I’ve spent most of the last two weeks reporting on and thinking about the Marshall Gramm case. I believe that in my haste to point out what I saw as unfair — specifically the unsupported claim that Marshall circumvented security measures — I failed to meet a lot of industry types and horseplayers where they were with the case.
Though I never excused his behavior, I should have said more forcefully that what he did was wrong. My own reporting established that he pulled the veterinary histories of 57,000 horses that were none of his business. He showed a staggering lack of judgment twice over — first in taking the data at all, then in not coming forward when it became a public story.
None of that changes the fact that he is a friend, and that Ten Strike Racing was the first commercial sponsor In the Money Media ever had. I’ve mentioned that in everything I’ve written about this and I’m saying it again here. I didn’t know he was the source of the leaked PPs until months after they first circulated. He only told me himself during his negotiations with HISA. Had he come to me in June, I’d have told him to go to them that day.
I am a horseplayer and I understand the anger of my fellow horseplayers — close friends, industry people, and a lot of the audience for In the Money. I did previously write that the anger around Marshall’s situation is legitimate, but that’s not the same as explaining why it’s justified and where it comes from.
For years, Marshall Gramm has looked like the best of us.
He was successful at two things that are close to impossible: He had tremendous success as a horse-owner and he was also a winning horseplayer, in his cash play and in tournaments. We are talking about a rock star in this world, a player other players studied and an owner whose success was envied.
And then he did the most impressive thing a horseplayer can do: he got a seat at the grown-up table.
He was elected to The Jockey Club. He served as treasurer of Thoroughbred Charities of America. He sat on panels at the Round Table and the Symposium, in the rooms where the decisions are made — at a table that has historically had room for owners and breeders and executives and almost never for horseplayers.
This matters a lot.
Horseplayers fund this sport. Every purse, every salary, every regulator’s budget comes out of money that bettors put through the windows. And for as long as I’ve been in it, we’ve been treated as a revenue line rather than a constituency — talked about only occasionally, rarely consulted. Ask any horseplayer how it feels to watch takeout go up, or a racetrack disappear, or a rule change land without anyone really caring what we think. You know the old cliché that the customer is always right? In racing, we are the customers who are barely tolerated.
Many of us thought Marshall could be the answer to that injustice. Here, finally, was one of us in the room where it happens. A real horseplayer, who grew up reading Beyer in the Post, who had the unique combination of real-world success and academic credentials to get so far that people in the corridors of power had to listen. Through Marshall, we thought, horseplayers would have a voice in the future of this sport.
So his mistakes cut deeper than taking an unfair edge. Marshall has lost horseplayers a seat at the table. Some will say this just makes it harder for the next horseplayer who tries to get that far. I think it’s worse. Marshall was a unicorn. The combination of things that got him into those rooms may not come along again in my time in this game. And sadly, I think his actions confirm exactly what a certain kind of racing executive has always quietly believed about us — that we’re degenerates who’d take any edge if we could find it, and that our interest in transparency was never principled so much as a case of looking for something for nothing.
Marshall is facing the music as he should. He’s accepted a provisional suspension. He gave back his Belmont Challenge winnings and is out of next year’s NHC. He’s resigned from the TCA board and The Jockey Club. That’s all fair and a good start.
Yet none of it gives horseplayers back what we have lost. One listener summed up the feelings of many succinctly. “What I lost was faith. Faith in the good guy. Faith in the system. And faith that the system could actually be fixed.”
