John Steinbeck described the Kentucky Derby as “one of the most beautiful and violent and satisfying things” he ever experienced. For Blackie Sherrod, Jim Murray and Red Smith, the Derby was one of every year’s two can’t-miss events, the other being the Masters golf tournament. And Irvin S. Cobb of the New York World once argued, somewhat famously, “Until you go to Kentucky and with your own eyes behold the Derby, you ain’t never been nowhere and you ain’t seen nothin’.”
True enough. Nothing’s like it; nothing’s even close. But the country’s fascination with the race is in itself fascinating because the Derby mystique affects even people who have never been to Churchill Downs, and rarely go to racetracks and believe betting is the devil’s lollipop.
In other words, the Derby mystique touches everybody, like rain. People can play in it if they like or just watch the drops slide down the windowpane. But most people are drawn to it and celebrate it. On Saturday, the nation will watch and celebrate the 144th Kentucky Derby.
Next to the Super Bowl, the Kentucky Derby is the most-watched sporting event of the year. People who might not see another race all season suddenly want to have Derby parties and want to know who might win. What is it about the Derby that compels a nation to put down its iPhone? Why do people from all over the country, indeed the world, converge on Louisville, Ky., to watch 20 horses that, in some cases, they’ve never heard of race 1 1/4 miles?
Part of the reason is that the Derby is an anachronism and, as such, intriguingly unlike anything else in sport. Horse racing itself, in fact, is an anachronism — a pastoral game in an industrial society, an individual sport in an essentially socialist-minded culture, an island of tradition in a sea of modernity.
Even more, there’s this suspicion that people and horses don’t so much win the Derby as get selected to become part of its history. An NBA title, a World Series, a Super Bowl — they’re all easier to win than the Kentucky Derby simply because they can indeed be won. Or bought. Consider: Over the last 20 years, five different teams have won multiple Super Bowls, five have won multiple NBA titles and four have won multiple MLB championships, but only one person, J. Paul Reddam with Nyquist in 2016 and I’ll Have Another, has owned more than one Kentucky Derby winner.
For more than 40 years, Joe W. Brown and then his widow, Dorothy, bred and purchased racehorses all with the goal of winning the Derby. It never happened; the Derby never selected them.
And how many millions of dollars has Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al Maktoum, the ruler of Dubai, spent trying to win the Kentucky Derby? A hundred, 200? Hard to say. But this much is certain: The Derby never has selected him, not yet anyway. Of his 11 Derby starters, Frosted’s fourth-place finish in 2015 was the sheikh’s best showing.
But in 1990 the Derby selected 92-year-old Frances Genter and her first Derby starter. As Unbridled swept to the lead in the stretch, she and her trainer, Carl Nafzger watched from their box seats. But Nafzger had to describe the action for the diminutive and frail owner, who couldn’t see over the crowd:
“He’s going to the lead; he’s a winner, Mrs. Genter. You won it …. I love you, Mrs. Genter.”
Brokers Tip won but a single race in his career — the 1933 Kentucky Derby. Native Dancer lost but a single race in his career — the 1953 Kentucky Derby.
How could the Derby select such a mediocrity as Brokers Tip, who put his nose in front at the wire in the famous “fighting finish,” where jockeys Don Meade and Herb Fisher, on the runner-up Head Play, clawed and grabbed and hit each other for nearly a quarter-mile?
How could the Derby not select Native Dancer, one of the greatest racehorses of all-time who became one of the nation’s first television stars as well as one of the sport’s greatest stallions? The world of the Kentucky Derby, unlike any other, is animated by such mysteries.
And how could the Derby not select Gallant Man in 1957? Owned by Ralph Lowe of Fort Worth, who foresaw it all in a prescient dream, Gallant Man moved powerfully to the front and looked like a winner with about a sixteenth of a mile remaining in the most famous of races, when his jockey, Bill Shoemaker, stood up in the irons.
One of the greatest jockeys in the history of the sport inexplicably misjudged the finish line, and although quickly recovering he and Gallant Man finished a nose behind Iron Liege and the irascible Bill Hartack. Was it Lowe’s dream, told to Shoemaker, that planted the seeds of their own misfortune, or was it something else about the Derby, its idiosyncratic criteria for selecting its winners, that put Iron Liege in the winner’s circle?
In the week leading up to the Derby, the early mornings at Churchill Downs have yielded the most precious moments — monastic moments filled with intimations and subtleties that can point to understanding. Early one morning in 1994, a handsome gray colt galloped around the oval languidly, looking like marshlight through the darkness. After an uneventful spin, he was pulled up and turned around. He slowly walked near the outside rail, returning to his barn. And then, quite unexpectedly, just before stepping off the track, he coughed, a deep cough of inanition.
This was Holy Bull, the Kentucky Derby’s favorite and the sport’s freshly anointed superstar. In Florida, whenever he went to the racetrack in the mornings for his routine gallops, he looked like a heavyweight champion swaggering into the ring. But here, suddenly and strangely, he looked like a snowbird. What could explain the change, and was the cough part of the explanation?
People believe whatever they want to believe, or need to believe for their own comfort and peace of mind. And Holy Bull’s connections chose to believe that the colt’s unusually calm demeanor was the consequence of maturity and that his cough, witnessed by only a couple of people, was his reaction to a piece of straw that must have irritated his throat. In other words, they refused to believe the Kentucky Derby had not selected them, they refused to believe in the imperium of the Derby. This was tantamount to insulting the Derby. And so, as the 2-1 favorite, Holy Bull finished 12th of 14. He had won the Florida Derby and the Blue Grass Stakes, and after his debacle at Churchill he won six consecutive stakes. The champion 3-year-old and the Horse of the Year, he nevertheless could not resist the authority of the Kentucky Derby.
If, as Martin Amis once suggested, we live in the karaoke age, where everybody can be a star and anybody a celebrity, despite a complete absence of any discernible talent or distinguishing achievement, then the Kentucky Derby has become the contradictory cultural event of our time. The Derby selects the music, picks the performers. Nobody is a bigger star than the Derby itself; nobody’s celebrity endures as long as the Derby’s. For modern America, the Kentucky Derby is the moment when, as the Maritimers would say, the waves “reconsider” and the tide turns.
The Kentucky Derby doesn’t consort with the vainglorious either, not happily anyway and not without reprisal. This isn’t where you want to point to the fences or make a Super promise; this isn’t the place to call when they’ll fall, as Muhammad Ali would have put it, or guarantee a victory. Given the grand scale of the Derby, trash-talkers and chest-thumpers look ridiculous here.
Horse racing can trace its origins back to the ancient Greeks and Romans, the race has frustrated the ambitions of kings and princes and sheikhs, and the prize, represented now as the roseate blanket, has been coveted by every breeder, owner, trainer and jockey of virtually every racehorse born in the last 140 years. And so no matter how large a person’s ego might be, how prodigious his talent or how stentorian his voice, when he approaches the Derby he comes as a tiny token on a vast board game.
Yes, in 1979 trainer Buddy Delp declared Spectacular Bid to be “the greatest horse ever to look through a bridle,” and this just six years after Secretariat. In 1981 trainer Johnny Campo, always a juggernaut blowhard, screamed, “I told you so,” as he led Pleasant Colony into the winner’s circle, and he probably had. And, yes, they both won the Derby and then took the Preakness in Baltimore, but neither could sweep the Triple Crown. They both failed abjectly in the Belmont Stakes, the final jewel in horse racing’s famously baroque piece of jewelry.
Early one morning in the Churchill Downs stable area in 1989, legendary trainer Charlie Whittingham calmly said the horse he had brought from California would win the Derby. He relayed the information matter-of-factly — the track kitchen has a ham-and-eggs breakfast special, the traffic light at the corner of Taylor and Longfield is on the fritz, and Sunday Silence will win the Kentucky Derby.
Many people that year were predicting Easy Goer would win, and not just the Derby but the Triple Crown, on his way to becoming a superstar and a magazine coverboy. The champion juvenile of the previous year, Easy Goer had nearly set a world record while winning the Gotham Stakes by 13, and then he won the Wood Memorial easily enough to become the overwhelming Derby favorite. He looked the part, too. Glistening red, powerful and regal, he galloped each morning with his neck bowed, as if he were a keg of dynamite just waiting for somebody to light his fuse. How could anybody expect to beat that? And without a motorized vehicle?
But Whittingham was certain Sunday Silence would win. It wasn’t boasting, though. A World War II veteran who had served with the Marines, Whittingham arrived at the barn before 5 o’clock every morning — how long before only somebody who also arrived before 5 o’clock could say — and at 76 he still did push-ups daily. Nor was his confidence brazen. It was as if Whittingham had experienced a mystical moment, an epiphany, and was simply explaining what he had seen. And he saw clearly. Sunday Silence won by 2 1/2 lengths at the start of what turned out to be the sport’s greatest rivalry since Affirmed and Alydar in 1978.
Although an anachronism, the Kentucky Derby hasn’t been completely immune to modernity’s demands. Much around the race has changed. More of the best horses, for example, seem to be in the hands of fewer and fewer people. Still, horse racing somehow remains the most democratic of sports. My Boy Jack, for example, was originally purchased by a Fort Worth-based partnership, the Don’t Tell My Wife Stables, for $20,000; he already has earned more than $645,000 and could come charging down the stretch Saturday, threatening to earn an even more lucrative paycheck.
Because so many owners and trainers focus with mesmerized single-mindedness on the Triple Crown, often foregoing a juvenile campaign for their classic prospects, and perhaps, too, because of an acknowledgement of a modern fragility, horses race less frequently these days, and so they come into the Derby with much less experience than they once did. Carry Back, who won the 1961 Derby, raced 21 times as a 2-year-old. But Justify, who’s this year’s 3-1 favorite, and Magnum Moon, who was bred by Ramona Bass of Fort Worth, didn’t race at all last year. They will attempt to become the first Derby winner since Apollo in 1882 who was unraced as a juvenile. Can their talent, which is prodigious, trump their inexperience?
A modern points system that limits the Derby field to 20 starters has eliminated some of the moonshots that once qualified for a place in the starting gate. That might be an improvement.
Then again, it could mean a horse such as Mine That Bird, who won at 50-1, might be excluded. In April of 2009, Mine That Bird, who had finished fourth in the Sunland Derby in New Mexico, was momentarily stabled in Grand Prairie preparing for the Lone Star Derby. Then word came that he could race instead in Kentucky. He and Calvin Borel skimmed the inside rail, got through a narrow opening and drew clear to win by nearly seven lengths, forever encouraging every horse owner in the nation to try to squeeze his fantasies and dreams into the two minutes of the Kentucky Derby.
Still, the Derby remains essentially unchanged. Not even the crass commercialism and boorishness of Churchill Downs has ruined it. Nothing’s like the Derby; nothing even close: the intrusion of cameras and visitors in the stable area and everywhere else a young horse might look for peace; a procession of retinues to the paddock, which is awash in bright pastels and populated by gawkers and oglers; a band playing “My Old Kentucky Home” as bleary-eyed fans attempt to sing along; 20 horses in various stages of anxiety and anticipation; an infield teeming with people and turf suites; a high-definition video board that can be seen from outer space; an auxiliary starting gate to accommodate the overflow field; the explosive start and the frenetic run through a long tunnel of noise to the first turn; the cavalcade of traffic on the backstretch; and then the positioning into the second turn, where somebody will make a winning move; and then the long stretch that leaves hopes gasping.
How can anybody win? Nobody wins the Derby, but rather the Derby, in the two minutes necessary for a decision, selects somebody for eternal fame and distinction.
And who will that be this year? Justify, Magnum Moon, Audible, Bolt D’Oro, Good Magic, Mendelssohn, Vino Rosso — surely the Derby will choose one of those. Unless it chooses otherwise.