Call me naive. Or prudish. But forewarnings about the “wild” infield could not have prepared me for the event.
Trash everywhere. Everywhere. A mixture of broken glass, smashed cans, trampled clothes, beer and urine from people who couldn?t make it to a port-a-john or didn?t care. T-shirts emblazoned with “Show me your Breasts (I won?t use the T-shirt artist?s word) 131st Preakness.” Beer flying from beer bongs, spraying neighbors. Young women straddling the shoulders of young men, working the crowd into a frenzybefore doing what the T-shirt told them.
All of this greets you before you enter the infield at Pimlico.
Trying to enter was a nightmare. Nothing was marked. There were no lines, just masses of people, many tugging massive coolers, (flouting rules allowing those that are one foot by one foot) jostling for the entrance.
Local stores must have had a run on carts ? for $5, a race day entrepreneur would transport your cooler in a Kmart or Family Dollar cart from car to line. If you didn?t link arms, you lost your group.
One police officer said in the 12 years he?s worked race day, Saturday?s event was the most disorganized he had ever seen. At 1:45 p.m., people still waited more than an hour to get in. Usually the chaos ended before noon, he said.
The chaos didn?t seem to relate to police presence. There seemed to be cops everywhere in clots of two, three and four, many simply talking with one another. Some smoking. There was even a special parking lot for “overtime” police, a colleague saw driving by.
Inside was a freak show. One woman pulled down her pink tank top on request, handing out pink business cards advertising her escort service. Other people played games with their private parts for crowds. Men stood in line to urinate on the back side of port-o-johns, making the ground a swampy mess. Many men just unzipped and urinated in the open into empty potato chip bags or next to their picnic spreads ? while friends snapped photos on cell phones. The producers at “Girls Gone Wild” missed a prime business opportunity.
Is this the celebration of “history and tradition” that Gov. Robert Ehrlich noted in his welcoming address in the race program? Or is it part of the “heightened sense of spirit during Preakness Week” that Mayor Martin O?Malley mentioned?
Many of the revelers, a good portion of whom could barely walk, seemed to be college students, judging from their sorority and fraternity T-shirts from local schools. Who knows if they were older than 21?
Author Tom Wolfe, who so precisely captures popular culture in books including “The Bonfire of the Vanities” and “I am Charlotte Simmons,” offers an explanation for the behavior. He said, in a recent speech in Baltimore?s Lyric Opera House, that the United States is entering a new moral phase: amorality. When else in history could a Paris Hilton so successfully flourish ? winning acting roles and launching a singing career with the help of a lurid sex video circulating on the Internet?
Maybe it?s true that none of the same moral rules apply today.
But Pimlico could still apply its own rules and enforce some level of decent behavior in the infield ? without sacrificing ticket sales. And local universities where those students attend could at least set some high expectations for student behavior whether the students ridicule them or not. Who knows ? the parents/tuition check-writers might take an interest, too. Should each school ask students to sign a code of conduct for on and off-campus behavior ? and enforce it?
Race day can still be fun for all generations with some level of grace and civility prevailing ? can?t it?
Marta Hummel is associate editorial page editor of The Baltimore Examiner. She can be reached at [email protected].
