Robertson will sell horse racing interests
By HANK KURZ JR.
Associated Press

    Religious broadcaster Pat Robertson will sell his sizable horse racing interests because some of his followers objected to his involvement in a sport driven by gambling.
   Robertson, whose involvement in thoroughbred horse racing was first detailed by The New York Times in a story last month, said in a letter that he will sell his interests in horse racing by November, when a nearly two-week sale of breeding stock is held in Keeneland, Ky.
   ``I am sorry that my fondness for the performance of equine athletes has caused you an offense,'' he wrote in a reply sent this week to followers who had written to say they disapproved of his involvement in horse racing.
   In the letter, Robertson wrote that competition among horses has been part of every society that owned them, and that as a child, he used to race his horses against others ``over country roads or rolling pastures.''
   ``Very frankly, none of this brought any sense of embarrassment to me because I felt then, and feel now, there is nothing wrong with contests of skill, either between human athletes or equine athletes,'' he wrote.
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Faith-Based Gambling

By Dave McKenna
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Track regulars joke that the only better way to lose money than betting on a horse is buying one. Well, at a Kentucky auction last year, Robertson threw a whole lot of money—just about $500,000, in fact—on a single nag. And that horse, which he named Mr. Pat, has been a complete bust.

Robertson, whose Christian Coalition has always presented itself as a vehemently anti-gambling confederation, for years did a wonderful job of keeping his ownership of a racing stable, named Tega Farm, a secret. Earl \"Abraham\" Ola, a former trainer there, told the Washington City Paper last year that he's been required to sign a confidentiality agreement not to discuss Tega's owners (Cheap Seats, 12/14/01). But when word got out about Robertson's involvement, the preacher told those in his shocked flock that he was in the racing game—the existence of which most people attribute entirely to wagering—purely for the athleticism of the four-legged participants, which he referred to as \"equine athletes.\" Robertson even advised track patrons, via a New York Times interview in May, not to bet on his stable's entries.
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Horseman of the Apocalypse

By Dave McKenna

Pat Robertson has hit a bad stretch.

He saddled gays and lefties with blame for the Sept. 11 disasters. Then Washington Post columnist Colbert King rode Robertson again and again for covertly cozying up to African butchers such as Mobutu Sese Seko and Charles Taylor in the hope of getting their peoples' gold. And last week, the Christian Coalition's founder and president, apparently after much coaxing from below, put himself out to pasture.

Thank God that, during these tough times, Robertson has horse racing to fall back on.

Yes, horse racing.

When he's off his high horse, Robertson has more than dabbled in a pastime that many in the 700 Club's target market might consider a tad sinful. His stable, dubbed Tega Farm, has run horses at tracks in this region for the past several years, and, until recently, he kept a barn at the Fair Hill Training Center, a top-flight racing outpost in Elkton, Md. Breeder's Cup winner Da Hoss, and the Weymouths, who make up a branch of the Du Pont family tree and have a colorful racing past, were also tenants at Fair Hill.
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By Dave McKenna

Televangelist Pat Robertson called attention to himself just as the primary season was about to kick off by saying the presidential campaign is a one-man race. Turns out that Robertson's tipster, God, told the minister at year's end to put it all on the chalk: George W. Bush. \"I really believe that I've been hearing from the Lord it's going to be like a blowout election in 2004,\" he said on Jan. 2.

But over at the stables of Maryland's Laurel Park, there's more than half a million dollars' worth of proof that Robertson can't pick a winner. He sure got a bum steer when God or whoever tipped him about Mr. Pat.
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Pat would be just another loser among the other Laurel barn-dwellers were it not for his link to Robertson. Mr. Pat was named for Robertson, by Robertson, after the well-monied and righteous preacher bought the then-unraced 2-year-old for $520,000 in 2001.

Just like fellow moralists Jimmy Swaggart, who had his prostitutes, and William Bennett, who closeted himself with slot machines, Robertson has long had a pastime at odds with his image: the ponies.
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But the publicity attracted by the purchase of Mr. Pat had started to cause big problems for his owner even before the Derby. Robertson's followers were peeved by his parimutuel pursuits, and let him know about it through calls and letters to his Virginia Beach outpost, the Christian Broadcasting Network. The angst sparked Robertson to issue a statement on his Web site in May 2002 that contained both a theological defense of his horsing around and what looked like a pledge to get out of racing pronto.

\"I am sorry that my fondness for the performance of equine athletes has caused you an offense,\" he wrote in an open letter to his flock. \"Therefore, for your sake and the sake of others like you, I have set in motion the necessary plans to dispose of all of my thoroughbred racing and breeding stock between now and the breeding sale in Kentucky in November.\"

Robertson didn't specify what year he intended to dispose of his horses, but he held onto Mr. Pat well beyond the Keeneland auction in November 2002. A few months after the sale, I asked Robertson's spokesperson, Angell Watts, why the auction had come and gone without Mr. Pat's being put up for bid. She answered, \"That's just common sense. You have to make the horse attractive.\"
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CP