Get your Preak on? Kegasus is gone, but infield party going strong

Remember when Las Vegas tried to reinvent itself, and the MGM erected a theme park for kids, and some of the other hotel-casino properties erected their own adventure domes and whatnot out back by the frontage roads and industrial avenues?

If you recall, Las Vegas reinventing itself didn’t take as well as, say, Madonna reinventing herself, although the Adventuredome at Circus Circus still is open. Sometimes when you are driving on Interstate 15 during late afternoon, the sun reflects off the insulated pink glass tiles and makes it hard to see where you are going.

You almost need blinders, like some of the horses that will run in today’s Preakness, which also tried in vain to reinvent itself.

I have a friend who went to the Preakness in 1993 and sat in the press box. But he said if you had binoculars, you could have seen people nearly drowning in the beer that was spilled in the infield, which is what the second jewel in horse racing’s Triple Crown is mostly known for.

The boozy infield at Pimlico Race Course become an issue in 2008, after drunk people started running along the roofs of the port-a-potties, and other drunk people started pelting them with beer cans — 300 people were taken to the hospital, 126 were ejected from the grounds, six were arrested.

Although these things tend to happen in Baltimore, the bring-your-own-beer infield policy was abolished the next year.

Attendance at the 2009 Preakness promptly dropped from around 100,000 to around 78,000. The lines at the port-a-potties weren’t nearly as long, and when you got inside, you couldn’t hear footsteps on top.

As reinventions go, this one wasn’t as successful as Madonna morphing into a virgin.

So the people at Pimlico decided they sort of liked the boozy infield. In 2010 they brought it back, only with an official name, and an official mascot.

They called it “InfieldFest.” Not that original. The mascot was called “Kegasus.” Totally original. It was a guy with a beer belly dressed in a centaur costume. He also had a nipple ring.

Kegasus would go around telling people he was the son of Preaknesius — the God of Thoroughbred Racing — and Shelly McDougal, a waitress from Ellicott City, Md.

You couldn’t bring your own beer anymore, but you paid $25 or whatever, and they gave you a bottomless beer mug.

Attendance immediately climbed to around 96,000.

The rowdies in the infield were back, and they were getting their Preak on again. Debauchery ensued. And ribaldry. But nobody got hurt or arrested.

Kegasus ultimately became a late scratch. By 2013, the Maryland Jockey Club said it was at “a different stage” with its InfieldFest promotion.

I’m betting it was the nipple ring.

UniCarl — half-man, half unicorn who was brought in as Kegasus’ “personal assistant and trainer” was scratched, too. Hope you didn’t have them on an exacta ticket.

This is what Stephen McDaniel, a sports and entertainment marketing professor at the University of Maryland, said at the time:

“The Kentucky Derby is very gentrified. If you compare the Preakness to the Derby, this is why horse racing people are not in favor of Kegasus. They feel it’s not helping the image. It’s appealing to the lowest common denominator.”

To me, the Preakness is sort of the redheaded stepchild of the Triple Crown races. This would explain why the South Point isn’t holding a viewing party. Or if it is, it’s keeping it private.

The Kentucky Derby is the granddaddy of the Triple Crown races, and then you have the Preakness, the redheaded stepchild, and then comes the Belmont Stakes, the eccentric uncle of the trio — eccentric because they make the horses run forever, and because they make them run near New York City.

New York has these eccentric horse racing fans, and when the horse that wins the Kentucky Derby also wins the Preakness, the Belmont Stakes becomes the Triple Crown’s crazy uncle much faster than Secretariat pounding toward the finish line like a tremendous machine.

Jerry Izenberg, the Hall(s) of Fame sportswriter who makes his home near Lake Las Vegas, hasn’t seen all 139 runnings of the Preakness, but he’s seen a lot of them. He will see today’s after missing the Derby on account of Sham — not the racehorse that finished second in the Derby and Preakness in 1973, but the sham of a prizefight that was Mayweather-Pacquiao.

This is how Izenberg began his column for the Newark Star-Ledger:

“And now comes that desperately needed pause on the Triple Crown highway when, for a single Saturday, a horse race is a horse race once again.”

Post time for American Pharoah and the other seven horses is 3:18 p.m., right around the time the sun will be getting lower in the sky and reflecting off the insulated pink glass tiles of the Adventuredome at Circus Circus.

Las Vegas Review-Journal sports columnist Ron Kantowski can be reached at rkantowski@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0352. Follow him on Twitter: @ronkantowski.