Last stop Wonderland, continued

by Chris Wright

TRACK MEAT: before a race, dogs are weighed, probed, appraised, and weighed again. "We keep track of everything," says a Wonderland employee. "Everything has to add up."

A report put out last year by the Massachusetts State Racing Commission reveals how dire the situation is: between 1998 and 1999, revenues at Wonderland plunged nearly 21 percent. At this rate, it is doubtful that the track can survive much longer.

And if dwindling revenues don't put Wonderland out of business, animal activists may. In November, Massachusetts voters will be presented with a ballot question, drafted by a grassroots anti-greyhound-racing organization called Grey2K, that will decide whether dog racing in the state will be banned outright (see "Dog Days," above).

"I saw a great business venture," Sarkis says, running his hands down his face. "It was the biggest mistake I ever made."

If Sarkis made a mistake, it was understandable. Owning a racetrack in the Bay State used to be a license to print money. And greyhound tracks were the most lucrative of the lot. The sport as we know it began in 1919, when a man named O.P. Smith opened a track in California. By the mid 1920s, dog tracks were springing up all over the country, and when Wonderland opened in 1935 on the site of Revere's old Wonderland Amusement Park, dog racing had become something of a national obsession.

Although Florida laid claim to being the state for greyhound racing, Wonderland soon established itself as one of the country's most prestigious venues. The top dogs -- Rural Rube, Rinaker, Rock A Dee -- all raced at Wonderland. In 1945, 22,607 people showed up to watch on a single night.

Being the only dog track in the Northeast certainly didn't hurt, and neither did the track's location in the thick of Revere's working-class neighborhoods. Greyhound racing has always been at its core a blue-collar pursuit. And even more than horse racing, it has always had a faint whiff of organized crime about it.

OLD HANDS: between them, Gary "the Gambler" Dascoli (top) and racing judge Herb Brenner (bottom) have racked up 80 years at the track. Wonderland's closing, says Dascoli, would be "like an old friend dying."

But there was glamour in those early years. A well-worn story tells of a 1939 banquet held at the Copley Plaza hotel to honor Rural Rube, widely held to be the sport's greatest runner. The guest of honor -- the dog -- sat at the head table and received a standing ovation from 1500 black-tie guests.

Even when it lost its New England greyhound monopoly with the opening of Raynham park in 1940, Wonderland continued to do a roaring trade. By the time Sarkis bought it in 1977, Wonderland must have seemed like a sure bet. In 1981, the track recorded its first million-dollar handle (the amount bet at a track in a single night), a feat it was to repeat four times in the course of the decade.

"I used to love walking through there," Sarkis says. "Some of the best times of my life would be over there on the big nights, the million-dollar handles. It was great. It was a lot of fun."

All that, however, changed in 1992, when Connecticut's Mashantucket Pequot tribe opened Foxwoods. "The month the Indians opened a casino in Connecticut," Sarkis says, "the bottom fell out of the greyhound industry."

In 1993, the Massachusetts state legislature responded to the crisis by legalizing simulcast broadcasting, which allows patrons of one track to bet on races at another. That measure provided some relief, and over the course of the decade, Sarkis continued to sink millions of dollars into sprucing up Wonderland's facilities. "We rebuilt it from one end to the other," he says.

The pride of the new park is its grandstand, a gleaming, glass-fronted edifice that was meant to usher in a new era in Wonderland's history. It ushered in a new era all right, only not the kind that Sarkis had bargained for. In 1990, 1.25 million visitors attended Wonderland; last year, only about 350,000 people showed up. In the same period, Wonderland's annual handle dropped from nearly $200 million to about half that. Today, Sarkis's grandstand is silent and dark. "It's sad," he says. "You walk through there now and it's like an old carnival that's closed down. It's creepy."

The state racing commission's 1999 report shows that Wonderland is not the only track affected by the slump. Between 1998 and 1999, revenues at Suffolk Downs horse track dropped 36 percent, while revenues at the Raynham-Taunton dog track fell 16.5 percent. The Plainridge harness track, which opened in 1999, netted a paltry $422,271 in its first year.

"This is a very deep crisis," says State Representative Daniel Bosley, who for four years has headed a government committee on racing. "Right now the tracks are trying to divide up one product, and I'm not sure there's enough product to go around. This may be something that has just run its cycle."

Nonetheless, last year Bosley's committee set out to draft a bill to save -- or at least shore up -- the state's racing industry. There were plenty of goodies on offer: legalized phone-account wagering, increased purses, and the possibility of a scratch ticket linked to the state lottery. But a fight over simulcasting -- the very thing that Sarkis thought would seal his good fortune -- proved to be a sticking point.

As the state's only thoroughbred track, Suffolk Downs effectively holds the thoroughbred franchise in Massachusetts. Therefore, to simulcast thoroughbred racing -- the most popular type -- Plainridge, Wonderland, and Raynham-Taunton must pay Suffolk a cut of their simulcast handle. This has been a sore spot for years, particularly between Wonderland and Suffolk, which are located less than three miles apart.

If Suffolk owner John Hall had his way, Wonderland wouldn't have any simulcasting rights at all. "Why would I want to expose my product a mile away?" he says. Sarkis, meanwhile, believes simulcasting should be completely deregulated -- i.e., free. "Throw it open, let everybody simulcast," he says. In the end, the racing bill died in committee because Sarkis and Hall could not agree on how much Wonderland would pay Suffolk for simulcast rights.

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Chris Wright can be reached at cwright[a]phx.com.