The Weekly Meat

The First Saturday in May

I picked my first Kentucky Derby winner in 1986. His name was Ferdinand, and old Bill Shoemaker guided him to one of the most perfect rides I've ever seen. The colt was an 18-1 shot, and I picked him out of sheer luck.

It wasn't until a few years later that I cracked the pages of "America's Turf Authority Since 1894" and actually attempted to handicap a race — an intricate science that requires endless time, analysis, snake oil, and bourbon. I was heading into my senior year of college, and I had the constitution for those sorts of things then. I lived that summer only a mile or two from the grande dame of race tracks, and so I studied the dense, coded charts of the Daily Racing Form, trying to make sense of them.

I did just that the night of August 13, 1989, knowing I'd be at the track to catch the first few races before work the next day. I picked a horse I liked in each of the first two races. I hadn't gotten to the third race, but as it turned out, I didn't need to.

I'm not into exotic wagers, but Saratoga had an early double, and I bet it. My horse in the first went off at 7-2, and won, beating the favorite by a half length, and I had the front end of my double, as well as $5 win and show tickets to cash. My pick — for reasons that completely elude me now, looking over the folded, yellowed pages of that day's Form — in the second race was named Cavanagh's Beau, and was ridden by Karen Rogers. He went off as nearly a 28-1 longshot, dead last by far in the betting pool. What happened next is the things Hollywood dreams are made of.

In a photo finish — while I stood sweating and hooting at the rail — my nag won the race by a nose hair, and I walked away from the pari-mutuel window with $1,200 in my pocket.

I've never had the stomach for gambling much. I bet no more than I'm willing to lose, and I walk when I'm ahead. If that means never winning a life-changing amount, so be it. I'm not the guy to parlay $1,200 into $20,000. I had placed $22 worth of bets on two horses, I'd gotten lucky, and they paid off well.

I was alone that day — no one to even buy a drink for — so I ran (literally, ran) from the track back to my car, and drove directly home. I had a couple hundred bucks already in my apartment from bartending tips and being paid the night before, and so I sorted my cash, rolled it into a fat pimp wad, put a rubberband around it, and drove it all down to the bank.

Then I went to work, as I did every other night that summer. Maybe smiling a bit more than usual and bragging on my double.

I have since had decent days at the track (and once or twice at casinos), but more often than not I lose what I consider to be a fee for the privilege of simply watching thoroughbreds run all out.

I can watch just about any race any time and enjoy it. But the Derby is special. Sure, it's a bloated, booze-soaked affair, steeped in southern aristocracy; the race itself, a crowded fire-drill. But in its way, it signals the start of springtime, and more importantly, it begins a new quest for the Triple Crown — one of the most difficult accomplishments in all of sport (there have been only 11 winners in history, and none since Affirmed in 1978). So with each year's quest, comes the tantalizing prospect that we may once again witness greatness. And so each year, without fail, I watch.

Because — though I'm not susceptible to the wiles of gambling — perfection is a drug I cannot pass up. I'll argue forever that Secretariat was hands-down the greatest athlete of the 20th century. He combined the athletic grace of Walter Payton with the confident swagger of Michael Jordan with Wayne Gretzky's omniscient economy of motion. Watching him win his Triple Crown races is quite simply the single most perfect thing I have ever seen. And in a small way, I live every day for even the possibility of seeing similar.

That said, I don't know that this is the year. Right now, all I know (just like every Phillies or Cubs fan) is that it could be, and so I watch. And I have become fairly good at handicapping the Derby. So come on back next week for this year's predictions. And turn on NBC by 6:00 pm EDT on Saturday, May 3 to watch 20 horses do what they were born to do.

Deliverance

The face she made as she got into the man's truck terrified me. It was the urgent face of a captive with something to tell. She said nothing. Her eyes begged. I said nothing.

She closed the door and the pickup pulled back onto the road to disappear slowly around the next bend.

I walked back to our car. It was mired in the soft shoulder of the road and slanting precariously toward the deep ditch.

I had just pulled off the road to check the map and had misjudged the shoulder, foolishly cut too far right and sank the tires into the sand, unforgiving after the recent rain. It was these things, it was me, that sent her off with a stranger in search of a truck that might give our stuck car a tug.

The stranger seemed nice enough. I would not have been so worried if it weren't for the scar he had — side to side, straight across his neck.

Someone, somewhere in that man's life someone had taken a knife across a healthy, breathing throat. The fact that someone seemed to have wanted the guy dead did not sit well with me.

I noticed the scar straight off the bat. There's no hiding something that size. After the initial, momentary shock, I explained the problem with our car. He said, yes he was from around here, and suggested he give one of us a lift into town to see if he could scare up some help. He was very nice and at any rate, he was the first person who stopped to help us. He had said his name, and Tina and I introduced ourselves. She wanted to be the one to hitch the ride into town, and since the car was mine, I felt I should be the one left stranded with it in the middle of the Adirondacks. My thinking was also that it might be safer for her to go with someone we had already met and gotten a feeling for rather than to wait by the side of the road alone.

I had indeed gotten a feeling about the man. I had seen his face, his eyes. He seemed genuinely glad to help out. I have great confidence in my ability to judge people on a first meeting, so I thought it fine when Tina volunteered to go with him. But the turn of her head and that asking look as she got in the car had given me real pause.

How often are our "feelings" about a person wrong? Maybe only two or three percent of the time. How often can you trust people in a situation like this? Maybe ninety-five percent of the time. Generally, these are numbers I can live with.

But when given the time to walk up and down a desolate patch of rural highway trying to flag down help while one's potential new girlfriend is off in a car with a stranger who has a vicious scar across his throat, one does get to second-guessing. How does the scar affect the odds? Does it? Should it? And what the hell was Tina desperately trying to tell me in that last-second look before she took off in the truck?

I paced back and forth on the side of the road. And thought of Deliverance.

After thirty minutes or so, as it happened, they returned with a tow-truck with a winch on it. The car came free from the soft shoulder, and we were soon on our way again.

So what was the look, I asked Tina later. She said, "I wanted you to get his license plate number. Just in case."

I, of course, had not. Normally so good about things like that — so over-prepared — yet this time it hadn't even occurred to me. We drove on in silence. I wondered what that small failing said about me, and my preparedness for a relationship. She opened her window, and the space between us widened.

Perfect Timing

By guest author Abby Luthin

My husband Ben and I just returned from our first-ever weekend away from our young daughters, a trip to our friends’ wedding in Arizona. No Electric Slide, no boozy toasts or weeping. Just lovely surroundings, fine food and wine, and a fun collection of people there to celebrate the new and classy married couple. It got me thinking, nearly seven years after our own “I do's”, about how far we have come together, and how things might be different if we hadn’t met. Or, more to the point, what would have happened if we’d met at a different time in our lives?

All I know is that I’m glad our paths crossed when they did because if it had been even weeks earlier, Ben and I would have hated each other. And not in a charming Sam and Diane, David and Maddie, Oscar and Felix kind of way. More of a get-a-load-of-this-guy and who-does-she-think-she-is? kind of way.

I recognize that I am very high strung. Understanding this about myself required great caution when Ben and I started dating. He might have thought the slow reveal was a feminine courting technique. I knew that if I disclosed the full reliquary of my eccentric tendencies too early, he might run for the hills.

My type A tendencies bloomed early in life. There was a whole year around the age of eight or so when I read both Hints from Heloise and Emily Post’s Etiquette: A Guide to Modern Manners many times over. If I spilled grape juice on the carpet in my doll house, I knew how to get it out before it stained. Serving cold soup before the main course? I knew which spoon to use. Need to write a letter to a colonel and his companion of many years? I had the proper salutation prepared. When we were far enough along in our relationship for me to mention having collected and absorbed these tomes in my youth (so helpful when picking the exact wording of our wedding invitations!), Ben sighed and noted, again, it was good to have met when we did.

What was Ben doing at the same age? By his own account, he was spilling grape juice, playing street hockey, and extruding mouthfuls of mashed potatoes from the gaps in his teeth.

Our late teens and early twenties also would have seen us as antagonists. One of my earliest memories at Macalester College was of reading about a kamikaze party set for the first weekend of the school year. A teetotaler myself, I thought those who imbibed didn’t take their studies seriously. My look-down-my-nose attitude poorly masked insecurities about not fitting in, but knowing that now didn’t help me one bit then. My roommate explained to me the nature of the event, mentioning that the booze in that dorm suite was always mixed in the bathtub and drunk with a plastic cup scooped into the cocktail. I probably mentioned that "cocktail" was a nice way of putting it, what with the poor sanitary conditions of a bathtub being used for a beverage hold. And then I most likely grabbed my books and headed for the library.

Ben’s college experience? A thousand miles away and four years earlier than mine, let’s just say he hosted plenty of similar parties, and still claims an acute tequila “allergy” stemming from those days.

Immediately before our friends exchanged their wedding vows in Phoenix, their rings were passed among the guests with the request that each person add a silent wish or words of wisdom for the new couple before they wore the bands as husband and wife. I surprised myself by knowing exactly what I wanted to say. That we had known and very much liked the groom before he met his bride, that we liked her right away, and that he’s been especially buoyant ever since. But that it’s important not to forget he’d had his lumps before, as have we all, and that he’d become the person ready for the relationship being formalized into marriage before our eyes the moment she’d walked into his world — and not a second sooner. It’s possible they’d have been happy as high school sweethearts, or college coeds, or twentysomethings in Boston. But I didn’t think so, and not just because of the span when he styled his hair in a fauxhawk. Yet it doesn’t make their partnership now any less powerful.

As Ben and I listened to the wedding tunes during the reception, I thought about how our formative musical experiences wouldn't have endeared us to one another either. In fact, we would never have been at the same venue. My first rock concert was Cyndi Lauper’s "Girls Just Wanna Have Fun" tour at Poplar Creek for my twelfth birthday — accompanied by three friends and chaperoned by my mom. I vividly remember being outraged by the price of t-shirts and, as we stood for the entire show, wondering to myself why everyone couldn’t just sit down already so I could use the seat my mom had paid good money for.

Sure, Ben knew about these tunes, but his first concert was the Kinks and he still owns ratty Bruce Springsteen and AC/DC t-shirts. Early in our relationship, I tried to impress him by boasting that I’d seen a concert at Minneapolis’s hip First Avenue, which for me meant that I’d evolved past the music of my early teen years. Naturally, he asked who I’d seen, hoping for Hüsker Dü, or the Replacements, or at the very least Prince. There was a long, awkward silence after I answered Big Country (I still have the ticket stub to prove it!). I filled this void with an approximation of the "bagpipe” solo from "In a Big Country." And yes, dear reader, he still married me.

During my post-graduate years, due to too much Tour de France viewing combined with my now unsurprising lack of dating experience, I had a few quirky requirements for the guys I dated. One was that the boy be clean-shaven. Ben? Thankfully, just weeks before we met, he had shaved off a soul patch he’d been sporting for ages. Another prerequisite was a very specific height and physique: over six feet, gaunt, and, preferably, with hairless biker legs. While Ben’s nowhere near gaunt, he’s also not quite, even in hockey skates, anywhere near six feet. He’s also refused to shave his legs.

Ben’s requirements, as I know now, were nearly as precise. He never thought he’d be interested in someone who’d never had a driver’s license. Or who has kept a record of every book read and movie viewed since 1988. (And he hasn’t even seen the rating and cross-referencing systems I’ve added.) He never thought he’d be interested in someone whose personal life soundtrack is stuck in the Top 40 of 1987, or whose earliest reference material reading was of household stain removal and etiquette guides. Or who could even name her earliest childhood reference material reading.

Superficial? You bet. But don’t we all try to control our romantic leanings because it’s out of our hands who we fall for? That’s not to say some differences aren’t insurmountable. Just that there’s something to be said for relaxing a bit and following our instincts and letting what we do have in common — the important things — speak for themselves. Because it’s at the moment you’re willing to go on a date with the hairy-legged boy, or confess that you thought Hüsker Dü was a type of child’s toy akin to the hula hoop, or ditch whatever else it is that keeps you in such a safe place you’re unwilling to grow, that amazing, wonderful things can happen.

So after the ceremony in Arizona, as we tooled back to our hotel in our rental car — the windows down, the cool desert air blowing in — “Angel in the Centerfold” came over the stereo. I said, “You can change it” at exactly the same time as Ben shook his head and turned up the volume. Perfect timing, indeed.

Full Spectrum*

*Post title lifted from Jay Greenberg's book of the same name, an outstanding and thorough history of the Philadelphia Flyers.

In 1974, the Flyers won their first Stanley Cup in what I can only describe as the temple of my youth, the Philadelphia Spectrum. I was six years old. I played street hockey religiously, and my hero was a skinny, diabetic kid from Flin Flon, Manitoba; no front teeth; wore number 16. His name was Robert Earl Clarke.

Every day until dark, I played my eyes out, drank orange juice to raise my blood-sugar level, I got cut, and I fell down and still scored even as I was falling. I wanted to be Bobby Clarke so badly I was actually mad I wasn’t diabetic.

Thirty-some years later, l've migrated north to Boston, but still follow the Flyers with fanatical devotion. And I find myself disappointed beyond melancholy to read plans for the Spectrum to be torn down.

I'm a realist; I've got nothing against change. But when change breeds acres of ostentatious, soulless, repetitious crap meant to create a "'Philly Live!' experience," well then, I've got a problem with it.

The Flyers' current arena, across the massive parking lot — the CoreStates First Union Wachovia Center — is itself case and point.

The approach funnels you to an outdoor beer garden, followed by a WalMart-sized merchandising center, then escalators up, up, up to your seats, and so forth. It has the cavernous and artificial canned-air feel of a mall, or a cruise ship. Same as Boston's Fleet Center Bank North Garden.

On my first visit to the new Philly rink a dozen years ago, I witnessed a ticket-taker telling a young orange-and-black-painted fan that no cardboard signs were allowed in the arena. Obviously, there were no advertising dollars associated with his homemade "Let's Go Flyers!" sign. And the Big Bank Arena couldn't hear his protests, for all of its bone-jarring neon, blinking TV monitors, and arcade games, with enough wattage to tear the roof off the old Spectrum.

It seems we cannot simply build new arenas with comfy seats and better sight lines. No, we're told we need "thriving entertainment destinations." Because, apparently, we fans are so prone to boredom while walking from the parking lot to the arena; the arena entrance to our seats; and, of course, while we're watching the game itself.

You know, there's a fine line between successfully selling, and selling out. But the line is there if we care to heed it. Hockey players are still arguably the most unaffected in pro sports, yet with every new arena complex, diehard fans like me are priced out of tickets by fatcat hack owners concerned with the corporate dollars brought in by their expanding arsenal of luxury boxes — filled largely with wealthy suits who think “forechecking” is something that happens before one player checks another.

I would open my window and scream, “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore!” like Peter Finch in the movie Network, but I can’t even do that because all of these big bank buildings attempt to manufacture enthusiasm (something the Spectrum — or the old Boston Garden — was never wanting for) by playing that exact video-bite on their big-screen jumbotrons.

So you real estate suits can go have your redevelopment project cakewalks, and then you can go screw. You're even worse than the fair-weather moguls who own our sports teams — and who are, themselves, often justifiably despised by their true fan base.

Me? Whether in Philly or Boston, I stay home and watch the games with a few other oldtime fans, all of whom have the ability to concentrate on only the game for a few hours — or in the event of quintuple overtime — for as long as it damn well takes.

I’m six again. It’s late in the game, we’re shorthanded, and we’re down a goal. I’m tired, I’m bleeding, and I’m diabetic. I don’t care. Give me the goddamn puck.

Postscript: I've got loads of great memories of the Spectrum. From hockey to hoops, to concerts, to a brief out-of-the-crowd spotlight moment I had with the Globetrotters, to '80s WWF wrestling, to a high school game skated on Spectrum ice (I think we played West Catholic, and I think they kicked our ass. But we got to change in a big-league locker room, and I met Tim Kerr as he arrived for that night's game), it was grandly labeled "America's Showplace." But that was marketing department wordplay, and in actuality, the Spectrum never presented itself as anything more than it was: a thunderous sardine can of a building with bad ice, sticky floors, basement bathrooms, and the smokiest concourse you could ever experience. But it was Philly, through and through — crammed with heart, soul, and genuine emotion. It was ours. And if you wanted to win in our Spectrum, you had to fight us for it.

The following are the five perfect memories of the Spectrum that will always spring immediately to my mind (I was there for 2–4, loving every minute of each):

5. March 28, 1992: Grant Hill inbounds to Christian Laettner, for the win in the NCAA east regional hoop finals.

4. May 16, 1985: Davey Poulin scores while two-men down to clinch the Wales Conference finals and send the Flyers to the Cup.

3. January 11, 1977: Flyers v. the Soviet Red Army Team.

2. May 28, 1987: J.J. Daigneault forces game 7 of the Cup against the Oil.

1. May 19, 1974: "The Flyers win the Stanley Cup! The Flyers win the Stanley Cup!"