The infield from the 1970s was much different from the way that it is now. For example, in 2025 Churchill Downs limits how many people can get into the infield and it costs $150.00 to gain entrance. When I went with my friend, Mike, in 1979 it costs all of $35.00 and security wasn’t diligent about searching for alcohol. In fact, it became a game of who could hide their stash from the guards so I had friends who taped small bottles of whiskey to their inner thigh or fill plastic bottles with vodka and place them at the bottom of a cooler. A ticket to the infield gave you free reign of the place and everybody was invited. No you couldn’t go up into the stands or to “Millionaire’s Row,” where the well healed bet on the races, but you could wander around the paddock and watch the horses as they left for the line up. I was able to get so close that I could smell the liniment oil used to stimulate the blood flow. Derby Day is looked forward to by all Kentuckians and I have some great memories from my time at the infield.
Before the first race, Mike and I climbed up the wall that protected the tunnel which connected the infield to the rest of Churchill Downs. It was the perfect place to perch ourselves to watch the horses. A very angry, and very drunk, man didn’t like the idea that we cheated the system by getting an unobstructed view of the race and yelled at us to get down. The guy was clearly our of his mind and looked like he had nothing to lose. We were vulnerable because our legs were dangling precariously over the side of the wall and the madman could have easily grabbed us and pulled us off. In order to avoid a confrontation, we meekly climbed down and slipped away into the crowd. It is better to be a coward than to get into a fist fight with white trash.There was a cinderblock wall in front of the woman’s bathroom that served as the entrance and for privacy reasons. It was easy to get up on this wall so it was used as a stage for the drunken revelers. The first guy to make the climb had his camera with him. A crowd had collected; at first there were just twenty people but, when it looked like something interesting was going to happen, the attendance quickly rose to a hundred or more. The guy held up his camera and gave the crowd the finger. Everyone quickly understood what the man was trying to do so we gave the finger right back and he snapped off a few pictures. It would have been fun to see one of those pictures printed in the local newspaper.
The wall then became a stage for strippers. A couple of woman couldn’t resist showing off their assets to a crowd of that size. The men, fueled by alcohol and having their inhibitions weakened by their day in the hot sun, started to chant, “Show Us Your Tits!” One by one the women obliged. And then it turned ugly. The crowd wanted more than tits and when the third woman flashed the crowd, she could feel the hands of the men standing up front grabbing for her shorts and they tried to pull them off. One guy had such a good grip that the woman realized that she was about to be totally naked in front of all those people, so she only had one option and that was to dive off of the wall. My only hope is that there was someone to catch her.
The last woman on top of the wall was clearly not going to show us her tits. She was a middle age white woman who was dressed more for a garden party than for the infield. And she was mad! The stage was hers and hers alone and she used her moment in the spotlight to chastise the whole crowd by saying, “This is the worst display of male chauvinism and objectification of women that I have ever seen,” she admonished. “You should be ashamed of yourselves!” She had the stage but didn’t read the room. Instead of being ashamed, a huge, hairy arm appeared from the front of the crowd and grabbed the woman by her shirt and pulled her off of the wall. The woman took a header and, once again, I could only hope that someone at the bottom was good enough to catch her. Feeling a little ashamed of themselves for taking part of this impromptu strip show, the crowd broke up. As Mike and I left we noticed that a couple of women were standing off to the side and, when asked to show their tits, replied “show us yours dicks first.” It is better to fend off rude behavior with humor rather than trying to chastise a drunken crowd.
In 1979 I was lucky enough to have checked off all of the boxes on the privilege list: white, male, affluent, and athletic. In my youth I rarely left my middle class life in the suburbs, so I had never seen anything like this before. But now I had seen enough and decided to leave the wall and the crowd behind to walk around the infield. Instead of getting better the scene actually got worse. There was a big concrete planter, easily seen from “Millionaire’s Row,” and a woman climbed on top of it and stripped off all of her clothes. Unlike at the wall, there was no big crowd to encourage her, just a couple of bystanders who were shocked by what they were seeing. The woman was drunk out of her mind and disgusting because she was dirty and sweaty and didn’t have the sort of body that one would want to see naked. She was looked upon as an object of pity rather than the sexual fantasy that she clearly though that she was. The police were called in and because the naked woman could not climb down on her own accord, so they had to catch her as she fell into their waiting hands.
The police are kept busy on Derby Day. They had their own station at the infield and spotters on the roof looking for trouble makers. You knew something bad had happened when suddenly six officers left their station, jogging together in a close pack to make an arrest. I personally saw a frat boy walking up behind complete strangers and tapping them on the shoulder. When the unsuspecting stranger turned around, the frat boy sucker punched him and ran away. I counted three victims to this cowardly act before the police arrived and took the frat boy to the infield jail. A few minutes later I saw another frat boy challenging an officer to a wrestling match. Instead of accepting the challenge or arresting the guy, the officer talked the frat boy down and let him go on his way.
You can try to excuse the violence and the stripping by saying that the participants were drunk, but that only goes so far. According to the law of unintended consequences, someone will always get hurt and, in the case of our day at the infield, that person was Mike. We had enough of the heat and the sun bearing down on us and decided to leave early. Suddenly, a glass bottle appears from out of the sky and lands right next to us. We were walking towards the exit so we were on the concrete part of the infield and the bottle exploded into a thousand pieces. A shard of glass rocketed to Mike’s arm and wedged itself in so we couldn’t get it out. He was bleeding pretty good so we made our way to the aide station. A nurse removed the glass, put on a butterfly bandage so that there wouldn’t be a scar, and then wrapped up the wound. I plaintively said to the nurse, “all that we were doing was walking away from the crowd.” The nurse shook her head, smiled at my naïveté, and said, “yes, but you were in the infield,” as if that explained everything.
