[Kasept]

The American Racing Championship Series was the brainchild of the very sharp Barry Weisbord who has brought many innovations and ideas to the game. Weisbord made 2 very well meant attempts to craft this kind of 'league' concept, elliciting the support of television and most of the elements that should have made it successful.

While there may have been a number of contributing factors, it is widely accepted that what ultimately doomed the effort was a particular kind of disdain for 'people like Weisbord' by Oaklawn's Charlie Cella.

Here is an Andy Beyer piece about the ARCS demise from 1993:

Good Idea Is Left At Gate

(August 18, 1993)
BY ANDREW BEYER

The Pacific Classic was created to be a climactic event of the American Championship Racing Series, the program of stakes races for the country's best older horses. But when the $1 million race is run Saturday at Del Mar, it will be a finale in a sense that the series' creator, Barry Weisbord, never imagined. This is the end of the ACRS, which has been terminated by the tracks that staged it.

The ACRS's three-year existence might constitute just a small footnote to racing history. But its demise reveals some hard and enduring truths about horse racing in America, and suggests just how ill-equipped this industry is to implement new ideas.

Weisbord's idea was an innovative one: tie together some of the nation's top stakes races as part of a series and give a lucrative bonus award to the horses who performed best throughout the year. He wanted to foster rivalries that would make horse racing more interesting for television. He wanted to stimulate fans' interest in races from far-flung parts of the country. And the idea worked.

In the ACRS's first season, Farma Way and Festin won early season stakes in California and Arkansas. When they went to Baltimore to renew their rivalry in the Pimlico Special, Marylanders knew them after watching them on simulcasts or national television coverage. They were stars - not unknowns from California. And by the time they came to the Pacific Classic for a race that was nationally televised by ABC, they were well-known nationally. The ACRS was a winner.

Or so it seemed to the public. But behind the scenes, relationships were often tense between Weisbord's ACRS organization and the tracks that hosted the races. Weisbord rubbed plenty of people the wrong way, as he himself acknowledged: "I'd go in and say, `I know these concepts work. We know how do do this.' I had a passion because I believed in the concept. And I caused some animosity."

Key tracks defected from the program for reasons that were often small and petty; they didn't want to sacrifice their own interests to serve Weisbord's vision of the greater good of the sport. Del Mar president Joe Harper said, "People who had a prestige race felt they didn't need the series."

Arlington Racecourse wouldn't join because the ACRS threatened to upstage its own big attraction, the Arlington Million. Oaklawn Park dropped out because president Charles Cella thought Weisbord was spending too much money. But the crushing defection was that of Santa Anita, which pulled out this year because track officials didn't want to encourage their best horses to leave the state. Without the $1 million Santa Anita Handicap as part of the series, the ACRS couldn't create a meaningful East vs. West rivalry.

Despite all of these problems, the member tracks of the ACRS had appeared willing to continue the series in 1994, and perhaps even expand it to include other categories of horses besides older distance runners. But last month the ACRS board issued an abrupt news release saying that the series was being abandoned. This decision was a result of racing politics - and also, evidently, of a gross miscalculation.

The participants in the ACRS are also members of the Thoroughbred Racing Associations, the organization that includes most of the country's major tracks. Dave Vance, the head of the TRA, also had been chairman of the ACRS - brought aboard to calm some of the waves that Weisbord had stirred up.

The TRA has never been known as a particularly innovative or effective organization. But it thought it could stage a national racing series without the involvement of Weisbord and his ACRS. Vance was quoted as saying that the TRA tracks were "exploring other options which follow the same basic concept of the ACRS but expand its horizons."

That option was supposedly a venture with ABC to telecast more than 20 major stakes events in a format that would lend itself to a national wager. Track executives thought the deal was set when they terminated the ACRS. But now it appears that there is no such deal.

ABC might have been miffed when the Breeders' Cup extended its contract with NBC: Why should ABC telecast all of these stakes races that are a preamble to the championship event on another network? Whatever the reason, the ACRS is dead, and at this moment the industry has nothing with which to replace it.

What is so worrisome about the ACRS's history is that it shows how poorly horse racing functions as an industry. Track owners are forever talking about the need for industry-wide initiatives, and there's a lot of talk within the sport nowadays about the need for a national commissioner. But the ACRS demonstrated that many tracks weren't willing to make small sacrifices or to suppress petty animosities for the sake of their common good.

For Weisbord, it's been a disillusioning experience. "There's a lot more hypocrisy in this business," he said, "than there is mutual support."

Weisbord has spent his life in horse racing. He revolutionized the breeding business with his creation of the Matchmaker Sales Co., selling shares in stallions by auction. He helped revive the Pimlico Special and conceived Laurel's International Turf Festival when he worked with the late Frank De Francis. He owned the champion sprinter Safely Kept. He loves the sport. But he's discouraged.

"The last few years have worn me out," he said. "I'm going to hang out my shingle in public relations and marketing and try to wean myself out of this business. I'd love to stay involved in racing, but I think this is not a business that I'd want to put all my eggs into."