Hero Worship

Every Derby winner holds a place in horse racing history, but certain winners seem to have an "Everyman" quality that resonates with the American public. And we gladly adopt these heroes who emerge from the least likely circumstances and revel in their victories.

One only need look back a year to recall the phenomenon at its best. When Smarty Jones sprinted past Lion Heart in the Churchill Downs stretch to become the 2004 Kentucky Derby winner, he set in motion a national love-fest that lingered through the spring. When he fell short of the Triple Crown by losing to Birdstone in the Belmont, Marylou Whitney, the owner of the winner, felt completed to apologize.

No doubt Whitney contributed to the moment by expressing her feelings candidly, but Smarty Jones had earned his own reputation as a darling of the public long before the sadness of his downfall was realized in her tears.

In reality, Smarty Jones was qualified on all counts to be a Kentucky Derby winner. He was an undefeated colt, having entered the starting gate in Churchill Downs on the heels of an impressive win in the Arkansas Derby. But the reason people loved him had to do with reality - his speed figures, his dosage, his accomplishments. It had everything to do with his being perceived as an ordinary Joe - all aspects of him, including his owners, his hometown, and his name.

In the eyes of the public, Smarty Jones was a catchy-named colt from the streets of Philadelphia, a battler with a gouge on his face, owned by a car dealer who named his Someday Farm for the dream that someday he'd make it in racing. People admired the fact that the trainer and jockey hadn't participated in other Derbies. The trainer's name did not ring with the household familiarity of a Lukas or a Zito. Rather John Servis had developed a reputation through hard work at his home base of Philadelphia Park, a mainly blue-collar regional track. The jockey, too, lacked prestige. A novice to the start-studded environment of the Kentucky Derby, Stewart Elliot had carved his career one race at a time on the relatively unglamorous tracks of the Northeast.

And the public was intrigued by the tragic stories of Smarty's previous trainer, a much-beloved stalwart of the Philadelphia racing scene who had been murdered by a family member.

Smarty was a "natural" for working-class Americans looking for a hero to love, and he and his owners, Pat and Roy Chapman, gave them every reason for a romance. Suzanne C. Segerstrom, associate profesor of phychology at the University of Kentucky, provides some insight into the collective chord struck by Smarty Jones and his ilk. She believes that when the privileged go down to defeated at the hands of an outsider, it feeds into our sense of possibility that hidden greatness might emerge from any of us. "At least, it gives us a chance to triumph through our identification with ordinariness," she says about our love of the little guy.

Even before Smarty Jones, however, there were others to love. A year earlier, Funny Cide had become a Kentucky Derby winner and a near Triple Crown hero of enormous magnitude. He, like Smarty Jones, was the epitome of a fan favorite on several levels. In the end, there were Funny Cide T-Shirts, Funny Cide beer, and Funny Cider.

What separated Funny Cide from his fellow Derby contenders on the popularity scale was that he was a New York-bred gelding owned by a ragtag bunch of former Sacketts Harbor High School buddies. One of the owners, Jack Knowlton, a guy who sold insurance in Saratoga, suggested each put a hard-earned Usd 5,000 to get started in the racing game. Fully vested in a common dream, these owners named their partnership Sackatoga Stable, a contraction of their two favorites places - well, al least before visiting Louisville.

Blue-collar owners who drive to the track in a school bus rather than a chauffeur-driven stretch limo aren't supposed to win the Kentucky Derby. Neither is a gelding nor a New York-bred, especially when running against a Kentucky colt as talented as Empire Maker, owned by a Saudi prince. But they did. Funny Cide and his Sackatoga Stable posse set a nation on edge with dizzying thoughts of a Triple Crown champion. Despite losing the Belmont, their Joyous ride through the Triple Crown illuminated all that was good about the sport to an avid public who couldn't get enough of their story.

A similar commotion, albeit on a more subtle basis, ocurred in 1998, when the always clowning Bob Baffert saddle the winner, Real Quiet, for his beer-drinking buddy Mike Pegram, an operator of McDonald's hamburger stands.

Pegram, who cut his teeth in racing at tiny Ellis Park - a western Kentucky "county fair" kind of track that grows soy beans in its infield - paid a mere Usd 17,500 for the winner, a slim-bodied colt that Baffert dismissed as "The Fish." The public relished the victory and Pegram's universal "good old boy" appeal. "Oh God," Pegram said in the post-Derby interview, alluding to his roots, "for a guy who used to skip school to come to Churchill, well, if this isn't a movie."

Pegram, Baffert and "The Fish" embodied an endearing ordinariness. The public was able to identify easily with them, and they were able to draw attention to the sport with their fresh-faced, fun-loving approach. Although Pegram was new to the Derby scene, Baffert had triumphed the previous year with Silver Charm.

Sometimes, serendipity is to be credited for making people fall head over heels for the Kentucky Derby winner. Consider the saga of Canonero II in 1971. His victory in the race came as a complete surprise, and in the element of that surprise, the magic ensued.

Prior to his Derby, few people knew who Canonero II was, and nobody, except his owner, Venezuelan Don Pedro Baptista, had the faith that his colt could win. Canonero had been a Usd 1,200 yearling with a crooked foreleg, and Baptista had repurchased him and two other horses in a package deal. So disregarded were Canonero's chances, that the colt was 500-1 in the Caliente winter book on the Kentucky Derby.

Others problems Canonero II faced before the Derby gave further credence to the thought that the horse was a hopeless participant. Canonero II's trip to Churchill Downs from his home in Caracas was a 17-hour flight to Florida in bad weather, then a long van ride to Louisville. During the trip he lost 70 pounds. Applying training methods that were unconventional to the Triple Crown trail, trainer Juan Arias, a product of the slums of Caracas, nursed Canonero II back to health with a series of long galops the wrog way around the track, and employed a 165 pound exercise rider who didn't use a saddle. The turf writers scoffed at the aspirations of the non-English speaking trainer and staff, the public read what they wrote, and he overlooked Canonero II entered the starting gate as part of the mutuel field, a group of longshots lumped as one betting entry.

Fortunately, the colt didn't realize the odds again him. He appeared for the Derby miraculously restored and streaked home a convincing winner. "We've come up here - two Indians and a black with a horse nobody believed in, and we're destroying 300 years of American racing tradition, dominated by the flower and cream of your society," said Baptista, as millions of Latinos samba-ed with glee in the streets as if the Kentucky Derby were a World Cup Soccer match.

For those whose memories go back that far, Canonero II was merely following in the footsteps of another blue-collar Derby winner. Carry Back won the Kentucky Derby in 1961, when the country was awash in idealism. He was the son of the indifferently bred Saggy, whose claim to fame was his defeat of the regal Citation in the 1948 Chesapeake Trial, and a Usd 300 mare, the equally unglamorously named and bred Joppy. Katherine Price and her trainer-husband, Jack, who had taken the mare Joppy in lieu of a board bill, bred Carry Back in Florida, and the colt raced in Katherine's name.

Forthright and determined, and, to a certain extent, lucky, Jack Price was a self-made man, who started a successul machine tool company after working as a "candy butcher" selling candies car to car on trains coming to and from the Cleveland, Ohio, station. He also personified the pioneering men who helped make central Florida a Thoroughbred breeding center to nip at the heels of the establishment in Kentucky.

Carry Back, who was attempting to follow in Needles' footsteps to become the second Florida-bred Derby winner, was a tepid favorite on Kentucky Derby Day because of victories in the Everglades, the Flamingo, and the Florida Derby. But Carry Back was also the "people's horse." He was ordinary in looks and modest in pedigree, yet raced with a running style that set hearts aflutter. With jockey John Sellers aboard for a thrilling finish, Carry Back made up 13 lengths in the Churchill Downs stretch to beat Crozier in a driving finish.

With Carry Back's Derby win, Price learned the extent to which the public can adopt a hero, and how ingrained in the public consciousness that hero remains. "God, did I find out exactly what the Kentucky Derby is," said Price years later. "Even today I walk into a restaurant in Miami or New York and people begin whispering, 'That's Jack Price. He owns that Carry Back horse.'"

Who will the next Carry Back or Smarty Jones be? Racing doesn't present many occasions for the American public to show its love in the way it did for Smarty Jones, Funny Cide, Real Quiet, and Canonero II. But when it does, we'll be ready.