By Bill Doolittle
Looking around the sporting landscape at the start of the 20th Century, Matt Winn, the general manager and chief thinker and operator of Churchill Downs, saw the explosion of interest in American spectator sports and thought the Kentucky Derby could be a part of it. Baseball, college football, the modern Olympic games – fans were filling up stadiums as they had never done before. Winn wished that for the Kentucky Derby.
He needed a good financial base from which to operate. With ordinary sound business practices, Winn managed to make a profit in his first year running the track in 1902. It was the first time Churchill Downs had ever made a profit.
He needed a better source of revenue, and pioneered a pari-mutuel betting system run by the track to replace bookmaking run by bookies. He needed regular citizens to come to the races, rather than just gamblers, and improved concessions and lowered the minimum wager from $5 to $2.
Most of all, Winn needed a better Kentucky Derby. The Derby had fallen well below the lofty level given it by Colonel M. Lewis Clark in the first running in 1875. (Which Winn had seen as a 14-year-old boy, standing on the seat of his father’s delivery wagon in the Infield.) Winn needed better horses and went out and got them. He needed cachet and color, and charmed the society set to see the Kentucky Derby as a glamorous national event. And he needed publicity, and so went about gathering up the top sports journalists to write about the Kentucky Derby. And they did.
Winn thought it would be good for the Derby to have its own special day. It had always been contested on the same day in May, but he picked the first Saturday in May. He told reporters that he had researched every available weather record of Louisville and discovered that the very best day of spring (not always, but usually) was the first Saturday in May. And the writers printed it. The Kentucky Derby thus got the nick-naming rights jump on baseball’s Fall Classic, March Madness, and the New Year’s Day bowls.
In 1934, Winn told Louisville Herald Post writer Jim Henry that it was all about people and personalities.
“My first love was the Kentucky Derby,” said Winn, “and I saw to it that the owners of the three-year-olds with box office appeal flirted with no other stake but the Derby when Derbytime rolled around. And we played one society queen against another until we steam-rollered Louisville into a one-day capital of celebrities.”
It was a special relationship Winn enjoyed with the writers, one he built from the start – and has carried on long after he was gone. It extended to the movies, and the newsreels that played in theaters before the movies. Radio came to the Derby with Bryan Field and gravelly-voiced Clem McCarthy calling the big race for national audiences. Then television. Now the Internet.
But it started with the writers.
Winn kept an apartment in New York so over the winter he could be close to the big time sports writers, captains of industry, and glittering social personalities. He operated from Broadway to Madison Ave. to Park Ave. He dropped items with columnists, not just about racehorses, but which socialite was entertaining whom at a gala party at her Bluegrass horse farm during Derby Week. Regular attendees, and horse owners included Frances Dodge Sloan and Elizabeth Arden Graham. Both won the Derby. So did Mrs. Ethel V. Mars, with Gallahadion getting the job done for her Milky Way Farm. Then Winn was back home to family and his racetrack, to which he seemed to be adding a new addition onto the Downs every year. Always noting that he just couldn’t find enough seats for all the people who wished to be at the Derby.
Journalist Billy Reed described Matt Winn in Famous Kentuckians:
“He was a pudgy, cigar-chomping man who looked something like Alfred Hitchcock, with a bit of W.C. Fields thrown in. In spirit and style, however, Colonel Matt Winn resembled nobody as much as P.T. Barnum. Or, as Arthur Daley of the New York Times once wrote, ‘He could give cards and spades to Barnum and still win.’
“He was ahead of his time in many ways,” added Reed. “(Today) he would probably be the head of a multi-million-dollar advertising agency on Madison Ave. He was a tough businessman and a shrewd salesman, yet so charming and disarming that a friend once called him ‘the only Irish diplomat in existence.’ ”
The famous syndicated columnists, who were read every day by millions of Americans, loved it all. No Derby went off without Damon Runyon, Grantland Rice, Frank Graham, Ring Lardner, Bill Corum, Red Smith.
Runyon wrote about Broadway characters who also played the horses. As in his Broadway hit “Guys and Dolls.” In the movie version of “Little Miss Marker,” Shirley Temple is left behind by her father as a “marker” with a bookie -- collateral to cover a bet on a horse. Bob Hope and Walter Matthau played the bookie in two movie versions of “Little Miss Marker,” so you can imagine. A recurring character for Runyon was Regret, the horse player, who was “named after the Whitney filly that won the Derby in 1915.”
In 1930, William Woodward, owner of Hanover Trust and also owner of a promising colt named Gallant Fox, sought out jockey Earl Sande – pronounced Sandy – to ride his horse in the Kentucky Derby. Sande was just retired, but Woodward pleaded. Gallant Fox won and Runyon, typing from the press box at Churchill Downs, headed his column with a few lines of verse – as he sometimes did to colorize a moment.
Say, have you turned back the pages
Back to the past once more?
Back to the racin’ ages
An’ a Derby out of yore?
Say, don’t tell me I’m daffy,
Ain’t that the same old grin?
Why it’s that handy
Guy named Sande
Bootin’ a winner in!
Well, you couldn’t beat that!
American Beauty
Winn believed that the Kentucky Derby should have recognizable traditions.
He persuaded the Kentucky legislature to make “My Old Kentucky Home” the state song, and brought out the University of Louisville band to play the beautiful piece during the Parade to Post, with fans encouraged to sing along. They did, and they do.
He noticed that the Kentucky Derby had always had flowers associated with the parties and that someone usually made up a rose bouquet (a couple times yellow roses) for the winning jockey. He called upon a florist friend, Mrs. Kingsley Walker, to make up a blanket of roses to be thrown as a lavish victory mantle over the shoulders of the Kentucky Derby winner. Winn found that back in the 1890’s a New York socialite named E. Barry Wall had attended the Derby just after attending the annual New York flower show. The American Beauty rose had been debuted, and Wall ordered all he get and had them shipped by train to Louisville for his Derby party. Later, sportswriter Bill Corum admired the blanket of American Beauties and called the Kentucky Derby the “Run for the Roses.” A moment of inspiration.
In the late 1930’s caterer Harry M. Stevens got into the spirit by serving up mint juleps in the Downs’ dining room. It was actually an old drink that dated to Col. Clark’s third Derby in 1877.
Kentucky Derby historian Jim Bolus dug up the tale for his book Run for the Roses. For the third Derby, in 1877, Col. Clark’s special guest was Polish Countess Helena Modjeska, and her husband Count Bozenta Chlapowski. The Countess was a very famous European actress and singer, then on an American tour. Clark invited her to attend the Derby and made her the guest of honor at a fabulous Derby party. Clark prepared a mint julep of his own recipe, using Kentucky bourbon rather than the usual gin. (I know. Gin. Can you imagine?) Clark iced the bourbon concoction in a huge silver punch bowl with fresh sprigs of mint for all the guests to enjoy.
“It is for you first of all, Madame,” said Clark as he placed the mint julep bowl in front of the beautiful actress. “We drink to the greatest race of all time.”
The Countess took the bowl up in both hands for a good-sized sip, and instead of passing it along, exclaimed, “Eet ees supreme! Won’t you please please feex anodder such dreenk for ze Count?”
Black Gold for the Golden 50th
Now where were we?
Oh, the horses. How about the 50th Kentucky Derby, in 1924, won by Black Gold?
Black Gold’s story is a wonderful saga of the turf. It begins with a mare named U-See-It, who was an ordinary runner raced by Al and Rosa Hoots around the Louisiana and Texas tracks. The mare didn’t have a lick of fashionable breeding, but she did have a high turn of speed, and when Colonel E. R. Bradley (four-time Derby-winning owner) saw U-See-It run one day in New Orleans, he told Rose Hoots that if she ever wanted to breed her speedy mare to Black Toney (Bradley’s top stallion), she would be welcome.
Rosa Hoots was a full-blooded Osage Indian, and when oil was discovered on her property in Oklahoma, she received a decent royalty. When time came for U-See-It to wrap up her racing career, Mrs. Hoots remembered Colonel Bradley’s offer. Thus the commonly bred mare was loaded on a van and hauled to Bradley’s Idle Hour Farm in Kentucky to be mated with one of the sport’s premier stallions. Evidently the right sparks flew between the king and the chorus girl, and the result was a striking black foal. The Osage called the new oil wealth that was found on their lands “black gold,” and that was the name Rosa Hoots gave to her colt.
Black Gold came on strong as he turned three, winning the Louisiana Derby and whipping a field of nineteen in the Kentucky Derby, including Bradley’s entry of Beau Butler and Baffling.
For many years, until Grindstone in 1996, Black Gold was the only Louisiana Derby winner to win the Kentucky Derby. Black Gold is buried in the infield at the Fair Grounds Track in New Orleans, home of the Louisiana Derby.
Mr. Longtail
I’ll defer to my friend Rick Cushing to explain 1941 winner Whirlaway:
He was half-witted, willful, knuckleheaded, stubborn, and unmanageable. He also was Calumet Farm’s first (of eight) Kentucky Derby winners, first (of two) Triple Crown champions, and a national hero. To his adoring public, he was Mr. Longtail.
“He was the dumbest horse I ever trained,” said trainer Ben Jones, but admitted, “He was my favorite Derby winner.”
He was Whirlaway, a brilliantly fast but slightly crazy chestnut with an unusually long tail that reached within an inch of the ground. He astonished fans with his blazing finishes, and he puzzled them, along with his trainer, with his habit of bolting to the outside fence coming off the final turn. He was Calumet’s first great horse.
Heading into the 67th Derby in 1941, Whirlaway was being talked of more as a basket case than a wonder horse. Whirlaway broke his maiden at first asking on June 3, 1940, even though he went to the outside fence and followed it around the entire five-eighths of a mile. In the Saratoga Special, he kicked into gear and passed all his rivals, but blew the turn and went to the outside rail. All of a sudden, he was last again. Arthur Daley of the New York Times wrote: “Did he win? Don’t be silly. Of course he won. He came like the whirlwind he is to triumph in the very last 25 yards.”
Jones worked all winter to cure the bolting habit. But Whirlaway bolted in the Blue Grass and again in the Derby Trial. Jones then made two telling changes: He switched jockeys to Eddie Arcaro, who had won the 1938 Derby on Jones’s Lawrin, and he cut out the leather left eyecup of Whirlaway’s blinkers. That gave the horse a good view to the inside but obscured vision to the right, with the goal to focus the colt’s attention to the inner part of the track.
Arcaro arrived in Louisville two nights before the Derby, and the next morning Jones had the jockey out early for a frightening experiment. Jones stationed himself on his pony at the head of the stretch, ten feet from the inner rail. He instructed Arcaro to take Whirlaway through the narrow opening.
“I could see that old man just sitting there on his pony,” Arcaro recalled. “I was bearing down on him full tilt … but Whirlaway slipped through as pretty as you please. Then I knew we had a hell of a chance at the Derby.”
Whirlaway was eighth after a half-mile and fourth turning for home – where he did NOT bolt – and blazed the final quarter-mile in 23 3/5 seconds. Unfurling his long tail, Whirlaway won by eight lengths in a record time of 2:01 2/5. “He nearly catapulted me out of the saddle,” Arcaro said of Whirlaway’s closing burst. “I felt as if I were flying.”
-- Rick Cushing
When Woody met Meg at the 100th Derby
For the 100th Derby, a record 163,628 fans jammed into Churchill Downs. The Infield crowd was estimated at 90,000 (including one famous streaker who scaled the Infield flag pole, naked).
The 100th Derby went to Cannonade, ridden by Angel Cordero Jr. and trained by Woody Stevens. Also on hand was Princess Margaret, of the United Kingdom, the fun-loving younger sister of Queen Elizabeth. On the winner’s stand after the race, Woody, from tiny Stanton, Ky., met “Meg”, as the British press called Princess Margaret. The two hit it off on the stand, and at the victory reception Woody and his wife Lucille chatted it up with Meg.
Woodford Cefis Stephens had come a long way. He started his first horse in the Kentucky Derby in 1949, ran third with Blue Man in 1952, and second with Never Bend in 1963. He won three Kentucky Oaks and five-straight Belmont Stakes. He had trained for Capt. Harry F. Guggenheim, of the New York museum Guggenheims, and won his second Kentucky Derby in 1984 with Swale, for Claiborne Farm. Cannonade was owned by John M. Olin, of Olin-Mathiesen chemicals.
“One reason I developed a liking for horses early on,” Woody explained in his autobiography, Guess I’m Lucky, written with writer James Brough, “might have been the fact that when my dad hoisted me up on one of them, or on the back of one of them, I was five or six feet higher off the ground, looking down at people instead of up. I got that boost up in the world from him, starting when I was three or four years old. He let me ride them as they pulled the hitch that did the plowing, It provided a lot more pleasure, I found out later, than hoeing tobacco for fifty cents a day. Dad used to say, ‘Woody’s a born horseman,’ and I was happy to hear it, because I didn’t want to be considered a born field hand.”
On the Sunday morning after the 100th Derby, Stephens was on his stable horse, as usual, chatting over the fence with reporters. The reporters wanted racing details, but the winning trainer was still soaking it all in.
“Imagine that,” said Woody, “A poor boy from Kentucky up on that stand with the Princess of England.”
A rivals story, from one side of the rivalry
Which was the greatest Kentucky Derby rivalry? Affirmed and Alydar? Easy Goer and Sunday Silence? For Art Sherman’s money it was Nashua and Swaps.
It was the 1950s.
Americans were moving west, and among them was young Art Sherman, who was just seven years old when his family left New York for California. A decade later, Sherman was graduating from high school in Whittier, Calif., thinking about what he might want to do, what he might be good at. He was five-feet-three but athletic, and he thought, well, maybe he could be a jockey. Sherman didn’t know a thing about horses, but he caught on as a stable hand, then exercise rider at the Rex Ellsworth ranch, run by trainer Mesh Tenney.
The Big Horse in the barn was Swaps, which won the Santa Anita Derby in fast time under Bill Shoemaker. Suddenly Sherman, a crew-cut eighteen-year-old, was boarding a train with Swaps, bound for a showdown with Eastern star Nashua in the 1955 Run for the Roses.
Sherman, Ellsworth and Tenney threw out their sleeping rolls in the straw beside Swaps and two stable ponies in a special freight car. One might think that would be a dusty, rough assignment, riding with three horses in a rail car across the United States. But for Sherman it was the thrill of a lifetime. “Swaps traveled first class,” said Sherman. “He had half a rail car, and we bedded him down with a bunch of straw, really deep.”
Shipping horses by rail was the custom in those days. Over mountain passes and across wide prairies, the train rambled, with Swaps’s car switched from one train to another to arrive in Louisville four days after leaving Los Angeles. The rail car was dropped on a siding at the L&N Railroad’s Strawberry Yards, three blocks from Churchill Downs. But don’t imagine a brass band on hand to hail the arrival of a vaunted Derby contender, or even a crew to unload him carefully.
“Oh, hell, no,” Sherman said. “We just jumped on ’em bareback and rode them off the train.” Then over to the track and through Gate 5. Sherman chuckled: “I remember when we got there, we figure-eight’ed him between the barns at Churchill Downs. They were all saying, ‘What in the world? Who are these cowboys?’ ”
On at least one morning, Tenney and Sherman rode up to the back fence so Swaps could get a close look at Nashua on the track. On race day, though, it was Nashua that got the best look at Swaps — from behind. The California-bred chestnut held Nashua at bay down the stretch, drawing away at the end in 2:01 4/5, just off Whirlaway’s 1941 Derby record.
Sherman had a 23-year career as a jockey, then settled in training horses, with his sons, at times. His wife Faye ran the souvenir shop at the track, Golden Gate Fields. Then, years later, the second Big Horse of Sherman’s life came along. This was California Chrome– a golden chestnut, with flashy white markings -- like white chrome on a customized roadster. California Chrome took no prisoners. He flew into Louisville on a jet, and led all the way in the 2014 Kentucky Derby.
Easy Goer and Sunday Silence
The presence of a Big Horse is a part of the mystique of the Derby. When there are (two Big Horses, the mystique runs even deeper.
This scribe is too young to have seen Swaps and Nashua in 1955. But I was on hand on a magical morning in 1989 when Sunday Silence and Easy Goer stepped out on the track at Churchill Downs at the same time, working not half a minute apart.
That morning attracted more people to the morning workouts than observers had ever seen at any track. All down the backstretch and around the first turn, fans squeezed up to the fence. In the distance, spectators looked like dots and dashes of colors. On the Ancient Downs dirt, a quarter mile apart, galloped two of the greatest horses of their age, set for a showdown six days later in the Kentucky Derby.
Up in a little clockers’ stand, we saw it all, and yet we couldn’t say exactly what we did see. Since they didn’t come on to the track together (they wouldn’t!), the two horses were placed well apart — maybe a quarter of a mile apart — and only one horse was watchable at a time. We lost one of them once … then (Whew!) found him again. Then each flew by in a rush of speed, seconds apart. With hoofbeats you almost couldn’t hear.
When they came back from their workouts, walking, breathing, strutting, each made an impression: Easy Goer strode big and magnificent, rippling with muscle deep through the chest under an orangey-chestnut coat. He had a regal presence.
Sunday Silence, colored “dark-bay or brown” in official horse-color terms, looked almost black, with a refined athletic physique. He wasn’t particularly tall, but in his walk he looked like a tall basketball player making his way along a crowded high school hallway.
The moment came, and then they were gone.
In the Derby, Sunday Silence won. Then won again by a whisker in the Preakness. For the Belmont Stakes, Belmont Park arranged a three-character confab for the press. Woody Stevens “moderated,” if that's a word one could use for Woody. With wise-cracking Charlie on one side, and reserved, but amused, Shug McGaughey on the other. It went on for a while, then Woody told Charlie that Sunday Silence was no lock to win the Belmont. “The buildings get a lot taller when you cross that Hudson," said Woody. “Well,” said Charlie. “I’m not coming in a covered wagon.”
Easy Goer aired in the Belmont under jockey Pat Day. The rivals met once more, at the end of the season in the Breeders’ Cup at Gulfstream Park, in Florida. Sunday Silence won that one.
Headed for the barn
Did we leave any stories out? Only a million. Unfortunately, out of space. We’ll have to save Affirmed and Alydar for another time. And D. Wayne and Buck Wheat. And Secretariat, Spectacular Bid and Barbaro.
Good Luck!