The 12-hour days, the constant phone calls, the niggling details, the lunch postponed until nearly 4 p.m. and then gulped in his office? Not to mention putting millions of his own dollars into an enterprise which may never return them.
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”You know how many yachts I could have bought with what I`ve spent here?” he asked a visitor. Rhetorically. He has no intention of supplying the answer.
Does a man who has already built an industrial empire, raised a family, amassed a fortune and attained power really have to put up with all of this?
Yes, as a matter of fact, he does. For the reasons he gives, for the reasons his critics give and probably for reasons nobody has given, Richard L. Duchossois needs to go through all the trouble involved in reopening Arlington Park as the rebuilt and (not incidentally) renamed Arlington International Racecourse.
The reasons he gives are, not surprisingly, quite high-minded.
”This country`s been very good to us,” he said, and ”I felt we had an obligation to put something back in.”
Toward that end, Duchossois said, he wants to make Arlington ”a world center for international racing,” which will provide an economic boon to the entire state of Illinois, not just those directly involved in the track but even the farmers who grow the grain the horses eat.
The reasons given by some others, most of whom would rather not be identified, are less complimentary. They see a man who has made a great deal of money, with which he acquired power, which he used to make more money, and they assume that what he wants is more of both.
These two explanations are not mutually exclusive. Duchossois, who makes the claim (unconfirmable, but possible) that Arlington is the beneficiary of
”more private money from one family than any project in the state,” does not deny that he wants to eventually earn a profit from the track. And no one in the racing business, or in the state, doubts that a successful Arlington Park would be good for horse racing and for Illinois, two enterprises which find themselves in some financial difficulty.
”He`s doing an outstanding job of putting it on the highest plane, of really going first cabin,” said Marje Everett, Arlington`s former owner, now the head of Hollywood Park in California.
But while both altruism and avarice may be involved, so, too, are chemistry and creativity, maybe even artistry. The re-creation of the widely
(and accurately) acclaimed racetrack appears to be something Duchossois is determined to do for reasons which go deeper than either society or money. For its owner, Arlington International Racecourse is more than a business, more than a community service. It is a magnum opus. It may even be a compulsion.
Doing things has long been a compulsion for Duchossois, who has not taken a vacation in years.
”Accomplishment is exciting,” he said.
A few months ago, one of his old friends was killed in a car accident, and at the funeral, Duchossois realized that of all his old buddies, he was the only one still working.
”The others were telling the same old stories or talking about the 18-inch putt they made,” he recalled. ”I couldn`t live that way.”
No doubt, he couldn`t. Even at 68, even with some serious heart troubles in his recent past, Duchossois is a bundle of energy. A fast-talking-though soft-talking-nattily dressed, short and trim fellow, Duchossois not only shows no signs of slowing down, he shows every sign of a man who knows he may be running out of time and had best hurry up.
”This could be,” he said, ”my last fling.”
Which may be why he wants to model it after the first one. Duchossois got rich after World War II by taking his father-in-law`s medium-sized rail car company and making it a very big rail car manufacturer. He says, and so do others, that he did it by catering to the customers.
”Our philosophy was go to out and find what the customers wanted,” he said.”
Now Duchossois, already the most important force in horse racing in Illinois, wants to use the same business approach to make Arlington the kind of track which can not only compete with the New York and California tracks but help revitalize thoroughbred racing, a sport with a stagnant and aging base of supporters.
The new park has been designed for the new customer, or, more accurately, for the new customers Duchossois hopes to attract and racing had better attract if it is to prosper. Not the heavy bettor, but the younger newcomer, small children in tow, who wants an afternoon`s enjoyment more than a big payoff. There will be free parking, a picnic area, a variety of restaurants, televised lessons about how racing and betting work and easy access to places where one can watch the horses in the paddock.
In a sense, then, Arlington is the canvas on which Duchossois is painting what he hopes will be his masterpiece, using the same techniques he started with at the Thrall Car Manufacturing Company in the 1940s plus all the skills he has learned in the intervening 40 years. If it`s his ”last fling,” he wants it to be a good one.
So he is going about things with an energy and intensity which both friends and critics call characteristic.
”He is a guy who once he gets hold of something, he really goes to town,” said a public official who has known Duchossois for some years.
And Lucy Reum, a former chairman of the Illinois Racing Board, said of Duchossois: ”He always thinks big, and above all he`s a perfectionist.”
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Such men tend to be self-confident, strong and hard-driving, and therefore not endearing to everyone.
”My contacts with him have been very pleasant and very confidence-building,” said Lawrence Greenberg, a Minnesota businessman who is trying to get into the horse racing world himself (he`s in the process of buying Shakopee Downs near Minneapolis) and who has had some business dealings with Duchossois. ”But he is an insistent kind of a guy. You get to be successful in the business world when you learn not to take no for an answer.”
This disinclination to take no for an answer has earned Duchossois the enmity of some competing horsemen, some present and former employees and some public officials.
”He doesn`t believe in the working man making a living,” said Sam De Pasquale, head of the Boilermakers Union local at Thrall, where workers are trying to win back the wages and benefits they had to ”give back” during the 1982 recession.
And a former employee at the racetrack said many workers there are unhappy, even ”paranoid.”
Distrust between the boss and the union local president is common, as are complaints by former employees. While denying that he is a hard man to work for, Duchossois does concede he`s an exacting boss.
”I have a pace I like to travel at,” he said. ”If you`d like a slower, more leisurely pace, maybe those people would be happier someplace else.”
Despite intensity and persistence, Duchossois has not always prevailed. For all his pride in the new Arlington track, rebuilding it after the 1985 fire was his second choice. What he really wanted to do was build an ”equine center,” complete with hotel, convention center, amusement park and golf course, on 350 acres in northern Lake County.
But first he wanted help from the state, and despite his influence with Gov. James Thompson, he didn`t get enough. Duchossois insists that he ”asked for no special favors for Arlington Park,” that all his requests were for Illinois racing in general. However true that may be technically, everyone in Springfield knew the lawmakers were voting on measures to help Duchossois, and not all of them were pleased.
”He hired a big cadre of lobbyists and publicists and made a big effort,” said a legislative source. ”But he kept wanting more and more. By the end, a lot of members thought it was almost a bait and switch. We`d be in the final passage phase and he would pull the rug out and say it wasn`t enough.”
Duchossois` political effort was both expensive and sophisticated. Though he`s a Republican who used to contribute to Thompson and to former Sen. Charles Percy, he hired the Democratic-connected form of Jasculca-Termin Associates to lobby in the Democratic-controlled Legislature.
Even Senate President Phil Rock (D., Oak Park), an admirer of Duchossois, said the track owner was ”pretty aggressive in asking for a lot more than we thought we could come up with. He wanted the power to override local zoning. It was a straight out power move and a little too much.”
What Duchossois, and the other horse owners, did get was a lower state tax rate on wagering, track-owned off-track betting and the right to negotiate property tax breaks with local officials. Those negotiations are still going on, and Duchossois made sure to tell a recent interviewer that if the local school board insisted on taxing his new facility at its improved market value, he might just ”shut the track down.”
Shut down his obsession? His masterpiece? Not likely. He`ll probably just get his way.