It was never a priority for a young athlete growing up in Northern Kentucky playing football, basketball and baseball.
The Kentucky Derby – and thoroughbred racing in general – would have to wait. No time left over. Luckily for me, there would be a spot as sports editor and columnist at The Kentucky Post and a Derby Week assignment every May.
Where as much as it would seem to be about those three-year-old Derby horses, it almost always turned out to be about the people at the Derby – and so many of them with connections here.
Like the very first year I hit the Churchill Downs press box early in Derby Week in 1980. And knew I had to get up to speed on that big binder of information on the jockeys, owners and trainers they supplied us with.
And so I’m reading it and come upon this line about a West Coast trainer whose name I didn’t know yet: “… left the Covington Protestant Orphans’ Home as a teenager for California in a box car of racehorses…”
Say what? Is this a movie script? Could this be for real? And so I hightailed it to the backside looking for Ron McAnally’s stables. And found him. Trying not to sound too dumb, I remember mentioning the first California racehorse I read about in Sports Illustrated – Silky Sullivan – and laughed at how there was such a stir about that coming-from-waaaay-behind horse.
“That was my uncle’s (Reggie Cornell) horse,” Ron dead-panned of a thoroughbred he’d been close to as he started his way on the path to a Hall of Fame career that notably had him finishing up with the all-time stakes and money winner, the legendary John Henry. It was said that McAnally, because of the circumstances of being orphaned with his four siblings, had a way of bringing the best out of horses others couldn’t quite understand.
Years later, on a Sunday when I’d decided to spend a day at the Keeneland Summer Sales – thoroughbred racing’s premier sales event – and see what all the multi-million-dollar fuss was all about, I ran into Ron again. He was there to find the next John Henry, he said, if that were only possible. But as special as the John Henry story was, finding an orphan from Covington who became a Hall of Fame training legend with three homes in California was the story I wanted to tell.
What a lovely, classy, quiet, professional man. A horseman in every sense of the word although he was an Air Force veteran and later a University of Cincinnati electrical engineering student. And just one in a long line of Northern Kentucky race-trackers who, over the years, went from Old Latonia to new Latonia/Turfway, to Ellis Park and Keeneland and Churchill on the Kentucky circuit.
Then as luck would have it, in 1985, Stan Hugenberg Jr. called me. As a member of the board at Churchill Downs, following his father, the onetime executive vice-president of the Downs, and a member of the boards at the brand-new Kentucky Derby Museum and the J. Graham Brown Foundation, the museum’s primary donor, Stan Jr. was going down for the grand opening. Turns out the Ft. Mitchell resident was a big behind-the-scenes player in bringing the Kentucky Derby Museum – one of the outstanding sports museums in America – into reality 40 years ago.
Would I like to come along?
Would I? Once inside, Mr. Hugenberg (I always called him that) introduced me to a fellow Churchill board member, Charles Bidwill Jr. “He owns the St. Louis (soon-to-be Arizona) Cardinals (of the NFL),” Mr. Hugenberg said, matter-of-factly. Bobby Knight was there with his trainer buddy and former basketball coach D. Wayne Lukas. I would later get to cover Knight and his Indiana Hoosiers.
And then we ran into George Steinbrenner in the clubhouse betting line. If the expression “a wad of bills big enough to strangle a horse” hadn’t been invented, it would have to be that day to describe the cash Steinbrenner pulled out of his pocket. And as with Knight, I would one day get to cover George and his New York Yankees, as well.
As for Mr. Hugenberg, his dad – Stan Sr. – had been a major racing leader who went from Old Latonia to Churchill Downs’ executive vice-president where he decided to make the “twin spires” the symbol of the Louisville track. And the man whose home Bing Crosby and Bob Hope would stay at when they were in for the Derby.
Speaking of celebs, you could get on the elevator and there would be Ricky Skaggs, the Hall of Fame Opry musician from Lawrence County, or soap star Susan Lucci. Or maybe British actor Albert Finney, who I accompanied to the backside to see a trainer friend of his from the UK.
You just never knew. But what you did know: You were going to run into as many special people as horses and they would become the story.
As they still are. You can take all the clubhouses and press conferences in the world of sports and they probably don’t equal the Churchill Downs’ backside on Derby Week.
Contact Dan Weber at dweber3440@aol.com. Follow him on X (formerly Twitter) @dweber3440.