I didn’t think a visit to the new Geneva Lakes dog track would make me sad, but it did. It happened before I even had a chance to lose any money. The minute they raised the doors on the little metal starting boxes and the greyhounds bolted out, some memory trigger popped, and I could feel my own dog Leo brushing past my leg, could see him charging out the door and down the street, a small furry blur hell-bent on freedom.
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The Geneva Lakes Kennel Club, a sprawling, pink puppy palace in the cornfields of Delavan, Wisconsin, had been shaping up as a pleasant enough place, sort of a cross between a theme park and the Woodfield mall. It has a huge parking lot, a fast-food court, a vast, climate-controlled, fluorescent environment, and a wholesome clientele of senior citizens and sunburned families. Everything about it is cheerful and sanitized. Toilets flush automatically while you’re standing there looking for a handle, and scrubbed young “tellers” wish you luck as they take your money. Any grungy track regulars who might be hanging around are outnumbered 50 or 60 to 1 by white-haired ladies in spotless white pants. It doesn’t cost much to get in either. One dollar to park and the same amount to enter the grandstand.
Geneva Lakes is one of four dog tracks that opened in Wisconsin this summer, after the state legislature determined that such facilities are not, after all, the last step on the road to hell. It is the biggest thing to happen to the Lake Geneva area since Chicago’s captains of industry gave up competitive mansion building there 60 years ago. Its owner is a publicity-shy real estate developer named Anthony Antoniou, who got his start building houses in the southern and western suburbs of Chicago. Antoniou’s Lombard-based Anvan Companies own the Barclay and Knickerbocker hotels, Printers Square, and numerous other Chicago properties, and has bought up enough of the Delavan-Lake Geneva area to turn it into a fiefdom. Anvan owns the area’s three largest resorts–the Abbey, Interlaken, and Lake Lawn Lodge–and is developing Geneva National Golf Club, which will include three golf courses, a hotel, and about 2,000 homes and condos.
What you have to do, as I was informed by Sister Mary, a nun I met in the grandstand, is learn to read the program. This is initially daunting, because it contains information on a few thousand variables, most of it in code, like “Blckd 1st-Coll” or “Nvr A Thrt Ins.” But you will quickly figure out that some of these bits of information are more relevant than others. Unless you’re handicapping on a mainframe computer, for example, it probably won’t matter who your dog’s mom and pop are, or what position he was in at the one-eighth pole on a race he ran three weeks ago. The trick is to focus on the matter at hand, which is how long it might take one dog to get to the finish line relative to the seven dogs he’s running against. Fortunately, two expert consultants named Railbird and Trackman have already gone to work on this puzzle, and their conclusions are printed right there on the bottom line of the page for us to copy–though without any guarantees.
For information on Delavan and the Lake Geneva area, see the Visitors’ Guide in this issue.
