The Longest 2 Minutes In Sports

This was no ordinary homecoming.  This was a do-or-die attempt to lay the ghost of years of rejection from the horse-rearing elite and the literati who sat in those privileged boxes overlooking the track and those unprivileged craven hordes who grovelled around the centre-field where he had suffered as a boy.

The clubhouse as I remember was worse, much worse than I had expected.  It was a mess.  This was supposed to be a smart, horsey clubhouse, oozing with money and gentry, but what I saw had me skulking in corners.  It was worse than the night I spent on Skid Row a month later, back in New York.  My feet crunched broken glass on the floor.  There seemed no difference between a telephone booth and a urinal; both were used for the same purpose.  Foul messages were scrawled in human excrement on the walls and bull-necked men, in what had once been white, but were smeared and stained, seersucker suits, were doing awful things to younger but equally depraved men around every corner.  The place reminded me of a cowshed that hadn’t been cleaned in fifteen years.  Somehow I knew I had to look and observe.  It was my job.  What was I being paid for?  I was lucky to be here.  Lots of people would give their drawing arm to be able to see the actual Kentucky Derby which was now hardly an hour away.  Hunter understood and was watching me as much as he was watching the scene before us.

Something splattered the page I was drawing on and, as I moved to wipe it away, I realized too late it was somebody’s vomit.  During the worst days of the Weimar Republic, when Hitler was rising faster than a bull on heat, George Grosz, the savage satirical painter, had used human shit as a violent method of colouring his drawings.  It is a shade of brown like no other and its use makes an ultimate statement about the subject.

‘Seen enough?’, asked Hunter, pushing me hastily towards an exit that led out to the club enclosure.  I needed a drink.  ‘Er… one more trip to the inner-field Ralph I think,’ I heard Hunter say nervously.  ‘Only another half-hour to the big race.  If we don’t catch the inner-field now, we’ll miss it.’  So we went.

While the scene was as wild here as it had been in the clubhouse, it had a warmer, more human face, more colour and happiness and gay abandon – the difference in atmosphere between Hogarth’s Gin Lane and Beer Street.  One harrowed and death-like the other bloated with booze but animal-healthy.

Who would have thought I was after the gristle, the blood-throbbing veins, poisoned exquisitely by endless self-indulgence, mint juleps, and bourbon.  Hide, anyway, behind the dark shades you predatory piece of raw blubber.

The race was now getting a frenzied response as Dust Commander began to make the running.  Bangles and jewels rattled on suntanned, wobbling flesh and even the pillar men in suits were now on tip-toe, creased skin under double-chins stretched to the limit into long furrows that curved down into tight collars.

Mouths opened and closed and veins pulsed in unison as the frenzy reached its climax.  One or two slumped back as their horses failed, but the mass hysteria rose to a final orgasmic shriek, at last bubbling over into whoops of joy, hugging and back slapping.  I turned to face the track again, but it was all over.  That was it.  The 1970 Kentucky Derby won by Dust Commander with a lead of five lengths – the biggest winning margin since 1946 when Triple Crown Champion, Assault, won the Derby by eight lengths.
…
‘I think it’s time I was thinking of getting back to New York.  Let’s have a meal somewhere and I can phone the airline for plane times.  What day is it, we seem to have lost a weekend.  I need a drink.’

‘You need a lynching.  You’ve upset my friends and I haven’t written a goddamn word.  I’ve been too busy looking after you.  Your work here is done.  I can never come back here again.  This whole thing will probably finish me as a writer.  I have no story.’

‘Well I know we got a bit pissed and let things slip a bit but there’s lots of colour.  Lots happened.’

‘Holy Shit!  You scumbag!  This is Kentucky, not Skid Row.  I love these people.  They are my friends and you treated them like scum.’

Ralph Steadman- The Joke’s Over

That scene will not be duplicated this year at the Kentucky Derby, no spectators. You’ll have to get embarassingly drunk at home.

Mint Julep

Ingredients

• 4 cups bourbon
• 2 bunches fresh spearmint
• 1 cup distilled water
• 1 cup granulated sugar
• Powdered sugar

Directions

I suppose I might mention this is the 148th edition and ask you all rise for perhaps the most racist anthem in sports.

It is made no better for having been composed by Stephen Foster and yes, they will be singing it again this year.

Ready to have some fun? Nobody at the Track this year, they’re all out on the street protesting the death of Breonna Taylor-

The Kentucky Derby arrives in Louisville, amid protests and a pandemic
By Chuck Culpepper, Washington Post
September 5, 2020

Track announcers’ voices echo across the vast and vacant grounds, a thought misshapen to anyone’s memories of Kentucky Oaks day, the populous annual Louisville fete that happened non-populously Friday. Mint julep stands stand idly even if technically they don’t cry bourbon. Mobile-phone reception, always lousy, proves wretchedly easy. The paddock, where horses are prepared for races and gaudy clothes stuff the area on Derby weekend, has gone blank enough that when Derby favorite Tiz the Law acclimated himself to it during the fourth race Thursday afternoon, barely more than several people looked on.

He often turned his head toward them, as if to say thanks for coming.

In the last darkness of Friday morning, the twin spires looked normal with pink in their windows per Oaks custom, but the twin traumas of the American 2020 have warped the Derby into a shape not even close to like any of the previous 145. The police killing of emergency room technician Breonna Taylor in a no-knock raid in March sparked protests that reached a milestone of commitment Friday: 100 days. The novel coronavirus pandemic has shoved the city’s loudest event — really, the loudest event in almost any city — into both September and a hush, removing the fans who make it such an irresistible logistical hassle.
…
Churchill Downs issued a lengthy statement about racial injustice Thursday that read, in part: “We are not doing enough, quickly enough. That is true in our country, in our city and in our sport.” It vowed the “atmosphere of the Kentucky Derby will be different this year as we respond to those calls for change.” The organization weighed whether to discontinue the post-time playing and singing of “My Old Kentucky Home,” Stephen Foster’s 1853 composition told from the viewpoint of an enslaved person and sung with blithe fondness and teary eyes every Derby. Ultimately it decided Friday afternoon to play the song, “thoughtfully and appropriately modified.” Before it plays, there will be a moment of silence.

Or not. Actually, right now, there are BLM Protesters and Boogaloo Bois and Alt Right Militia hoping to provoke a Race War facing off outside separated by about a block of Cops in Riot Gear and National Guardsmen.

If you must watch this dreadful experience Post is around 7 pm on NBC.

Since you can hardly be expected to follow Horse Racing unless you’re a tout or plunger in one of the few forms of gambling deemed socially acceptable (as opposed to Poker, which is not gambling at all) and 2 year olds don’t have much of a record to handicap.

This year Joe Drape at the New York Times picks Honor A.P., Ny Traffic, and Tiz the Law; Melissa Hoppert picks Tiz the Law, Honor A.P., and Max Player. That link has takes on every horse in the field.