EVANSVILLE – During his decades-long career, Toby Keith came to the Evansville area multiple times, playing everywhere from the Ford Center to a high school in Southern Illinois.
But in 2003, there was one place he wasn’t allowed to go: the lounge at Ellis Park.
According to an interview Keith gave to the Horse Racing Network 15 years later, the country star came to Ellis to watch Cactus Ridge, a horse from the farm he owned, run in the juvenile race. Just before the gates opened, he tried to duck into the upper-scale lounge to grab a drink.
“They wouldn’t let us in because we had jeans on,” he said in 2018. “Even being a celebrity and having one of the top horses in there, they were just going to look down their noses at us.
“So I said, ‘Let’s just all go hang out in the beer tent.’”
Word soon got around as to what happened. And when Cactus Ridge blew away the field, track officials asked Keith to come back upstairs and have a “big drink with the owners.”
“We’ve got jeans on,” Keith replied. “Tell them to come to the beer tent.”