6/27 ATR: Josie Carroll, Lou Raffetto and more.. ("Best Of" Tues.)

Originally Posted by Kasept

Coach,

I wouldn't condemn Raffetto for offering answers to the questions I asked him. He starts in the job Friday... As to his hire, Raffetto's background is almost entirely East Coast based. I think the California people reached to him as someone who would bring at least a different regional perspective.

Recognize that the issue with bringing in 'fresh blood'' from outside the industry is getting them up to speed with the intricacies of the job(s).

Yeah and those intricacies are primarily (at least in Kentucky) kissing ass up the nepotistic ladder.

[Calzone Lord]

I'll tell you what else is very annoying to me after a browse of another board - the type of stuff coming from the HANA folks.

Yes, handle is down over $200 million in just 6 months in California since the takeout hike - and the majority of that decline has come on weekends when field sizes are better... big deal.

That takeout hike is MUCH more devastating in the long term than the short term.

$207 million lost in handle over 6 months - is just a squirt of piss in a very big bucket. No big deal compared to the massive self inflicted setback of making the game more of a suckers game for new bettors than it was six months ago.

There was a time when baseball, boxing, and horse racing were the three big sports in this country. And coincidentally, I'm sure, some of the best horse bettors of that time made the equivlent of tens of millions of dollars in their best years, some of them dated well, and others were tabloid figures that newspapers obsessed over.

Go and look for them now! They don't exsist anymore.

A good portion of society today views horse bettors as lonely senior citizens or degenerate scumbags. ESPN tries to push the sport - and one of their guys like Mike Wilbon (Wilbon's own father loved horse racing and he was strongly exposed to it as a kid) can justifiably sh!t all over the sport. Do you think actresses still want to fucl< horse bettors?

In so many ways, the sport is MILES better now than it was a hundred years ago ... but because they've reduced it to a suckers game - it suffers.