Roy Exum
So here we are, long after one particular year in the 25 I covered the Kentucky Deby, when we’d gone on the Thursday where they draw for the post (position in the starting gate.) Believe it or not, post position is a huge deal because positions 1 through five can get pinched out at the rail and anything 12 or over must sprint from the outside into unyielding traffic.
The way you’d cover Derby week would be at leave a 4 a.m. wake-up call at the front desk, quickly shower the minute the phone would ring, and then go to the back side of the track before daybreak to talk to trainers, jockeys, ‘hot walkers’ and anybody else who could give you the greatest inside on “the Greatest Two Minutes in Sports.”
Yah, yah, hay yah.
Here’s the better story. You befriend these horse people and most have a daily race form in their hip pocket. Sure, it is on a cloudy Wednesday before Saturday’s big race but these cats play the ponies every day. So you interview them, joke and kid some, and then ask innocently, “You got any nudges for today?”
“Not really … I don’t know anything strong,” they reply while pulling the racing form from their back pocket. “You might think about giving some thought to the three horse in the second race and the fourth horse in the fourth placed second in Arkansas. Willy Nilly in the sixth is made for distance …. bet a strong place bet … and in the feature bet half your winnings on Sinbad’s Son … he’s just been beaten once but nobody’s seems to have noticed.”
Well, there is no fun under the sun better than that. Some bets we’d win, some we’d lose. But such fun was never to be had but that at Churchill Downs. All before that hallowed eighth race on Saturday, when time would always stand still.
If you’ll please, Jim Murray was my idol as a sports writer, and Jim, who wrote famously for the Los Angeles Times, penned this story on the Kentucky Derby on Friday, May 3,1974. Yep, 46 years ago, yet it is as true today as grits and sausage go with eggs and biscuits with gravy.
* * *
A PARTY IN KENTUCKY
(Written by Jim Murray in the LA Times on May 3rd, 1974)
LOUISVILLE – Probably the least chauvinistic of God’s creatures is the horse. I mean, horses don’t go around with flags in their lapels, or belong to lodges, or have secret handshakes. They don’t wear bumper stickers saying “If you don’t like being a horse, why don’t you go back where you belong?” Or, “Horsedom – Love It Or Leave It.”
Nobody cares if they stand at attention on the victory platform. In fact, they’re expected to look bored. Or mad.
Horses are not all that proud to be horses, never mind Californians or Floridians or Kentuckians or Irish or French or Italian. You might say geography bores them. Also history.
There isn’t a horse alive who wouldn’t take his Kentucky Derby blanket, and go hock it for a nosebag. No horse ever went out and won for the old Gipper. Or for God, country and Yale, for that matter. The only reason a horse runs fast is to get away from that guy on his back whipping him.
A horse is not religious or political. He resists geographical identification. It is impossible to tell from looking at him whether he is from Japan or Jersey City.
And, yet, when a Kentucky Derby comes upon us, it is as fiercely intersectional as the Rose Bowl. California breeders bite their lips and pray. So do Floridians, Texans and horsemen who have extensive breeding interests in their home states, and thus economic stakes in the outcome. Kentuckians have the arrogance that comes from winning 19 or 20 of their own Derbies. It is the bluegrass or the lime water, the same things that made Dan’l Boone great, they’ll tell you – particularly if they’re trying to sell you the horse. The fact that something like 20 out of 20 racers are bred in Kentucky in the first place, gets lost in the spiel.
However, it is true that California, with its relatively massive breeding industry and round-the-calendar racing program, has bred a disproportionately low number of Kentucky Derby winners and NO Triple Crown winners. Florida, with its comparatively new breeding industry, and a few months of winter racing, has done significantly better.
So California racing has taken to rooting for horses which have even raced in California. No matter that they were born in Kentucky. Even here, they have developed a massive inferiority complex. No matter where horses are born, they seem to run like California after they get there.
You see, racing, generically, was the sport of entrenched wealth – the guys who got here and cheated the Indians, or cornered the wheat, or stole the patents – guys who used to have banquets on horseback in New York hotel ballrooms. They all lived on Long Island or Newport and went around not only in their own railroad cars, but on their own railroads, and they kept breeding farms in Maryland or Kentucky or Virginia.
They cornered horse racing the same way they cornered gold, they syndicated stud shares of the good stallions among themselves. They already owned all the good brood mares.
This kept out of racing the people who didn’t get their money through probate. People whose wealth was less than a generation old would never be considered eligible to the fraternity of the horsey set, fetchingly called “The Jockey Club,” even though most of the members only sat on horseback at hotel banquets sipping champagne.
All of these diverse elements come together in this rotting old river town, nodding in the sun of a May afternoon, and humming Stephen Foster to itself, in a horse race which, for a day, turns America back to the 19th Century. It’s Camptown Racetrack One Mile Long in this old barfly of a town with its chipping brick, aging like its whisky, on the banks of the Ohio which is beautiful only in song.
It was honest once, this race. Now, it’s commercial. It’s worth $20 million to the town, not much of which finds its way into the pockets of the drifters and the rooming houses along the river with the broken windows and the chipping paint.
Why Kentucky? Likely because of a stickpin gambler named Matt Winn, an Irishman who realized that all Louisville needed was for the rich to roll in here by railroad car for just one weekend and some of the lightest-fingered gentry in the Western world could make the score that could last them till next Derby day.
He sold his race the way Barnum sold his circus, and Carter his liver pills. He coddled the press, flattered the rich, and sent freight cars for the good racehorses – and opened his windows.
The New York rich didn’t like it. They grumbled and balked – and insisted the Belmont was a truer test of horseflesh. As though that had anything to do with it. It was too early in the year and too hard a track at a bush meeting – and so forth, they said.
Ultimately, they had to send their stock. The public didn’t give a damn about the Belmont. A burro could win it for all they cared.
All racing began to be built around the eighth race at Churchill Downs on the first Saturday in May. The Belmonts and the Whitneys and the Phippses and the Vanderbilts stopped turning out their horses over the winter in places like South Carolina or Virginia. To be ready in May, they had to race in December.
Californians bravely came East each year with their suspect little sprinters, hoping that among them would be the great Swaps who electrified the hard boots and the railroad-car magnates nearly two decades ago.
And, there may be great changes in the rest of the world this month of May in this year of our Lord. But, on Saturday in Kentucky, it’s going to be the Gay Nineties or Reconstruction or even antebellum once again for two minutes. It’ll be Stephen Foster time, and Somebody-Bet-On-The-Bay, the Old Folks at Home, and the railroad barons and Wall Street against the people who only think they have money.
They put leaves in the drinks and braids on the horses, and America has a party for itself. In its Old Kentucky Home. By and by hard times may come aknocking on the door. But, for one day, we’ll sing one song for our old Kentucky Derby, our old Kentucky Derby, far away.