Mike Paradise was a legend of Chicago harness racing
by Neil Milbert
No writer, broadcaster or publicist has ever made contributions to Chicago harness racing comparable to those of Mike Paradise.
A pillar of the sport for more than a half century, Paradise died of cancer at age 83 on Aug. 1 at his home in the Chicago suburb of Rolling Meadows.
A 2009 inductee into the Illinois Harness Horsemen’s Hall of Fame, Paradise outlived six Chicago area tracks — Washington Park, Aurora Downs, Arlington Park (where the standardbreds raced for two years after Washington was destroyed by fire), Sportsman’s Park, Balmoral Park and Maywood Park.
After beginning his career in 1961 as a part-time copy boy for the now-defunct Chicago American he wrote his first harness racing story for the newspaper in 1972. He then started making picks and writing a weekly column called Track Topics.
In the early 1970s, Paradise also was in the spotlight in the sulky, guiding his horse to a narrow victory in a Washington Park media race promotion.
The Chicago American’s name was changed to Chicago Today and it became a tabloid before the parent Chicago Tribune shut it down in September, 1974.
In his last column for Chicago Today he wrote: “Thanks for a lovely buggy ride. It’s the homestretch for this column.”
In the body of the story he told his readers that Arnold Cattle Co. and Farrington Stables were “unveiling a promising youngster Rambling Willie.”
Paradise was one of a select group from the Today sports staff invited to move to the Tribune.
He turned down the opportunity to become a Tribune sports copyreader to accept an unsolicited offer to become the director of publicity and public relations for the Sportsman’s harness and thoroughbred meetings. His PR debut came when he went to the Balmoral standardbred meeting that Sportsman’s president of harness racing, Billy Johnston, was overseeing at the time. The 1975 winter/spring harness meeting was Paradise’s first at Sportsman’s.
John Brokopp was the first person Paradise hired at Sportsman’s in 1975 and they remained a team until 1997 when what was one of North America’s leading harness tracks dating back to its inaugural meeting in 1949 abandoned the sport to begin an ill-fated attempt to become a combination auto racing/thoroughbred venue.
“The thing about Mike was that he wasn’t a journalist or PR guy who got a job in racing,” Brokopp told the Chicago Tribune. “He was a harness racing fan who happened to be there when Sportsman’s needed a publicity man. He was a great publicity man and a wonderful writer, and he always was embracing new technology.”
Paradise changed the Sportsman’s program from its previous format and introduced a new concept, providing past performance lines, stories and analysis. The United States Trotting Association would later adopt his format as the standard for programs at member tracks.
When he learned that the Chicago television stations got feeds from Midwest Relays at the downtown Merchandise Mart he persuaded Johnston to get a micro-wave system that would enable Sportsman’s to relay race results to the stations, enabling the track to get exposure on the 10 o’clock newscasts on the nights of major races.
With the advent of computers, he tailor-made results summaries for each of 15 newspapers in Illinois and one in Indiana. The arrival of off-track betting parlors in Illinois made these summaries an important component in their success.
To augment the product on the racetrack and broaden its audience, Paradise was instrumental in bringing recording stars such as Ike and Tina Turner, The Captain and Tennille, Blood Sweat and Tears, Chuck Berry and Chubby Checker to Sportsman’s for concerts on race nights.
In May, 1992 when Sportsman’s moved into a new era when it expanded from a five-eighths mile to a seven-eighths mile oval — giving it a 1,436 feet homestretch that was the longest in the harness racing world — Paradise published the Sportsman’s Park Historical Review to commemorate the milestone.
The introduction said: “From 1949 through 1991 Sportsman’s Park has taken its place as one of the premier harness racing facilities in North America… This Historical Review was produced with the hope of bringing back many fond memories to longtime Sportsman’s Park patrons and to enlighten new harness fans to the rich traditions of Sportsman’s Park.”
The publication consisted of a yearly synopsis of the meetings during that 42-year span, highlight photos and a wealth of statistical information.
Five years earlier, when cable TV was in its infancy Maywood’s beautiful and charismatic director of group sales, Eleanor Flavin, welcomed Paradise’s invitation to join him in inaugurating what became a nightly Chicago harness racing show on Sports Vision (which later became Sports Channel and then Comcast Sports Net).
“We were on the cutting edge of cable competing with the networks and Mike was the driving force by constantly innovating,” said Flavin, whose father, Pat Flavin, was co-owner of Maywood at the time.
“Our fans were the primary focus and our other focus was on fans who couldn’t come to the track anymore because they were infirmed. The show was on satellite and we got fan mail from Australia and New Zealand and servicemen on a base in Guam.
“Mike was the expert and he made everything work. We tried to make the horses who raced week-in-and-week-out fan favorites by finding out what kind of personalities they had and what their quirks were. We’d choose a race and our viewers would try to beat Mike in picking the winner. We’d go to the farms. Off-track betting came in and we did the OTB parlor tour, taking TV crews to all of the locations. We’d have looking back segments and talk about horses like Albatross and Rambling Willie.”
When FOX Sports bought the channel and put its own programming in the time slot, Flavin and Paradise turned down an offer to move their show to 4 a.m., ending its eight-year stint in 1995.
After Sportsman’s discontinued harness racing in 1997 Paradise went to Maywood to head the PR department.
Starting in the late 1970s, Paradise also had a freelance job as the Chicago Tribune’s harness racing handicapper.
His stint at Maywood ended in 2009, coinciding with the Tribune’s decision to discontinue handicapping harness races.
He then moved to the website of the Illinois Harness Horsemen’s Association (IHHA), working until he became terminally ill this year.
Ironically, Tony Somone, whose first racetrack job came in June, 1986 when he was hired by Paradise to send race results from Sportsman’s, hired Paradise to work on the IHHA website.
“Mike came to me and said he wanted to stay involved and felt he had a lot to contribute,” said Somone, the IHHA’s executive director since 2007. “I hired him to do the morning line (at the Chicagoland tracks), his picks and racing recaps and feature stories, but I never suggested what he should write about. Mike’s picks and stories were consistently what people went to on our website [to read].
“I learned so much about the publicity side, the administrative side and the political side of the business working under Mike at Sportsman’s and then Maywood in the early 1990s. I learned the inner workings and that led me to my current job with the IHHA.”
Paradise once said one of the things he was proudest of was bringing Somone and Kim Rinker into harness racing and seeing them go on to become important people in the sport.
Rinker went to work for Paradise as a writer at Sportsman’s in 1984, a time when women were starting to make a breakthrough in newspaper sports and sports public relations, and moved with him to Maywood, staying there until 2015.
“Mike was a great guy to work for,” she said. “He was loyal and would go out of his way to help you further your career.”
Rinker started “a stable on the side” during the time she worked for Paradise.
“What other boss would let you race your horse in the first or second race and then come back upstairs to the Press Box and do your work?” she asked.
After leaving her job at Maywood, Rinker went on to run the Ohio Sire Stakes program for eight years and become prominent nationally by writing for trade publications.
Marty Engel, the president of the IHHA for several years, described Paradise as “an ambassador for the sport who had a passion for harness racing and helped grow the sport with all he did over all those years as a PR man, a newspaper handicapper and on the TV show that had so many followers.”
“He never bet on the horses,” Engel said. “He didn’t care about the gambling aspect. He just loved the people in the sport, the horses competing in it and the history. He had a strong passion for harness racing; he could have done other things and made more money but this was what he loved.”
Paradise is survived by his wife of 42 years, Shelly; his daughter, Laura Housman, and her husband, Jesse; his son, Michael, and wife, Diane; his widowed sister, Angel, and five grandchildren.
