WAYNE KNUCKLES: Ninety Miles and a World Away

The Kentucky Derby is next Saturday, May 2.

Ninety miles up the road from where I'm sitting. Churchill Downs. The twin spires. The hats. The mint juleps served in a commemorative glass that costs 12 dollars and holds four dollars worth of bourbon.

I have watched this race my entire life.

I have never once felt like it belonged to Kentucky.

Don't misunderstand me.

The Derby is ours in the way that a famous relative is yours. You claim them at Christmas. You mention them when it comes up. You're proud, mostly, with a few asterisks you keep to yourself.

But Churchill Downs on the first Saturday in May is not Kentucky. Not really. It's a television event that happens to be located in Louisville, which itself is a city that the rest of Kentucky has a complicated relationship with and always has.

The people in the expensive seats didn't drive down from Harlan County. The celebrities in the infield didn't fly in to experience Appalachian culture. The reporters filing stories about the most exciting two minutes in sports are not, by and large, people who know what a tote board is.

They showed up for the spectacle.

Nothing wrong with that. The spectacle is real. I'm not going to pretend watching those horses come around the final turn doesn't do something to me, because it does, every single time, and I have seen it enough times that it should have stopped working by now.

It hasn't.

I spent the last month at Keeneland.

Keeneland is what the Derby is pretending to be.

Small. Serious. A track where the people in the stands actually know the difference between a closer and a presser, where the racing form gets read instead of used as a sun visor, where you can stand at the rail and feel the ground shake when twelve horses come past you at full run and understand for one clarifying second exactly why people have been doing this for 300 years.

The Derby horses ran at Keeneland.

Most of the ones worth watching did, anyway.

I watched several of them.

Nobody in the celebrity boxes will know what I know about him.

That's the one thing I've got.

Here's what I'll do next Saturday.

I'll watch it the way I always watch it. Probably from the couch, if I'm being honest, because I've been to Churchill on Derby Day and what I mostly remember is standing in a line for forty-five minutes for a bathroom and missing the race.

I'll watch the post parade. I'll look at the horses the way Keeneland taught me to look at horses — how they're moving, whether they want to be there, what the body language says underneath all the noise and pageantry.

I'll make a pick.

I'll probably be wrong. The Derby has humbled better handicappers than me since 1875 and shows no signs of stopping.

But I'll watch that final turn the way I always do, and something will happen in my chest that I can't quite explain and wouldn't want to, and for two minutes I'll forget everything except those horses running.

Kentucky does that to you.

Even when Kentucky is dressed up in a hat it doesn't normally wear.

Wayne Knuckles is a veteran of the newspaper industry and publisher of The Wayne Train. He began his career as a sports writer for his hometown weekly newspaper, The Pineville Sun.