Horse Racing is in His DNA

Posted by Speedhorse on 07/26/2021

KarenJoyce_PeteDogIn some ways, Eugene Trotter “E.T.” Joyce’s background seems incompatible with his Wyoming cowboy persona and a 30-year career in Wyoming’s horse racing industry. Born in Manhattan, New York — which he jokingly refers to as “a little island just east of here” — his family, including a dozen brothers and sisters, moved to the Chicago area in the 1970s. There, his father worked as president and part owner of Arlington Park racetrack through the late ’80s, when Joe, the elder Joyce, bought Wyoming Downs and moved out west to Evanston.

Eugene’s horse-loving brother, Mike — on-air television talent at TVG who lives near Long Beach, California — describes Eugene as a chameleon of sorts. “Here’s this kid who was born in New York, went to a Jesuit college in the Midwest, lived in Chicago, then in New York City as a young man,” he says. “He worked in sports marketing and was everything from a sailor on Long Island Sound to a volleyball player on Manhattan Beach [California] and he showed up in his 30s to help our parents at Wyoming Downs as they got older. He loved horse racing. He wanted to be a part; it was in his blood.”

HIS BACK STORY

Born fourth oldest of 13 children to Joe and Elizabeth Joyce, Eugene attended Holy Family High School on Long Island. After the move to Chicago, he attended Marquette University, graduating in 1981 with a history degree. He worked in TV and sports marketing for Host Communications, Turner Broadcasting and Madison Square Garden Network, then moved to the West Coast, where he sold radio advertising for the University of Southern California football program until 1990.

“That’s when I got the call from my father asking if I wanted to spend the summer in Wyoming,” he says. “I went out there thinking I was just going to be there for the summer and fell in love with horse racing and Wyoming. Then I just fell in love.”

Eugene’s brother Mike, the caboose on the Joyce train and nearly 20 years Eugene’s junior, says, “Eugene came back to Wyoming in chinos and penny loafers, and within a week he’s got a full beard and he’s roping cattle. He wears ostrich-skin boots with a cowboy hat and drives an F-150 pickup. He can adapt to any lifestyle, and he does it in a way where he doesn’t just toe the water; he jumps in with both feet and with no fear.”

But Eugene’s new-found cowboy persona almost lost him his chance at romance with his now wife Karen, a teacher and the sister of a friend who was an Evanston city planner. When the friend tried to set the two up, Karen promptly said she wasn’t interested in any cowboys. But when her brother told her Eugene was from New York City, Eugene became a kind of refugee from back East, out in the Wild West. “Since then, it’s been magical, and the greatest adventure I’ve ever been on!” Eugene says.

The relationship did take some give and take, though. “You talk about a clash in cultures,” he says, “School teachers are off every weekend, every holiday, and all summer long. Us race trackers work on the weekend, we work on the holidays, and we definitely work all summer long. But somehow, it’s all worked. Love is a powerful force of nature.”

ON THE ROAD AND BACK

Eugene_Starting_GateEugene worked with Joe at Wyoming Downs for nine years, until Joe sold the track in 1998. After that, Eugene worked as assistant general manager at Lone Star Park in Grand Prairie, Texas; general manager of SunRay Park and Casino in Farmington, New Mexico; interim general manager at Remington Park in Oklahoma City; and, from 2005–2010, as president and general manager of Turf Paradise in Phoenix, Arizona.

In 2011, while at the Race Track Industry Program (RTIP) symposium in Tucson, Arizona, Eugene serendipitously bumped into Charlie Moore, executive director of the Wyoming Pari-Mutuel Commission. “Charlie told me that the Wyoming Downs operator was going bankrupt and there was no live racing at all in Wyoming, so he hoped I’d think about coming back and getting things up and going again,” Eugene says.

“My wife’s family lives in Evanston, and so it was a chance for us to get back home to Wyoming,” he continued. “We’d bought a place here when we first got married and have had it since.”

 

BUILDING WYOMING RACING

Because the owners wanted what Eugene thought was too much for Wyoming Downs, he started leasing fairgrounds that had had live racing. “During the 1990s, in the go-go days of racing in Wyoming, four were operating: Wyoming Downs in Evanston; Sweetwater Downs in Rock Springs; Energy Downs in Gillette; and the Central Wyoming Fairgrounds in Casper. Counties had built these facilities in the ’80s and they’d been in mothballs for 19 years, so in late August 2011, we ran four race dates at Sweetwater Downs, which allowed us to get our permits for simulcasting.

“When we brought back simulcasting, it was only at about 60 percent of what it was previously,” he continues. “So, in trying to figure out how we could bring new revenues into the industry, we looked at Kentucky, which had passed historic horse racing in 2010.”

By 2013, he’d helped introduce and promote a historic horse racing bill. “Anybody and everybody told me it didn’t stand a snowball’s chance in hell of getting passed,” he says, “but the overwhelming consensus in the Wyoming legislature was that they wanted to help horse racing get back up on its feet.”

Since then, another operator has purchased Wyoming Downs and Eugene’s group has built their race days from four in 2011 to two operators with 32 days of live horse racing. They’ve also grown the Wyoming-Bred Program from around $30,000 in 2010 to $3.2 million this year. “That has led a number of people from neighboring states, especially Utah, to purchase properties in Wyoming and ship their broodmares here to participate,” he says. “In the 1990s, less than 10 percent of our races were Wyoming-bred horses, and now it’s 30 percent and climbing.

“We’ve got a bunch of trainers who are trying to make a go of it, running with us all summer and also buying Wyoming-bred horses. It’s been a winning bet for Wyoming. We just finished an economic impact study and if I remember, in 1990 Wyoming Downs had a $15 million impact; in 2018 it was over $62 million. So, we’ve come back from the dead and we’re running as fast as we can.”

“With his idea and his ‘forcive’ personality, Eugene is the only one who could have pulled this off,” says Mike. “It took a lot of heavy lifting and a lot of convincing, but he had a vision that he really believed in and he got everyone to come on board. I don’t know anyone else who had the connections he did, who had the perseverance that he did, and who had the eternal optimism and the personality to pull it off. His personality is really his strength. He’s extroverted, he’s very well spoken, he’s got a lot of integrity and his word is gold. He’s a very engaging and magnetic person and he can charm anybody.”

HIS MANY IDENTITIES

Eugene isn’t just unique as a New Yorker-turned-cowboy; over his lifetime, his endeavors and accomplishments have spanned a wide range of interests.

“It’s so funny, people think of Eugene Joyce as this cowboy from Evanston, Wyoming, and I still think of my brother who spent a year in Ireland and played rugby at University of Cork, and studied acting at Juilliard,” Mike says. “Every endeavor he pursued, he pursued it to the utmost. There are so many different layers to his personality.”

As evidence, in addition to the administrative end of racing, Eugene has been getting more involved in running horses himself. He bought a couple of broodmares from Kentucky a couple years ago to start in the Wyoming-Bred program and is waiting for their babies to grow up and head to the starting gate.

AppoloosaHe and Karen also have a couple riding horses. “My wife’s favorite horse is a 22-year-old Appaloosa mare she calls Philly after Philadelphia cream cheese,” he says. “It looks like someone took a big swath of cream cheese and slapped it on that horse’s butt.”

In his down time, Eugene likes to get out into nature, be that back country skiing in winter with Karen and their dogs or hiking with their lunch in a backpack. “The one thing I truly enjoy, but don’t get to do when I’m live racing, is go to a racetrack and sit in a box seat with the Daily Racing Form trying to figure out the puzzle that is the next race, then put a wager on that and see if I can cash a winning ticket. I also like going over horses’ past performances and handicapping races.”

Eugene says that in addition to his front-of-housework duties as General Manager of Energy Downs & Sweetwater Downs he enjoys trading his suits with his boots. “I try to focus on the safety aspects of the business,” he says. “I work very closely with my track superintendents. One thing my father said early on in my career is that everything can be right at the racetrack, yet if the racing surface is wrong, then everything’s wrong, but if the racing surface is right, then you can serve warm beer and cold hot dogs and everyone’s happy. I have the same million-dollar insurance policy as Churchill Downs’s for my jockeys. I don’t want to spend the rest of my life, because I was cheap, doing bake sales for these jockeys if they get injured — and they will. I strive on a daily basis to reduce the risk as much as possible. That starts with the best equipment, and we’ve improved our equipment every year.

“One complaint I’ve gotten over the years in Wyoming is from the Quarter Horse owners who say the surface is too deep and they’re not getting fast enough times,” he says. “I could care less about times. To me, you’ve got to have enough cushion to absorb the pounding those horses get when they’re running at full speed. In this business, they don’t pay you by the clock; it’s the first one across the line, so the heck with the times and the speed indexes. Let’s just get them over the ground safely.”

That dedication to safety paid off at the Breeders’ Cup in 2004 when it went to Lone Star Park. “We were told that that year was the first Breeders’ Cup ever that a horse ambulance didn’t go onto the track in the two days. I’m not taking credit for the hard work that Ron Moore, the track superintendent, did, but to be a part of that was my proudest accomplishment until I came back to Wyoming.”

His group had leased Sweetwater Downs at the fairgrounds outside Rock Springs and because of a demolition derby in front of the grandstand, they couldn’t get access until Monday for races to start on Saturday. “We had four days to turn a racetrack that had been in mothballs for 19 years into a safe track,” he says.

Soil testing revealed the silt and clay component exceeded 45 percent. “You want it to be 16 to 18 percent,” he says. “When you start hitting 20 percent, it compacts like asphalt and you start having breakdowns.

“I can’t even remember how much sand we had to put on that racetrack. We had belly dumps of sand coming for three days straight, just dumping it on the track and spreading it out, then we had to rip and till it, then we had to work it up, and I think the first time the horses could get onto the track was Friday afternoon.

“We had horses shipping in from all over the Intermountain West, and we didn’t have one horse break down,” he says. “The track ambulance never came onto the track. Zero breakdowns for four straight years. That’s the thing about horse racing: It’s a communal venture. It’s people getting together and working hard; it’s a magic mixture of people doing what they do best and having it all come together to make something positive happen for a lot of people.

“It’s really a blessing in my life to see the industry get to the point where people can make a living at it and have some fun doing it,” he adds. “Success is always sweeter when you can share it with friends. I’m the kind of guy who likes to be down at the rail in the morning during training. I like to tell people there’s not a long line to get to me, and it’s a way for me to keep my finger on the pulse of what’s going on, not only for the jockeys and the horsemen, but the horses themselves. That’s the fun part of racing for me. And of course, on race day, the people in the stands. I like to say that if you can’t get excited watching a horse race, you’d better double check to make sure you still have a pulse!”  

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