Clear Choice Best of Poor Field in Swaps : McCarron Rides Five Winners as Hollywood Park Meeting Ends

The Swaps Stakes, which was run Monday as Hollywood Park closed its 67-day summer meeting, had much in common with the struggling Inglewood track.

Both the race and the track have seen better days.

The Swaps, a major race with a $245,000 purse, drew an undistinguished collection of nine 3-year-olds and was won by Clear Choice, the only stakes winner of any significance in the field.

On hand to watch Clear Choice win were only 22,292 fans, 10,000 fewer than attended last year and the smallest closing-day crowd in track history. The previous low for a season-ending crowd was 25,005 in 1939, Hollywood Park’s second year of operation.

Those patrons who stayed away, however, missed an outstanding riding performance by Chris McCarron, who won five races out of six mounts.

McCarron won four straight races, the second through the fifth, and finished out of the money in the seventh before outdueling Bill Shoemaker in the final strides of the Swaps to get Clear Choice to the wire a head in front of Southern Halo.

McCarron won three of the season’s last four stakes, having already scored with Magnificent Lindy in the Vanity Handicap and Captain Valid in the Hollywood Juvenile Championship. The Hollywood Gold Cup, which he’s never won, continued to elude McCarron, however, as favored Precisionist ran third behind Super Diamond and Alphabatim on Sunday.

Gary Stevens, shut out Monday, still won the riding title over McCarron, 80-73. McCarron was called out of town for several stakes assignments during the meeting and wound up riding in 133 fewer races than Stevens. Stevens and McCarron also ran 1-2 at the Santa Anita meeting that preceded Hollywood’s.

Hollywood Park finished with daily averages of 22,595 in attendance and $5 million in handle. Attendance was down 12.2% from last year, and betting was off 8.5%.

This year’s Santa Anita season showed declines of 11.2% in attendance and 3.8% in handle. Santa Anita’s averages were 29,000 and $5.7 million.

A couple of days ago, Marje Everett, the track’s chief executive officer, and Neil Papiano, Hollywood’s chief legal counsel, discussed the poor season.

“Racing is a sport of peaks and valleys,” Papiano said. “The lottery has jolted us back into a valley.”

Since the state lottery began last October, no Southern California track has finished a season that surpassed the previous year in business.

“This has been a difficult season,” Everett said. “But everybody in racing seems to be having difficult seasons. Tracks in the East are off by 26% in handle in the last two years. At least our business is down less than that.”

Big days at Hollywood Park never materialized. There was one 51,000-plus crowd, but days that the track usually counted on to boost business were disappointing. For example:

--The Fourth of July, despite falling on a Friday, which appeared to be a choice day, accounted for a crowd of 36,000, third-smallest in Hollywood history for that holiday.

--On Sunday, the day of the Hollywood Gold Cup, one of the track’s premier races, the crowd was 39,000, the smallest for that stake since 1977.

--On Monday, the handle was $5.3 million, smallest for a closing day since 1976 and almost $2 million under last year’s betting total.

“Things that worked in the past are not working now,” Everett said. “We wouldn’t need to promote if we had horses like John Henry, Conquistador Cielo and Spectacular Bid. Mistakes have been made, and I assume the responsibilities for those mistakes. But we have the finest organization and the finest facility in the country, and I still have a lot of confidence in California racing.”

Everett was able to keep one star, Preakness winner Snow Chief, at Hollywood Park by raising the Silver Screen Handicap purse from $100,000 to $400,000. Snow Chief was upset by a more recent star, the brilliant filly Melair, but Melair’s owners didn’t decide until the last minute to run in the race, preventing Hollywood from promoting the matchup with the colt.

Several top horses, led by John Henry and Ferdinand, were stabled at Hollywood Park but didn’t run there. John Henry, retired since 1984, is attempting a comeback as an 11-year-old but is still weeks away from his first race. Ferdinand, after winning the Kentucky Derby and finishing in the money in both the Preakness and Belmont Stakes, got a rest during the Hollywood meeting.

The purse for the Swaps would have been increased to $400,000 if any of the winners of the Triple Crown races had run. Instead, the field had only three stakes winners, one maiden and two starters who had only beaten maidens.

Still, Clear Choice and Southern Halo, both trained by Wayne Lukas, made it a thrilling finish, and Jota, rallying on the outside, also appeared to have a chance as the three colts neared the wire.

“Man, my horse was fighting,” McCarron said of Clear Choice, “but so was Shoe’s horse. My horse really didn’t want to get by him. I got up head and head with Shoe, and I was surprised (we passed him).”

Clear Choice, paying $7.20 to win as the second favorite behind Southern Halo, is owned by Gene and Joyce Klein.

The $475,000 yearling purchase has been inconsistent. He won the Withers at Aqueduct in May, then finished last in the Preakness 10 days later. After a couple of seconds, Clear Choice ran in the St. Paul Derby at Canterbury Downs and finished last in a 12-horse field, 36 lengths behind Cheapskate, who won the race.

Clear Choice gave McCarron his seventh stakes win of the meeting as he finished one behind Laffit Pincay in that department. McCarron’s five-win day Monday was his third of the season.

John Gosden was the leading trainer all the way around with 26 wins, eight of them coming in stakes. Neither Gosden nor Lukas was at Hollywood Monday. They were back at Keeneland’s yearling auction with some of their rich clients, hoping to find a few stakes winners for the tomorrows.

Horse Racing Notes Paul Deats, a member of the California Horse Racing Board, takes exception to remarks made by Marje Everett, who suggested that one of Hollywood Park’s problems at the end of the season was competition from the Orange County Fair at Los Alamitos. Everett said that both the quality and quantity of the track’s fields were affected by the fair, which ended a two-week run Monday night. The fair had run its meeting in the fall until this year. “On Sunday, Hollywood Park had 68 horses entered, compared to 65 on the same day a year ago,” said Deats, who chaired the committee that allocated all of the state’s 1986 racing dates. “On closing day last year, 61 were entered, and this year, Hollywood had 65, so it looks to me that there isn’t much difference, even though the fair is there this year. How about the first 12 weeks at Hollywood, before the fair started?

“It seems to me that there were also a lot of fields with only six or seven horses then. As for quality, I don’t think you can make a valid comparison. Hollywood Park runs maiden races for $28,000 to $32,000 claiming prices, while the fair has horses in the $10,000-$12,000 range. The kind of horses that run at the fair are with trainers looking for cheaper races that might produce a win.” Deats said that Hollywood Park didn’t object to the overlapping Orange County Fair dates at the time they were presented. “The racing board is open-minded and tries to treat all track operators the same,” he said. “To harm one of them for the benefit of another would be defeating our purpose. My committee worked long and hard in trying to put together the best schedule possible.” Orange County Fair officials had requested summer dates this year because business had fallen off appreciably last fall.

Alfred Shelhamer, who spent part of the Hollywood Park season in the hospital, retired as a steward after Monday’s program. Shelhamer, 67, rode for 11 years, until 1945, and has been a racing official since 1946. He still has the film of his last ride at Santa Anita, in which he was seriously injured in a spill. The film shows Johnny Adams, the Hall of Fame jockey, pulling a horse off Shelhamer’s prone body. Shelhamer believes that he might have been crushed by the horse if it hadn’t been for Adams’ alert action.