he story begins like those of most people who become involved in racing. A father takes his son to the races. The spectacle is seductive. The atmosphere is enchanting. There is brilliant color, excitement and glorious, graceful thoroughbreds. The senses are filled to overflowing. The connection is instant and permanent. Lives are changed. A few are destined to make history.
"By serendipitous coincidence, Patrick Winn, an Irish immigrant whose heritage embraced racing, took his 14-year-old son, Martin, who was called Matt, to the new racetrack just south of Louisville on the day the first Kentucky Derby was run. The Louisville Jockey Club, which would be renamed Churchill Downs for the family from which the land was purchased, and the Derby were born from the vision of Colonel M. Lewis Clark but the teenager who watched from the infield as Aristides carved his name first in the granite of the sport's most enduring history would one day transform this event into the world's preeminent horserace."
Having been smitten by racing on that fateful afternoon, May 17, 1875, Matt Winn, who was destined for many things including the honorary title, Colonel, would go on to business school, honed his handicapping skills, worked for a time as a bookkeeper, then a traveling salesman and in 1887 formed a partnership to open what would grow into a prosperous tailoring enterprise in Louisville that built a national clientele and became a gathering place for the city's businessmen and politicians.
hile young Matt Winn, a boy of humble beginnings, watched the first Derby from his father's grocery wagon, one of 12,000 in attendance, the new race was immediately embraced by the leaders of Louisville society, many of whom were among the original investors in the track. In the first clubhouse, spectators sipped mint juleps and viewed the races from rockers on a veranda while soothed by Strauss waltzes. During its nascent years, the Derby attracted huge crowds and the nation's best horses while Clark, who conceived the idea of a 12-furlong race for elite 3-year-olds modeled after the Epsom Derby even before building the racetrack, devoted himself fully to his wealthy patrons, leaving the details of operating the business to subordinates. Churchill Downs, though popular, was profoundly unprofitable. Things soon became worse.
A dispute between track officials and the powerful Eastern horseman James Ben Ali Haggin, whose namesake colt won the 1886 Derby, nearly resulted in the end of both Churchill Downs and the Derby. After having won the Derby, Haggin, angered by statements made by a track official, withdrew his entire stable from Churchill during that spring meeting and later persuaded all prominent Eastern owners, whose horses dominated the sport at the time, to join his boycott of Churchill.
bandoned by the nation's leading stables, Churchill Downs and its still-infant signature race fell upon difficult times. Only six horses started in the Derby of 1890, four in 1891, three in 1892, six in 1893. Public interest declined steadily and Clark covered debts with his own resources. In 1894, with just five horses entered in the Derby, the Louisville Commercial called the race "a contest of dogs." Later that year the track went bankrupt and five years later Clark, still grieving his failure, was found dead, a pistol still in his hand.
A group of investors acquired and renovated the track and built a new grandstand crowned by twin spires. The Derby distance was cut to a mile and a quarter. But purses were slashed, trainers took their best horses elsewhere and attendance continued to decline.
During those dark years, Matt Winn saw every running of the Derby. He had become a prominent and influential figure in Louisville, well known for his charm, élan, business savvy and promotional flare. In late 1902, he was persuaded by a friend, Charlie Price, who was an official at the track, to give up his tailoring business and join the management of the struggling Churchill Downs, first as vice president and later as general manager.
Though he had no experience in racing management, the sport was Winn's first love and his name would become synonymous with both Churchill Downs and the Kentucky Derby, a race he made his own and bestowed upon the city he loved.
Winn first focused his attention on disenchanted Louisvillians, offering seats at the 1903 Derby and lavish entertainment. The effort was an unqualified success and Churchill Downs soon made a profit. The challenges, however, would continue.
The early years of the 20th Century brought anti-gambling reform that reached Louisville in 1907 when the city's government banned bookmaking, leaving Churchill Downs with two alternatives - auction pools, which excluded those whose wagers were small, and the French pari-mutuel machine, which had not been immediately accepted by Americans, who preferred wagering with bookmakers. Clark had originally introduced pari-mutuels, but the unpopular machines were quickly abandoned. Winn chose the pari-mutuel system but the city responded by dredging up an old law that banned machine betting. Again, the track and the Derby faced a crisis.
Winn and Charlie Grainger, who was the track's president, wondered how Clark had gained legal authority to use pari-mutuels and undertook their own investigation. They found, deep in legal code, an amendment excluding pari-mutuels from the anti-machine law.
hey found four machines originally acquired by Clark and two more were sent from New York. The City government responded with threat to arrest everyone at the track connected with gambling. Winn took the matter to court and won. The Derby was saved and as a result of the publicity and Winn's promotion of the benefits of pari-mutuel wagering attendance at the 1908 Derby was five times greater than in 1907. Winn's efforts had, in fact, saved racing in Kentucky.
The Derby, however, remained out of favor with Eastern horsemen.
In Winn's vision, the Derby could - would - become a race of national and international importance, the race Clark had imagined. He traveled east, to New York, on a mission to end the long-standing boycott and in 1915 convinced Harry Payne Whitney, one of the sport's leading breeders and owners, to run his brilliant filly, Regret, in the Derby.
Though no filly had won a Derby, Regret led the boys at every call in the 41st running. Whitney said afterward. "I do not care if she never wins another race, or if she never starts in another race. She has won the greatest race in America and I am satisfied."
With that statement, "the Derby was thus 'made' as an American institution," Winn would write in a 1944 memoir. "Regret "put us over the top."
inn was keenly aware of the power of publicity and with the boycott behind him began courting influential print and, later, radio, journalists, treating them to every possible luxury while at Churchill. Free travel, lodging, food. No pleasure of the flesh was overlooked. Over the years, he befriended many of the nation's best-read sportswriters and columnists whose dispatches from Louisville extolled the Derby, the racetrack and the force that drove both.
"The greatest horses this country has ever produced have run in the magnificent setting he provides every spring at Churchill Downs," Damon Runyon wrote in a 1941 piece on Colonel Winn. "His boxes are filled with the big-wigs of society and of local and national politics. He has entertained there an Earl of Derby, one of whose ancestors gave the name to the British race from which the event is copied and a Governor of Kentucky would be deemed extremely lax in his official duty were he not present with the Colonel to bid the high and low welcome to Kentucky, in whose diadem of gallant and kind and courteous gentlemen there is none more sparkling than Colonel Matt Winn."
y the mid-1920s, 80,000 people were cramming into the track for the Derby. The first radio broadcast, in 1925, drew five or six million listeners, an audience estimated at the time to be the largest yet for any broadcast in the history. In 1931 it was estimated that half of all Americans heard the broadcast. Ten states desperate for new revenue sources legalized betting during the Great Depression and racing quickly became the most heavily attended sport in the nation. The Derby was the biggest race of the year.
Winn's influence stretched well beyond Louisville. He founded the Kentucky Jockey Club in 1919 as a holding company for Churchill and three other Kentucky tracks - Latonia (now Turfway Park) the Kentucky Association in Lexington and Douglas Park, which was also in Louisville. Fairmount Park in East St. Louis, Ill. and Lincoln Fields in Crete, Ill. (now Balmoral) were acquired later. The Kentucky Jockey Club, renamed the American Turf Association in 1928, added Washington Park in Illinois to its holdings. The nation's most powerful racing organization of the time was not unlike the present-day Churchill Downs, Inc.
Many of the things that have become part of the Derby's fabric were introduced by Winn - the blanket of roses draped over the withers of the winner, which led to the race becoming known as "The run for the roses," the playing of "My Old Kentucky Home" as the horses parade before a the largest racing crowd of every year. In observance of the Derby's 50th running, he commissioned the unique gold trophy that is replicated annually and still arrives at Churchill to great fanfare. It is said that he coined the phrase, "The Greatest two-minutes in sports."
Sixty years after his death, in the autumn of 1949, Colonel Matt Winn, who saw every Derby run during his lifetime, remains the most important human ever associated with the world's best known race, his genius and vision still evident, his thumbprint clear.
"He is fond of the great traditions that he helped establish for the Kentucky Derby," Runyon wrote, "and has a marvelous memory that makes him the perfect raconteur on old times and old things, but his life is essentially of the present and his eye on the future."
Written by Paul Moran