Eric Jackson, who served for three decades as general manager of what's now Oaklawn Racing Casino Resort, vividly remembers a trip across Chesapeake Bay. It was February 1998. Jackson and Bobby Geiger, Oaklawn's director of wagering at the time, had taken a flight to Baltimore, then boarded a small boat headed for an island in the bay.
"It was dark, it was sleeting, and Bobby and I just had on our suits," Jackson says. "We were freezing. We knew we had a lot of work ahead of us."
They were bound for Parsons Island, once described by the Baltimore Sun as a "bucolic, privately owned island covered in corn and sunflowers."
The 100-acre retreat belonged to Jim Corckran, who along with his brother owned an east Baltimore manufacturer of nails, rivets, nuts, bolts and other fasteners. The company had been founded in 1865. Corckran had purchased the island from McCormick & Co., a well-known spice company that started doing business in 1889.
Jackson and Geiger weren't headed to the island to talk about nuts, bolts or spice. They were there to find ways to preserve thoroughbred racing in the face of increased casino competition.
Two years earlier, brothers John and Jim Corckran had teamed up with Ted Mudge, owner of a Baltimore-based insurance brokerage, to purchase AmTote International. Founded in 1932 as American Totalisator Co., the firm specialized in equipment used to control pari-mutuel betting at horse and greyhound racing facilities. American Totalisator installed its first mechanical tote system at Chicago's Arlington Park in 1933.
A ballot initiative that would have allowed casinos in Arkansas, including one at Oaklawn, was tossed off the ballot just before the November 1994 election. Oaklawn made another run at it in 1996.
"We got sucker-punched about a month before the 1996 election," Jackson says. "We had gone into it with the idea that companies operating casinos in Mississippi wouldn't oppose us since two casinos would be allowed at Hot Springs in addition to what happened at Oaklawn. Then they came after us. The ads were brutal, and we got our teeth kicked in. Simulcasting races had been Plan A. The casino initiative had been Plan B. Frankly, we didn't have a Plan C."
The proposed 1996 amendment would have established a state lottery, permitted charitable bingo games and raffles by nonprofit organizations, and allowed Hot Springs voters to decide whether to authorize casino gambling at Oaklawn and two other sites in the city. The amendment failed 61 percent to 39 percent.
It was then that Jackson began to play around with what became Instant Racing.
"I thought there had to be a way to take past races and put them in a format people would enjoy," he says. "Our advertising agency came up with artwork of what terminals might look like, and we invited representatives of three companies to come and hear what we had to say. Two of them thought it was a dumb idea. The third person was Ted Mudge at AmTote. He wanted to give it some additional thought."
That was in 1997. Mudge's interest set the stage for the February 1998 trip to Parsons Island.
"It was like a think tank on that island," Jackson says. "There were all kinds of people there. We worked for about 36 straight hours. It became known as the Parsons Island Project. We had files around here for years labeled P.I.P."
During the 1999 legislative session, the Arkansas Legislature removed a requirement that simulcast races be shown live, opening the door for Instant Racing, in which a player deposits a wager in a terminal, and a race is randomly selected from a video library of more than 60,000 previous races. Identifying information such as the location and date of the race, and the names of the horses and jockeys, is not shown.
The first terminals were placed on the floor at Oaklawn and what was then Southland Greyhound Park in West Memphis in January 2000. There were 50 machines at each track.
"For the longest, Instant Racing was just in Arkansas," Jackson says. "We then started to get into other states. Louis Cella was our Fuller Brush salesman. He went all over the country talking about Instant Racing."
Cella, the Oaklawn president, inherited his father Charles' love of racing. Charles was at the track's helm from 1968 until his death in December 2017 at age 81. Charles' grandfather and great uncle were among the founders of Oaklawn in 1904. Louis' grandfather John Cella led Oaklawn into the modern era and was the track's president for many years until his unexpected death in 1968.
Jackson was Oaklawn's director of operations from 1978 until he was promoted to general manager in 1987. He served in that position until 2017 when he became senior vice president. Earlier this year, Jackson achieved the rare feat of being inducted into the Arkansas Business Hall of Fame and Arkansas Sports Hall of Fame in the same year.
In 2005, Oaklawn and the Cella family were awarded the Eclipse Award of Merit, the most prestigious honor in the racing industry. But no longer was Instant Racing enough to keep up with casinos in Mississippi, Louisiana and Oklahoma. Oaklawn needed additional relief from the state, and got it when the Legislature passed an act in 2005 permitting Oaklawn and Southland to install "games of skill" such as electronic blackjack and poker if approved by the city or county.
Gov. Mike Huckabee allowed the bill to become law without his signature. More than 60 percent of West Memphis voters approved the games at Southland. In late 2006, work began there on a $40 million expansion that included a new main entrance to the dog track, a 55,000-square-foot gaming room and a 400-seat special events center. In 2014, an additional $37.4 million expansion was announced.
In Hot Springs, meanwhile, a public referendum to allow expanded electronic games at Oaklawn passed by just 89 votes in November 2005. Litigation ensued. In September 2007, the Arkansas Supreme Court upheld the law authorizing Oaklawn to add expanded games of skill. On the day after the Arkansas Derby in April 2008, Oaklawn began construction on a 60,000-square-foot two-level structure to house electronic games.
Things took off from there. In August 2012, Oaklawn announced there would be a record $20 million in purses for the 2013 race meet (the amount has almost tripled since then). When Rebel Stakes runner-up Oxbow won the Preakness Stakes in Baltimore in May 2013, he became the 10th Triple Crown race winner to come from Oaklawn in 10 years.
In June 2013, Oaklawn announced plans for an expansion to its gaming area that would increase capacity by another 50 percent. Work began in early August that year and ended just prior to the start of the 2014 race meet. Construction of the additional $20 million expansion resumed the day after the Arkansas Derby in April 2014. In November 2014, the new gaming area and Silks Bar & Grill opened.
By the start of the 2015 race meet, a high-limits area and poker room had also opened.
The approval by Arkansas voters in November 2018 of a full casino with table games and sports wagering at Oaklawn took things to the next level. What has happened since then is outlined in my cover story in today's Perspective section.
"We picked ourselves up off the mat with Instant Racing," Jackson says. "We realize that we looked into the abyss and survived. When things were at their worst in the 1990s, Charles Cella insisted that we keep the racing quality up until we could find a lifeline. He was, in essence, underwriting the purses.
"These days most tracks are owned by gaming companies. We consider ourselves a racetrack that happens to have gaming. We're the only one that truly uses gaming proceeds to vastly improve the quality of racing. Gaming pays the light bill here, but racing is our passion. It's in our DNA."
At age 88, Hall of Fame trainer D. Wayne Lukas is still working. He calls Hot Srings "a national treasure. ... Going to the races is still part of the culture of this state. There's a genuine enthusiasm for the game that's hard to find elsewhere."
Rex Nelson is a senior editor at the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.
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