Balmoral Park and Maywood Park are sister tracks with virtually no common identifying characteristics. Balmoral has gone in and out of style, but now is back in.
Maywood has been somewhat of a trendstetter, introducing open-stretch racing to North America and becoming one the first tracks in Chicago to eliminate the hub-rail. Nevertheless many consider it old-fashioned.
Maywood has the distinction of being the track that introduced pari-mutuel betting on harness racing in Illinois in 1946. In the 1940s its half-mile track was considered the prototype. Maywood’s first president, Robert Johnson, came from New York where six years earlier he had been one of the pioneers who started pari-mutuel harness racing in the United States at Roosevelt Raceway on Long Island.
In contrast to the sprawling thoroughbred tracks, where aficionados needed binoculars to stay on top of the action, Roosevelt and Maywood gave fans an up-close look at what was happening on the track and the horses passed in front of the stands three times–at the start, halfway and at the finish.
“People loved seeing the horses up close,” said standardbred historian Stan Bergstein, executive vice president of Harness Tracks of America. “I get amused when people say the demise of Yonkers and Roosevelt Raceway is because they were half-mile tracks. Those same half-mile tracks used to put 24,000 people in the seats and have nights when those people bet more than $2 million on track.
“I know horsemen prefer five-eighth-mile tracks to half-mile tracks and mile tracks to five-eighth-mile tracks. And, if they could race a mile on the straightaway at Daytona Beach they’d like that best of all.”
Like horsemen, most serious horseplayers prefer a spacious mile track such as Balmoral and The Meadowlands to the cozy confines of Maywood. Luck is a bigger factor at the half-mile track because the horses can get in trouble on the turns and have only a short homestretch to surmount problems encountered earlier in the race. There’s also a greater risk of injury.
“I have a few horses that fit Maywood but I don’t like the track,” said the Chicago circuit’s top trainer, Joe Anderson. “The track takes its toll.”
But Tony Morgan, the winningest driver in North America in each of the last three years, prefers Maywood.
“I started out driving on half-milers and I’m more at home at Maywood,” Morgan said. “It’s more competitive, and I feel that puts more of a premium on my driving ability.”
The departure of Sportsman’s Park and Hawthorne Race Course from the standardbred scene has left Maywood as the only harness track in Cook County.
Both locally and nationally, crowds and betting are a far cry from what they were during harness racing’s heyday in the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s. The attendance and handle also have declined at thoroughbred tracks, but the drop hasn’t been as pronounced as in the sulky sport.
“Because harness racing is at night and because we’ve traditionally had a working-class audience we’ve been harder hit by competition from other gambling, other sports and other forms of entertainment, said Billy Johnston, who heads Maywood and Balmoral.
“That’s why we had to build off-track betting parlors,” he said. “People want their entertainment close to home.”
