The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent and Depraved

In May 1970, Hunter Stockton Thompson was a 32-year-old journalist best known for writing an excellent book on the Hell's Angels. He wrote in a clean, vivid style of the kind made famous by long-form journalists such as Tom Wolfe in the 1960s and 1970s, and he had a great talent for spotting the key image in a scene. But Thompson was also a native of Louisville who had grown up on the verge of Louisville's high society and who became a passionate UK basketball fan. So when a short-lived magazine called Scanlan's Monthly sent him to cover the 1970 Kentucky Derby, he was going home. And something about the experience triggered something in Thompson that changed his career forever.

The article he wrote for Scanlan's -- "The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent and Depraved" -- is regarded as the beginning of what Thompson called "Gonzo" journalism, the notion that journalists should use their own feelings, emotions, and reactions to tell a story. In fact, Thompson didn't limit himself to what actually happened -- he was perfectly willing to make up stories and characters, exaggerate or distort key facts, or go off into paranoid fantasies in order to get at what he considered the "real" truth. Gonzo journalism is like one of those experimental albums that Matthew listens to -- some people really like it, others really hate it, and it doesn't always work.

From 1970 to 1974, it worked for Thompson. He followed up his Kentucky Derby article with Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1972), Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72 (1973), and a wonderful series of articles on the Watergate Scandal -- most if not all of which were originally published in Rolling Stone. By the time President Nixon resigned, Thompson had become a cult hero, a fact that made it extremely difficult for him to keep doing journalism, and a fact that also freed him from having to do journalism -- or much work at all, really. He spent the rest of his life, as far as I can tell, pretty much doing what he wanted, and occasionally churning out this or that piece on topics that interested him.

On February 20, 2005, at the age of 67, he shot himself at his farm in Aspen. Thompson was a huge NFL fan, and the suicide note he left behind was entitled "Football Season Is Over."

Thompson spent virtually his entire life outside of Kentucky -- as have I. But I can tell you that anyone who grows up in Kentucky never really leaves it. What Thompson hated more than anything -- and he railed about it over and over for decades -- was the idea that comfortable, powerful people who don't care about us were using their political, military and economic power to push us around. I would comment only that if you really wanted to make sure that a really smart kid would learn to hate elitism in any form, a good plan would be to have him grow up on the edge of society in the Louisville of the 1940s and 1950s. And if you wanted to watch a really bright 32-year-old snap and lash out at the world around him, you probably couldn't do better than to send him back to Louisville and make him report on the Derby.