To See A Man About a Horse
A couple years before I was born, the late, great gonzo journalist, Hunter S. Thompson, wrote an essay called "The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved." The other day television talking head, David Letterman, described the Kentucky Derby as being the most exciting two minutes in sports. This leads me to believe that he never read the good doctors article, or that perhaps he is saying something very profound.
If the most exciting moments in sports is a bunch of horses running in a circle, perhaps the sports have lost a bit of their luster. I know the athletes have. Each interview is terrible mashup of old cliches, painful to the ear and even more painful once one realizes that these sports figures aren't embarrassed by their verbalized abstractions. They just aren't smart enough to realize they ought to be embarrassed. I'm waiting for some technological speech to replace the war speech. Instead of holding a line we might limit their bandwidth. When will we google their formation?
But lets get back to the horses.
Thompson's objection wasn't to horse racing itself. He was a sports freak. He would watch most anything and if he could get his head around the statistics he would bet on it. His problem was the aristocratic culture that had grown around the Kentucky Derby. And this was thirty six years ago.
This year there were news stories about thousand dollar mint juleps being served at the race. People can hit the local OTB any day of the week and bet on a horse, but only the truly elite are seen in the VIP section at the Kentucky Derby. (It's not like paying the yearly charge at a local track or club to get special service, this is a whole new level of weeding out the riff raff).
In Summary: I didn't watch the race. I'm not exactly secretly jealous of people wealthy enough to burn the 1000 dollars on a mint julep. I don't think I'd actually like a mint julep, and I'm not sure if its the flavor or the cultural snobbery that bothers me about it.
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If the most exciting moments in sports is a bunch of horses running in a circle, perhaps the sports have lost a bit of their luster. I know the athletes have. Each interview is terrible mashup of old cliches, painful to the ear and even more painful once one realizes that these sports figures aren't embarrassed by their verbalized abstractions. They just aren't smart enough to realize they ought to be embarrassed. I'm waiting for some technological speech to replace the war speech. Instead of holding a line we might limit their bandwidth. When will we google their formation?
But lets get back to the horses.
Thompson's objection wasn't to horse racing itself. He was a sports freak. He would watch most anything and if he could get his head around the statistics he would bet on it. His problem was the aristocratic culture that had grown around the Kentucky Derby. And this was thirty six years ago.
This year there were news stories about thousand dollar mint juleps being served at the race. People can hit the local OTB any day of the week and bet on a horse, but only the truly elite are seen in the VIP section at the Kentucky Derby. (It's not like paying the yearly charge at a local track or club to get special service, this is a whole new level of weeding out the riff raff).
In Summary: I didn't watch the race. I'm not exactly secretly jealous of people wealthy enough to burn the 1000 dollars on a mint julep. I don't think I'd actually like a mint julep, and I'm not sure if its the flavor or the cultural snobbery that bothers me about it.
More Laters
posted by Rich Rosenthal II at 3:01 AM
2 Comments:
But the hats are so cool!!!
And the city of Louisville itself still has so much that reminds you of this country when we were kind of an aristocratic society, that it's sort of a cute little nod to those days...if the same event were held in a city any further north, it just wouldn't fly.
I'd like to see em try and hold it at around chicago. That would bring out the crazy's. Is that track even out there in cicero anymore?
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