great Barrington Fair, where he loses $1,500 and “the last vestiges of my innocence.”
