The sad news about D. Wayne Lukas this week sent the memory galloping across the half-century of the Hall of Fame trainer’s career, trying to identify the one horse, one race, one moment that sums him up.
You could play semantics and say the Lukas moment is the entire modern history of horse racing in North America, given all the trends he set, events he ruled and other prolific trainers he taught or inspired.
But unlike most most legendary trainers, Lukas isn’t easily identified with a single horse or achievement. There are the fillies Lady’s Secret, Landaluce, Winning Colors and Serena’s Song, and there’s Tabasco Cat, whom Lukas turned into a Preakness and Belmont Stakes winner just months after the tragic incident at Santa Anita in which the excitable colt trampled and disabled Jeff Lukas, Wayne’s son and top assistant. But that’s only scratching the surface of a life in racing that has brought, first, 24 world-champion quarter horses and, then, 26 thoroughbred Eclipse Award champions, more than $300 million in purses, more than 1,100 stakes wins, 15 in Triple Crown races and 20 at the Breeders’ Cup.
In 1999, as Charismatic gave Lukas his best shot at sweeping the Triple Crown, a wise-guy columnist (hello) wrote that whether Lukas knew it or not, he needed the overachieving colt to win the Belmont Stakes so that when people thought of the dominant horseman of his era, they’d also think of a horse – not just those gaudy statistics.
This was, after all, the trainer whose Hall of Fame induction speech earlier that year had thanked horse owners, thanked his talented employees and even thanked reporters, but didn’t acknowledge a single horse.
To the suggestion he needed the overachieving Charismatic to win to add equine flesh and blood to his résumé, Lukas responded with characteristic bravado: “Do you think this is going to be the last time I get the opportunity to do this?” It was.
Charismatic didn’t win the Belmont, but, the way it turned out, maybe that was the horse, race and moment that summed up a career full of contradictions.
Lukas’ ability to win major races with horses other trainers never would have entered was demonstrated when Charismatic, a colt who’d run for a claiming tag in February, and finished fourth in the Santa Anita Derby, and needed a win in the Lexington Stakes just to earn a shot at the Kentucky Derby, ended up winning the Derby (as the third-longest shot on the board at 31-1) and Preakness (as the public’s fifth choice at 8-1).
But Lukas’ reputation for asking too much of horses seemed to be borne out when Charismatic, competing for the fifth time in nine weeks, hobbled to a third-place finish in the Belmont, having suffered a left-foreleg fracture near the wire. Charismatic lived, thanks to jockey Chris Antley’s quick work pulling the horse up and cradling the injured limb, immediate attention from veterinarians, and next-morning surgery.
The trainer, whom you might say was good at hiding emotion, was asked what he’d say to people upset at seeing Charismatic break down. “These horses are probably getting more care than their own children,” Lukas said of what he called animal-rights “purists.” “You can only educate them that we’re doing all we can.”
It was weird, though hardly new in sports, that last year Lukas became a sentimental favorite when Seize the Grey made Lukas a Preakness winner for the seventh time, some 44 years after he won his first major thoroughbred race at Santa Anita with Codex.
He’d started out as the bane of the sport’s establishment, an affront to the image of trainers as simple men in muddy boots. D. Wayne Lukas had a name like a lawyer (the D is for Darrell) and a mind like a chief financial officer. He had a master’s in education from Wisconsin-Madison and had coached high school basketball, giving him a gift for talking about racing in terms sportswriters understood. He dressed for the spotlight and, for at least one year, traveled to the Kentucky Derby with his own publicity agent, a man who’d helped Tom Lasorda arrange speaking tours.
After watching Lukas come “up from” quarter horses at Los Alamitos, traditional thoroughbred horsemen saw him aim higher than they ever had and become the first “supertrainer” to establish a practically national stable. The quarters-to-thoroughbreds path would be followed by Bob Baffert, now known as the trainer who broke the Triple Crown drought with American Pharoah and Justify. The operation of barns at several major tracks at once required sharp assistant trainers who’d go on to their own success, Lukas’ coaching tree topped by all-time earnings leader Todd Pletcher, whose own former assistant Michael McCarthy trains Journalism.
Lukas and Baffert were interviewed together by NBC before last month’s Preakness.
“I don’t think 15 Preaknesses between us is an accident,” Lukas said that day, before adding: “When you’re at my age, numbers of what you’ve accomplished don’t mean as much. I’m more interested in the next one.”
It was announced Sunday that Lukas, who would celebrate his 90th birthday Sept. 2, was retiring from training and entering hospice at home after being hospitalized in Louisville with a blood infection. His horses will be trained by assistant Sebastian “Bas” Nicholl.
As he leaves the sport, there are many ways to think of D. Wayne Lukas. One way is as a man who trained great horses and became bigger than any of them.
Follow horse racing correspondent Kevin Modesti at X.com/KevinModesti.