Asked to Run

By all the rules of thoroughbred racing, the tiny, long-tailed brown colt did not belong on the same track with the nation's best three-year-olds. His sire, Saggy, was an undistinguished racer whose stud fee was only $400 and whose sole claim to fame was that he had once beaten Citation. His dam, Joppy, never won at all, and sold for $300--$150 in cash, the rest an unpaid $150 board bill. Yet, as he paraded to the post for the 87th Kentucky Derby last week, Carry Back already had earned $492,368, was up on the tote board as the 5-2 betting favorite.

At post time, the Derby still was anybody's race. The coffee-colored track at Churchill Downs was soggy from heavy rains the day before, and the big, 15-horse field included Crozier, a courageous black colt that won the Derby Trial in record time, and California's Four and Twenty, a descendant of Man o' War.

Breaking quickly, Four and Twenty drove for the lead, but lost it to Globemaster, a sprinter that had beaten Carry Back by 3 1/4 lengths in New York's $86,000 Wood Memorial. Carry Back, running lazily, was lodged deep in the pack in ninth place. "Clods kept coming up and hitting him in the face," explained Carry Back's shrewd little jockey, Johnny Sellers, "and he didn't like it a bit."

Finally, Sellers took matters into his own hands. "I shook the stick at him," he said, "and he started to run." Veering to the outside, Carry Back flashed past the exhausted Globemaster and pulled even with Crozier. Again Sellers waved his whip; again Carry Back responded. At the finish, the brown colt was in front by almost a length. Carry Back had earned another $120,500, and crewcut Jockey Sellers--at 23, the nation's leading jockey (TIME, March 24)--had won his first Kentucky Derby. "All I had to do," said Sellers modestly, "was ask that horse to run."

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