TWO-MINUTE WARMING

LOUISVILLE, Ky. —  The late Bob Grams may have lived in Baltimore, the home of the Preakness, but he was in love with the Kentucky Derby.

On Charles Street, not far from the newspaper where Grams worked as an artist and cartoonist, there’s a joint called the Harvey House. Late on the morning of every Kentucky Derby, Grams would stroll into the place, armed with a batch of fresh mint sprigs and a syrup made by boiling equal parts sugar and water.

The bartender furnished the rest-- namely, a bottled-in-bond, 100-proof Kentucky bourbon. Barside at the Harvey House, Grams warmed up for the Kentucky Derby much the way tens of thousands of delirious spectators did at Churchill Downs. Grams’ lifetime seat for the Derby was at the far right end of that bar, directly under the big TV set that sat on a high ledge.

The magnetism of the Kentucky Derby has a pull far beyond Louisville. It’s a horse race, of course, but as an event--a happening--its lure is universal yet inexplicable. Next Saturday, Churchill will throw the Derby party for the 126th time, and the fastest of 18 to 20 horses will run 1 1/4 miles in about two minutes, give or take a tick, before 150,000 fans at the track and millions more watching on television. Some of them, especially those who have been partying for hours in the Churchill infield, may even see which horse wins. The truth be told, the Kentucky Derby for many is more of a rite than a race.

Joe Hirsch, the very proper executive columnist for the Daily Racing Form, really saw his first Kentucky Derby from the Churchill Downs infield. That was in 1959, the year Bill Shoemaker rode Tomy Lee to victory, and six years later, in a journalistic capacity, Hirsch wore a suit and tie on the day Shoemaker won again, this time with Lucky Debonair. Hirsch has worn a suit and tie and covered every Derby since.

“It’s been said that it’s the most exciting two minutes in sports, and I think that’s right,” said Hirsch, who was already in his familiar formal dress Friday morning here, patrolling the backstretch for pre-Derby news and gossip.

While very much a man of words, Hirsch added:

“It’s hard to describe the Derby in words. I compare it to a pie with three slices. There’s the race buildup. There is Derby day itself, with all the festivities and the running of the race. And the third part is afterward, what happens to the horses from then on. So it’s obviously more than just a two-minute race.”

For horsemen, the Derby is the Holy Grail, the Dead Sea Scrolls, the summit of Everest. Whether your roots are Kentucky or Kalamazoo, if you are a racetracker, your ne plus ultra is winning the Derby.

Woody Stephens, a Kentuckian to the quick, ran four horses in the Derby before his Cannonade, perceived as not even the best horse in his barn, won the centennial running of the race in 1974. Stephens won the Derby again with Swale, another of his second-stringers, 10 years later.

John M. Olin, Cannonade’s owner, was ill on the 100th Derby day, so Stephens accepted the trophy and a winner’s-circle handshake from England’s Princess Margaret.

“I had been to many Derbies, and I had kind of taken the Derby for granted,” Stephens said later. “It really didn’t dawn on me until I started walking back. I looked up at the stands full of people--thousands of them--and I thought: ‘This country boy has come a long way.’ ”

On the West Coast, legendary California trainer Charlie Whittingham practically wore it on his sleeve that he could make a nice living, thank you, without ever winning a Kentucky Derby. Whittingham thought that the first Saturday in May was far too early for still-maturing 3-year-olds to be pushed over 10 furlongs while carrying 126 pounds. The charm of the Derby didn’t register with the hardened ex-Marine until after Whittingham had been there and done that. Then in 1986, when he was 73 and already in the Racing Hall of Fame, Whittingham brought the precocious colt Ferdinand to Churchill Downs. With another geezer, the 54-year-old Shoemaker, in the saddle, Ferdinand found the hole that produced the roses and suddenly Whittingham had the once-unwanted race on a platter.

And you know what? In the September of his years, Whittingham caught Derby fever. Three years after Ferdinand, he won the Derby again, with Sunday Silence, and he said: “You can win a lot of races, some of the biggest races around. But no matter where you go, you can go to Alaska and maybe even to the moon, and if you say you’re in horse racing, the first question you’ll get is, ‘Did you ever win the Kentucky Derby?’ To the average guy, you ain’t done much in this game if you’ve never won the Derby.”

Winn Shows

The Derby didn’t acquire that cachet in a nonce. The race’s name was borrowed from the English Derby, and the English race, first run in 1780, would have been called the English Bunbury if Sir Charles Bunbury hadn’t lost a coin flip to his good friend, Lord Derby.

Kentucky’s first Derby, run in 1875, was worth $2,850 to the winner, Aristides, and $200 was paid to the second-place finisher, Volcano. It’s a $1-million race now, and worth millions more as some of the winners go to the breeding shed. M. Lewis Clark Jr., a banker and tobacco man, was only 29 when he formed a group that built Churchill Downs and unfurled the Derby as its opening-day feature on May 17. The Preakness was two years old and the Belmont Stakes eight, and there was no Triple Crown quest to stir the public. In fact, at least once the Preakness was run the same day as the Derby.

The honest-to-a-fault Clark was a man of mixed principles: He believed the turf writers of the day could drink his champagne, but he frowned on their betting the races. By the late 1890s, Churchill Downs was struggling financially, the Derby was run seven times with five-horse fields or less, and Clark was in failing health. In 1898, he died after discharging a revolver that was against his right temple.

It appeared that the 1902 running would be the last Derby, the track having been earmarked for shutters. The savior was one Matt Winn--Col. Matt Winn, if you will-- who headed a group of Louisvillians who bought the track for $40,000. In 1903, Winn closed his tailor’s shop to become general manager of Churchill. Winn didn’t become president of the track until 1938, when he was in his late 70s, but in the preceding years, his imprint was on anything the track and the Derby did.

“He had the mind of a businessman and the flair of a publicist,” the late Jim Bolus wrote in one of his Derby books. A friend of Winn’s referred to him as “the only Irish diplomat on the planet.”

Winn, a freckle-faced kid, had watched the first Derby, in 1875, from his father’s flatbed grocery wagon in the track infield. Winn saw the next 74 Derbies as well, the streak ending with his death, at 88, a few months after Ponder’s win in 1949.

Winn raised local money to rebuild the clubhouse, revived parimutuel betting in the U.S. and, just as important, successfully courted the big-time New York newspaper titans, many of whom flocked to Kentucky, drank their host’s bourbon and stayed in pre-paid hotel rooms. Winn announced a crowd of 40,000 for the 1910 Derby. Five years later, the Derby was shamelessly calling itself “America’s Greatest Race,” and the win by the filly Regret--the first of only three fillies to capture the Derby--reinforced the claim.

A New York-based horse, the California-bred Morvich, won the Derby in 1922, and that, together with unstinting Winn’s hospitality, brought the New York press to Louisville in large numbers. Between Derbies, Winn traveled to New York, reinforcing his old newspaper contacts and cultivating new ones. Damon Runyon’s turgid tribute to Winn couldn’t have been better had the colonel written it himself:

“I have known a great many men in sport in my time. I have known the champions and the promoters. I have known the magnates and the moguls. I have known those who could take the good and the bad with the same kind of a smile, and I have known the crybabies--the ones who could not stand up when the going got tough. But of them all, I have never known one who has worn as well as Colonel Winn.”

Chimed in Arthur Daley of the New York Times:

“Martin Joseph Winn . . . could give cards and spades to Barnum and beat him. The Kentucky Derby is his monument. It’s his baby and his alone.”

‘Bigger and Bigger’

Georgie Jessel once said of the legendary entertainers Al Jolson and Eddie Cantor, “You couldn’t have stopped them with a gun.” Under Matt Winn, the Kentucky Derby was also indestructible. World War I, the Great Depression and World War II couldn’t slow the Derby down. When transportation restrictions threatened to cancel the Derby in 1943 and 1944, Winn promised federal officials that out-of-towners would be discouraged from attending. Count Fleet, en route to a Triple Crown sweep under jockey Johnny Longden, won in 1943, in what became known as the “Streetcar Derby.” The crowd was 61,000.

The post-Winn era dovetailed with the early days of television.

“Television coverage has had a big role in the Derby’s continuing popularity,” Joe Hirsch said. “As an event, it got bigger and bigger with television. It became to horse racing what the Super Bowl is to football. I think it’s in the right city at the right time of the year, and it is something people look forward to each spring. If you could bring back M. Lewis Clark, I’d love to see the expression on his face. He was responsible for it all, and I’m sure he’d be overwhelmed with the scene. It would certainly be hard to explain it to him.”

Winning trainers, jockeys and owners appropriate bragging rights, and even racegoers--jaded celebrities included-- seem proud to say they’ve been to a Derby. Richard Nixon attended while he was president, Ronald Reagan was here before his presidency, and George Bush came before and after his. The Duke and Duchess of Windsor watched a Derby, and so did Babe Ruth, more than once, and Prince Rainier of Monaco. At Tricia Barnstable Brown’s star-laden pre-Derby party a few years ago--which raised $250,000 for the American Diabetes Assn.--actor Robert Duvall said:

“The Derby is one of the great events of the world. This is the Mecca of horse racing.”

As a quarter horse trainer, Bob Baffert had watched many Derbies on television. Then in the early 1990s, Baffert switched to thoroughbreds, and in the last four years he has had eight Derby starters, winning with Silver Charm in 1997 and Real Quiet in 1998, and finishing second, beaten by a nose by Grindstone, with Cavonnier in 1996. Next Saturday, Baffert will try to win again with Captain Steve, and Friday at his Churchill Downs he reflected on the Derby experience:

“It’s the biggest thrill in the game. After you’ve been here, you want to get back every year. [Trainer] Nick Zito, who’s won two Derbies and shows up with a horse almost every year, doesn’t have one this year, and I know he’ll feel pretty weird next Saturday. Even if you’re here with a 50-1 shot, you think you’ve got a chance, and then if you’re lucky enough to see your horse take the lead, you’re just not prepared mentally to handle that. Just walking into the track, you get soaked up with all the tradition, all the history. It’s like walking into Yankee Stadium.”

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Kentucky Derby Facts

* Where: Churchill Downs, Louisville, Ky.

* When: Saturday

* Distance: 1 1/4 miles.

* TV: Channel 7, 1:30 p.m. PDT (post time approximately 2:30)

* Horses: Favorites in the field of 3-year-olds are expected to be Fusaichi Pegasus, The Deputy, High Yield, Captain Steve, Hal’s Hope, Graeme Hall and Trippi.

* 1999 winner: Charismatic