D. Wayne Lukas went to the Big Shedrow In The Sky over the weekend, and if you don't know who that is it's because you never dropped coin on the nose of Glue Shu Pork in the sixth at Keeneland or some such thing. Because that was D. Wayne's world, and he owned it.
He was a high school basketball coach who became one of the top horsemen of his age, and no one ever loved or cared for or knew the quirks of high-strung thoroughbreds better. The man trained mounts that won 15 Triple Crown races in his long career, including seven Preakness and four Kentucky Derby wins. If he'd been so inclined he could have carpeted his spread with the red roses and black-eyed susans his horses collected in those wins.
D. Wayne wasn't so inclined, however. He leaned more toward the rhythms of barn and stable and pasture, and loamy expanses of dirt. Almost until the day he died at 89, he was up with the dawn and on a horse to do the work, because the work was all.
He was close friends with the other Rushmore trainer of this era, Bob Baffert, and best buds with Bob Knight and other like-minded folks. Knight, in fact, once called him the "Babe Ruth of thoroughbred racing."
If not that, he was damn close. Like his pal Knight, he was relentless, driven and obsessed with detail. Unlike him, the athletes he was charged with overseeing required more finesse to bring out their best.
From the Associated Press obit: "The whole secret of this game, I think, is being able to read the horse: Read what he needs, what he doesn't need, what he can't do, what he can do," Lukas said in May before his 34th and final Preakness Stakes. "That's the whole key. Everybody's got a blacksmith, everybody's got the same bed available, the feed man. We all can hire a good jockey. We all can hire a pretty good exercise rider if we've got the means, so what the hell is the difference? The horse is the difference and what we do with him in reading him."
In which case, D. Wayne Lukas was as literate as the next guy. And far more so than almost all of them.