Bing Crosby's Racetrack

On July third, nineteen thirty-seven, Bing Crosby personally stood at the gate of the Del Mar racetrack and welcomed the first fifteen thousand fans through the turnstiles. He had been working toward this moment for years. He and his friend, actor Pat O'Brien, had each put up six hundred thousand dollars against their own life insurance policies to guarantee the track would be built. That is what it took. Without Crosby's personal financial guarantee, Del Mar would not exist.

Crosby wrote a song for the opening. It was called Where the Turf Meets the Surf, and it has been the track's official anthem for nearly ninety years. The founding partners read like a Hollywood studio call sheet: Jimmy Durante, Oliver Hardy, and Charles Howard, who was simultaneously the owner of a racehorse named Seabiscuit. Howard knew something about gambling on long shots.

What Crosby built at Del Mar was not just a racetrack. It was a production, staged on the same terms as any Hollywood picture, except the cameras were in the grandstands and the audience was real and paying. The horses were real, the odds were real, and the losses were real, but the atmosphere, the glamour, the sense that you had been invited to something rather than merely admitted to it, that was Crosby's contribution. He understood that people wanted to feel like insiders. The racetrack as theater. Every major venue since has borrowed from the model without necessarily acknowledging the source.

The Del Mar racetrack has been a California Historical Landmark since that era, and the summer meet, running from late July through early September, still opens with Crosby's song. The horses come out of the gate. The Pacific sits a quarter mile away. The turf still meets the surf. That part has not changed.