I was at Murphy’s by 11 a.m. because the Derby is the one day a year I can drink bourbon before noon and pretend it’s research. I had not been on the stool ten minutes when a kid named Tanner — sandy hair, lanyard from somewhere, drinking something pink — leaned across two empty seats and showed me his phone like it was a sonogram. “Mr. Holloway,” he said, because Tanner has manners his parlay does not, “I got us cooking today.”
What Tanner had was a six-leg parlay on an app whose name sounds like a children’s cereal. Leg one was a horse in the Derby. Legs two through four were NBA player props I will not dignify by transcribing. Leg five was the over in a Portuguese soccer match that had already started. Leg six was a horse he kept calling “Burrito,” which is not, as far as I can tell, the name of any horse running today, last year, or in the foreseeable future. The actual name on the screen was something Spanish with three syllables and an accent mark. Tanner had decided this was close enough.
I asked him what a furlong was. He said it was “like a quarter mile or whatever.” I asked him which horse had the rail. He said “the inside one.” I asked him who trained Burrito. He said his roommate’s dad knew a guy. I have been writing about sports since this kid’s father was eating paste, and I have never in my life heard a more honest answer.
Coach DiMaggio used to take us up to the OTB in Yonkers the first Saturday in May, which was technically a field trip and technically a felony. He would buy a single program, fold it lengthwise, and circle three names with a golf pencil. He picked horses the way he ran a Power-I — by feel, with conviction, and with a deep moral suspicion of anything fancier than a maiden claimer. He went 0-for-everything most years and was happier than any man I have ever met holding a phone.
The Derby itself, the actual race, is still the best two minutes in American sports, and I will fight a man who says otherwise. Twenty animals built like jet engines and the size of a Buick, kids on top of them who weigh less than my golden retriever, going at speeds that would get you a ticket on the interstate. It is unironic, unfiltered, unsponsored sport, and it is over before the commercial break is finished loading on the streaming service that my granddaughter has me logged into without my consent.
The other six hours, though. Lord. They have turned the infield into a content farm. There is a woman on Instagram whose entire job, as I understand it from my niece, is wearing a different hat at the Derby every year and getting paid by a bourbon company to be photographed not drinking it. Ray Kowalczyk called me Tuesday to report that his granddaughter spent four hundred dollars on a hat she will wear exactly once, in a backyard, in Akron, on a folding chair, while watching the race on a laptop. Ray asked me what a hat does for four hundred dollars that a hat does not do for forty. I told him I’d get back to him.
Down the bar from Tanner sits Petey Corrigan, who is eighty-one and still picks his Derby horse the same way he has since Eisenhower: he reads every name out loud, slowly, and bets the one that sounds like a man he would have trusted with a key to his house. This year he is on a horse whose name I will not print because Petey believes saying it on the radio jinxes it, and as far as I’m concerned a paper counts as radio. Petey has a two-dollar win ticket and a ham sandwich his wife packed in tinfoil. Petey is going to have a better afternoon than Tanner. Petey is going to have a better afternoon than most of us.
I am not against the kid. I am against the app. I am against the idea that a horse race — a thing humans have been doing for four thousand years, a thing that requires no batteries, no second screen, no opinion from a man with a podcast called “Edge Lords” — needs to be cross-bred with a Portuguese soccer over to be worth caring about. The Derby was already a parlay. It was a parlay of a hundred and fifty years of bloodlines, a half-ton of muscle, a kid from Louisiana on a saddle, and the weather. That used to be enough action for anybody.
Tanner just yelled because his Portuguese soccer leg cashed. He has informed me he is now “alive to a fifty-grand ticket,” which is the kind of sentence that ought to require a permit. The race goes off in two hours. Denise is bringing chili over for the undercard. She says it’s from a podcast.