Lifestyle
Larry Demeritte will be the first Black trainer in the Kentucky Derby in decades : Consider This from NPR
For sponsor-free episodes of Consider This, sign up for Consider This+ via Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org. Email us at considerthis@npr.org.
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1. Saturday marks the 150th running of the Kentucky Derby at the Churchill Downs Racetrack.
Crowds will cheer as the thoroughbreds thunder around a mile and a quarter track. The race itself only lasts around 2 minutes, but the tradition runs deep in America.
Excitement ramped up a few days ago as post positions were assigned to the horses in this year’s race. The last horse to be called was West Saratoga – a longshot gray thoroughbred. Its owner Harry Verruchi credits veteran horseman Larry Demeritte for finding the horse, saying that Demeritte “can look to a horse and see more than normal people can see.”
Larry Demeritte is a horse trainer in his 70s. In an interview with NPR’s Scott Detrow, he said he’s been around horses for as long as he can remember.
“My dad was a horse trainer and he put me on the horses back when I was pretty young… I know them before I know myself, and I know I wanted to be in the horse industry,” he remembers.
“I said ‘Well, I don’t want to be a jockey because their careers don’t last long. I know I’m not going to be a worker, so I have to be a horse trainer because I could do that til’ I die.’”
2. Horse racing wasn’t always so exclusive.
Demeritte is the first black trainer to participate in the Derby in 35 years, and the first person ever from the Caribbean to do so. Before 1989, there hadn’t been a Black trainer since 1951. Black trainers, jockeys, and grooms are a rarity at the Derby these days, but that wasn’t always the case.
The first Kentucky Derby was in 1875. Oliver Lewis won the first Kentucky Derby, and his horse was trained by Ansel Williamson, both of whom were Black men.
Ronald Mack is the founder of the Legacy Equine Academy, and in a Kentucky Educational Television documentary about the history of Black horsemen, he noted that 15 of the first 28 winners of the Kentucky Derby were Black jockeys, “And so there was dominance and prominence in the industry.”
Black people played a key role in the early history of the Kentucky Derby, but they were forced out through Jim Crow segregation. Today, Demeritte hopes the sport can open its doors to more people:
“We need to sell our sport better than we do… We need to form more syndicates because it’s getting pretty costly now to own a racehorse. It’s like any other sport… car racing and all of them, they all have syndicates…so [many] sponsors. I feel like that’s what we have to do to let the middle class know in America that it’s not a sport of kings. Anyone can play it, and the reward is so great when you have success in it.”
3. Persisting through illness.
Demeritte has faced three separate cancer diagnoses over the years, as well as a rare disease called amyloidosis. Despite struggling with his health, he says he’s kept a positive outlook through his faith in God.
“I feel like I’m here for a purpose. And I think this is my purpose, the opportunity to make a difference in someone’s life… Anything is possible. But you have to work at it, you know? That’s the way I look at life.”
He says he never lets his illness stop him from being focused on the task at hand. And looking toward this weekend, he’s excited for the big day, and he’s confident about West Saratoga’s chances.
“When you do things you love, it’s nothing tough about it. Get that smile put on your face when you see a horse train good that morning for you. And that’s the good thing is Saratoga, he don’t have too many bad days,” he says.
“He’s such a cool horse.”
For sponsor-free episodes of Consider This, sign up for Consider This+ via Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org. Email us at considerthis@npr.org.
This episode was produced by Jonaki Mehta.
It was edited by Jeanette Woods.
Our executive producer is Sami Yenigun.
Lifestyle
What's it like to live in a vacation spot when tourists leave? 'Wait' offers a window
Thomas Wolfe famously titled one of his novels You Can’t Go Home Again. It’s something to keep in mind when reading Gabriella Burnham’s Wait, in which a mother and daughter experience two very different homecomings after years away. Both come to see the birthplaces they left in their late teens in new light.
Burnham’s second novel is not the breezy beach read you might expect from its Nantucket setting and the classic shingle-style shorefront house on its cover. Instead of a summer frolic, what we have here is a coming-of-age story set against a backdrop of stark economic disparity. Wait features a less well-known Nantucket, a millionaires’ vacationland whose year-round residents, some of them undocumented, struggle to pay high rents and make ends meet, especially during the slack off-season when local service businesses like landscaping, housekeeping, and restaurants go on hiatus.
The novel begins on the eve of its main character’s graduation from college, where she’s majored in environmental studies. Due to financial constraints, Elise has not been back home to Nantucket since she left for North Carolina four years ago. She’s excited that her mother, Gilda, and her 18-year-old sister, Sophie, are coming to celebrate this milestone with her.
But after a night of partying on campus with her wealthy best friend, Elise awakens to alarming news from her sister: Their mother has gone missing. She never showed up for the ferry, the first stage of their long trip to Chapel Hill.
Gilda, who left Brazil more than two decades earlier, is a cook who puts in 70-hour weeks during Nantucket’s high season in order to support her two American-born daughters. The girls’ father, an Irish bartender whom Gilda met soon after her arrival on Nantucket, headed back to Ireland without a trace when the girls were young.
We soon learn that Gilda, who’d let her last visa lapse 18 years earlier during her rough second pregnancy, was intercepted on her way to the Hyannis ferry by ICE agents and deported, “subject to expedited removal.” An ICE official, it turns out, had been monitoring Gilda’s social media accounts, which tipped the agency off about her plans to leave the island in order to attend her daughter’s college graduation.
Gilda lands back in Brazil at her half-sister’s home, shaken and worried about her daughters. The girls field her frantic calls, often en route to their low-wage summer jobs. Whatever else one might say about Gilda, she has clearly done a good job raising her two daughters, who are excellent students and diligent workers. Sophie, just out of high school, takes on extra shifts at a local upscale café, where she remains unflappable in the face of demanding customers’ complicated orders for fancy coffees. Elise returns to her pre-college summer job monitoring endangered wildlife on a remote stretch of protected shoreline. Fledging plovers become a lovely symbol for how the resourceful women in this family take flight.
When Elise’s college friend Sheba arrives at the summer estate that her two high-powered, socially connected moms have recently inherited from her grandfather, it at first feels like an answered prayer to the sisters’ mounting housing worries.
In an interview with her publisher, Burnham spoke of her firsthand knowledge of housing insecurity on this island of multimillion dollar mansions that sit empty for most of the year: When she was in high school, her family was evicted from their rental home, and she and her sister were placed in foster care. Her mother, like Gilda, was from Brazil and worked in Nantucket kitchens, though she was not deported. Burnham’s familiarity with Brazil enriches both Wait and her first novel, It Is Wood, It Is Stone, about an anxious American woman’s relationship with her grounded Brazilian housekeeper when she moves to Sao Paulo for her husband’s job.
Set during a uniquely stressful summer for Gilda and her daughters, Wait highlights the strong bonds between the three of them. Burnham also probes various friendships, as well as relationships between summer residents and year-rounders on the island.
In contrast to the sisters, Sheba is a woefully unsympathetic character. Her role in the novel is to drive home the familiar point that material riches can be spiritually impoverishing and that financial security doesn’t protect against emotional insecurity. Sheba’s jealousy of Elise’s relationship with Sophie and her petulant sense of entitlement provide too sharp a contrast to the sisters’ caring connection and purposeful lives. It strains credulity that sensible Elise would be drawn to her for so long. Would she be if Sheba weren’t so rich? “Promise you love me for more my than my house?” Sheba says pathetically after she has behaved particularly obnoxiously.
Burnham’s assured narrative pulls us along, although some peculiar word choices give pause: “a cascade of pasta,” “the accomplishment” of Sheba’s mothers’ room, “a stroll of emotion loitering inside her.”
Yet, quibbles aside, Wait movingly tackles serious issues in one of America’s premier vacation spots. It is a commendable accomplishment.
Lifestyle
Ricky Stenhouse Jr. Fined $75k For Fighting Kyle Busch, Dad Suspended
NASCAR driver Ricky Stenhouse Jr. going all Mike Tyson on Kyle Busch at the All-Star Race just set him back financially — he was just fined $75K for his involvement in this past weekend’s wild brawl.
The racing organization handed down the punishment on Wednesday … saying not only will RSJ have to write out a hefty check, but his dad was suspended indefinitely for his role in the scrap as well.
X/@NASCAR
As we previously reported, the two drivers confronted each other after Sunday’s event … with Stenhouse pissed after Busch seemingly caused him to wreck on purpose at the beginning of the race.
During their altercation, Stenhouse clocked Busch with a vicious punch … and both teams quickly got involved.
2024 All-Star race @ North Wilkesboro, Ricky Stenhouse Jr’s full race onboard. pic.twitter.com/4UJ0rS6sK0
— Andrew (@Basso488) May 20, 2024
@Basso488
Two Stenhouse crew members were hit with bans … as Clint Myrick got an eight-race suspension, and Keith Matthews was handed four races as a result of the fight.
But there’s an opportunity for RSJ to make the money back — as TMZ Sports previously reported, the two drivers got an offer to take their beef to the ring via Celebrity Boxing … with Damon Feldman willing to give them a solid payday.
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