Why I Love the Kentucky Derby

I love horse racing. Just typing that statement feels weird, because I devote no more than one half hour out of each year to horse racing; I could not name a single jockey, past or present; I have never been to a horse race, nor have I ever bet on one, and I would probably only bet on one if I somehow found myself at a horse race, because otherwise I’m almost certain that I’d be infuriatingly bored; I wouldn’t play fantasy horse racing (Okay, that’s not true, I’d play fantasy horse racing, if only to draft players with names like Runs the Gamut.); I will almost certainly spend more time this year writing about horse racing than I will watching it. But it’s true: I love horse racing. Not the way I love baseball, but I love horse racing, in my way. And here’s why:

One: Enjoying horse racing requires nothing of you. I watch three horse races a year: the Kentucky Derby, Preakness, and Belmont – the Triple Crown races. (Actually, I think it’s now called the Visa Triple Crown, because, you know, why wouldn’t it be?) In the Derby, I will root for whichever horse has the coolest name. As a tie-breaker between two cool-named horses, I’ll go with the bigger underdog. Occasionally I might root for a horse because there’s some sort of interesting story behind it, but rarely. Unless said story is synopsized in the five or ten minutes of pre-Derby coverage I might happen to watch, then I won’t even know about it. I just look at a list of horses, pick one, and that’s who I root for. In the Preakness I root for the Derby winner, regardless of whether or not there’s a cooler-named horse in the race, or if my Derby horse is running, because the only reason I watch horse racing is to see a Triple Crown winner. If the Derby winner wins the Preakness, obviously I root for him in the Belmont. Otherwise, back to the cool-named underdogs.

And that’s all there is to know. I doubt if there’s much else that can even possibly be known. Sure, there are people out there somewhere, buying, training, and riding the horses, but you don’t need to know anything about them to know who to root for. I may know what Bob Baffert looks like, but that hardly influences my rooting. Heck, he had three horses running in the Derby; rooting for any one horse because it’s a Baffert horse would be like rooting for the first third of the Yankees’ lineup to defeat the other two-thirds. No, you just see a list of horses, and you pick one. There’s no team to follow, no stats to keep track of, no rivalries to keep straight; just a list of funny names.

Rooting in the Triple Crown is like rooting in the NCAA tournament. Even if, like me, you don’t follow college basketball at all, you need only spend a half hour or so filling out a bracket, using some arcane methodology (like my legendary go-with-the-team-with-the-better-free-throw-percentage technique), to become emotionally invested in the tournament. Suddenly – because, for example, you haven’t picked an upset in a while so, what the hell, Bradley – these games, between schools you’ve never heard of featuring players you’ve never heard of, become exciting. Ridiculously exciting. Dinner-skipping, picture-in-picture, trash-talking, celebratory phone-calling exciting. And then you’re mathematically eliminated from winning your pool, and a month later you can’t even remember who won the tournament let alone find their school on a map or name a single player. But for those few weeks, it’s exciting. And horse racing manages this in about six minutes spread out over a month or two.

Two: Reporters on horses. This has got to be the coolest sports journalism idiosyncrasy ever. I wonder if the first televised horse races featured journalists on step ladders reaching up to get the microphones in the jockeys’ faces, and an NBC executive said, “Boys, this isn’t working. We need to get these reporters on horses of their own.” I think this kind of press corps solidarity should be mandatory in all sports. How much more interesting would the Olympics be if you had reporters slaloming down the mountain or hanging out on a third parallel bar? Give Melissa Stark a bathing suit and a waterproof microphone and let her interview Michael Phelps while doing the butterfly; I guarantee your ratings will go up.

Three: How short the race is. Barbaro won the Derby today with a time of two minutes and one second. That’s the whole race. There’s like an entire day of television coverage for a two-minute race between contestants who aren’t even people. People seem surprised that I’m into the Triple Crown races, but how could I not be? For even a casual sports fan to not muster enough enthusiasm for six annual minutes of horse racing would be like spending the eighteen dollars to ride to the top of the Empire State Building and then not throwing a quarter into the binoculars.

Four: The fact that you can’t even figure out what’s going on until the third or fourth time you watch the race. The first time you watch it, here is what you’ll see: a bunch of horses; one is in the lead; another passes it on the left; then another passes that one on the right; then it’s over. Despite the frantic announcer and NBC’s bright graphics on the bottom of the screen, you can’t tell which horse is which. I bet it’s not uncommon for a jockey to, at the end of a race, say, “Wait a minute, I’m Captain’s Pride? I thought you were Captain’s Pride.” You watch the race a second time and you start to see which horses are making moves when and what their strategies are. A few more times and you’ll finally understand what the winner did and when in order to beat out the competition. But let’s face it: everything you know about horse racing, you learned from Seabiscuit. When you’re watching the Kentucky Derby live, you only see a bunch of horses.

Five: The names of the horses. I don’t think this needs explanation. The names of the horses are (this year’s lackluster field notwithstanding) awesome. Here is a list of past Kentucky Derby winners, in no particular order: Bubbling Over, Pensive, Keep Your Cool, Exterminator, Behave Yourself, Hold Steady, Foolish Pleasure, Spend a Buck, Night Watchman, Go for Gin, Eleventh Hour, Bold Venture, Dust Commander, Broken Promise. Baseball may have a Milton Bradley and a Coco Crisp, but that’s nothing compared to an average Derby field.

By the way, I made four of those names up.

I’m not crazy about the name Barbaro. There will probably be half a dozen horses with better names at the Preakness, but I’ll be pulling for Barbaro, because that’s how it works. Horse racing is easy to understand and easy to digest. It swoops in seemingly out of nowhere, entertains us, captivates us, excites us, asks nothing of us, and then vanishes into the night. And for six minutes a year, horse racing is awesome. That is why I love horse racing.