The Derby – Bill Levy, 1967 ★★½

The Most Exciting 200 Minutes of Sports

Since 1875, the Kentucky Derby has been drawing the greatest race horses ever known. Okay, not Man O’ War or Seabiscuit, or famous 20^th century racehorses outside North America. But hundreds of top American thoroughbreds have beaten their hooves along the dirt track of Churchill Downs for what is often called “the most exciting two minutes of sports.” After nearly 100 years of this, Bill Levy wrote a coffee-table book commemorating the event.

The Derby recounts some of the milestone races, from the first one won by Aristides in a then-record time for a mile-and-one-half distance (since shortened to a mile-and-a-quarter) of just under two minutes and 38 seconds to the 1966 victory by Kauai King, a rare occasion where the winner led post-to-post. At least as much of Levy’s focus is on the culture surrounding the race, its people and traditions, and what it was like to be in Louisville on a May weekend for the big race, circa the mid-1960s:

The TV audience will surely see more of the actual race than most of those assembled at Churchill Downs on this day. But somehow watching the spectacle of the Derby on TV is not quite like being there in person. The coverage is complete, the close-ups of the personalities are good. But it’s like watching football – you usually see more of the game on the screen than you do in a seat a hundred yards from the field. But it’s impossible to capture the groundswell of spirit that engulfs the crowd.

Impossible or not, Levy does his best to explain it. In that he is assisted by a young photographer, Mike Tonegawa, who captures the sights around the 1966 Kentucky Derby with impressively clear black-and-white photographs.

If you ever read Hunter Thompson’s famous account of the scene just four years later, “The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent And Depraved,” and wondered how that spectacle might have appeared to someone taking nothing stronger than a cocktail, Levy’s your man:

Such standards as “Kentucky Orange Juice,” a potent combination of the sunshine drink and bourbon, and mint juleps help to embellish the bacon, ham, eggs, and hot rolls. Some of the less hearty folk drink Bloody Marys. But it is safe to say that by the time hundreds of the party-goers arrive at Churchill Downs they are already candidates for a pot of black coffee and a steam bath.

Elsewhere, Levy notes the hellacious difficulty had in trying to get accommodations in Louisville the weekend of the Derby (always held on the first Saturday in May), the party scene around the city on the eve of the race, and the various ornate hats sported by women at the scene with social connections: “A sage observer once described the scene as Easter Sunday, New Year’s Eve, and Christmas all rolled into one, with each woman trying to outdo the next in the splendor of her attire.”

There’s an old “Simpsons” word that describes The Derby: Cromulent. Levy’s approach to the material is more dutiful than engaging. There’s a chapter on how the betting money is collected and toted, and another that focuses on Wathen Knebelkamp, the president of Churchill Downs. Knebelkamp comes across as amiable if tight-lipped regarding just how big a people draw the Derby is.

The horses are on the turn at the Kentucky Derby. Behind them can be seen the distinctive twin spires of the grandstand, "the trademark of Churchill Downs," as Levy notes, part of the Derby's unique legacy since they were built in 1894. Image from https://www.theodysseyonline.com/the-kentucky-derby-festival.

“The two most successful one-day sporting events in the United States are the Indianapolis ‘500’ and the Kentucky Derby, and neither gives out official attendance figures,” Knebelkamp says.

This is one of those times you realize how old a book The Derby is, that it came out the same year the National Football League kicked off what is known today as The Super Bowl.

Fifty years later, it’s also no longer true that only one filly ever won the Derby (Regret in 1915, since joined by Genuine Risk in 1980 and Winning Colors in 1988.) Nor is Eddie Arcaro alone among jockeys with the most Derby wins (Bill Hartack would join him when he made his fifth and final trip to the winner’s circle in 1969.)

Other milestones reported in the book remain in place: Apollo in 1882 is still the only horse to have won without having raced at all the year before as a two-year-old. Donerail in 1913 is still the winner with the longest odds, “more than 90-1,” Levy says. [Wikipedia lists the figure as 91-1.]

“I nearly fell off, he had so much left,” Levy quotes Donerail’s jockey, Roscoe Goose, a fixture at Churchill Downs for many decades after. “He was so fresh at the end of the race that when he came back to the winner’s circle, he wouldn’t let them put the roses on him.”

With the exception of a few moments like that, Levy’s rundown of the Derby’s history is perfunctory. He records some of the bigger outcomes in terms of payouts, a somewhat monotonous stat as the figures kept growing alongside the Derby’s stature and overall inflation.

One aspect of the Derby that doesn’t get as much attention as I expected was its place as the first of three celebrated horse races that make up the Triple Crown. At the time of The Derby’s publication, only eight colts had managed the feat, beginning with Sir Barton in 1919 and continuing on through to Citation in 1948. The next winner, Secretariat, hadn’t even been born yet.

It was a funny thing: There were three Triple Crown winners in the 1930s, which was when the accomplishment first got dubbed as such by the media, and four more in the 1940s. By the time of The Derby’s publication, it had been a while, something people today can relate to given the even longer drought of 37 years that was finally broken by American Pharoah [sic] in 2015. If 2017’s Derby winner, Always Dreaming, doesn’t go on to win the Preakness and the Belmont Stakes, he still will be in great company.

“This is the greatest race in our country,” jockey Willie Shoemaker tells Levy. But why? That’s not a question Levy answers directly.

Instead, he spends much time on the men who transformed the Derby from a somewhat-sleepy stakes race, across a period of serious economic hardship and near-collapse, into the major spring event it has become. Chief among them is Matt Winn, a business executive who gave up the tailoring trade in 1904 to take up ownership of the Derby at a time when it seemed drooping attendance and legal roadblocks to gambling on the race would spell its doom:

By 1911, the first year $2 mutuel tickets were sold at Churchill Downs, Derby Day betting was up to $170,834, with almost $50,000 wagered on the feature race of the day. The Derby was becoming popular, and Winn moved to make it even more attractive by hiking the stakes in 1913, when the total purse was boosted to $5,000 added.

That year, the Derby’s ultimate longshot Donerail paid off. You could say something similar happened for the Derby itself, with substantial help from Winn’s keen salesmanship.

The real pleasure for me in reading The Derby is not in Levy’s explanation of the history, serviceable as it is. It comes from the peeks we get at the life of Louisville during the Derby week. In this, Levy is aided by Tonegawa’s fine photographs of the scene in 1966, with plenty of attention paid to a fine dark-bay colt with a white peninsula-shaped mark on its forehead that would win that year, and go on to win the Preakness, too: Kauai King.

Kauai King celebrates his victory at Churchill Downs in 1966 with his groom, both of whom are featured in several Mike Tonegawa photos included in this book. Image from http://www.horseracingnation.com/horse/Kauai_King_photos

Tonegawa’s photos show the King in the stable, getting his legs wrapped, and trotting along the track between warm-up runs. Sometimes he seems to be smiling at the camera: perhaps he had a sixth sense about that sort of thing. In his victorious Derby run, I swear there’s a moment in the backstretch where he is looking right at me, his head tilted away from the track and toward the camera. Apparently Kauai King was easily distracted by spectators; he wore blinders for the big race, and as Tonegawa shows, for the practices, too.

Levy doesn’t describe any of this; it’s something I picked up on and supplemented via Wikipedia and YouTube. Levy’s focus is more on the people, which is not a bad tack, either. He visits a couple of parties thrown on Derby Eve, a fancy one thrown by the Ashland Oil Company and a more intimate and fun-centered affair thrown by a Louisville businessman named Bob Whitehouse which consists of friends and associates he puts up around town.

At the Ashland shindig, there was a balloon-covered pool at the Stouffer Louisville Inn. Whitehouse made do with toy stockcars that partiers took turns racing along a track in his backyard.

“I don’t like cold parties,” Whitehouse tells Levy. “Being a doctor, I’d be associated with sadness. The only way to have a warm and friendly party is to put yourself in it. You have to reflect your personality into the party in the little favors and decorations, which actually tell the story of you.”

It makes a fitting capstone for the story of the Kentucky Derby, a week-long party which seems anything but cold, whether or not the weather cooperates. By focusing as much as it does on the party aspect, Levy creates an enjoyable time capsule that dishes out the charm more than it does the history of this fabled event.