It was as if the slot machines were hungry.
Kathy Hanaman, a happy-go-lucky 45-year-old woman in an iridescent purple blazer, was feeding them as fast as she could, her fat golden tokens dropping one after another into the machines and then passing into the financial belly of the Grand Victoria Casino.
On a recent “cruise” of a few hundred yards up the Fox River in Elgin, Hanaman’s feet lay across the neighboring stool so she could command two slots at once.
A bucket of about 100 shimmering tokens-each worth $5-was perched like movie popcorn on her lap.
Two more disappeared, plunk, plunk.
To understand something fundamental about the recent debate over casino gambling and horse racing, listen to Kathy Hanaman as those tokens slip from her fingers into the bright and noisy machines before her:
“I used to go to the track all the time,” she says-plunk, plunk-as her eyes fix on the blurred spin of cherries, bars and numbers.
“It’s borrrring,” she says, drawing out the word like a child kept indoors on a rainy day. “I have to work there. I have to depend on an animal. Here, all I have to do is read (the slot display).
“And I can’t win there what I can win in a pop here. In a pop!”
In 10 minutes, her $500 bucket of tokens is empty.
As Richard Duchossois, owner of Arlington International Racecourse, plays out his end game-which, he says, is intended to find a way to have horse racing and casino gambling co-exist in Illinois-he faces the insurmountable fact that many 1990s gamblers find casinos more attractive than tracks.
Like books succumbing to television sets and letter writing yielding to telephones, horse racing-a vestige of an agricultural society-is finding that the bells and whistles, lights and action of the electronic age are taking its place in society’s fabric.
“This is instant gratification. Bam! You know if you win,” said Guy Chipparoni, a spokesman for the Elgin casino, as he stood aboard the flashy boat. “With horse racing, you have to wait 20 minutes between races, then you have to wait for the race.”
Florence Rosenthal, a slight, 69-year-old retiree, clutches at what she believes is a passing age. She’s there at the racetrack at least three times a week, supplementing her income, she says.
“I can’t imagine wasting so much time pulling the handle of a slot machine-it’s like you’re some kind of vegetable,” Rosenthal said between races recently at Hawthorne Race Course in Cicero. “It’s an ugly thought.”
To her, betting isn’t dumb luck, it isn’t tossing your destiny in with the tumbling dice or the dropping roulette ball. It’s using reason, honing one’s hunches. It’s weighing the horse’s recent record, its lineage, its jockey, the weather, even the amount and look of the lather that foams up beneath a horse’s tail as it warms up-and putting money on it.
“Every race you follow gives you more experience and knowledge for picking your next race,” she said. “If you win, it’s money in your pocket. But it’s also an affirmation that your hunches or method for picking a winning horse is working that day.”
And she sees it all waning, fading like a horse without the wind or the heart to finish.
“For every old-timer like me that dies off, there’s nobody coming in to reinvigorate the sport,” she said. “You can’t keep a sport going if that continues.”
“The adrenaline-pumping types of gambling are gradually overtaking the more cerebral types like horse racing,” said Bill Eadington, professor of economics and director of the Institute for the Study of Gambling and Commercial Gaming at the University of Nevada-Reno.
In the last 15 years, the amount bet on horse races nationally has decreased, while gross revenues for casino gambling doubled.
“There’s a relationship there,” Eadington said.
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“Horse track bettors are more cerebral; it’s a different type of gambler. He pits his own knowledge against the knowledge of everyone else who has bet on a given race.”
This is not to say that horse bettors are bookish. In fact, one woman betting at Hawthorne on a recent afternoon remarked that, to her, the crowd looked similar to what one might find at Cook County Jail.
“People talk a lot about bringing in young people with families, but it’s not a friendly place for them,” said John Strickler, a 26-year-old, $2 bettor at Hawthorne. “There’s a lot of horse betters who are weirdos, and they’re not the kinds of people you would want to have around your kids.”
Nevertheless, there is a nearly literary tradition in horse racing that the slots could never rival. The stories of the great horses-the Exterminators, the John Henrys, the Man O’ Wars, the Seabiscuits and the Secretariats-rival any of the great stories of ballplayers.
But who today has time for all that?
“Racing comes out of an agrarian culture, out of the county fairs, where wagering went along with it,” said Eadington. “In the 20th Century we are far less agrarian, and our link to horses and farm animals is just that much more removed. We don’t grow up on farm ranches, and the linkage of horse racing has declined.”
Robert Herman, an urban sociologist who wrote a book about gambling two decades ago, said his studies showed bettors at the track put tremendous thought into their wagers.
“As far as I could see, the men at the racetrack were working very, very hard,” said Herman, a professor at Pomona College in Claremont, Calif. “If I could get my students to work that hard, they’d graduate in 2 1/2 years.”
On the other hand, “casino gambling is very much more conceding to luck, letting Lady Luck rule the day,” Herman said.
Casinos also have made a science of heightening the gambling experience to make it more exciting. Winning becomes a public event, something noisy and spotlit. The air in a riverboat casino is filled not just with smoke, but also with the ringing jackpot clatter of coins tumbling out of machines, tokens falling into thin metal tins that amplify, rather than deaden the sound.
“Watch all the heads turn around,” said one 76-year-old gambler aboard the Grand Victoria as his slot machine noisily disgorged a stream of golden tokens. “Every time you do that, they look. `Look at the winner!’ “
But his face looked sour, not happy. The slot machine, he explained, was just giving him change. He had put a $100 bill into it, and the machine changes cash for tokens the same way it makes winners, by spitting them into the tins.
“They make it so I look like a winner,” he said. “I’ve been on the boat 15 minutes, and I’m down $300.”
He comes to the casinos, he said, because his wife has Alzheimer’s disease, and he likes to be out of the house all day while she is cared for. The horse track, however, is not someplace he would go to kill time.
“I don’t know anything about the horses,” said the man, a retired Niles businessman who asked that his name not be printed. “You’ve got to know something to win. It’s like going to college.”
That kind of thinking makes horse bettors like Nick Katsis, 68, of La Grange, scoff. He’s been a student of the track for 50 years and finds casinos distasteful.
“These are mindless people,” Katsis said. “I’m sorry, when you sit down at a table and everything is happening without your control, you don’t develop skill.
“I think casinos appeal to the younger people with all the dollars. Hey, it’s hard to learn how to bet on the horses. It’s much easier to learn the casino games. They go to the casinos and get treated like kings.
“They come to the track,” he said, “and there’s nothing that really appeals to them.”