Jim O'Donnell: Hopefully a splendid day awaits the last Arlington farewell of Dick Duchossois
THE GREEK DRAMATIST SOPHOCLES WROTE, "One must wait until evening to see how splendid the day has been."
The evening of Dick Duchossois has arrived.
He is 99 years old. His war is over. For the first time in forever, his personal phone line has gone unanswered this week.
No one outside of his innermost circle even knows whether he will be in attendance Saturday at Arlington Park. That's when the racetrack he once embraced as a consuming autumnal passion will honor him.
His spirit will be there.
Even as his racing palace awkwardly tumbles toward its own finish line, the spirit of Dick Duchossois will linger.
THAT SPIRIT COULD inspire. That spirit could infuriate.
That spirit could certainly baffle.
His ways and means could be extraordinarily sophisticated - disarming and effective.
His ways and means could reveal a Napoleonic petulance that would make a Rothschild want to lance a French country vase.
"You've got to stop listening to all of those rumdums who call you," he once said to an insouciant downtown horse racing columnist.
"Then you've got to stop hiring them," was the snappish reply.
HE CAN APPROPRIATELY BE assigned most of the credit and much of the blame for all of the undulating path that Arlington Park has clopped down over the past 35 years.
He brought some remarkable glory days to the Arlington Heights oval. There were afternoons that took the collective breath away from the global racing class.
He brought some moments of peril to the more starting-gate intense, none greater than the likely demolition of the track property's buildings and peripherals in the months ahead.
IT WAS 38 YEARS AGO this week - a maiden's blink, really - when he and partners Joe Joyce, Sheldon Robbins and Ralph Ross completed the purchase of the track from Gulf & Western after the sudden death of corporate master Charlie Bludhorn.
It was 36 years ago this month when the foursome blazed to glory with the staging of "The Miracle Million," an event that retains some open-ended questions all these furlong poles later.
One year after, "Mr. D." was sole proprietor of Arlington Park. The 64-year-old industrialist found niched sports celebrity a comfortable fit.
Yet at Friday dusk before the 1986 Million - the main event of a magnificent 15-day "country festival" of racing in front of temporary facilities - he told a Daily Herald sports writer to take a walk with him across the long Arlington parking lot to an employee party in the track kitchen.
He feigned weariness at the demands and spotlight of it all.
"You know," he said. "I think I liked it better two years ago when no one could pronounce my last name."
Close to three decades later - toughened and much wiser about the game below the game of thoroughbred racing in Illinois - he told the same hirsute medfly:
"You know, I'm long past realizing that when some people look at my last name, they see the "S's" only as dollar signs."
THERE WAS THE ABSOLUTE magical run from the "Miracle Million" to Arlington's 1989 reopening.
Someone floated the figure "$200 million" as the cost of his rebuild and no one in the media vetted it.
The number had such a "Camelot" ring to it. All around him sometimes spent time wondering what the king was doing tonight.
He had assembled a bright, generally young, thoroughly energized staff.
Track president Ken Dunn, direct from the cover of "GQ." Counsel Tom McCauley, as sharp a young attorney as the region could offer.
Bright-eyed, passionate staff - people like Jeanne Frederick and Julie Taylor and David Hall and Mike Cronin.
Even colorful marketing dream weaver Tom Finch, once labeled "the Monte Hall of Golf Road."
FAMILY GREATLY ASSISTED as the new AP rose from the ruins.
No. 2 son Bruce Duchossois - the man who got his father into horses - and his partner Jack Wetzel helped with interior design.
No. 1 daughter Dayle Duchossois-Fortino and her husband Ed Fortino assumed positions of command. So much so that many thought Mrs. Fortino would one day be the second coming of Marje Everett as an heiress overseeing All Things Arlington.
Then the days of thunder - and the betrayals - began.
ENABLING LEGISLATION FOR the Illinois flotilla of 10 riverboats was passed in 1990. The game was forever changed.
Neither his great friend and beneficiary Gov. Jim Thompson nor anyone from Thompson's staff suggested that Duchossois hop into an ownership group, as the Bidwill family of Sportsman's Park so wisely did with The Casino Queen in Downstate East St. Louis.
As a favor to Thompson, Duchossois took on a relatively obscure Ed Duffy as a VP and overseer of Arlington's startup network of OTBs.
In the executive hallways of Arlington, Duffy - a former Chicago cop and one-term Arlington Heights village trustee - proved so adept at toxic knife fighting that within a few years, all semblance of positive energy was gone from Duchossois's domain.
Dunn, McCauley, Frederick, Taylor, Finch - so many - departed.
Bruce Duchossois and Wetzel left the family's regal Hill 'n Dale farm in Barrington Hills for the show horse country of Aiken, S.C.
In a last stand, even the Fortinos resigned.
BY 1994, AWASH IN A CREATIVE SORT of red ink, Duchossois was threatening to close his racing Louvre.
Duffy delivered a further blow within months when he announced his resignation to join with Charlie Bidwill III and Chip Ganassi in converting Sportsman's Park into an ill-advised auto racing/horse track.
In 1997, Duchossois did the once completely implausible: He announced his opulent oval would be closing at the conclusion of the live season.
Few believed it was a forever thing. And it wasn't.
The state legislature softened. Laws more favorable to racetracks were passed. Arlington's value actually increased during its 1998-99 shutdown.
With a veneer of spontaneity, Duchossois again opened anew in the spring of 2000.
THEN TALKS OF A "MERGER" with Churchill Downs Inc. began to surface.
No one has ever really said with probable truth when those talks began.
In September 2000 it was official: Duchossois and family received approximately 21% of all CDI stock - then valued at $22 per-share - plus three seats on the corporation's 15-member board of directors.
And Churchill Inc. technically owned Arlington Park.
The final moment of racing glory came in October 2002 when Duchossois, track president Steve Sexton, operations ace Frank Gabriel Jr. and all hosted Breeders' Cup XIX at AP.
But even that event's momentousness was tempered when it turned out that the day's big bet - The BC Pick Six - had been doctored by three computer wizards who had once been fratmates at Drexel University.
Many felt CDI's maneuvering of the Breeders' Cup to Arlington was intended to be the career valedictory of the 81-year-old Duchossois.
Instead, for the past 19 years, he has resolutely hung on, a ceaseless cheerleader and profit-maker as the Louisville corporation has all but left multistate horse racing behind.
CDI's focus has been on acquisitions and growth of its burgeoning casino and online wagering networks.
Racetracks be damned, as Arlington Park evidently is.
No one benefiting from the balance sheets of the Duchossois family is complaining.
IF THE PRIME CRITERION is commitment to entrepreneurial capitalism, it is quite accurate to say that the life and times of Richard L. Duchossois - the son of a department store vice president - have been a smashing success.
He has won many good fights. He has deigned to engage in some bad ones. In close-up moments, he has frequently shown a propensity for being of vast heart.
Whether or not he is at Arlington Park on Saturday, hopefully they will play one song and allow the crowd to gaze upon his excelling grounds as the 99-year-old Duchossois might.
The song would be Roger Whittaker's "Last Farewell," replete with its mesmeric third verse:
"I have no fear of death
It brings no sorrow
But how bitter will be
This last farewell
"For you are beautiful
And I have loved you dearly
More dearly than the spoken word
Can tell."
And then, the evening - the splendid evening - shall arrive.
• Jim O'Donnell's Sports & Media column appears Thursday and Sunday. Reach him at jimodonnelldh@yahoo.com.