Kentucky Derby 150: Marla Ridenour remembers Howard Cosell's toupee, tutelage of legends

I served as Jim Murray’s eyes during a Kentucky Derby post parade after the Hall of Fame sports columnist became virtually blind.

I turned down a rose from Spectacular Bid’s winning garland in 1979.

I watched actor Jack Klugman traipse the backstretch just after dawn, enthused before his colt Jaklin Klugman finished third in 1980.

I laughed as Sports Illustrated’s William Nack, best known for his biography of Secretariat, combed his hair in the finish line mirror.

I ate breakfast in the track kitchen with the lifeblood of the sport and sipped bourbon with the legends of journalism hours later.

When I covered the Kentucky Derby from 1978-90 and again in 2002, I didn’t know how lucky I was.

I do now.

Memories have come flooding back ahead of Saturday’s 150th Run for the Roses at Churchill Downs. But it’s not the performances of the world’s top thoroughbreds that dominate my bursts of nostalgia, but the people whom I worked alongside.

My time coincided with journalism’s heyday, when there were few constraints on the budgets of newspapers and magazines. Top writers wanted to cover the Derby because the backstretch was a gold mine of stories of hard luck and hard work, of the overlooked and the overachievers.

A native of Louisville, I had never been to the historic track during racing season until I was assigned to cover the Derby. Many Louisvillians party at home; my recollections of those neighborhood bashes go back to my favorite horse, Candy Spots, in 1963. My grandmother lived close to Churchill Downs and she and my mother took me there once when the cavernous grandstand was empty. I was struck by the massive size of the Twin Spires, the cracks in the stone walkways that would wreak havoc with my high heels in later years.

About a year into my first job with the Lexington Herald Leader, I became part of the paper’s Derby coverage headed by trailblazing, Eclipse Award-winning turf writer Maryjean Wall. I watched from the winner’s circle as Affirmed outdueled Alydar, the first of their three epic Triple Crown battles, all won by Affirmed. The editors also sent me to the Preakness and Belmont.

Some might say the ride was all downhill from there. I beg to differ.

The following year, I got to know the owners of Spectacular Bid as the colt won the Blue Grass Stakes at Keeneland in Lexington. It was Harry Meyerhoff’s then-wife Teresa who offered me the rose in a hallway after the victory at Churchill Downs. No one was around, but I demurred. Perhaps I didn’t want to disturb the garland that to me was the Holy Grail. Whatever the reason, I still regret I don’t have that flower dried at home.

With the bluebloods of the horse industry among my audience, there was pressure. Without the internet and Google, I kept a clip file on each horse.

Hall of Fame columnist Edwin Pope of the Miami Herald, who sat across from me in the press box, tried to assuage my nerves. Pope told me this was the only day of the year people read about horse racing, so write for them, not for those whose pristine farms ringed the city.

At the end of a week that was like survival of the fittest for the horses and imbibing media — one friend always got a B-12 shot to prepare — Pope was a master of maintaining freshness on Derby Day. He slept in and took a cab to the track about 3 p.m., at least six hours after I’d arrived.

In 1981, I was hired at the Dayton Daily News and sports editor Si Burick introduced me to a whole new world when it came to the Derby.

The media party at the Galt House was lavish and I found myself at a table with Burick, who wrote columns for the Dayton Daily News for 58 years and is a member of the Baseball Hall of Fame, and his closest friends. Those included Murray of the Los Angeles Times, Blackie Sherrod of the Dallas Morning News and Dan Foster of the Greenville News. Fred Russell of the Nashville Banner, who covered more than 50 consecutive Derbies, was likely also there.

I fetched double bourbons for Sherrod and listened to their tales. The Derby was the first major sporting event I covered, and that table of journalism icons proved to be the ultimate training ground.

Years later at the Super Bowl, an NFL colleague watched as I chatted with Murray on a shuttle bus and asked how we knew each other. I mentioned those parties and one race day when I was seated next to Murray outside the press box. He asked me to describe the scene leading up to post time. When I told him the winner’s circle was guarded by members of the military, that wasn’t enough. Murray wanted to know which branches of the service were represented.

There were anxious moments, like when I risked the wrath of Burick in 1983. Dayton had a morning paper, the Journal Herald, and the Daily News in the evening. I told Burick I thought Canadian-bred Sunny’s Halo had a good chance to win and I needed to do a Journal Herald piece on him. He scoffed, saying he’d already written that story. I did it, anyway.

When we got home, he told me I was the most uncooperative person he’d ever worked with. Thankfully, Sunny’s Halo won.

There was another factor involved in that label. Several friends from Dayton attended that Derby and I visited them in the infield, much to Burick’s consternation. When we left the track as a group that evening, one carried their cooler on his shoulder. He collided with broadcasting icon Howard Cosell and the cooler dislodged Cosell’s toupee.

My Derby beat ended when I was hired in August 1990 by the Columbus Dispatch, which already had a horse racing writer. Joining the Beacon Journal in 1999, I got one last working trip to Churchill Downs in 2002 to cover Harlan’s Holiday, bred at Double D Farm in Medina.

I arrived at the backstretch on Friday morning, when most of the participants might be talked out. I desperately searched for Jack Wolf, who founded Starlight Racing in 2000. One of the first six yearlings he purchased, Harlan’s Holiday had won the Florida Derby and Blue Grass Stakes and went off as the Derby favorite.

Fortunately for me, Wolf showed up at the barn.

Wolf is a Louisville native, and I told him I grew up between Bardstown and Taylorsville roads. So did he. We began whittling down the neighborhood and discovered we’d both lived on Rosedale Boulevard. From then on, I was “Miss Rosedale.” I still use that moniker on X when I tweet Wolf, co-owner of 2018 Triple Crown winner Justify, good luck on race days.

Most of my favorite Derby stories do not involve gambling, even though my first television and lawnmower were purchased with daily double winnings at River Downs. But there is a reason my office memorabilia include a signed photo of jockey Chris McCarron holding the 1987 garland and a small print of him aboard Alysheba.

I consulted my close friend, the late Cliff Guilliams, for betting tips. Then the chart caller for the Daily Racing Form, Guilliams loved Alysheba and Bet Twice. I listened.

Among my wagers were three three-horse exacta boxes, with those two on each ticket and a different horse third. Each ticket was $18. I needed two of the three in the top two, in any order, and Cliff’s picks ran one-two. With Alysheba going off at $8.40-1, the exacta paid $109.60. I had it three times.

There were betting windows in the press box where the likes of the Washington Post’s Andrew Beyer, who developed the speed figures that bear his name, cashed in massively. A white-haired gentleman had been my go-to ticket seller, so after interviews were concluded I sought him out.

“I’m sure you’ve had people win lots more than this,” I told him.

“Yes,” he said, “but they didn’t enjoy it as much as you.”

I feel the same way about my days at Churchill Downs, whether I was unknowingly totaling thousands of muddy steps before 10 a.m. visiting the barns, standing in a scrum around trainers D. Wayne Lukas, Charlie Whittingham and Woody Stephens or witnessing some of the most thrilling races of two Derby decades.

I have Murray, Pope, Burick, Wall and many others to thank for that.

This article originally appeared on Akron Beacon Journal: Kentucky Derby memories from Louisville native Marla Ridenour