Weekender: What if only three horses showed up, and other tales from Derbies past

That year only three starters ran in the race, down from four starters the previous year, and six the year before that. The race is historic for another reason: the winning jockey, the great African-American rider Alonzo Clayton, became the youngest Derby-winning jockey, at age 15, a record that still stands.

In the 1890s, the Derby was on hard times. It’s hard to imagine a time when the Derby wasn’t Thoroughbred racing’s signature event, but as we have seen in previous columns, in the 1890s, the Derby was less than 20 years old, and had begun as little more than a publicity stunt — a race for 3-year-olds — to draw fans to a startup track in Louisville that wasn’t yet called Churchill Downs.

Merriwether Lewis Clark, grandson of the Clark of the Lewis and Clark expedition, and named after the Lewis, founded the Derby in 1875. Clark had a mercurial personality type and was entirely unsuited to managing a racetrack, or perhaps any other business. He sadly took his own life in 1899.

Clark had based the Derby on the English Derby, a race for 3-year-olds, in an age when the prime year of a horse’s career was his 4-year-old season. The idea of a 3-year-old race, particularly in the spring, was new and meant to attract attention. It was, in large part, a publicity stunt.

But by 1892, the new had worn off. Other races, such as the Preakness Stakes, then often run on the same day as the Derby, and the Belmont Stakes, often run only a few days later, had the advantage of not requiring horses in training on the East Coast to be shipped west to Kentucky.

It’s hard to say why 1892 became the low point. The Panic of 1893, which virtually destroyed Churchill Downs financially, was a year away, and the wave of reform that virtually killed racing in the northeast after the turn of the century was more than a decade away. Of course, this wasn’t a one-year phenomenon: with only four starters the year before, and six before that. The race hadn’t been a popular race in almost a decade; the last time the race had drawn ten starters had been in 1886, and the last time it drew 14, nearly equaling its opening day performance of 15 starters had been 1882.

The three entries in 1892 were the great runner Azra, who beat an unknown named Huron by a nose and went on to win the Travers Stakes and the Clark Handicap as a 3-year-old, and the third place horse, named Phil Dwyer, who loped in six lengths behind.

Both Huron and Phil Dwyer were owned by Ed Corrigan, about whom I don’t know much, other than that he provided two-thirds of the entries for the smallest Derby field ever. Obviously Huron, who only lost by a nose, wasn’t a bad runner on that day, despite his obscurity. It’s hard to say much in favor of Phil Dwyer, though. In a three-horse race, with the other two nose and nose at the wire, it’s hard to say you had a bad trip. And, at 2:41 1/2, for a mile and a half, it’s not like they were setting the earth on fire.

Azra was owned by Bashford Manor Stable, an up and coming Thoroughbred breeding operation founded by George J. Long in Louisville in 1887. Bashford Manor would breed and race Thoroughbreds well into the 20th century, but Azra was its only Derby winner.

He was trained by John H. Morris, one of the top trainers of his day. His regular jockey, and his Derby rider, was the great African-American jockey Alonzo Clayton, who, at age 15, made history himself.

The Derby had another decade to struggle, before salvation arrived in the form of Col. Matt Winn, the impresario who turned a publicity stunt into the modern face of Thoroughbred racing. It improved a little bit, eking along at seven and eight starters, until the late teens, when buoyed by some of Col. Winn’s own publicity stunts, the numbers began creeping up as Matt Winn’s race became America’s race. The era of three horse Derbies is long gone.

Secretariat won the 1973 Kentucky Derby, setting a record that stands to this day. We saw the Maryland Racing Commission revise its time for the 1973 Preakness, which had been in dispute all of those years, to a time of 1:54, a record for that race as well. Secretariat’s record time in the Belmont Stakes has never been approached. In that glorious spring of 1973, Secretariat set records in all three Triple Crown races that stand to this day.

While all that was going on other places, I was 13 years old, and growing up in Heidelberg, a small community in Lee County, Kentucky, on the banks of the Kentucky River, an area not known to be a hotbed of Thoroughbred activity. Lee County is further east than Powell County, childhood home of legendary trainer Woody Stephens, and the location of a statue and monument in his honor, a marker I have identified earlier as the only monument or marker concerning the Thoroughbred horse business between Central Kentucky and the Ashland area, home of a pioneering track, Raceland.

Secretariat rocketed to victory in the 1973 Kentucky Derby. (Photo from Churchilldowns.com)

The early ’70s were my introduction to horse racing, and it all came through my watching the Triple Crown races on TV; I never made it to a racetrack til I was in college. Canonero II’s upset victory in 1971 taught me that a longshot could win. I don’t remember much about Riva Ridge’s victory in 1972, but by the time the 1973 Triple Crown season rolled around, I was old enough to get caught up in the media frenzy that was Secretariat, and by the end of that season, I was a lifelong racing fan.

Little did I know in 1973, as Secretariat rocketed to victories in the Derby and Preakness so fast that everyone wondered if he could really run a mile and a half at the Belmont, that in 1988, Secretariat would be bred to Tom Gentry’s great broodmare Crimson Saint or that the offspring of that mating would change my life.

By 1990, the filly (later named Navajo Pass) was being sold as a yearling at Keeneland, by Tom Gentry, whom I represented in his famous Chapter 11 bankruptcy. My future law partner, Joe Johnson, represented a lienholder with an interest in the filly. I had known Joe before this, but not well; like everyone, I knew him by reputation if nothing else. He’d been Fayette County judge, and a reformer in a time that might not have been ready for reform. He’d just run for governor and founded the Kentucky Training Center and the Kensington Sales Co.

In our negotiations over the lien, Joe and I became good friends, to the point that if Tom and I were in court, Joe would come sit beside me at the counsel table, mumbling advice. Joe and Tom were both larger than life figures at that point, and it was a heady time for a young lawyer. After Tom’s case was over, and I left the law firm with which I practiced, Joe and I went into practice together, where we remained until his retirement.

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