Okay, so it’s early May. Baseball season is in full swing. The NBA playoffs are just beginning their grueling and exciting spectacle. NFL mini-camps are under way and first-rounders are negotiating contracts or falling off of motorcycles. And who is SportsCenter interviewing for ten minutes a day?
A horse pimp.
Yeah, you might call him a “breeder” or a “rancher.” Hell, you can call him “Steve” for all I care. The fact is, his job is to monitor horse fucking, making sure the right studs mount the right fillies, and if he becomes the best that he can be... he will be the leading expert on horse cock in the Southwestern United States.
And why are guys like this dominating the coverage of every channel I allow my TV to broadcast?
The Kentucky Derby, also known to me as “that. . . fucking. . . horse race,” is why. I hate the Kentucky Derby more than I hate nightclubs, suicide bombers and every citizen of Miami combined.
I despise the Derby for the same reason I despise 21st Century R&B and 2001: A Space Odyssey. They thrive by circulating so much hype around nearly non-existent substance until the hype becomes the substance. Of course what I call “hype,” Derby fans call “tradition.”
It’s this “tradition” that lands on front pages across the country, that eats up countless minutes of TV and radio time, that makes me throw things violently around my living room every time I hear Steve The Horse Cock Man talk about his advanced breeding techniques.
Let’s not forget that all this tradition comes from the Deep South. Yup, from the countryside that brought you cotton plantations, the Confederacy, country music, and grits comes little men riding big horses in a circle for less than two minutes. Sell hot dogs in the stands and whiskey at the bar and you can garner enough fat alcoholics with no real lot in life to become obsessed with it. Instant tradition.
But no, I am wrong there, at least in a sense, because that insinuates that this “sport” is somehow for the layman, the Joe Schmoes who watch Monday Night Football at a bar with their office buddies and have to split a plate of nachos because they’ve spent all their money on utility bills and mortgage payments. While the Derby does attract that business, the race is not held for these people, the ones who generally swelter in the lower deck stands or standing-room-only areas. It is held for the rich Good Ol’ Boys, the ones born into money and made stock and mutual fund transactions before they saw the first breast they didn’t drink from. It is a game for brokers, traders, owners and presidents. Important People with Important Things on their Important Minds that must be soothed with imported liquor.
And why not? After all, the Derby isn’t about the ability of the horses or the jockeys or the leadership of the trainers. It’s about gambling, which is really a bedfellow of investing, putting your money in the right places to get a profitable return. The experts on the Derby don’t talk strategy and execution in the days before the big race. Instead they talk about celebrity picks, oddsmakers tactics and the who-owns-what schmoozing that leads everyone to believe that George Steinbrenner’s horse is the favorite. That’s not sports analysis, that’s brandy-and-cigar conversation used to break the ice before a corporate merger discussion.
The Derby pulls all these heavyweight bosses to the track through another facet of self-promotion: pageantry. Blow the trumpets, drop confetti from the sky and make a big hoopla about an event by inviting celebrity guests, A-listers if possible. Promote the shit out of that shit until a major broadcast network sets up cameras and gives it a prime daytime slot. Then they have to promote the shit out of your shit, too. With a big-time network behind you, you could get all those bigwig corporate shits to bet lots of shit while getting shitty on martinis in the VIP Lounge even if you were hosting a shit-tossing competition.
Hell, if it all works out, you could go crazy with it. Invite the trumpets, blow the big-time network and drop the celebrity guests from the sky. Hell, even I would watch it then.
But when it all comes down to it, the Kentucky Derby is a bloated topic of evening conversation for the greedheads around the world, and I want it, its pageantry and Steve off my fucking television set.