Fizzle of a Legend

All week long Louisville was a country carnival, happily clipping the customers. The town belonged to hotelkeepers with five-buck rooms sold out at $25 a flop, to hash houses peddling 60-c- breakfasts for $2, to taxi drivers with their meters off, charging fat, flat fees. It belonged to loud, lubricated crowds, to light-fingered dips tiptoeing daintily among the juleps. But right up to post time, the 84th running of the Kentucky Derby belonged to a big-barreled California colt named Silky Sullivan (TIME, March 17).

The smart money studied the figures and played Calumet Farm's Tim Tarn or Jewel's Reward, the Maine Chance speedster. But reading race charts is a cold-blooded business. Sentimentalists liked Silky, the brawny, unkempt boy from the West; hunch players loved him for his heart-stopping habit of hanging back, far off the pace, and coming on in the final seconds to overhaul horses in a wild scramble up the stretch.

So even the parade to the post belonged to Silky, his red coat gleaming through the muggy afternoon, a red shadow roll across his nose and a red ribbon braided into his tail. And the cheers were still for Silky when the field ran away from him at the start. He fell back nearly 30 lengths, but this was the way it was supposed to be. No one was worried. There was even a special battery of television cameras trained on Silky. There was no room for him in the main lens, which focused so closely on the leaders that televiewers had a hard time following the race.

Up front, a speed horse named Lincoln Road forced the pace. Tim Tarn, cleverly guided by Jockey Ismael Valenzuela, a last-minute substitute for injured Willie Hartack, saved ground and came around the muddy track hugging the rail. Then, at the three-eighths pole, Silky turned it on. He exploded past two horses, and the crowd came alive. But the high rising scream stopped short. Silky suddenly ran out of steam--and the race was still up front, where Jewel's Reward was faltering but Tim Tarn was steadily closing on Lincoln Road. At the wire, it was Tim Tarn by half a length. Lincoln Road, hanging on gamely, was second. Noureddin, a fast-finishing long shot, was third. Silky was a sad twelfth. The red comet from California had fizzled out in the gaudy glare of the Derby. The hangover from the carnival still belonged to a brief, bright legend; the real horse race and the regal $118,000 went to the best horse.

In recent years, betting against the devil's-red-and-blue of Calumet Farm has proved a losing business. With Plain Ben Jones and his son Jimmy to handle her horses, Calumet Owner Mrs. Gene Markey can practically claim squatter's rights on the special Derby winner's circle at Churchill Downs.

Tim Tarn was the seventh Calumet colt to come home first in the "Run for the Roses,'' the third since Mrs. Markey inherited the farm from her first husband, the late baking-powder heir. Warren Wright. And Plain Ben Jones has even one more Derby winner than that: he trained the great Lawrin for Kansas City Clothing Merchant Herbert Woolf back in 1938.

Time was when Calumet specialized in standard-bred harness horses. But when Warren Wright took over from his father, he reformed the famous bluegrass farm. He sold all the wagon ponies and began to buy the best thoroughbred brood mares he could find. Only ten years later, in 1941, Calumet sent its first champion to the races--Whirlaway won the Derby, went on to take the Preakness and the Belmont to complete the Triple Crown. After that came Pensive (1944), Citation, also a Triple Crown winner (1948), Ponder (1949), Hill Gail (1952) and Iron Liege (1957).

Happily for horse racing, when Warren Wright died in 1950 his widow decided that Calumet must carry on. It is a $900,000-a-year responsibility, but with Plain Ben and Jimmy to help, it has remained a good investment. Such horses as Tim Tarn have been the payoff on the Jones boys' training skills. As a two-year-old, Tim Tarn ran only once; Jimmy wanted him to fill out, to learn the fundamentals of racing before he was really pushed. This winter, in the Florida campaign, the colt was worked into condition, "stretched out" to slowly increasing distances until he was ready for the classic mile-and-a-quarter of the Derby.

In the 30 years since she saw her first race, Mrs. Markey has rarely missed a Derby. But last week she came down with pneumonia, had to watch the race on a television set installed in her bedroom in the big mansion outside Lexington.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.