Occasionally, pop songwriters match strides with Bob Dylan and pen a line worth remembering, which happened, I think, in 1981 when Dan Fogelberg recorded his Kentucky Derby song, “Run for the Roses.” The keeper phrase: “It’s the chance of a lifetime in a lifetime of chance.”
This play-on-words has survived millions of hearings on radio stations, on video soundtracks and even, I assume, in karaoke bars. It avoids descending into cliche because it’s such a clean word twist and — here’s the genius — because we receive constant reminders of its essential truth. If the randomness in life, the unpredictability, hasn’t cuffed you on the cranium lately, you may have allowed Fogelberg’s signature phrase to recede deep into your subconscious. But events will bring it back. They will bring it back.
Putting together this year’s Derby issue of Louisville certainly reminded me that chance is a front-runner. Our two feature stories about horse racing, “The Ecstasy and Agony of Edgar Prado” (page 74) and “Stride for Stride With Big Red” (page 88), strongly evoke the vicissitudes of the Sport of Kings. In the first of those pieces, freelance writer Claire Novak captures the emotional roller coaster ride of a Peruvian jockey who came to the U.S. with nothing, found his lifetime chance at last year’s Derby aboard champion Barbaro, and then suffered with all of us after his mount broke down two weeks later in the Preakness Stakes. Surely, Edgar Prado has experienced highs and lows that most of the rest of us can only attempt to imagine.
Happenstance of another sort thrust Penny Chenery into the Derby limelight in 1972 and ’73, shortly after she’d left behind an anonymous life as a homemaker in Colorado to become the owner-operator of a Virginia horse farm built by her father, whose health was deteriorating — the same breeding and training facility that produced back-to-back Derby winners Riva Ridge and Secretariat in the early ’70s. Staff writer Josh Moss pieces together the intriguing set of circumstances that created an opportunity for Chenery to emerge in a male-dominated horse racing culture and explores how seizing that moment altered her life forever.
The magic of the Run for the Roses spins a spell over the Kentucky Derby Festival, Louisville’s Derby Week parties and other events at Churchill Downs and in the city leading up to the first Saturday in May. I can’t help but notice that a number of serendipitous moments filter through other stories in this issue. Joe Atkinson’s bemused account of deciding to att/files/storyimages/the race just two days before it went off and then traveling from Evansville, Ind., for the adventure (“The 48-Hour Derby,” page 45) is the sort of plunge into possibilities that in many ways defines our fabled rite of spring. And speaking of games of chance: As veteran turf writer Bill Doolittle argues in an “End Insight” column on page 152, playing the ponies in the Derby field is little more than a crapshoot, which I take to mean that bozos like me can feel empowered to ride our hunches all the way to the betting window. Even associate editor Melissa Duley’s accidental celebrity moment in the grandstand (“Me and Tommy Lee,” page 24) translates, as she wryly observes, into a shyness-shedding grasp of the moment.
All of these encounters with fate, on small and large stages, roll together to form the Derby experience. The blossoming of spring brightens moods. Louisvillians and their guests swell into hotels, bars, restaurants and nightclubs, lifting the energy level, breaking us loose from our city-of-the-small-town moorings. Why not go with the flow?
Here’s hoping that all of you have a moment — or several moments — to remember from Derby Week 133. There will be up to 20 horses, plus their owners, trainers and jockeys, saddling up with an optimism that keeps racing forever young. Clouds over the environment, over Iraq and Afghanistan, over any of the numerous personal challenges we all face — those clouds will lift as we focus on the moment of opportunity. Thundering Thoroughbreds and their gritty riders will live those two minutes of intensity for us. But we will have our own turns to break from the starting gate. Derby Week gives us our time to embrace the new, the gift of surprise.
In his “Run for the Roses” refrain, Dan Fogelberg adds a rhyme that completes this thought:
It’s the chance of a lifetime in a lifetime of chance.
And it’s high time you joined in the dance.
It’s high time you joined in the dance.
