From the Horse's Back

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There’s an old saying in business: The best thing you can do for your career is learn to think on your feet. For Donna Barton Brothers, that has meant thinking with her feet in the stirrups of a saddle atop a horse, with an audience of up to 16 million watching and listening. Gulp. If she makes interviewing the winning jockey annually following the Kentucky Derby look easy, there’s more to it than meets the eye.

The riding is perhaps the easiest part, and in her case, it should be. A former jockey with a sparkling career, Barton Brothers rode the winners of 1,130 races for some of Thoroughbred racing’s top trainers, including D. Wayne Lukas. She retired from race riding in 1998.

Her start in television broadcasting was at Fair Grounds Race Course in New Orleans, where she was asked to interview the winning connections of stakes races on weekends. In 1999, at the conclusion of the winter Fair Grounds meet, she traveled north to Louisville and Churchill Downs with her husband, trainer Frank Brothers. The late John Asher, then the on-air racing analyst at Churchill, asked if she would want to take over his job. She couldn’t have been in a better place at a better time for what was to come.

“I was doing that when NBC came to Churchill Downs to observe the Derby, because they had signed the contract for the following year,” she recalled. “Unbeknownst to me, they were looking for a reporter on horseback.”

Also unbeknownst to Barton Brothers was that longtime racing analysts Tom Hammond and Mike Battaglia had recommended to NBC brass that they watch her on-air work from the paddock and consider her for the mounted-reporter position.

“My first show was that fall, the 2000 Breeders’ Cup that was at Churchill Downs, and then my first Derby with NBC was in 2001,” she said.

The sport’s principal trade magazine, The Blood-Horse, reviewed the broadcast coverage. Anticipating a good review in her first work for NBC at the Breeders’ Cup, Barton Brothers was in for a shock. “One of the things written about me was, ‘I don’t know why NBC continues to insist on using these fluff interviews on horseback after a race,’ ” she recalled.

Her riding background, at that point, provided just what she needed. “As a jockey, you deal with criticism all the time. Sometimes it’s constructive, and sometimes it’s not so much,” she said. “But if you’re a good jockey, you’re going to ask, ‘Is that a valid critique? Were the interviews fluffy?’

“There was not a single question that I asked of any of the Breeders’ Cup jockeys that day that I couldn’t have asked of any of the other ones—‘Tell me about your trip. What’s it mean to you to win this kind of race?’ It was because of the harsh review that I started to put myself in the rider’s position, especially for the Derby.”

The lesson was that, while a Derby or other Triple Crown race win is going to be highly meaningful to riders, “it’s going to mean something a little different to each one,” she said. Determining that is the heavy lifting behind the job: to have specific questions prepared for 20 riders.

That is only a part of Barton Brothers’ preparation. In the days leading up to the Derby, she is at Churchill Downs for early morning workouts, assessing each starter with observations and details that might escape someone without a riding background. The disposition of each horse is noted, as equine nerves of steel are necessary to run before a crowd of more than 150,000 Derby fans.

“I need to see that so that I can report before the race on anything unusual in their temperament,” she said.

The running style of each horse also is taken into account. She will know who the front-runners are, the “stalkers” running near but not at the front, and the “closers” who, as the word implies, save energy for a late homestretch burst. She will know if the winning horse and rider had an unusual or unexpected trip to Derby glory or ran to form.

Despite being on horseback on the track during the Derby and with the gigantic video board showing the race on Churchill Downs’ backstretch, Barton Brothers sees very little of the race, relying heavily on the call of the race by track announcer Larry Collmus.

“I get on my horse in the tunnel when the horses are in the paddock after I’ve done my walkover with the trainers,” she said of her Derby routine. “I go stand out on the racetrack where the other lead ponies are and wait for the horses to come out, and then I just watch them all walk out. I want to see how they’re handling everything. I stay there right in front of the grandstand, and I watch them all get through ‘My Old Kentucky Home’ and see who’s handling it, who isn’t.” She then follows the Derby starters behind the starting gate, watching them gallop out and monitoring for any unusual behavior to report.

As the last few horses are loaded into the starting gate, Barton Brothers begins going the opposite way around the turn to the backstretch, away from the Derby horses and the race’s start. By the time she has ridden out of the turn and is on the backstretch, the Derby field is heading toward her and the outriders. “We’ll stop there at about the half-mile pole and stand there on the outside fence facing the horses,” she said. “That’s a really important moment for me because it gives me a sort of a quick snapshot.”

Even with the video board above her head, she often doesn’t watch until maybe the final sixteenth of a mile to see if the race is a tight finish or is won easily. She then gallops clockwise around to the first turn to join the winning rider and horse and the outrider escorting them to the winner’s circle.

Barton Brothers’ take on last year’s Derby, when Maximum Security, with Luis Saez up, was disqualified after crossing the finish line first, offers a glimpse into the immediacy of live television. “I feel like everybody experienced it in the way that Luis Saez did,” she recalled. “They felt that joy. It was part of the story and how it unfolded, and that they won.” Even though the moment was short-lived, it was still that result in that moment.

Barton Brothers explained, as well, that the objections lodged by jockeys claiming their mounts were interfered with by Maximum Security did not come until after her interview.

That most unusual Derby for Barton Brothers can’t surpass what she thought was her worst interview. She interviewed a tearful jockey Calvin Borel after his 2007 win aboard Street Sense, not expecting to get caught up in Borel’s high emotion following his first Derby victory. “I totally forgot all my questions,” she admitted. “All I could do was talk to him about what he had just said. I thought at the end of my interview with Calvin I just totally blew it.”

To her surprise, one and then another NBC producer approached her separately after the telecast to compliment her on what they thought was a great interview.

Brothers recalled Hammond telling her it was great because of two things: “Number one, the fact you just listened to what he was talking about,” she remembered him saying. “And the other thing is, when you threw it back to me, you said, ‘Obviously an emotional win for Calvin with the tears streaming down his face.’ ” NBC hadn’t gotten a closeup of Borel but quickly did so to capture the raw, unbridled emotion of the great jockey.

Thinking on her feet—or actually not thinking, in the case of the Borel interview—brings to mind another old saying in sports that applies to Barton Brothers: The great ones make it look easy.