Mutuel friends clash over Derby scheme
By Beth Teitell
Thursday, February 2, 2006
My phone rang yesterday morning and the caller was clearly not happy. ‘‘Did you hear the bad news?” she asked.
‘‘No,” I answered, not in the least worried.
With all due respect, my friend’s idea of ‘‘bad news” runs to tragedies such as a potential Brad and Angelina split, a revelation that, say, drinking eight cups of coffee per day (even if they are soy lattes) may be harmful or the return of Capri pants, so I wasn’t too worried.
‘‘What’s the matter?” I asked, clicking onto the People Web site to see if I could find the source of her distress.
‘‘It got a sponsor,” she sniffled. ‘‘I’m not even sure if I’m going to watch again.”
It? What? The State of the Union address? Would it become the Cinnabon State of the Union? Were the Oscars poised for naming rights? The Advil Academy Awards?
Or maybe the movies themselves were up for grabs. ‘‘Vail Brokeback Mountain,” perhaps, or ‘‘Consumer Reports ‘Crash.’ ”
‘‘The Kentucky Derby,” she gasped, ‘‘it’s going to be sponsored by Yum! Brands. Who ever even heard of them?”
Not me, but it turns out they own Taco Bell, Pizza Hut and KFC, she told me.
KFC? ‘‘Well at least the ‘Kentucky’ part makes sense,” I said.
‘‘They’re sullying something very dignified,” she said.
Truth be told, I stopped listening and started musing about how KFC’s attempt to lose the ‘‘fried” stigma by changing to initials didn’t really work, but then she said something that made me take notice: ‘‘The Kentucky Derby is fusty, in a good way, like Boston. So it’s as if Boston got a sponsor, and from now on we’d have the Motel 6 Swan Boats and Spencer Gifts Beacon Hill. Think of it: The Skoal Common.”
Finally, I saw her point. ‘‘I’m sorry for your loss,” I said. ‘‘I can only imagine how upset the horses must be.”
She sagged into macabre humor: ‘‘Is Taco Bell’s Chalupa where the losing horse goes?”
I knew this wasn’t what she wanted to hear, but I had to say it anyway: ‘‘If you ask me, the real surprise isn’t that it got a sponsor, but that it hadn’t had one until now. Kinda makes you wonder what’s wrong with it.”
With that, she snapped. ‘‘Nothing. Yum! Brands is very lucky. I live for all the races in the Visa Triple Crown.”
