On the morning of Sunday, August 23, 1959, my 16-year-old heart was racing as I grabbed The Lexington Herald-Leader off the front steps at 329 Mentelle Park in Lexington and pulled out the sports section. I hurriedly thumbed through the pages until I found the story headlined, “53 Henry Clay Grid Candidates Prep for Opener.”

It had a byline – my byline – and a head shot of me embedded in the type. Oh, my. I was thrilled beyond words. I didn’t know it at the time, although maybe I could sense it in some cosmic way, but I had found my life’s work. Already I couldn’t imagine anything more exciting or fulfilling than writing for a newspaper.

The truth be told, the byline and photo would have been pay enough. But here was the kicker: They paid me in real American currency to go to ball games and write them up. It wasn’t much – something like $1.50 an hour – but it was a life-saver for a kid whose father already had told him he was done supporting him.

As the job grew, so did the money. I earned enough to pay my way through my last two years of high school and five years of college. I earned enough to buy myself a car and take girls on dates. And the thing was, it wasn’t really a job – it was an affair of the heart.

I loved going to the Herald-Leader office on Short Street, behind the courthouse, and walking into that exotic world of clacking typewriters and ringing telephones and chain-smoking editors. We didn’t put out great newspapers, the way they did up the road at The Courier-Journal and The Louisville Times. But we did our best, day after day, edition after edition. And, my, did we ever have fun doing it.

That world is gone now, but the memories remain, pungent and poignant. So, too, does my love for newspapers and the people who put them out. For almost 50 years, I’ve chased stories all over Kentucky and far beyond. Although I’ve written cover stories for Sports Illustrated and appeared on national TV, I’ve always been a newspaper guy at heart – and a Kentucky newspaper guy, at that.

New friends often ask me to name my favorite sport to write about. Most assume I’m going to say college basketball because I’ve written extensively about the sport since the days of Adolph Rupp and Uncle Ed Diddle. In addition, from 1972 through 1987, I had either a close personal friend or a team I covered in the NCAA Final Four every single year.

But much as I love college hoops, and much as I love the World Series and the Masters golf tournament and the Olympic Games, nothing has provided me with as much good story material or personal joy than the horse business. I’m talking mainly about thoroughbred racing, of course, but I’m also including harness racing, quarter-horse racing, and even saddlebred shows.

In the early 1960s, only a few years after I had fallen in love with newspapers, I got the best advice I ever received from J.B. Faulconer, the former University of Kentucky play-by-play announcer for the Ashland Oil network who then was publicity director at Keeneland.

“Billy,” he said, “if you’re serious about wanting to be a sports writer in Kentucky, you need to learn everything you can about the horse business and be able to write about it.”

So I did. And it opened up a whole new world for me – a world of fascinating people bound by their love of horses. I covered the thoroughbreds at Keeneland, beginning with Northern Dancer’s victory in the 1964 Blue Grass Stakes. I covered harness horses at the Red Mile, where I was introduced to Frank Ervin and the great pacer Bret Hanover. I covered saddlebreds at the Junior League Horse Show, where I marveled at the brilliant five-gaited champion My My.

And J.B. Faulconer turned out to be exactly right. My interest in horses helped me land a job at The Courier-Journal right out of Transylvania University in 1966. And two years after that, it helped me get my first job at Sports Illustrated. The magazine’s managing editor, Andre Laguerre, loved horses of all kinds. He hired me and made me the backup horse writer to Whitney Tower.

The horse business is God’s gift to writers. I don’t care if it’s the Kentucky Derby or the Montgomery County fair, there’s always a terrific human-interest story to be found and told. Behind every trophy and blue ribbon, there’s a tale of dumb blind luck or shrewd planning or an incredible gamble. And when a horse suffers in trying to please us, as we saw with Eight Belles in the 2008 Derby, it can move a nation to tears.

Over these 50 years, my computer and I (in the beginning, it was a portable typewriter) have traveled extensively in search of news and stories. Everywhere I’ve gone, as soon as somebody finds out I’m from Kentucky, the next question will be, “Have you ever been to the Derby?” I can’t think of any other state that is so closely identified with an industry – a wholesome, family industry – as much as Kentucky is linked to the horse industry.

Read the Rest After the Jump…

Had somebody told me 50 years ago – or even 20 years ago – that Kentucky’s status as the “Horse Capital of the World” would ever be put in jeopardy by predatory rival states, I would have laughed as heartily as I did in 1972 when Barry Bingham Jr. told The Courier-Journal news staff that the day was coming when newspapers would be obsolete and news would be delivered electronically.

And yet the unthinkable has come to happen. On the brink of my 50th anniversary in journalism, both newspapers and the horse industry are in deep, deep trouble here in Kentucky, as well as around the nation.

I’m not sure what, if anything, can be done to save newspapers, but I sure hope somebody comes up with something. With all due respect to the new technology and the internet, there’s still nothing that can tie a community together quite as effectively as the newspaper that appears on our city door steps or in our rural mail boxes.

But we still have the time and the means to save Kentucky’s racing industry, provided our elected officials heed the industry’s S.O.S. instead of giving it the back of their hands, as we recently saw in the state senate.

Because rival states have inflated racetrack purses and breeders’ incentive programs with revenue from alternative forms of gambling, owners and trainers are being forced – against their will, in most cases – to leave Kentucky and compete where they have a better chance to at least break even.

For me, it’s a case of deja vu. When I was covering harness racing for Sports Illustrated in the late 1960s and early ‘70s – I probably covered seven or eight big races every year, including the Hambletonian for trotters and the Little Brown Jug for pacers – Kentucky held the same preeminent position in the standardbred industry, both in racing and breeding, as it did in thoroughbreds.

But today Kentucky’s standardbred industry is all but gone, a victim of the same forces that today are threatening our thoroughbred industry. It is a cautionary tale worth serious consideration by those who blithely take our horse industry for granted.

At this juncture I could repeat all the reasons why the horse industry is so vital to Kentucky’s image and economy. But rather than talk about the 100,000 jobs it creates or the millions in tax revenue it generates or the thousands of acres of farm land it preserves or the hundreds of working-class families it touches, I’d rather talk about what it has meant to me personally during the last 50 years.

I got to be good friends with both Jim McKay and Howard Cosell because of our mutual love for the Kentucky Derby. I got to walk the barn areas of the Triple Crown tracks with some of the greatest sports columnists of all-time – Red Smith, Jim Murray, Shirley Povich, Blackie Sherrod and others – because they, too, knew that horse stories are the best stories.

I got to be friends with great jockeys, the most underrated athletes in the world, and I got to witness incredible drama worthy of great theater. I was there when Affirmed and Alydar battled through the Triple Crown. I was there for all five of trainer Woody Stephens’ five consecutive Belmont Stakes victories. I was there to report the great commoner-to-kings stories of Seattle Slew and Spectacular Bid.

During the 1978 World Series between the Yankees and the Dodgers, I skipped the Saturday game in New York so I could cover the Jockey Club Gold Cup at Belmont Park. It was billed as a duel between Triple Crown winners Seattle Slew and Affirmed, but a wonderful horse named Exceller upset both.

The next day, my colleague Dave Kindred told me I was conspicuous by my absence at the game. When I told him what I had done, he looked at me with an arched eyebrow of disbelief and said, “Reed, you’re crazy.”

Given the same choice today, I’d do the same thing. The best stories are at the race track or in the show ring. I’m not sure the industry itself really understands that. The most memorable line from the movie Field of Dreams is “Build it and they will come.” My advice to the industry would be a twist on that: “Tell the stories and they will come.”

I’ll close by trying to debunk the notion that horse racing is a rich person’s game.

Over the years, as I fell more and more hopelessly in love with horses and the people who care for them, I began dreaming of someday owning a horse. Well, like most Kentuckians, I never had enough extra money to indulge that fantasy. But I did get involved in horse syndicates put together by my friend Bill Malone, the pride of Allen, Ky., and a longtime esteemed CPA in Louisville.

For a few hundred bucks, I was able to join my friends in the ownership of a few horses. Believe me, it’s the ultimate interactive experience. No matter what the size of our investment, each one of us had such a strong proprietary interest that it was almost as if we were the sole owners.

Every time one of our horses, we would turn out in the hope of getting our picture taken in the winner’s circle. The track appreciated us because we bet and bought refreshments, but the track photographer absolutely loved us because when we won, his business went through the roof.

From that experience, I learned something about both myself and the industry. Although I’ve covered some of the best horses and biggest races of all time, there’s nothing quite like seeing a horse – your horse! – carrying your silks to the front and drawing off to win a race.

I also could tell you about the time Delvin Miller, one of harness racing’s all-time greats, decided to honor me by naming a pacer “Meadow Reed.” I thought that was nice until I learned the horse, like his namesake, tended to be a bit, ah, fractious and, therefore, had to be gelded. But that’s another horse story for another day.

It’s killing me to see newspapers dying and the horse industry suffering because, well, they’ve literally been my life – or, at least, a large part of it. It’s the exacta from hell, the one I never could have envisioned 50 years ago. So call me a fool – I’ve been called worse – but I’m not going to give up until the last newspaper turns out its lights and the last racetrack is bulldozed into a shopping mall.

Some things are too good to let go gently into the night.