Quote:
Originally Posted by joeydb
It hits me in the gut to see a brainless game beating our game. It's an anti-merit situation.
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I believe it all gets back to the takeout. It's my opinion that horse racing should - and possibly would - be more popular than the NFL and MLB had takeout steadily been reduced from 10% starting levels as opposed to steadily increased.
Betting on the sport would be absolutely huge beyond belief. The lead to Sports Center many nights would be a horse racing story - now, it's a rareity if an elite race gets covered on ESPN .. and if the College Vollyball game goes to overtime you could miss half of the coverage.
Horse racing is only an essential to life for a few truly crazy crazies like myself. All of the suckers, hunch players, name betters have been seduced away by lotto's and slots. And as the pair-mutual competiton has become tougher the takeout has risen well beyond oppressive levels.
What happens to countries when they oppress her people? What happened in Rome when the bread and circuses ran out? What happened in France when they were told to eat cake by a clueless aristocrat? What happened in Athens when a handful of oligarchs marched them off a cliff in the Peloponesian War? What's happening in Egypt right now?
Because horse racing is not an essential - and never will be - instead of a revolt you just see the sport has slowly slid more and more to irrelevance with the general public for all but one or two days a year.
The remarkable thing is that no one gains from raising takeout. Progress is stunted and everyone loses from it. It honestly makes no sense at all to me. The part I never understood was why it went up in the first place. That's why I found the following quote from the 1950's so interesting ...
