The fastest two minutes in sports devolved into a half-hour of tedium and confusion Saturday. The Kentucky Derby ended in embarrassment, with genteel horse racing fans angrily chanting “bull—-” on national television as a back-up winner was crowned.
And another sport was infected by the curse that is instant replay.
In case you weren’t among the 20 million TV viewers, here’s what happened: Maximum Security, the fastest horse in the field, went wire-to-wire and won by one-and-a-half lengths. He was draped with the garland of roses. His joyous jockey and owner were interviewed.
NBC was about to wrap and move to hockey when word came that two also-rans (one of whom finished 16th) claimed Maximum Security interfered with their paths. Racing has a system for such complaints, but it is rarely employed — and had never affected the results in 145 years of the Derby.
On this rainy Saturday, it did. For more than 20 minutes, race stewards scrutinized every molecule of film, from every angle. They eventually concluded that, yes, Maximum Security had made contact and cut off the path of others. And so the horse that led the entire way was stripped of his title. It was given to Country House, a 65-1 underdog who hadn’t even been affected by the bumping.
This is the curse of instant replay: It parses minutiae frame-by-frame to tell you that your eyes didn’t see what you just saw. It takes sports into a dark room and emerges insisting that the also-ran must be the winner.
It’s everywhere now. You can’t watch any sport without the drama being stripped by an announcement that the previous play is being reviewed in some off-site studio. Spontaneity is gone. You can’t cheer a highlight until the coaches’ challenge is heard or the events affirmed by super-slow motion.
The argument for all this, of course, is the need to get it correct. On its face, that has merit. The problem is that instant replay still often gets it wrong. We’ve all seen refs make the right call on the field, then study the film, then botch things up with a foolish reversal.
Before replay, no one in football wondered what a catch was. We just knew. Now we analyze every replay like it’s the Zapruder film just to see if the ball’s nose may have touched one blade of grass.
I’m no horse-racing maven, so I can’t speak to the alleged foul during that Derby downpour. What I witnessed was 19 tightly-packed half-ton animals stampeding through peanut butter. It seemed miraculous that they didn’t all crash into each other.
But my friend Dick Jerardi is among the country’s foremost racing authorities. On my radio show Sunday, Dick argued that if it took the stewards 20 minutes to rule, well, they mustn’t have been certain they saw much of a foul. And that being the case, it was inane to disqualify the obvious top horse.
Look, I know the genie is out of this bottle. Replay isn’t going away. And often, I’ll concede, it rights egregious wrongs.
But it has become the joyless despot governing sports. Can we scale it back a little? Can we live without the frame-by-frame replays studying whether a base stealer’s finger left the bag for 1/24th of a second? Can we leave it for the big moments?
In the end, replay rarely settles the arguments. All it does it start new ones. And it takes forever to do so.
