Handicapper quickly learns beverage of choice during long-awaited trip to Churchill Downs

LAS VEGAS — Sean Worley quickly learned the key about the Kentucky Derby.

No tequila. No margaritas. No beer. Those were staple beverages for the longtime Dallas-area resident.

“You order bourbon,” he said. “Kentucky people are the most proud, hospitable people you’ll ever meet. I check into the hotel a mile from the track, and they’re giving out souvenir horseshoes. Everyone is nice, funny, cordial.

“And it’s all about bourbon. They start early and go late on the bourbon, no ifs, ands or buts.”

Worley, 62, isn’t just a close pal. As two of 30 who pledged the same San Diego State fraternity, our knot is exceptionally tight.

As is his devotion to the sport of kings. That Del Mar season of 1985 was a learning experience for the rest of us. The main rule conveyed that August was always box exactas.

After graduation came many experiences at Hollywood Park and Santa Anita. He often talked about going to Louisville one day.

Finally, two years ago, Sean pulled off his first junket to Churchill Downs. After guiding the Dallas College Richland Thunderducks to seven national junior-college soccer titles, he had retired.

He had the time and means to experience Kentucky.

Vegas and the Grand Ballroom festivities at the South Point had long been the annual Derby gathering mecca for us and fellow Sigma Phi Epsilon kin, but Sean headed for the big time.

“Tom Brady and Kid Rock and so many others are always there,” Sean said. “I’d see that and say, ‘That looks like fun.’ It’s hard to ask friends to go to the Derby and spend three grand. Actually, it’s not very smart.

“But I did it.”

Loves ’cappin’

Worley contacted a tour-package company, and he paid off the above amount in four monthly installments. By the time he touched down in Louisville, the bill had been settled.

All you can eat. All you can drink. Primo seats for that Friday’s Kentucky Oaks program and Saturday’s full Derby schedule.

Friday at Churchill Downs, his assigned seat put him among a group of sorority women who had attended the same Virginia college and made this an annual affair.

“They all thought I was the smartest guy,” Sean said, “because I picked the winner of the first race.”

All wore hats and colorful outfits. Everyone, everywhere was dressed nattily, laughing, having a ball. He elaborated about the scene.

“One negative about the [weekend]: They go to party, not to pick horses. Just to have fun,” Sean said. “I’m trying to pick winners. But you can’t sit at Churchill and not drink. I’m handicappin’, and they’re buyin’ me drinks.

“So smooth, I can’t say no. It’s my first Derby, and I’m hittin’ winners. I had $50 on this horse comin’ in, and it does. I’m hittin’ exactas. I was ON.”

When Worley’s ’cappin’ is on, he’ll disappear for an hour or more, like he’ll do this weekend when he rejoins us commoners at the South Point casino.

He’ll weigh all the moving parts of a race, or a string of them, and rejoin us with playable numbers. “A Beautiful Mind,” thoroughbred version.

His Churchill Downs stories from the last two years will rule the weekend.

1-2-3 and 8-9-10

Sean is the pony-pickin’ progeny of his maternal grandfather, Carlucci “Carl” Palermo, who long ago fancied running around Chicago with the notorious Anthony “Big Tuna” Accardo and Nicholas “Nick the Plumber” Calabrese.

From Cosenza in Calabria, Italy, atop the foot of the boot, Palermo settled in Melrose Park, where butcher Francesco “Yamo” Lata-rola produced succulent Italian sausages.

Calabrese, who oversaw epic neighborhood Fourth of July bashes, and Latarola were Carlucci’s cousins, Sean’s uncles confirmed. Accardo started as a bodyguard to Al Capone.

Palermo tried to immerse into an underworld that didn’t welcome him, so goes family lore, and he ultimately heeded strong advice to relocate his growing family to St. Louis, then to the San Francisco Bay Area.

Sean’s uncles call gramps the black sheep of the family, a crude painter who chain-smoked Lucky Strikes and grabbed pre-made screwdrivers and gin-and-tonics at 7-Eleven for lunch when Sean tagged along to help.

At the magazine rack, Palermo dangled Hustler magazines at his grandson.

“Even my grandma didn’t like him,” Sean said with a laugh. “He wasn’t the nice grandfather you’d see on ‘Leave it to Beaver.’ Just a dirty old man. He fooled around, even back in Chicago. A wanna-be gangster.”

He taught Sean how to digest a Racing Form, triggering his consumption of books about great jockeys and horses, handicapping and Andy Beyers speed figures.

Sean would drive Palermo to work, only to divert to Bay Meadows in San Mateo. Everyone seemed to know the gruff Palermo, who always cut in ticket lines.

Eventually, relegated to a wheelchair, he’d take the bus to the track. Family became worried one night when he hadn’t returned. Around 10 p.m., there he was, cruising home down Main Street, having missed his bus.

Palermo was 89 when he died in June 1993.

“He’d always chirp about the 1-2-3 and 8-9-10,” Sean said. “He’d go around, ‘1-2-3. Gonna bet the 8-9-10 and the 1-2-3.’ Those became my salute to him.”

A great time

At his first Derby, Sean favored the Japanese star Forever Young, No. 11. It didn’t work out. However, thinking of gramps, he scrambled to fashion a big 1-2-3 exacta ticket.

No. 3 Mystik Dan won, No. 2 Sierra Leone placed.

A $2 exacta (3-2) paid $258.56.

“It got me back to over even,” Sean said, “for all the money I lost on Forever Young, and then some.”

Worley put $100 on a horse to win the next race — it won.

He left Churchill Downs and his first Kentucky Derby weekend with more than $2,000 in profit.

He returned last year, but it wasn’t the same. Can a second ever match a first? -Before that second trip, I had emailed him Hunter S. Thompson’s infamous piece from the June 1970 issue of Scanlan’s Monthly magazine.

Anything here, I inquired, resemble the truth?

In “The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved,” Thompson, a Louisville native, pondered macing the governor and ruminated about watching “the real beasts perform,” on this side of the fence.

He coaxed British artist Ralph Steadman to capture a “special” kind of face, “a pretentious mix of booze, failed dreams and a terminal identity crisis.”

Viewed through a certain lens, Thompson is a comedic-fiction wordsmith of the highest order. Hilarious.

Sean, however, sent it to his travel contact, who reacted differently.

“No response,” he said. Later … “not as friendly.”

“My perception was that the Kentucky Derby is one big giant party,” Sean said. “Fun, fun, fun. Everyone smiling and enjoying the day. Drinking. Eating. Betting the horses.

“I think Hunter saw it from the 1970s, maybe excessive. I never saw any of that. Just a bunch of happy people having a great time.”