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Living the Derby high life can get messy
By Jay Cronley
Special to ESPN.com
|  | | Silver Charm owner Robert Lewis holds the trophy as his wife Beverly, trainer Bob Baffert and jockey Gary Stevens celebrate their victory in the 1997 Kentucky Derby. |
The Kentucky Derby represents vastly different things to those at Churchill Downs on the day of the special race.
To somebody with a carefree attitude and about $48 to wager, it affords the opportunity to lay out in the infield for seven or eight hours and feel your skin heat up while listening to the sounds of the horses circling
the track from time to time.
To the exit-level entertainer, the sitcom star whose series went off the air six years ago, it is a chance to get his face seen on live national television for perhaps the last time.
To Kentucky politicians, it is the chance to identify potential prime-time
contributors.
For tourists, it is like The Canyon or the Indy 500 -- something you
have to do once.
But to real-life gamblers, the Kentucky Derby can be more like a trial than the main event.
Fancy races like the Derby are tough to bet because of things like post position 18. I'm sure Andrew Beyer has hit more than his share of fancy races. I just must have been looking elsewhere at the time.
Besides being a tough wager, and too clean for most gamblers, the Kentucky Derby presents possibly the most difficult challenge in racing history: Gambling on horses with your spouse, or the equivalent.
It's like taking your spouse fishing once every four years: You have to take your thumb off the button on the reel before the lure will
go anywhere. You mind turning the radio down a little? There usually aren't too many
fish right next to the motor.
Serious gambling on horses is not a spectacle like baccarat. It is a very private endeavor. Your move isn't determined by somebody seated to your left or right. At the races, a person tends to turn quietly inward
toward his own experience.
And suddenly into this very intense vacuum-like past-performance fog -- wearing a $320 hat and a $750 linen suit and smelling like the best peaches -- comes your wife!
I went to the Kentucky Derby first in 1987, when Alysheba put it to them, as the guest of the great man A. Ray Smith. Great like
Jackie Gleason, big and bold and original. A. Ray Smith, who died a few years ago, owned the AA minor league baseball team in Tulsa, where I worked. And then he bought the AAA Louisville ball club, which outdrew the Cincinnati
Reds one year. His management secret seems unique now: Being nice
to the fans.
We went to the 1987 Kentucky Derby in a chartered bus with a police escort. But we did have to walk through those grandstand-type people to the private elevator. It's kind of like the perp walk you see on the cop shows where somebody wants to get where they're going fast, without being seen or touched, the daily newspaper over their head. Expensive
people (and their guests) rushing through the grubby people toward the
high rent district is a racing thrill I will not soon forget.
The private room for our party of 20-something at Churchill Downs was not lavish. That's because they're selling ambiance here. And the view from just beyond the finish line. There were no singles in this room. Spouses
were all about, smiling like the food was the big deal, the real-life gamblers
trying not to scratch the itch, trying to look innocent.
Here is what is hard about going to a fancy race with a spouse who had seldom been there before: Socialites are neat. Gamblers are messy. I was the first stained at our table, ink on a sleeve; my Racing Form also
attracted some strange looks. It was intensely color-coded, as usual, and
full of dozens of margin notes. My wife seemed slightly embarrassed because
few other men even had Forms up here.
Nobody particularly wants his wife seeing him bet a $220 exacta box. So you have to be very organized. Before the first race on this Derby Day, I went to the windows four or five times, wagering, planning, tinkering,
accumulating some 15 betting tickets.
"What the hell are you doing?" my wife hissed.
Five-dollar bills in one pocket, hundreds in the other, one trip to the window at the fancy races with a spouse.
Screaming can also suggest you have bet more than $4 to show. So if you have $50 on an 18-1 shot coming clear, you must not stand on the table the way gamblers so often do.
Party people do not run out of money at the races. Gamblers sometimes might.
Here's the way you play the ATM machine with a spouse nearby. You play
it during a race. When somebody says, "They're off," you run your card
through the slot. Case closed.
Derby Pick: You don't like the favorite, you're buying me lunch. Thanks.
The trifecta? Pegasus, Deputy, all; Pegasus, all, Deputy.
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