Harnessing the past at Rosecroft

The roar of the crowd is reduced to the screaming of a handful of children. Grandstand seats sport undisturbed layers of grime. Harness drivers coming down the stretch don’t bother to look for fans.

A weeknight at Rosecroft Raceway has the feel of bygone America. It is a place akin to an unused, weed-choked drive-in theater or an abandoned roller rink.

“There’s nobody,” driver Nick Callahan says with a wince. “That bothers you, but people want that quick return like Keno. They don’t want to wait 20 minutes [between races].”

A group controlled by the family of Baltimore Orioles owner Peter Angelos received approval from Rosecroft’s owners yesterday to buy the 64-year-old harness track in Oxon Hill.

The purchase is expected to aid a besieged movement to gain legislative approval for slot machines at Maryland tracks — a move that would help revive Rosecroft’s fortunes.

The raceway once drew large crowds. Though it was considered a “working man’s track,” it still managed to project a modest aura of glamour.

Country music stars Porter Wagoner and Dolly Parton performed at county fairs there.

Elizabeth Taylor once dined at the track. While she ate, track publicist Charlie Brotman bet for her on every horse in every race.

The dining room at Rosecroft was once one of the largest in the area, and it drew overflow crowds looking to place a few bets and enjoy crab cakes tastier than any served at a waterfront restaurant.

Crowds were large enough that police routinely had to direct traffic as the track emptied after the final race.

But other entertainment options steadily eroded Rosecroft’s fan base. Night football games devastated the track’s Sunday card, its second busiest of the week. Cable TV, air conditioning and the Internet provided further hits.

Maryland harness racing has had its ups and downs since William Miller converted a pasture into the Rosecroft track in 1939, but rarely has it fallen as low as it is now.

The combination of small purses, poor attendance, inadequate marketing and competing entertainment has caused the sport to fade.

And yet, rarely has the future been so promising.

“We’re in a lull,” says Rosecroft racing superintendent Danny Herbst, whose family has worked at Rosecroft since 1939. “There’s no promises. We’re just hoping something good comes out of the sale.”

Harness always has been the poor relation to thoroughbred racing.

That gap narrowed briefly in the early 1980s when Frank De Francis revitalized Freestate Raceway in Laurel, but he jumpedto the flat tracks in 1985, and popularity for the trotters quickly receded. Freestate eventually was turned into a used-car lot.

Rosecroft, meanwhile, had a series of owners — from local real estate developer Mark Vogel to California tycoon Fred Weisman to a local horsemen’s group — who were unable to make year-round racing work. The track has declined steadily to the brink of obscurity.

The stable area that once housed 1,200 horses now has 700 stalls, and less than half of those are needed. Most horsemen ship from the Eastern Shore, where they can also race at Delaware, Virginia and Pennsylvania tracks. Top sire stakes have fallen from $60,000 to $40,000. Modest stakes dropped 50 percent to $3,000.

“Everything is down because of the Delaware competition,” racing secretary Rick Bonekemper says. “We have short fields, and racing is not as good as it once was. I don’t look at the numbers anymore. It’s not good.”

Delaware racing thrived as Maryland’s declined. Slots transformed small Delaware tracks into leaders in the Mid-Atlantic that could offer purses triple the size of those in Maryland. Jim Morand dominated Rosecroft in the 1980s as a driver but left Maryland for better prospects in Delaware.

“The money was the big difference,” Morand says. “At Dover Downs, you can race six nights a week, 15 races a night for six months. They should have slots in Maryland. Look at the money that’s gone to Delaware. Go to the parking lot and you’ll see I don’t know how many Maryland license plates. I hated to leave here, but I have a family to raise.”

Family is big on the harness scene. It’s not unusual for siblings and cousins to compete regularly. Tradition is a big lure, one that keeps many second and third generations in the sport.

“I could have gone to college and made a lot more money,” says driver Jonathan Roberts, whose father, Bib, is a top East Coast driver. “But I wouldn’t enjoy it as much as I do racing.”

Purses have been slashed so much a winning driver on some nights might earn only $50 and a fourth-place finisher $9. Rosecroft runs three nights a week in the summer — half as many as a decade ago — and two evenings in the winter. Fields are smaller. Stakes races are largely gone. The nation’s best horses and drivers no longer come to Rosecroft.

“A lot of [horsemen] are out of business and don’t know it,” Herbst says. “The last four, five years have been really tough on the small person. The majority of small people aren’t depending on harness racing for a living. It would be tough to make a living here.”

Says Callahan: “You have to love it. If you love it, you can do well, and if you do it just for the business, you’re going to struggle.”

Bonekemper knows horsemen might make more money elsewhere, but they return to Rosecroft hoping slots eventually will arrive and reward their loyalty.

“We’re very fortunate to have a hard-core following sticking it out, hoping to get better,” Bonekemper says.

But for how long? Herbst calls Rosecroft’s five-eighths mile track a “wicked piece of dirt,” one of the better surfaces at Eastern tracks. But the horses that run on that surface no longer are of the quality of the Mack Lobells or Go Get Losts who once ran here.

Mediocre horses and short fields mean less wagering. Rosecroft averaged more than $600,000 wagered on its own cards each night in the mid-1980s, when harness racing peaked.

Now the track might handle $600,000, but 90 percent of that comes from simulcasting out-of-town races. Win pools sometimes draw only $1,500, allowing even a modest wager to move the tote board dramatically.

Fans watch a bank of 12 TVs near the finish line, TVs that don’t include the local races. Mutuel clerks who once ran the downstairs clubhouse have given way to self-serve machines and state lottery cards.

Preztels and fried chicken pass for grandstand dining these days. The tiered clubhouse restaurant, with its panoramic glass wall that’s perfect for watching races, now might seat 60 people on weeknights.

Al and Estelle Mindel are two of the few regulars in the dining room. The Alexandria couple are Rosecroft’s leading horse owners: They have nine training. They love playing exactas and triples, enjoying another evening at their “second home” the past 20 years.

The Mindels wonder what happened to those nights when crowds of more than 5,000 would make heading to the betting windows an adventure rather than a leisurely stroll.

“We’ve been holding on the last several years hoping the slots come in and purses go up,” Al Mindel said.

The hope is slots will be approved and revitalize Rosecroft, just as they did Charles Town Races in West Virginia and Delaware Park — tracks that went from shuttered to slot palaces in the past decade.

If not, the racing oval will join the drive-in as an empty reminder of the past.