Time Out for The Derby in The Ville
If you haven’t been here for a long, long time, you won’t understand the rules that govern our embrace of the Kentucky Derby and all the indefensible activities that attend its arrival at 6:57 p.m. today, and every other first Saturday in May since Hector was a pup. I’m off from regular work today as I dress up and mingle down with anyone I see. Pretty much all I do is ask whomever I encounter who they like. I say he’s gotta chance even if I don’t think so, and then tell them who I like even if they don’t ask back.
I like American Promise for the very good reason that he ran the mile and one-eighth in his victory in the Virginia Derby faster than any of the other contenders did in their big prep. If you’re a junkie, like I am, you know how the track conditions at Colonial Downs were playing that day, earning American Promise’s one-forty-six-and-change for nine furlongs a Speed Figure that barely broke 100, which is thin compared to the 108 that Journalism, the favorite today, earned for his slower-time win of the Santa Anita Derby. But if anybody you encounter throws that back in your face you say, “Five horses were in the California field when Journalism did that, and there’ll be nineteen today right here in River City.”
If they’ve got the time to politely wrangle, I’ll offer American Promise’s trainer D. Wayne Lukas, a lifer now 89, and still throwing a leg over a horse’s back every morning as he works the magic that won his steeds the roses four times back in the day of his prime time. And the encountered, if she’s a junkie too, will smile at the many memories of the man they call “Coach” because a good handful of the other trainers today have big money careers that began with mucking Wayne Lukas’s stalls and walking his hots for about ten dollars an hour.
I know who my close friends and my five kids will spend the day with today and where they’ll be when the gates spring open for a miraculous nanosecond of widespread silence when everybody who’s watching will simultaneously suck in a hope-filled breath before going back to undifferentiated screaming for what some ink-stained sportswriter once called the “greatest two minutes in sports.”
Who do you like?