The Belmont Stakes is among those sports events that once commanded an awful lot of attention. But the horse racing industry, be it the thoroughbreds or the harness horses, just isn’t as significant to the American sports culture as it was in, say, 1950. A spectator sport from a bygone era, the industry has for decades seen a steady decline in interest and is now dependent on revenue from video lottery terminals or slot machines for its survival. In New York, harness racing was saved from extinction by the installation of slots at Yonkers, Monticello, Tioga, and other tracks.

Essentially, horse racing has become largely dependent on a one-armed bandit to keep it going.

Thoroughbred racing has suffered a direr fate. The New York Racing Association is in the middle of bankruptcy proceedings, and has appealed to the state legislature and Governor Spitzer to pass legislation that would bring slot machines into Belmont, Aqueduct, and Saratoga racetracks as a way to increase revenue flow into the industry.

And New York is not alone in trying to save horse racing by introducing slots at the tracks. West Virginia, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Florida, and other states have followed suit. In Maryland, the owners of Pimlico Racecourse and Laurel Park have continued to lobby both statehouses and the governor to approve slots for their tracks without success.

In an interview with this columnist before the Art Rooney Memorial Pace on Saturday, the president of Yonkers Raceway, Tim Rooney, said that the old hilltop track off the New York State Thruway would be a shopping mall today, if not for what he refers to as “the machines.” In the same vein, the president of the New York Racing Association, Charles Hayward, said he believes the slots would be a boon to Belmont, Aqueduct, and Saratoga; with added revenue would come bigger purses, better horses, and perhaps substantial facility upgrades.

Still, the presence of the machines at the racetracks may not necessarily deliver more horseplayers. Gamblers seem to prefer the slot machines to the minutiae of researching and picking horses, according to Rooney.

When asked if he anticipated the slots would lure new customers, Rooney told The New York Sun, “No, no, I do not see anymore people. I think eventually we will get some people back. But in all of our projections [at Yonkers], we didn’t think we were going to have a tremendous influx of people.

“We are not going to have the 30,000–35,000 [person] attendance for a race like this, Rooney added, referring to the $1 million Art Rooney Memorial Pace last Saturday, which would likely have drawn such a crowd 30 years ago, in the days prior to Off Track Betting.

“But I think there will be more owners involved,” Rooney said optimistically. “They are going to be buying and raising horses in New York and they are going to be racing here, and with the purses going up, you are going to have more owners who want to race for the purses we have now.”

The decline of horse racing was brought on by numerous factors, including the emergence of state sponsored lotteries, OTB, and American Indian casinos. The ease with which one could now place a bet had a significant impact on horse racing.

“The first thing was OTB came in,” Rooney said. “And OTB took 30-some percent of the business from us and they were giving them the product in the neighborhoods. There was always a certain element of people who didn’t care about the sport — they cared about the gambling aspect of it…then we started televising our racing into the parlors, so it made it easier for them to stay in the city than [come] out here [to Yonkers], so our attendance went down even further. Then you add the other types of gambling: Atlantic City came in, the lottery came in.

“People want to win that $200 million prize. I think the Indian casinos up in Connecticut and having Atlantic City open, it took a lot of business off of the racing industry,” Rooney added. “It’s a faster game and you don’t have to get that racing form, and handicap what the speed rating was, if it was a muddy track, and what jockey or driver switches there are. It’s a little more complicated than getting on one of these machines, putting $50 in it, and just pressing buttons.”

Yet Rooney acknowledges that the slot machine dollars have stabilized the horse racing industry and that parts of it can be rebuilt.

“It’s being revitalized. From a horseman’s standpoint, it doesn’t make any difference what the source of income is,” Rooney explained. “If the source of income is going up in leaps and bounds, and the breeding programs are going up in leaps and bounds, it’s revitalizing the breeding industry, the people in the farms, the people buying horses and racing horses.”

The difficulty is that even in the face of so much progress, the new developments cannot guarantee that lapsed racing fans will return to the sport. Rooney personally recalled the days when Aqueduct would seat 40,000 on Saturdays. Today, the NYRA tracks see far fewer attendees unless a major event like the Belmont Stakes is underway.

Like Rooney, Hayward, who heads the NYRA, believes slots would have a “material impact” on his organization. “The projections from Aqueduct would yield somewhere around $40 million a year to purses,” Hayward told The Sun yesterday at the Belmont Draw.

But it may take a while before slots find a home at the NYRA tracks. Meanwhile, Hayward and the NYRA must continue to draw fans to the tracks, a task that has grown increasingly difficult across the country.

“Racing on big event days is increasing and increasing its visibility,” Hayward said. “But I think in terms of the big picture, year to year, total wagering referred to as “handle,” handle has been growing about 1% a year, which when you take in inflation, [has gone] down slightly.

“People talk about going back to the glory days,” Hayward said of the years during which thoroughbred racing enjoyed a monopoly on legalized wagering. “I think there will be a strong place for racing, there is still a tremendous amount of enthusiasm for the sport.”

If Hayward has his way, the state will intervene and require OTB and the tracks to combine their efforts.

Hayward, who can at least expect a packed house at Belmont on Saturday, harbors one fear: Roger Clemens. “I was a little disappointed to hear that Mr. Clemens might be coming back [to pitch for the Yankees] on Saturday,” he said. “There is no doubt in my mind that people, though they can watch the [baseball] game here at the racetrack, are going to turn some of their attention. So the casual fan, we compete for that fan all the time.”

It is ironical that state-sponsored gambling, which has been such an underlying factor in the waning of the sport of horse racing, has also helped to revitalize business at the track. Only time will tell if horseplayers come along.

evanjweiner@yahoo.com