Guest blogger, Cathy Neelon, is filling in while Chris takes some time off. Cathy is a member of the RCN-TV staff and an avid fan of horse racing. Chris will return with a new blog June 29.
___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Saturday, June 6, 2015…
There I was, hunched over in my seat at Coca-Cola Park, in the midst of a crowd of waving, hollering IronPigs fans. With eyes closed and fingers jamming my earbuds as far into my ears as they could go without coming out the other side, I desperately tried to shut out all the noise and distraction so I could hear the faint sound of the radio broadcast of this year’s Belmont Stakes.
The closer to post time it got, the more hunched over I got, the more I ignored or waved off any attempts to engage me in conversation, and the more I wondered why oh why I had come to the game in the first place when my attention was clearly not on what was happening on the field right in front of me.
During the race itself, I was still as stone, listening to the call, gripping my smartphone, almost breathless, not daring to believe what I was hearing as the horses made their way down the backstretch, then rounded the far turn into home. During the run down the homestretch, I quickly wondered – after all the years of disappointments and near-misses, when would American Pharoah lose this one? Which horse would be the one to thwart yet another promising attempt at the title? Would I ever see another Triple Crown champion in my lifetime?
And then I had my answer.
The first words to go through my mind?
Holy…
I was stunned. He’d done it. I was shocked. American Pharoah was the Triple Crown champion. I almost couldn’t believe it. After so many fabulously hyped and talented horses had tried and failed, this colt had found success.
And somewhere in the background, I think there was a baseball game going on…
As most of my RCN Studio colleagues could tell you, I have long been a rabid fan of the Triple Crown races. Chris Michael himself could probably attest to the number of times that I’ve bugged him to include a horse racing topic in the ‘Roundtable’ section of “RCN Sports Talk” or piped in with a suggestion for an equine ‘Shoutout’ when Derby time came around each year. What many of my colleagues might not realize is exactly how long I’ve been a fan. And what I did not fully appreciate until this past Triple Crown season is just how much my experience of those three races has changed over the years.
My first Derby-Preakness-Belmont viewing came in 1977, the year of the sensational Seattle Slew. Cable TV was around, but not nearly as ubiquitous as it is today. We certainly didn’t have it yet at my house, so, like most of America, I watched the three races live on broadcast network TV. Like cable, consumer-grade VCRs were around but the market was still in a relative infancy, so chances were if you missed a race live, you were out of luck and had to wait to read about it in the newspaper the next day.
No doubt as a result of those early viewing limitations, the Triple Crown races became my first true “appointment TV”. For years afterward, on those three Saturday afternoons each year, you would not have been able to budge me from my lonely spot in front of the TV until the very end of each broadcast. Even now, my first inclination is to plant myself firmly in front of my TV at home and tune out as much of the rest of the world as possible. Don’t try to call me, don’t ask me to go out, don’t knock on the door – I won’t answer. It’s race time and I don’t want to miss a second of it.
However, times change. Technologies change. Personal circumstances change. I grew up, graduated from college and went to work for a TV production studio where occasionally I have to – gasp! – work on one or more of those sacred Saturday afternoons in May and June.
Usually the culprit has been our Grandview Speedway coverage. My fellow crew members on those productions have seen me go through contortions to get my live Derby-Preakness-or-Belmont fix.
A couple of times, I’ve poked my head through one of the side windows at the Grandview concession stand if they’ve had the race running on the TV in the kitchen; one of those times, I had to resort to listening to it on my old Sony Walkman (remember those?) while watching it because the volume on Grandview’s set was either turned off or busted. Most other times, when the kitchen TV was turned off, I listened to the races on the radio, either with the aforementioned Walkman or, more recently, with an app on my smartphone – pacing up and down behind the stands trying to find the quietest spot possible. At least two of those Saturdays ended in rainouts in Bechtelsville, and I either managed to catch the races on the set back at the studio office or had to settle for listening on the car radio on the drive back.
Despite all of those contortions and non-traditional viewing methods, all of those years had one thing in common. I managed to watch at least one of the three races per my original “appointment TV” mandate – live, alone, and in front of a traditional TV set.
And that held true for a long time. Until this year.
This year’s Kentucky Derby saw me at home, but with a dead TV set. I hadn’t yet signed up for MyRCN, so I couldn’t watch the Derby live online – and I was forced to listen to it through a radio app on my laptop computer. Hours later, I was able to watch a clip of NBC’s race coverage that had been posted on YouTube.
This year’s Preakness Stakes saw me at Grandview, pacing up and down by the production truck, earbuds in place as I listened to my smartphone app and relayed the dreadful Baltimore weather conditions and gratifying race results to my fellow crew members. Grandview ended up raining out that day and as soon as I got home, I popped onto YouTube to check the clips.
This year’s Belmost Stakes, as I mentioned back at the beginning of this post, saw me at Coca-Cola Park at an IronPigs game. In addition to listening live on my smartphone app, I was able to watch a delayed replay of the majority of the race on the park’s huge videoboard when the guys in the booth showed it between half-innings. Later on, there was the obligatory YouTube clip check at home and the reading of just about every online newspaper article on the race that I could find.
When I’d first realized the date on the game ticket, I had seriously considered staying home and giving my ticket away. It struck me that if American Pharoah won the Belmont, as he seemed likely to do, I would have experienced this Triple Crown in a completely different way than the last one 37 years ago.
1978 – I watched Affirmed take the Crown – on old-school live broadcast TV right down the line.
2015 – I “watched” American Pharoah take the Crown – via an weird amalgam of Internet, WiFi, radio, cable TV, websites, apps, mobile phone, videoboard and laptop computer.
Oh, what a strange new world…
One that I doubt my eleven-year-old self could ever have imagined.