Memo to California Owners...

We are 9,000 owners of the most beautiful, intriguing, infuriating creatures ever raised on earth. They can form the core of a business, or the center of an extravagant avocation. They make us love them, worry about them, wager indiscriminately on them. We know a great deal about their ancestry and can often divine the broad distinction between a :21.1 quarter and a :22.2 mark for the same distance. We have learned an arcane language of the backstretch that includes a lexicon of descriptive terminology such as "bleeders," "roarers," "quarter cracks," "queen’s plates," and when fillies become mares, and colts turn into horses.

For all that, I wonder sometimes how much you know about the commitment, the work, the vision and the energy that goes into the operation of Thoroughbred Owners of California. A 15-person board meets 11 or 12 times a year.When emergencies occur, the Board gathers by telephone to render their judgments and recommend actions that are needed. We have been long been known by the acronym TOC. One older member of the original Board cited the acronym as "toke," until warned that it might be misconstrued as a term used by drug users. "Tock" is better.

We take pride in the decade of accomplishments racked up on behalf of our constituency. We have initiated important advances in security at the tracks, reshaping medication rules up to and including the recent focus on "milkshaking."We are the watchdogs of dollars applied to purses, and police of legislation that might affect racing. Board members serve on TOC committees and on industry-wide boards and committees. TOC is universally recognized as one of the most formidable organizations of its kind in the United States. All Board members are unpaid volunteers.

We serve gladly. Each Board Member also joins at least one of our seven committees, which often meet one or more times a month. If we have any complaint, it’s that the vast majority of owners do not take the opportunity to warn us of problems they foresee, complain to us about mistreatments related to their racing interests, or comment on the work that we are doing, or even should be doing. The TOC Political Action Committee receives so little funding from our membership as to be embarrassing. We’re here to serve.We try to attack problems before they fester into crises.