On the face of it, horse racing is the most basic of sports.
And Neil Dachille, an OTB employee of 11 years who had expected to spend the afternoon at the unemployment office, contemplated the future of his job. Yen, an older regular who preferred, like every gambler I met, not to give his full name, scanned the television screens for clues about the horses. Three young guys in the corner booth bemoaned a race that had cost them $208, which they calculated to the last expletive.
Two days after OTB’s board of directors voted, despite losses of tens of millions of dollars, to keep at least some of the 66 state-run betting parlors alive for another year, I sat there alone, puzzling over the daily program. Now horse-racing fans who choose to visit the Clipper (and there are not many) place their bets in the ghostly shell of a restaurant or from the empty bar, which, with its nautical motif and its lack of windows, might as well be on a lower deck of a sunken cruise ship. But at some point during its parent organization’s long slide into the red, those amenities fell away, leaving only the cover charge, in return for which OTB takes a smaller cut of the winnings. The Yankee Clipper had been conceived as an upscale alternative to OTB’s usual street-front betting parlors, with a restaurant and bar and $5 admission. The Off-Track Betting Corporation has just survived the latest of its many brushes with death, but on Monday at the Yankee Clipper, its South Street Seaport outpost, rumors of the institution’s demise seemed, well, just about accurate.