In the end, the reaffirmation of Santa Anita as the site of this year’s Breeders’ Cup was a no-brainer. We all understand the potential risk of terrible consequences if, God forbid, a horse suffers a catastrophic injury in this Breeders’ Cup. But moving this Breeders’ Cup away from Santa Anita likely would have had profoundly negative consequences, too. Imagine the ammunition racing’s opponents would have gained from such a move. How effectively could racing respond if those who want to see an end to our game were able to make the claim that not even one of the industry’s biggest players (the Breeders’ Cup) had the confidence to stage one of the industry’s biggest events at Santa Anita? It would have cut the legs right out from underneath the track and could have severely handicapped any effort in favor of continued operation. The decision to keep the Breeders’ Cup where it was originally scheduled to be was, in a sense, a lifeline for Santa Anita. Unfortunately, there are no more lifelines for Suffolk Downs, which will race for the last time this weekend. This is sad because for me, losing Suffolk Downs is like losing another member of my family. I first went to Suffolk in May 1968. I was able to do that because Bill Veeck, the great baseball impresario, was part of a group that purchased the East Boston facility, and one of the first things he did in an era when you had to be 21 to get into the track was to get legislation passed allowing admission of minors to Suffolk when accompanied by an adult. Since my dad was at one track or another every day and every night anyway, it was only natural that I would wind up tagging along with him to Suffolk. And virtually overnight, I became completely consumed by the art of handicapping. I was mesmerized by the past performances in The Morning Telegraph, or Tele, which was the eastern version of Daily Racing Form until the early 1970s. I was captivated at how every horse’s entire performance life could be encapsulated in such a small past-performance cut and was emboldened by the challenge of the countless ways a person could interpret all of that data. So, I started going to Suffolk (and many other tracks soon after) with my dad on Saturdays and every day after school let out for the summer, and before Rockingham would open its summer meet. It wasn’t much later before I would be cutting my last class or two in high school, hopping on the trolley, and heading to Suffolk during the week, too. The desire to be there was no match for the need I felt to hide in the deepest, darkest corners of the Suffolk grandstand for fear of being caught where I shouldn’t have been by my father, or one of his many track friends. There were numerous options for a Thoroughbred racing junkie in New England at that time. There were also many options for harness and greyhound fans, too. Suffolk is where I spent most of my time though. I mean, come on! It was Thoroughbred racing right in my backyard for the more than nine months or so a year Suffolk ran at that time. Suffolk was where I learned how certain trainers set horses up to cash a bet, and where I learned how profound real track biases could be. Suffolk was built on marshland right next to the Atlantic Ocean, so it had a proclivity for track biases. But those biases could get outrageously strong during the harsh Boston winters. I vividly remember a period one winter when speed on the rail was so unbeatable that it rendered every other handicapping factor completely inconsequential. On one weekday, after the first race was won by yet another inside speed horse (proving the bias was still in full effect), there was a horse in the second race with terrible overall form but with early speed and the 1 hole. He opened up at 60-1, yet given the overwhelming bias, his actual chances of winning were akin to a 2-5 shot. At about five minutes to post, with this horse still hanging on the board at a massive price, I noticed the valets and the jockeys still hadn’t emerged from the jocks’ room. Those familiar with winter racing know that’s always a bad sign, and sure enough, the rest of the card was canceled. I never had the chance to bet on my lead-pipe-cinch 60-1 shot, who I know in my bones would have capitalized on the bias and won. As it turned out, it took about a week for the track maintenance crew to get the track back into racing shape. And when racing resumed, the incredible, potentially life-changing inside-speed bias was gone. Suffolk was where I had my first brush with celebrity. Gerry Cheevers, the goalie for the great Boston Bruins teams in the early 1970s, was at Suffolk all the time and would occasionally nod hello to me, which made my day. A couple of years later, Don Zimmer, a friend of one of my dad’s friends and who, at the time, was third-base coach for the Red Sox, used to come out to Suffolk and bet the daily double (daily double is what it was at the time, not the “early” double). Don would sit in my father’s clubhouse box for the first race, and if he got alive, he’d hand his live double tickets to Little Watch (me) and, with a wink, tell me to cash them if they won. I can’t remember ever cashing any tickets for Don. Suffolk is also where I first got my foot in the door with the Form. After an introduction by a press-box runner, I would occasionally go up to the Form booth in the Suffolk press box and practice taking the chart call from a new chart caller who had recently taken over from a veteran named Eli Chiat. That new chart caller was Mike Welsch. Yes, that Mike Welsch. And it was at Suffolk in May 1980 when I was summoned upstairs to the Form booth to take a phone call. That call was from Daily Racing Form headquarters in Hightstown, N.J., informing me that if I could be at Churchill Downs in a day and a half, I’d have a job as a Racing Form chart-call taker. That was the lowest rung on the Form track and field crew ladder. I made it to Louisville in a day. The end of Suffolk is sad for many other reasons. It continues to stun me that an area that had active Thoroughbred racing at Suffolk, Rockingham, Narragansett, Lincoln Downs, Scarborough Downs, Green Mountain and the Brockton, Weymouth, Marshfield, Northampton, Great Barrington, and Berkshire Downs fair circuit, and which offered day/night Thoroughbred racing all year long, now, after this weekend, no longer has any live Thoroughbred racing whatsoever. Of course, I am aware of the efforts to revive a race meet at Great Barrington. But while Great Barrington is nice (or at least it was when I was last there many years ago), it’s not Boston. Great Barrington is a 2 1/2-hour ride from Boston, a nearly three-hour ride from New York City, and about an hour ride from Albany, and that doesn’t begin to account for traffic. And even if a revival of racing at Great Barrington proves successful, which I hope, it simply won’t be the same. It won’t be racing in a major metropolitan area, and it won’t have the history Suffolk Downs has. Great horses like Seabiscuit, Whirlaway, Stymie, Riva Ridge, Cigar, and Skip Away, to name just a few, raced at Suffolk Downs. We will never see the likes of those at Great Barrington. It is difficult to accept that a major city like Boston will no longer have Thoroughbred horse racing. I suppose the demise of tracks like Longacres, Ak-Sar-Ben, and the tracks in Detroit are somewhat analogous. But given the history involved, I don’t think we’ve seen a dissolution of Thoroughbred racing in an entire geographical region that includes a major U.S. city quite like this. And it’s very tough to take. At the very least, I, and I’m sure many others like me, still have memories of Suffolk, the hub of what once was an expansive New England Thoroughbred racing scene. I cherish those memories and wouldn’t trade them for anything.