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 Racing toward oblivion
Posted: Thursday May 13, 1999 12:01 PM
For almost all this century, the month of May, sports division, was characterized by the bookends of America's two greatest races -- the Kentucky Derby on the first Saturday of the month, the Indianapolis 500 on the last Sunday. Those events were the sporting queens of our May -- but now, as the century ends, both are not only greatly diminished in attention, but, for very different reasons, both the Derby and the 500 are also even losing primacy in their own sports. Part of this change is simply the shift in interest in American spectator sports, wherein the three super team sports -- baseball, basketball and football -- grow larger and more powerful, squeezing out all the other flowers in the athletic garden. Especially the individual sports -- track and field, boxing, tennis, golf -- have increasingly become little more than niche entertainments that attract small avid audiences, but which can only occasionally make inroads into the huge public that follows the three super team sports. This has been the most significant trend in American sports in the latter half of this century. It is instructive that when the Derby and the 500 truly ruled May, there were no NBA -- or NHL -- playoffs to compete with. Once the Soviets were finished parading their ordnance on Red Square, on May Day, the month belonged strictly to the horses and the engines of our pleasure. It's hard to believe now, but the Derby once drew the largest radio audience in America; regularly half the nation tuned in. But quick -- name the Derby winner of just a few days ago. Probably, if you said Charismatic, you're some old Kentucky hardboot, or you're a senior citizen hanging around the local OTB parlor. The television ratings for the Derby this year set a new low -- about the size of a run-of-the-mill Monday night wrestling audience. The Indianapolis 500 isn't even premier in its own sport any longer. The major automobile race in America is now the Daytona 500, for stock cars. The Indy 500, which is contested by stylish low-slung European machines, cannot compete with the All-America NASCAR circuit and its down-home national stars. Really, the Indianapolis 500 is now running the wrong kind of vehicles. Imagine, if you will, if we watched baseball all summer, but then told Americans that Mark McGwire and Ken Griffey Jr. and the Yankees were going to be put out to pasture while we conducted the World Series in cricket. The Indianapolis 500 is cricket. Derby Day, meanwhile, certainly does remain undisputably the glamor-puss of thoroughbred racing. Quaint old Churchill Downs is managed so beautifully that it makes it all the more ironic and inexcusable that the race itself, the Run for the Roses, has become more of an equine Ring Around the Rosie. Twenty horses compete, turning it into a rodeo, bumper cars, a Derby of demolition. Horses clip heels, bump, stumble, stagger. The race has become such a dangerous crapshoot that no favorite has won in more than 20 years. And so if the Derby remains yet the best-known horse race in the United States, it's become more festival than competition. In fact, the more modest second leg of the Triple Crown, the Preakness, which is run this Saturday at Pimlico, is a much fairer, more genuine test of horse flesh, making it the best race that -- ah, yes -- now falls upon a day in the merry month of May. These commentaries, which appear each Wednesday on National Public Radio's Morning Edition, are posted weekly by CNN/SI.
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