THE GREATEST TWO MINUTES in sport is preceded by this:
"Thousands of raving, stumbling drunks, getting angrier and angrier they lose more an more money. By midafternoon they'll be gazzling mint with both hands and vomiting on each other between races. The whole place will be jammed with bodies, shoulder shoulder. It's hard to move around. The aisles will be stick with vomit, people falling down and grabbing at your legs to keep from getting stomped. Drunks passing on themselves in the betting lines. Dropping handfuls of money and fighting to stoop over and pick it up. Hunter S. Thompson. "The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent and Depraved" (1970)
This is America's premiere horse race and it resemble nothing so much as a final exam in a rough but enjoyable course. The whole brief experience revolves around the week-long foreplay, foreplay, the loud ubiquitous hoopla perfected by Kentuckians years before the networks even started researching it. Barbecaes, races of everything from riverboats to hot-air balloons, beauty contests, and constant parties follow one another with dizzying speed and profusion. By the time the frazzled and usually drunken Derbygoer makes it to the Big Event itself (which comes, by the way, after a full slate of seven or eight races) he mostly feels a vague desire simply to get it over with, although he will be the first to deny it. As genuine and visceral as the excitement of the packed race is--in recent years the Derby has fielded more than 20 horses--the feeling doesn't come close to guaranteeing against a post-race anticlimax ranging from basic ennui to outright collapse.
I don't mean to downgrade the grandeur or enjoyment of the Derby. On the contrary, the first Saturday in May in Kentucky has been a very special day in American sport for more than a century, and millions--me included--hope it will stay that way.
Originally attended almost exclusively by Southern gentry and the world's most serious gamblers, the Run for the Roses now attracts more than 100,000 spectators, probably most of them college-aged. It's a spectacle par excellence, an unforgettable experience, and a slice of Americana unique to the Bluegrass State.
But writing in 1970, Thompson, the drug-driven madman journalist who lived in Louisville (or "Looahvull," to say it properly) for his first 18 years, may have seen a darker side of the event, so seemingly out of place in that turbulent time:
"Old people arguing about bets; 'Hold on there, I'll handle this' (waving pint of whiskey, fistful of dollar bills); girl riding piggyback, T-shirt says, "Stolen from Fort Lauderdale Jail.' Thousands of teen-agers, group singing 'Let the Sun Shine In,' ten soldiers guarding the American flag...So far we hadn't seen that special kind of face...the mark of the whiskey gentry--a pretentious mix of booze, failed dreams and a terminal identity crisis; the inevitable result of too much inbreeding in a closed and ignorant culture..."
In the years since Thompson wrote his love/hate article about the Derby, times have changed for both the race and the country. As if in lockstep with the nation's lurch to the right and Reagan's expropriation of sport for political currency, the thoroughbred industry has undergone a speculative explosion. The Derby is only its most visible manifestation.
What Thompson saw as the cultural disassociation of the traditional Derby from its contemporary setting has now become an economic disjuncture as well. Two years ago a yearling, completely untrained and untried, was sold for--no, I'm not fibbing--$10.2 million at the annual Select Yearling Sale at Keeneland Racetrack in Lexington, breaking all known records.
Both total and average prices for the best horses each year have multiplied since the mid-70s, fueled greatly by Arab petrodollars and favorable tax laws. The really big money lies in breeding; the Derby's approximately $300,000 winning payoff is peanuts compared to the potential return for the winner in stud fees and offspring sales. Syndications (partnerships behind a horse's stud results) for top stallions can run for $40 million and more. The Derby winner, no matter how fast, is almost invariably retired immediately after the other Triple Crown races, the Belmont and the Preakness. He then spends the rest of his life in blissful retirement, his only job to, uh, breed.
THE DERBY IN the '80s reflects the economic turbulence of the '70s. Who could have predicted 15 years ago that the quintessential gentlemen's hobby would have become the preferred investment for sheiks, lawyers and industrialists alike? Suddenly (for Kentucky, at least), the rolling farmland and quaint barns which make the central Bluegrass one of the most picturesque regions in the nation acquired enormous value Inflation and its causes made it profitable, in only to invest massively in precisely those assets which make central Kentucky one of the most underrated tourist areas in North America-its farms, landscape, and related services.
Now it's not just the Derby which requires a host of good hotels, restaurants, spots to satisfy the demand; a year-round influx of some of the world's wealthiest people creates a fascinating dual economy and culture in the oldest state west of the Appalachians. Mercedes sedans park next to beat-up Chevy trucks; private helicopters swoop down on quiet farmland; expensive restaurants spring up next to Billy's Bar; and Joe Bob the trainer, a plug of Red Man in his cheek and a splash of mud on his boots, rubs elbows with Texas wildcatters and Arabian princes.
This is ideal if you're planning a visit. Central Kentucky--Lexington and its environs--is what you could call a non-touristy tourist spot, not unlike what the French Riviera (albeit without beaches) must have been like before distant vacations became widely available to the non-affluent.
The same kind of service mix prevails. In the middle of the local, low-income economy you find stores and restaurants looking for the visitor with large amounts of money to spend. Several new hotels have risen on the sites of old tobacco warehouses, and nouveau entertainment spots are all the rage. Notwithstanding this culture shock, the predominant tobacco, horse, and farming industries continue to thrive and provide the all-important "flavor" lost to more popular tourist areas further south.
KENTUCKY IS probably best-known outside its borders by the slogan "fast horses, smooth bourbon, and beautiful women." Kentuckians themselves don't find this stereotype too offensive, although stage and screen depictions of the racist "white trash redneck," or of the feuding, murderous hillbilly, sometimes can cut to the quick.
The state government has actually tried to capitalize on the more favorable aspects of the nationally-held stereotypes through extensive ad campaigns aimed at both tourist and business audiences. The natural beauty of the central Bluegrass region and far western lake country (the world's largest manmade lake, incidentally, is Kentucky Lake, built by the Tennessee Valley Authority) have proven to be considerable revenue sources in recent years.
Like the South in general, Kentucky has found that its climate, location, natural beauty, and amorphous "charm" can work to its financial advantage. The best outdoor tourist areas--the western lakes, Daniel Boone National Forest in the foothills of the Appalachians, and the rolling hill and forest land in between--are perfectly complemented by the only two urban centers, Louisville and Lexington.
All in all, the Kentucky Derby--with its money, liquor, fast horses and steamy depravity--may get you to check out the state in the first place, but there will be a lot more to make you come back. As the state tourism board jingle goes, "Oh, Kentucky--you'll come to love it"--and there's no better time to come than on that sunny May morning when 80 hooves scatter mud across Churchill Downs.
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