63rd Derby

(See front cover)

Contrary to popular impression, the Kentucky Derby, in which a score of able U. S. three-year-old horses will this week race1 1/4 miles at Churchill Downs in Louisville, Ky., is not the oldest, the richest or the best U. S. horse race. It is the most famed U. S. horse race and indubitably-- in crowds, excitement, importance to the U. S. scene--the biggest. Last week the amiable, horsey city of Louisville was busy removing traces of the $52,000,000 damage left by last winter's flood in preparation for the one day in the year when it is the sporting capital of the U. S. For its 50,000 visitors, who it hopes will leave about $1,500,000 behind them, Louisville this week will provide a program aimed at making this 63rd Derby the noisiest, gayest, most profitable since Depression.

Derby Week starts Wednesday night, with a parade and pageant depicting Kentucky sports, followed by dancing in the streets. Thursday night's specialty this year was to be a tennis match between Ellsworth Vines and Fred Perry at the Jefferson County Armory. Friday night festivities were the Derby Eve Ball, an all-star wrestling program, and the annual reunion banquet & mint-julep shower of Kentucky Colonels. Saturday is the Derby.

Derby Day is the one day in the year when almost all the private railroad cars in the U. S. are in simultaneous use. Despite 50 such vehicles parked in Louisville railroad yards, roofs and beds in the city are always fabulously scarce. This year Louisville's Derby Festival Committee rounded up accommodations for 20,000 Derby refugees, in everything from $1 rooms to 12-room houses at $1,000 for the weekend. At Churchill Downs, main refuge during the flood which did it $8,000 damage, renovations this year include 3,000 new seats, 150 new boxes. With 70,000 paid spectators and 5,000 admitted free in the infield, the crowd should equal the biggest in Derby history. If, as anticipated, 24 horses should go to the post, this week's field would top the old 1928 record of 22. With the purse, reduced for the last three years, upped again to $50,000 added, the prize would also be an all-time record. What all Louisville's uproar boiled down to last week was the simple question: Who will get it?

If the Kentucky Derby is not quite the best horse race in the U. S., it is certainly close to it. This week's field represents the cream of the whole U. S. crop of last year's two-year-olds. Grouped together as favorites at odds of 4-10-1 until last week were Mrs. Ethel Mars's Reaping Reward. Colonel Edward Riley Bradley's Brooklyn, Samuel D. Riddle's War Admiral. Jerome H. Louchheirn's Pompoon (clockwise from upper left on TIME'S front cover). Last week the group suddenly dispersed. At Lexington, Ky. in the Blue Grass Stakes, when Brooklyn finished third, behind his stablemate Billionaire and Fencing (trained by Earl Sande), his owner withdrew him from the Derby.' At Jamaica, L. I., Pompoon finished a miserable fifth in the Wood Memorial, causing his odds to jump to 10-to-1. Meanwhile at Louisville, Reaping Reward encouraged his admirers by working 1 1/4miles in the worthy time of 1:55, and War Admiral arrived from Havre de Grace where he had won the Chesapeake Stakes last fortnight. On the strength of this impressive victory War Admiral was the No. 1 favorite last week at 5-to-2.

Since the sole purpose of the Kentucky Derby is to answer the question which was disturbing Louisville last week, attempts to answer it by other means are preposterous as well as premature and probably in error. Nonetheless, last week a large portion of the U. S. press and public concentrated on doing so. Consensus of innumerable touts and tipsters who make their livelihood from just such vain speculations was that it was practically impossible for any horse at all to win the Derby. Pompoon's alleged fault was lack of stamina; his sire, Pompey, was a famed sprinter but bad at long races and 1 1/4miles is a long race. Brooklyn and his stablemate Billionaire were originally favored because horses from the stable of their owner, whose horses' names always begin with B, have won the Kentucky Derby four times; and because Owner Bradley had bet $10,000 to $11,000 with Owner Louchheim that Brooklyn would beat Pompoon, winter book favorite. Twice Bradley horses have finished in tandem position in winning the Derby (Behave Yourself & Black Servant in 1921, Bubbling Over & Bagenbaggage in 1926). Since last week's race was the second one in which the pair have finished second and third this spring, there seemed no good grounds for expecting either to finish first in the Derby.

War Admiral is a son of Man o' War, who last month celebrated his 20th birthday. Like Man o' War, he is owned by Samuel D. Riddle, who never before started a horse in the Derby. As a two-year-old, War Admiral was beaten three times in six starts, though he never finished worse than third.

Last year Reaping Reward won three of his last four starts, helped materially to make his owner the leading money winner of the U. S. turf. Before that he had won only two races out of eleven. He has not run this spring. If Mrs. Mars fails to win the Derby with Reaping Reward or one of the four other horses she has nominated for it. she may still have the satisfaction of keeping the prize in the family. Her daughter Mrs. William H. Furst has an entrant, Gerald, of whom turf opinion is indicated by his odds, 40-to-1.

This year's Derby has a record number of entries by woman owners (21). Among others are Trainer Mary Hirsch (No Sir). Mrs. Frank Xavin whose late husband owned the Detroit Tigers (Kermay), and 10-year-old Betty Bosley, whose Betty's Buddy was a doubtful starter.

One of the only two jockeys to ride three Derby winners was famed Earl Sande (1923, 1925, 1930). This week Fencing had a chance, early rated at 60-to-1 but improved to 20-to-1 by his Blue Grass victory, to make Sande the only man to win the Derby as both jockey and trainer. Two other early outside choices for sentimental hunch players, Mrs. Payne Whitney's Eli Yale and Hal Price Headley's Old Nassau, were disappointments. By last week, both were considered unlikely to start.

Oldest horse race in the U. S. is Saratoga's Travers Stakes which started in 1864, eleven years before the Kentucky Derby. Richest is the Santa Anita Handicap, with a $100,000 added purse. Best, in point of quality of the entries, is usually the Belmont Stakes. Properly speaking, although the 14 other Derbies in the U. S. and Canada have made the word Derby so common that racing officials are currently campaigning to find a more accurate and less banal one. the Kentucky Derby is not a Derby at all. Main feature of England's Epsom Derby on which it is modeled is its length--1 1/2 miles. The Kentucky Derby was shortened a quarter-mile in 1897. That in the face of all these odds against it, the Kentucky Derby is by & large the No. 1 U. S. horse race is by no means a tribute to its own history nor to the traditions of U.S. racing. It is a tribute principally to the industry and wily determination of a fat, white-haired Louisville Irishman who, as General Manager of Churchill Downs since 1902, has transformed the event from a pip-squeak Dixie picnic to a major U. S. sport fiesta.

When Matt Joseph Winn became General Manager of Churchill Downs, the Kentucky Derby was worth only $4,850 to the winner. As a fixture of the U. S. turf it compared unfavorably with the American Derby at Chicago, the Suburban Handicap at Sheepshead Bay, the Belmont Stakes and all major races at Saratoga. Started by Colonel M. Lewis Clark, presiding judge of the Louisville Jockey Club 27 years before, as one of a series of five events patterned closely on England's major races, the Derby, even after being shortened to conform to the U. S. premium on speed rather than stamina, had failed to attract more than local attention. Main faults appeared to be its location and its date. Most important U.S. stables were in the North. Their owners tried to have their horses in peak condition for Saratoga's August season. An ambitious Louisville drummer for his father's wholesale grocery house, whose habit was to invest all his spare funds in bets at the race track and who had seen every Kentucky Derby since his father took him to see Aristides win the first in 1875, Matt Winn at the turn of the Century became acquainted with Louisville's Mayor Charles F. Grainger. In 1902, Mayor Grainger, with backing from substantial Louisville citizens, acquired control of Churchill Downs, then dominated by a clique of gamblers. Matt Winn was installed as manager.

First reaction to Mayor Grainger's control of Churchill Downs was a move by rival politicians to have it shut. First step in the Winn campaign to make the Derby the greatest U. S. horse race was to arrange matters so that it could be run at all. In 1908, two days before the race, a reform sheriff threatened to close the track unless the bookmakers who operated there illegally were ousted quickly and completely. Dodge by which Colonel Winn saved the Derby was digging up an old state law allowing "parimutuel" betting which, tried long before, had failed and been forgotten. Pari-mutuel betting, devised in France, is a system whereby instead of betting against a bookmaker, betters bet against each other in a pool wherein the odds are determined by the total amounts bet on each horse. Promptly installed at Churchill Downs, pari-mutuel betting surprisingly took hold. Still Kentucky's only legal form of race-track gambling, the prestige pari-mutuel betting acquired at Churchill Downs not only saved the track, it popularized the pari-mutuel system all over the U. S. Today, with vastly complex mechanical "totalizators" to compute the odds, it is standard in every betting state except New York.

Colonel Winn is therefore more than any other individual responsible not only for the popularity of the Kentucky Derby but for the popularity of U.S. horse racing as a whole.

Haying kept the Derby intact, Colonel Wmn's next move was to put it on the map. With pari-mutuel betting the only kind allowed at the track, his shrewd scheme was to persuade bookmakers outside Kentucky to open "winter books" on the Derby--i. e., accept bets on entries long before the race. The winter book on the Derby, still the only important such enterprise in the U. S., helped publicize the race, bring more entries. As the quantity of entries increased, Matt Winn increased the prize money to improve their quality. By 1914, the Derby was worth $9,000 to the winner. It jumped to $16,000 in 1917, $20,000 in 1919. In 1922 the purse was upped to $50,000 added, where it remained until 1934. The Derby's success helped publicize Kentucky's mild climate and blue-grass countryside as a site for winter training. Increased winter horse populations helped minimize the disadvantages 1) of the Derby's early date, which had to be maintained to avoid rivalry with northern racing, and 2) its location, which Matt Winn neatly capitalized by publicity that stressed the note of East v. West competition.

Major coup in Matt Winn's Derby campaign arrived in 1930, when England's Earl of Derby, whose ancestor started the "original" Derby in 1780, attended its Louisville counterpart, approved the U. S. pronunciation of "Derby" instead of "Darby." This week the Earl of Derby's ten-minute radio broadcast was one of six preliminary radio features designed to boost the Derby.

Most promising private Derby parties were those to be given by Barry Bingham, son of U. S. Ambassador Robert Worth Bingham, the day before the Derby and by Mrs. Alvin T. Hert the day after.' Standard fare at Kentucky Derby entertainment are country ham fried chicken, beaten biscuits. Scene of most Bingham parties involving visiting celebrities is the estate's outdoor Greek theatre, with a bar on the floodlighted stage. Mrs. Hert's guests dance to a pipe organ which sometimes provokes screeches from the peacocks on the lawn.

Main cause of the main U. S. news event of this week, Colonel Winn is currently a benignly convivial old gentleman who, at 75, looks 15 years younger. This he attributes in part to his abstinence from intoxicants before noon, when his day begins with a drink of Bourbon whiskey. Part owner and head of two other tracks as well as Churchill Downs, promoter of the most famed post-War match races in the U. S., between France's Epinard and the best U. S. horses of 1924. Colonel Winn currently has an ample income of which none finds its way back to its source. His career as a gambler, of which the bet he remembers best was $100 on Spokane at 100-to-1 in 1889 when he took his wife to see her first horse race the day Spokane beat famed Proctor Knott, ended abruptly when he became a race-track executive. Famed as a whiskey connoisseur, bon vivant and raconteur, he lives in a luxurious six-room apartment over the Churchill Downs clubhouse, maintains a similar establishment in Chicago. As perfectly as though he had designed them himself, Colonel Winn's soft freckled hands and silky white hair, his round babyish face, innocent blue eyes and substantial paunch personify that feeling for the South and its traditions of which his Derby is the grand scale panorama. Pleased with his handiwork Colonel Winn regards the past with satisfaction and the future with aplomb. Says he: "Five years from now I wouldn't be surprised to see 200,000 people at Churchill Downs on Derby Day. We are already making preliminary plans to accommodate such a throng. . . ."

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