Hornaday Jr. picks up first win of the season at ORP

Autoracing Betting Lines

07/23/2010 - Clermont, IN (Sportsbook Betting Lines) - Ron Hornaday Jr. snapped a 22-race winless streak in the Camping World Truck Series with an impressive performance in Friday's AAA Insurance 200 at O'Reilly Raceway Park at Indianapolis.

Hornaday Jr., the four-time and defending series champion, took the lead from pole sitter Timothy Peters after 62 laps and dominated from there. Peters reclaimed the top position during the fifth and final caution when he opted to stay on track, while most of the leaders, including Hornaday, pitted for the last time.

Shortly after the final restart, Hornaday and Kyle Busch chased down Peters. Hornaday then made his winning pass with 48 laps remaining. He finished two seconds ahead of Busch for his 46th career truck victory, but his first since August 1, 2009 at Nashville.

"It was just a great day," said Hornaday, who led 129 of 200 laps. "Hopefully, it keeps everybody a little bit quiet, but it took [crew chief] Ernie [Cope] to come here and settle everyone down, because the guys were getting a little anxious. We know we've got a winning team, but we just had to prove it to them."

One year ago at ORP, Hornaday made series history by becoming the first driver to win four races in a row. Hornaday extended his record to five consecutive victories the following week at Nashville.

At the end of the 2009 season, Hornaday's then crew chief Rick Ren left his Kevin Harvick Inc. team and moved over to Kyle Busch's new Truck Series team to serve as director of competition.

Hornaday also won a truck event at ORP in 1997 and 2007. He will compete in Saturday's 200-lap Nationwide Series race for Kevin Harvick Inc.

Busch's second-place run was his best finish at this short 0.686-mile oval.

"We made it through the evening pretty well," Busch said. "I thought we had a shot to win there and battle with Hornaday a little bit. I felt like if maybe I could have stayed in front of him the results would have been a little different, but we knew going into practice, he was a little bit better than we were. Unfortunately, we just didn't have enough for him tonight."

Matt Crafton finished third, while Johnny Sauter and James Buescher rounded out the top-five.

Rookie Austin Dillon took the sixth spot, followed by Todd Bodine, the current points leader, Brad Sweet and David Starr.

Peters, who led 71 laps, faded in the late-stages and wound up finishing 10th.

Bodine now holds a 177-point advantage over Aric Almirola, who crashed halfway through the race and ended up with a 31st-place finish. Almirola got collected in an accident involving Mario Gosselin and Narain Karthikeyan.

"We're struggling, and we're racing for 20th," Almirola said. "We were trying to work on our truck and get it better with a hundred laps to go, and [Karthikeyan] kept running into me every corner. This place is as wide as they come for short tracks."

With the win, Hornaday moved up to fourth in the standings, trailing Bodine by 212 points.

Johanna Long made an impressive debut in the series with a 17th-place run. Long, who drove the No.15 Toyota for Billy Ballew Motorsports, became the youngest female to compete in a truck race at age 18.

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SPORTS BETTING - Tennis is an underrated and under-utilized bettors' sport.

Ten years ago, at just about this time, I called Alan Boston in Vegas and left him a voicemail that went something like this (abridged version): "Hey Alan, Chad Millman from ESPN The Magazine calling. I want to do a book about wise guys, you in?"

A couple weeks later I got a message back (abridged version): "I don't know, maybe," Boston said. "Call me and we'll talk about it. But not later today. I got $1,000 on Andre Agassi to win the French Open at 40-1, and he's in the finals."

Here's what happened next (abridged version): Agassi won his tourney. Boston won his $40,000. I wrote sportsbook.

In the ten years since, how much has been wagered on the big-time tennis events? Put it this way: The Nevada Gaming Commission doesn't even track the number year by year because it's so small.

"Tennis makes up about one-tenth of one percent of our take," says Lucky's bookmaking boss Jimmy Vaccaro. "The last big golf major we probably had $100,000 worth of bets. In tennis, we might have written two big tickets."

Tennis' lack of popularity amongst the American bettoratti is no surprise, really. For starters, the biggest sports betting holidays -- the Super Bowl, the NCAA tourney -- are must see TV. People, at least the degenerates I know, plan vacations around watching those events in Vegas sports books.

But Wimbledon? Doesn't exactly reel in the whales. "Seriously, it's the nuts as an event," says Boston. "But who even knows when it's on?"

Here's another reason that helps explain why golf gets traction, something I call "The Bubbe Theory." My Bubbe is pushing 95 and has cataracts so bad that, to her, even the most crystalline Chicago day is mostly cloudy. But she still listens to the Cubs games, and she still calls me in a fit if she disagrees with something Rick Telander writes in the Chicago Sun Times. She's a sports fan. If she doesn't know you, you're just filling a niche. And niche players, even historically good ones like Roger and Raf, don't drive betting volume. Only the highest profile names attract square money, which inflates wagering totals like a shot of saline to the lips. Bubbe, and the public, loved Agassi, tennis' last cross-the-rubicon, mainstream draw. She also has a crush on Tiger. She's given me standing orders to put a sawbuck on the big cat whenever I walk through a sports book (or mistakenly tap into one via my Internet machine.) That explains why the Masters is getting $100K in action at some books while the four tennis majors might not get that combined this year.

This isn't a case of tennis being a difficult sport to bet. In fact, in Europe, it's probably the second most popular sport for gambling after soccer. Granted, as the WSJ football betting last week and The Mag's Shaun Assael examined in even greater depth last year, that might be because gamblers across the pond see it as an easy game to fix. But it could also be because, over there it holds the kind of sway the big two do over here.

Street corners in Spain are peppered with public courts and kids doing their best Raffy impressions. In some war torn parts of Eastern Europe poverty-stricken kids view tennis as an escape route, like football or basketball here. A couple years ago The Mag's Lindsay Berra wrote a great piece about Belgrade's Jelena Jankovic, Ana Ivanovic and Novak Djokovic. They learned the game as kids while bombs were raining down on their homeland. They practiced in drained swimming pools. Not exactly Nick Bolletierri conditions.

In the United States, casual fans think tennis is played four times a year. But on the tightly packed European continent, national interest in homegrown talent runs deep every weekend. Of the ATP's current top 20 players, only two, tennis betting and James Blake, are American. Fourteen are from Europe, representing six different countries.

No wonder fans from Lisbon to Bhudapest get jacked up for the net game, whether it's Wimbledon or a low-level tourney like the Estoril Open in Portugal (congrats to Spain's Albert Montanes for winning that one, btw). Chances are good that someone representing their flag will not only be playing, but have a shot at winning.

And that's all any bettor can ask for.

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