All Can See a Troubled Sport, None Agree on How to Fix It : Horse racing: Some see cross-town betting and race track card clubs as interlopers. Others see them as salvation.

Listening recently to horse racing people talking about their sport brings back the line that Strother Martin, the prison foreman, used as he throttled Paul Newman in “Cool Hand Luke”: “What we’ve got here is a failure to communicate.”

The only point that the various segments of the racing industry--track operators, horse owners, trainers and breeding groups--seem to agree on is that the sport is in distress. In California, where the economy felt the sting of recession long after the rest of the country, Hollywood Park and Santa Anita are retrenching, as tracks in New York, Maryland and Florida did during the 1980s.

“Racing is dying in California,” said Curtis Tucker Jr., a state assemblyman. The health of racing is particularly important to Tucker, because he represents Inglewood, where Hollywood Park is located. The fall season at Hollywood ends today, and besides downturns in business, the meeting has been punctuated by a heightening of the ongoing animosity between track management and many of the trainers who work there.

R.D. Hubbard, chairman of Hollywood Park since February of 1991, has spent about $20 million in improving the facilities for the fans and the barn area for the trainers, yet his credibility has suffered.

Besides other horse racing interests in New Mexico and Kansas, Hubbard is the principal owner of two greyhound tracks in Kansas and Oregon and plans to open a card club at the Inglewood track in 1994. Hubbard has never suggested legalizing greyhound racing in California, and Hollywood Park officials say they believe that the card club will expose more gamblers--particularly those in the Asian community--to horse racing. But some trainers are uncomfortable about Hubbard’s association with greyhounds, and they loathe the guaranteed, voter-approved arrival of card playing. Those trainers suspect Hubbard has an agenda that is not compatible with theirs.

“That card club is a dirty word as far as we’re concerned,” said trainer Noble Threewitt, president of the California Horsemen’s Benevolent and Protective Assn., a trainer-owner group.

For Hubbard, the suggestion that Hollywood Park plans to get out of the live horse racing business amounts to fighting words. “Not only is thoroughbred racing here to stay, but it will flourish for decades to come at Hollywood Park,” he said recently in a letter to a trade publication.

Hubbard and Tucker said that about 100 trainers have discussed applying to the state for the racing dates that belong to Hollywood Park. Brian Sweeney, a board member of the CHBPA, alluded to this possibility last week before the California Horse Racing Board, whose seven members are already weary of the struggle that consumes much of their meetings.

“The trouble is, even if they got the dates, they’d have to find a race track where they could run them,” Hubbard said.

Tucker, chairman of the assembly’s government organizations committee, said he talked to a few of the trainers. “I told them flat out that their plan would never happen,” Tucker said. “At a time like this, the last thing racing needs is a lot of infighting. Their bottom line is that a lot of trainers no longer want to come to Inglewood, because they don’t think the neighborhood is safe. Well, we’ve got the card club to hang our hat on in this community. Those trainers are crazy if they think we’re going to let Hollywood Park become a 300-acre ghost town.”

While well aware of the furor over Friday night racing and the trainers’ objections to new claiming rules for horses at Hollywood Park, Sweeney is even more concerned about the impact of cross-town betting on the races at Hollywood Park and Santa Anita. Since legislation more than a year ago that permitted an inactive track to take bets on another track’s races, neither Hollywood Park nor Santa Anita has seen a boom in business.

“Instead of new money, we’ve found ourselves with recycled fans,” Sweeney said. “Total attendance has stayed about the same, with the fans just going to the most convenient location. The handle has shown minor increases here and there, but because the horsemen don’t get as much of a purse cut from the off-track betting, the purses in general since 1991 have gone down.”

Don Robbins, president of Hollywood Park, agrees with Sweeney in part. “Cross-town betting has not been what we’d hoped,” Robbins said, “because there have been no new fans. But considering the economy, we would have been much worse off if we didn’t have betting on our races at Santa Anita and Los Alamitos.”

Hubbard said that while purses have shown less than a 2% growth overall in Southern California since 1989, they have gone up 13% at Hollywood Park.

When the legislation for cross-town betting was passed, many trainers may not have been aware that their purses would benefit less from money bet off- track.

“We didn’t do our homework,” trainer Ron Ellis said. “I’ll bet that 99% of us didn’t know how off-track betting would affect the purses.”

The strained relationship between Hollywood Park and the CHBPA will get more complicated with the launching of the Thoroughbred Owners of California, a group of horse owners who are breaking from the CHBPA because they don’t believe they have been adequately represented.

“I don’t think the new group will amount to much,” said trainer Charlie Whittingham, a vice president of the CHBPA. “It’s just a few owners.”

Ed Friendly, an owner who resigned last week as vice president of the CHBPA to organize the new group, said that he has support from owners of more than 1,200 horses.

“The surge of owner interest in our group has been startling,” Friendly said Wednesday. “Many owners are seeking us out, to see how they can get involved.”

For Robbins, the key to racing’s recovery lies with the owners.

“Hardly anybody wants to own horses anymore,” Robbins said. “The tax laws changed several years ago, and that drove a lot of owners out. This is the most serious problem racing has, and it is the one that is the most difficult to fix.”

On Jan. 4-5, the CHBPA will hold a two-day conference to discuss the effects that other forms of gambling have on horse racing. The first day, Hubbard is listed as one of the speakers. There may be hope yet for a truce.

The Hollywood Park season ends today with the Dahlia Handicap, with Kostroma heavily favored in what might be the last race of her career. There is still a chance that the 6-year-old mare might run in the San Gorgonio Handicap at Santa Anita on Jan. 17 before she is retired for breeding.

Overshadowed by Flawlessly most of her career, Kostroma has won 11 of 25 starts and earned $1.1 million. In her last start, she was third behind Flawlessly and Super Staff in the Matriarch at Hollywood.

Trainer Bob Hess saddled two winners Wednesday, giving him 19 and breaking Charlie Whittingham’s record for a Hollywood Park fall meeting.

Whittingham had 18 winners in 1986.