Next Saturday Is My National Holiday

This coming Saturday marks the first Saturday of May.

That fact is meaningless to 99.5 percent of the American population, who will spend the first Saturday in May doing what normal people do -- shop, attend their kids' youth league games, browse yard sales and tend to their homes and gardens.

However, as my wife has learned in a little more than a year of marriage, I represent the less than 1 percent of the American population who don't follow normal weekend pursuits on the first Saturday in May.

I'll celebrate my national holiday -- by watching the 137th running of the Kentucky Derby. It's an all-day event, full of Grade 1 stakes races featuring the best Thoroughbreds in the country, followed by "The Greatest Two Minutes in Sports," around 6:15 p.m. 

I was fortunate enough to spend 15 years as an active member of the National Turf Writers Association, writing stories about the owners, horses, jockeys and trainers involved with the Derby for a Kentucky-based industry publication.

and followed this year's pre-Derby activity sparingly and from a great distance. One of my annual tasks was to write a review on the hours of national television coverage dedicated to the Derby. I've been relieved of that duty.

Yet, I'll still spend time this week pouring over the past performances lines of the 20 three-year-old colts that will face the starter late Saturday afternoon at Churchill Downs in America's most fabled horse race.

It isn't an easy task. I successfully tabbed last year's winner, Super Saver, and actually put a few dollars in my pocket as a result.

Prior to that, I hadn't selected a Derby winner since 2004 when local favorite Smarty Jones -- owned by the late Philadelphia-area car dealership magnate Roy Chapman -- wore the blanket of roses.

I have my opinion on what will transpire this year. However, I won't make that public here. I don't believe this is the proper venue for gambling selections.

What I will admit is how bittersweet the memories are surrounding the one and only Kentucky Derby I covered in person back in 1999. A You Tube video of that race is attached and I invite you to take a look.

Those memories are burned into my brain and they'll come flooding back again full force this week. They include:

-- The first time I laid eyes on the Twin Spires of Churchill Downs in the foggy mist of an early Louisville morning -- well before luxury skyboxes and were constructed next to them and lights installed in front of them for night racing.

-- The phone call I made to my father while standing in the Churchill Downs press box viewing area, high above the track, for the first time  He knew how hard I'd worked to get there and how I had to share it with him.

-- Standing in the Churchill Downs winner's circle with a colleague at 11 a.m. on Derby Day for a photo I still have hanging on the wall of my office. 

-- Sixteen-hour work days on Friday (Kentucky Oaks day) and Derby day, not to mention eight more hours spent Sunday working on wrap-up stories.

-- The awe of seeing 140,000 people in one place at one time, singing "My Old Kentucky Home," in unison.

-- Appearing on a Louisville AM radio station sports panel show the night before the Derby to make a public selection -- a horse that finished next-to-last.

-- Sipping my first-ever mint julep out of a metal cup, which tasted like a 7-Eleven slushie with laced with a murderous portion of bourbon.

-- Watching a 30-to-1 shot named Charismatic win the '99 Derby. Charismatic went on to win the Preakness that year and later broke down in the final yards of the Belmont Stakes. His jockey and owned have since passed away.

-- I'll think of a another colleague that I worked side-by-side with that weekend, about 10 years my junior, who passed away suddenly the very next summer -- so far before his time.  

I don't even know where the magazine stories I wrote that week are physically located. Probably in a box that I might never find again.

I probably won't ever get to Churchill Downs for another Derby. I'm no longer an accredited media member and the tickets are impossibly expensive. Instead, I'll take my wife on a long weekend trip to Keeneland Race Course in beautiful Lexington, Ky. this fall, a place where the grass really is blue.

But I'll never let go of those '99 Derby memories and how proud I was to have reached the pinnacle of my chosen vocation, even if was for one fleeting weekend.

Horse racing in the United States is a dying sport, but for one afternoon this coming Saturday, it will again take center stage.

I'll sit back and enjoy it. I hope you'll take the opportunity as well.

The Kentucky Derby will be shown Saturday afternoon on NBC with coverage beginning at 5 p.m.