Dog Racing: Down the Straight at 40 m.p.h.

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Talk about greyhound racing to a horseman, and his lip curls in contempt. "Outdoor roulette. The numbers game —for gamblers and rubes," he sneers, recalling the days when Al Capone and Frank Nitti ran the action and anything went: switching dogs, doping them, filling them full of water to slow them down, sticking thorns in their feet. Some of the old flamboyance still persists in Britain, where the whole country was buzzing last week over the dognapping of Hi Joe, the favorite for next June's Greyhound Derby. But in the U.S. these days, dog racing is almost respectable—and booming as never before.

Over the past ten years, the number of tracks has grown to 32 in seven states,* attendance has climbed 40% to 10 million a year, and the pari-mutuel handle is expected to top $500 million in 1965. At least half of that will be bet in Florida, where 16 tracks (four in Miami alone) outdraw the horses by a margin of 2 to 1. Florida dogmen classify their sport as "nighttime entertainment." The big tracks run eleven 5/16-mile to 9/16-mile races an evening (purses: up to $80,000), provide extras like free parking, bar service, "lead-outs" in white dinner jackets to parade the dogs to the post, and fanfares from 4-ft. trumpets. The fans like it so much that they pour $700,000 a night into the pari-mutuel machines.

Muzzles & Meatballs. The tracks make such a big deal out of keeping the sport clean that racing hounds even have the color of their toenails recorded for identification. During race meetings, the dogs are kenneled at the track, are constantly muzzled, fed nothing but a carefully supervised diet of vegetables, vitamins, horse meat and beef. On race days, they are confined to guarded cages to make sure that nobody throws them a "meatball"—a wad of hamburger laced with a stimulant or depressant—and they are given postrace drug tests, just like horses. The tests are so exacting, in fact, that one trainer almost lost his license because he fed his dogs chocolate syrup for extra energy. Caffeine from the syrup showed up in the hounds' urine.

Dog breeders insist that hounds are even easier to handicap than horses. For one thing, there is no jockey to worry about. Greyhounds reach speeds up to 40 m.p.h. on the straightaway. They compete without regard to sex, and the winningest dog of all time was a little brindled bitch named Indy Ann, who racked up 137 victories in the mid-1950s. Buying a hound is somewhat cheaper than buying a race horse (promising pups sell for $1,000 up), and far less chancy: unlike the ponies, greyhounds breed so true that handlers can predict the habits of a pup with a fair degree of accuracy. "If you breed two good rail runners," says Florida Trainer Oscar Duke, "at least six out of eight pups will be rail runners too."