Barry Tompkins: Galloping off into the sunset

Golden Gate Fields, the last surviving horse racing facility in the Bay Area will close at the end of its current racing year — the last remnant of a once-popular sport in these parts that in recent years has been little more than a decaying memory.

The race track also represented all that the Bay Area was. It abounded with memorable and almost cartoon-like miscreants. A throwback to more bawdy days in the City. A bit of the underbelly of life all concentrated within the confines of sprawling grounds that have long since outgrown the scope of their sport.

Damon Runyon surely drew inspiration from the race track for his “Runyonesque” characters in Guys and Dolls. But, Nathan Detroit, Hot Horse Harry, and Nicely-Nicely Jones had nothing on the characters that strode the grounds of Golden Gate Fields over the years.

“Lyin’ Tom” was the first to greet you as you entered the stable gate. “Money Waster” was there to park your car before you entered. “Slaughter House Red” was a press box assistant, and George “The Greek” Andros was a San Francisco night club owner and horse race handicapper who made fortunes in the City and burned through fortunes at the race track.

For this San Francisco kid, horse racing represented a little slice of growing up in an area where hard and fast rules were sometimes only a suggestion. Horse racing thrived in the Bay Area. There were three tracks within 25 miles of one another. Bay Meadows in San Mateo, Tanforan in San Bruno, and Golden Gate Fields in Albany. Tanforan was razed in 1964 to make room for a shopping center. Bay Meadows was deemed an albatross in 2008. RIP Golden Gate Fields in 2023.

My misspent youth was fostered by crawling under the fence at Tanforan to spend my allowance on hoping to hit it big on a 10-to-1 shot in the fifth. We gate crashed into Bay Meadows by slipping by the guards in the barn area. Never did such trivial things as homework get in the way of an after school adventure at the track.

I learned math by figuring out baseball batting averages, and I was taught deductive reasoning by learning how to handicap a horse race. Over the years those two things have helped me more than any Algebra class I ever took.

Golden Gate Fields was once the only place in the Bay Area where you could spend an afternoon in the Turf Club, have lunch and an adult beverage or two, and gamble in a family environment without smoke-filled rooms and one-armed bandits. Or, you could wander the grandstand and hang on the rail, knock back a beer, and be up close and personal with both horse and jockey.

That was then. Now, you can place a bet on any horse race anywhere in the world by tapping an app on your phone. No need to drive, park, and be with the madding crowd. In fact, in the past several years there were not only no madding crowds, there were no crowds at all at Golden Gate Fields.

The back barn area at a race track like Golden Gate Fields is a village all to itself. It’s not just a place of residence for the thousand thoroughbred horses who run at the track.It’s also home to those who walk and bathe the horses, muck the stalls, feed, brush and care for the four-legged denizens of this little village. There’s a general store, a barber shop, communal areas and a restaurant. And it’s about to be a wasteland.

Stronach Group, the owners of Golden Gate Fields, say the reason for the closing is that they are “doubling down” on their racing efforts at two other race tracks which they own, Santa Anita and San Luis Rey. The sad but true fact is, horse racing itself is on the endangered-species list.

Animal Rights groups are loudly applauding the closing of GGF as a victory. And I suppose in its way, it is. But it’s not the reason for the demise of the track.

Developers I’m sure are thinking the site, adjacent to the bay with views of San Francisco, is now prime for new housing. Zoning laws, however, do not currently allow that.

I can vouch for the fact that one of the most spectacular views of the City from the East Bay is out the men’s room window in the Turf Club at Golden Gate Fields. Reminder to self: Don’t hire the architects who designed GGF.

There’s an old adage in horse racing that a mule will never win the Kentucky Derby. What that says is that the sport is all about breeding. The theory is that races at most tracks are running with five or six horse fields as opposed to ten or twelve. The smaller the field, the lesser the payoffs for a small time bettor. By closing Golden Gate, it might make for bigger fields elsewhere, which could mean better payoffs for the betting public. All good – in theory. Ahhh but for that breeding thing. Most of the 1,000 horses stabled here are not of the caliber that can race at Santa Anita.

So where do they go?

Only a handful of the horses stabled at Golden Gate Fields will ship south to fatten the fields at Santa Anita and San Luis Rey. The rest will find new homes at the fairgrounds of Pleasanton and Santa Rosa where they’ll share track space with Appaloosas and quarter horses.

And what of the people in the back barn? Sadly, they could go the way of Lyin’ Tom, Money Waster, Slaughterhouse Red, The Greek — and Golden Gate Fields itself.

When the tote board goes dark on the last day of the current meeting, so does a little chunk of Bay Area history.

Barry Tompkins is a 40-year network television sportscaster and a San Francisco native.  Email him at [email protected].