Tom Crean’s excellent adventure as Indiana University basketball coach took a really weird turn in April, when Eli Holman, a 6-foot-9 sophomore-to-be, came to the office to tell the coach he was transferring. During the meeting, Holman became so agitated that Crean, fearing Holman might be “a danger to himself and others,” called the campus cops, who arrived too late to save the potted plant that Holman attacked on his way out the door.

Only at IU would Holman’s behavior generate a wave of nostalgia for a previous IU coach, and, no, we are not referring to the over-his-head Mike Davis or the dialing-for-dollars Kelvin Sampson. No potted plant was safe when Bob Knight was running the show in Bloomington. But it’s also true that nobody ever had to worry about graduation rates, NCAA violations, or competitive teams.

Under Knight, in fact, Indiana basketball became living proof that it was possible, at the highest level, to win while playing by the rules and graduating players. Knight’s occasional tirades notwithstanding, Indiana became the model for doing things right. Ask Mike Krzysewski, the former Knight player and assistant who took the model to Duke, where he has enjoyed a bit of success.

But now about all that’s left of Knight’s legacy are the candy-striped warmup pants. His successors, with the tacit blessing of an incompetent administration, have steadily and willfully frittered away everything that made IU basketball special. The landscape is so bleak that it’s a wonder IU was able to hire Crean away from Marquette, where he was running a program that would have made Al McGuire proud.

The immediate future looks so forlorn and hopeless that Crean already is the front-runner for national Coach of the Year in 2008-’09. That’s because he faces the most daunting rebuilding job of a major program since Rick Pitino replaced Eddie Sutton at Kentucky in 1989. [Read more →]

A few days before the Kentucky Derby, former Governor Brereton Jones was standing on the backstretch at Churchill Downs, talking about trainer Larry Jones’ decision to run the filly Eight Belles in the Kentucky Derby instead of the Kentucky Oaks. Brereton applauded the decision, and not just because it meant that his filly, Proud Spell, would have one fewer formidable opponent in the Oaks.

“Larry’s a great horseman,” Brereton said. “He wants to give all his horses their best opportunity to reach their potential. We entered Proud Spell in the Derby, too, just in case, and I think she would be competitive there. But she’s not as big or strong as Eight Belles, so I think Larry is doing the right thing by both horses.”

At this point he was approached by a journalist who didn’t want to talk about horses. So the first thing he said was, “I can’t believe we couldn’t even get the casino issue on the ballot in Kentucky…do you think it’s dead?”

Brereton did everything but heave a huge sigh. Earlier this year, as the driving force behind KEEP (Kentucky Equine Education Project), he suffered a disappointing blow in his drive to let Kentuckians vote on the issue of casino gambling.

He knew, better than anyone, that a lot of Kentucky horsemen were taking their stables to rival states which had used some of the revenue from casino gambling to beef up their race track purses and enhance incentive programs for breeders, putting Kentucky’s tracks at a competitive disadvantage.

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On the morning of the 40th Kentucky Derby that the grandfather would see in person, he picked up his daughter and son-in-law so that they could go to Churchill Downs together. It was a splendid first Saturday in May, the warming sun promising relief from the previous day’s rain, and the grandfather felt the old joy stirring, yet again, as he was met at the door by his older granddaughter, age 5.

She has her mama’s smile and hair, and the grandfather thought briefly about the Derby Day, many springs ago, when he took the child’s grandmother to see the great race. It was 1967 and the grandfather, so young and so intoxicated with love, bet $2 on the longshot Proud Clarion, for no good reason other than he had witnessed the colt’s final Derby workout and written a newspaper story about it.

So imagine his feelings late on a cold and rainy afternoon when Proud Clarion came splashing down the stretch to win. He collected his winnings, the remarkable sum of $62.20, and plucked a rose from the traditional winner’s garland to give his girl. And he left the track that long ago day convinced forever that nothing he would ever encounter in life would be more wonderful or romantic or thrilling as the Kentucky Derby.

Now here was his granddaughter, showing him a picture she had drawn of the horse she was picking to win the Derby. She was going to root for Eight Belles, she had decided (probably with a nudge from her mother) because she was the only girl horse in the Derby. Besides, she loves princesses. Eight Belles was a princess with four legs.

The grandfather admired the drawing, which was more or less a stick-horse version of a race horse. But he knew who it was because she had printed the name right above in her squiggly, 5-year-old scrawl. Yes, indeedy, said the grandfather. That was surely Eight Belles, only a fool could fail to know it, and he told the child, quite seriously, that she just might have drawn the Derby winner.

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The “scattered showers” predicted for Friday afternoon turned into a steady downpour that soaked a lot of Derby hats and took the starch out of just about everything except the Kentucky Oaks, where Proud Spell lit up the day with a stunning performance that defied the slop and the gloom.

I had been on her bandwagon since January, when former Kentucky Governor Brereton Jones, her breeder and owner, told me to keep an eye on her. I never wavered, even when she finished third in the Ashland Stakes at Keeneland. Yesterday morning I touted her to a tour group from Los Angeles.

So it’s already been a good Derby weekend for yours truly. I’ve always liked and admired Governor Jones, a sensitive and compassionate man who cares deeply about the horse industry and its relationship to the people of Kentucky. He and his wife Libby represent the best of us.

After yesterday’s deluge, handicappers everywhere went back to their charts, graphs, printouts and system to see which of the 20 Derby entrants might run best on an “off” track. That’s good information to have, although I have a feeling that we’re going to have a fast track for the Derby.

In Butch Lehr, Churchill Downs has an incomparable track superintendent. If the weather gives Butch and his staff a break, you can bet the track will be as good as human beings possibly can get it.

You want analysis? I have analysis.

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“It’s still so real to me, although I’m sure I’ve forgotten some of the angles and the details. Hey, how many guys can say they won the Derby and then they didn’t win it? Only one. Me.”

 – Peter Fuller, owner of Dancer’s Image

Next to my desk, at a place where I can see it every day, I have a black-and-white photo that was on the cover of the May 11, 1968, issue of The Blood-Horse magazine. It shows owner Peter Fuller and trainer Lou Cavalaris leading Dancer’s Image into the infield winner’s circle at Churchill Downs following his stirring victory over Calumet Farm’s Forward Pass in that year’s Kentucky Derby. I’m clearly visible in the background, a couple of yards behind the gray colt. At 24, I was doing then what I’ve spent most of my life doing: Looking for a story for the next day’s newspaper.

At the time, I was working for The Courier-Journal, and my assignment was to do a sidebar on the Derby winner. So here I was, trailing the action surrounding the colt whose charge from last place had electrified the crowd on a bright and sunny afternoon under the twin spires. In the photo, I’m smiling, as are Fuller and jockey Bobby Ussery. Cavalaris looks nettled, his hand on the shoulder of a man in front. I can almost hear the crowd, still babbling and whooping over the thrilling bit of history it had just witnessed.
“Isn’t that something?” Fuller had said on the track as he led his colt with one hand and wave at the crowd with the other. “I felt like he would win all along. I was sure of it. This horse was destined to win.”

If so, then destiny has an incredible mean streak. After receiving the gold winner’s trophy from Kentucky Governor Louie B. Nunn – like him, a Republican – Fuller left it at the track for engraving purposes. He never got it back because, on the Tuesday after the Derby, the international sports world was shocked when the race stewards announced that Dancer’s Image had been disqualified and placed last because a then-illegal medication had been detected in his post-race urinalysis.

It was the first – and still the only – time a Derby winner’s number had been taken down. Angry and outraged, but mostly puzzled and confused, Fuller denied any wrongdoing and vowed to get back the trophy and the winner’s purse. For almost five years, he fought his way through every jurisdiction, from a hearing by the stewards to the Kentucky Supreme Court. But in the end, he and his colt lost in court what they had won on the track. Forward Pass was declared the official winner and Dancer’s Image was ignominiously placed 14th and last.
To this day, almost 40 years later, the mystery of what happened to Dancer’s Image remains unsolved.

Everybody who had access to the colt claimed to be innocent of any wrongdoing. The chemists who conducted the post-race tests stood by their work. Everybody had a theory, but nobody knew anything for sure.

As I walked behind the victory party that day, looking for an angle, little did I know that the biggest story of my career was right in front of my face. I became involved in the investigation in a very personal way, as we shall see. But after all was said and done, I had only one certainty to show for my work: Peter Fuller was the tragic hero and innocent victim of the damnedest story in Derby history.

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Here in 2008, diversity remains a foreign concept in thoroughbred racing. The sport is still mainly a club for good ol’ (white) boys. You need a search warrant to find females or African-Americans in the important decision-making roles of industry organizations or race tracks.

Look at it like this: The campaign for President of the U.S. has more diversity than the upcoming Kentucky Derby, which has zero females or African-Americans occupying the key roles of owner, trainer, and jockey.

This state of affairs hurts the sport’s attempt to widen its audience. It’s human nature for people to have heroes who look like themselves. Where in thoroughbred racing can women and African-Americans find role models?

The sport seemed to make a breakthrough, at least in the gender department, when jockey Julie Krone held her own against the top males in the 1980s and ‘90s. But her success did not open the floodgates for female jockeys, just as Tiger Woods’ success in golf has not led to an influx of talented young African-American players.

The only way racing can claim it embraces diversity is by pointing to the huge number of Hispanic jockeys. The majority of the riders in Saturday’s Derby will have surnames like Saez, Prado, Gomez, Garcia, Velasquez, Flores, and Lezcano.

But this creates another problem for racing: The language barrier. Since horses can’t talk, it’s up to the jockeys to speak on their behalf. But many racing fans, and most of the racing media, are not fluent in Spanish. So there are misunderstandings. Nuances are lost in translation. Frustration abounds on both sides.

So, in an odd twist on the diversity issue, the sport now needs more top-notch white jockeys like Pat Day, Jerry Bailey, Chris McCarron, and Gary Stevens, who all retired in the last five years. They were gentlemen and ambassadors for their sport. They also were white and articulate. White fans related to them.

The suits who run racing don’t like to address issues involving diversity and inclusion. But don’t accuse them of intolerance. To the contrary, their tolerant attitude toward drugs and cheating has contributed mightily to the sport’s image problems. It’s no coincidence that racing has slipped off the radar screen of most America sports fans.

The sport’s human-interest stories are as fascinating as ever. The problem is, the suits who run the sports don’t know how to tell them. Even when a Smarty Jones or a Barbaro falls into their laps, they don’t know how to promote and market it. They have learned nothing from the lesson taught by the Seabiscuit book and movie – namely, the Americans love animals and moving stories about them. [Read more →]

Today we are proud to bring you the first installment of our public-service series, “Ask Colonel Billy.” The purpose is to give you a way to find out everything you ever wanted to know about the Kentucky Derby but were too scared – or stoned, as the case may be – to ask. Today’s topic, submitted by inquisitive reader Martha in Florida, is, “How do race horses get their names?”

Ha! Good question. The first thing you should know is that no matter what you always may have suspected, most thoroughbreds are not named by a committee consisting of big-time college basketball players who have failed remedial English. The misspellings and run-together words are intentional, believe it or not.

It also is not true, generally speaking, that race horses are named by the same people who name rock bands and their songs. Take Anak Nakal, for example. You might think this is a hot new rap group who will be one of the hot items at the Barnstable-Brown party. But you would be wrong. Anak Nakal is a thoroughbred whose name translates to mean, in English, “Jerry Abramson.”

O.K., I made that up. I have no idea what Anak Nakal is, but somebody decided to hang that name on a horse and the Jockey Club approved it.

So now you’re probably thinking, “Colonel Billy, what is the Jockey Club and how short do I have to be to join?”

Well, despite what the name suggests, the Jockey Club is not an organization for the height-challenged men and women who ride horses. In fact, I’m betting that no actual jockey has ever belonged to the Jockey Club because, you see, the Jockey Club is a very snooty and exclusive organization of bluebloods.

So far as I know, and I’ve been around this game a long time, nobody has ever actually seen a member of the Jockey Club. The main qualification for membership is to be rich – and the older the money, the better.

The only way we know the Jockey Club actually exists is that it has approval rights over the names of horses. The rules are as strict. No name can exceed 18 characters, including spaces, which is why there’s a horse in this year’s Derby named Recapturetheglory instead of Recapture The Glory.

Odd, isn’t it, that such an old-school group would countenance such a horrid run-together name and please don’t get Colonel Billy started on the bad spelling or the spinoffs from great sires such as Seattle Slew and Storm Cat.

The Jockey Club also does not permit horses to be named after living persons without that person’s permission – and even then some names wouldn’t be accepted. For example, we simply couldn’t have a filly named Paris Hilton or Lindsay Lohan running around now, could we? Oh, my, think of all the tasteless jokes.

In addition, a certain amount of time must pass before names can be recycled. That’s the literal reason we have never seen another Secretariat. The Jockey Club also would undoubtedly reject names like Secretariat Jr., Secretariat II, or Secretariatthegreat.

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Don’t get the wrong idea about Larry Jones. He did not catch an incurable case of Kentucky Derby Fever when he finished second last year with Hard Spun. He has plenty of common sense under his trademark cowboy hat. He’s so respectful of convention and history that he gets a sort of crooked grin when he talks about trying to win both the Derby and the Kentucky Oaks the same weekend.

That feat has been done before, of course, most recently by another guy named Jones, Ben A., the legendary horseman who trained for Calumet Farm in the 1940s and ‘50s. In 1952, he won the Oaks with Real Delight and the Derby with Hill Gail, both ridden by Eddie Arcaro.

But now Larry Jones is poised to try something that Ben never pulled off. Neither did Max Hirsch, Horatio Luro, Charlie Whittingham, D. Wayne Lukas, or any other training icon you might want to mention. He’s going to try to win the Oaks and the Derby the same weekend with two different fillies.

“I know some people will say I’m crazy,” he said yesterday (Sunday) at Churchill Downs. “But I really think it’s the right thing to do by both the horses. I’ve talked to both the owners and they agree. If it doesn’t work out, do you think I can get away with blaming them?”

One of the owners is yet another Jones, former Kentucky Governor Brereton, who bred the filly Proud Spell at his Airdrie Stud farm. Never worse than third in seven career starts, Proud Spell is so strong and consistent that Jones toyed with the idea of running her in the Derby. In the end, however, the traditionalist in him won out over the non-conformist. She’ll run in the Oaks, where she could be the favorite.

The other owner, Rick Porter of Fox Hill Farms, has decided to enter his filly, Eight Belles, in both the Oaks and the Derby. But he sees the Oaks as Plan B in case she draws the far outside post in the Derby. Barring that, he’s committed to making her the 39th filly to try the boys in the Derby.

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Given our city’s longtime fascination with all things brown, it was inevitable the day would come when we would have a Kentucky Derby horse named Big Brown. This animal is named for UPS, our city’s leading employer, and will take an unbeaten record – three wins in three starts – into the 133rd Derby on Saturday May 3.

I guess his credentials are good enough to get him an invitation to the ultra-snooty Barnstable-Brown Party, although he might need a good word from Owsley Brown, Phyllis George Brown or Bad, Bad Leroy Brown to merit a canter down the red carpet. (Red? How in the hell did red get in here?)

I’d recommend that his owners stay at the Brown Hotel, which was built and operated by the philanthropist and horse owner J. Graham Brown, a statue of whom is right outside the hotel’s entrance. He ran two utterly unremarkable horses in the Derby, Snuzzle finishing 15th to Count Turf in 1951 and On the Metal struggling home 10th to Carry Back a decade later.

Over the years many horsemen and sports writers have stayed at the Brown, including Ralph Lowe, who dreamed the night before the 1957 that jockey Bill Shoemaker would cost his Gallant Man the Derby by misjudging the finish line. The next day, that’s exactly what happened.

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AUGUSTA, Ga. – The final day of the 2008 Masters golf tournament was a simple story: the South African kid didn’t choke and the Tiger didn’t charge. Period. Everything else went pretty much as Bobby Jones and the golfing gods might have planned it.

The Sunday pressure grabbed guys like Steve Flesch and Paul Casey right by the throat and caused them to go south so fast they almost slid off the leader boards. Others made only cameo appearances in the top 10. Phil Mickelson continued to make progress in rehab from his 2006 U.S. Open breakdown.

Down six shots to Trevor Immelman when he teed off on Sunday, Tiger Woods needed to post some early birdies to get back in the hunt and give the 28-year-old leader, who only a week earlier had missed the cut at the Shell Houston Open, something to think about.

But he didn’t. Right before our eyes, Tiger became mortal. All afternoon he seemed in greater danger of falling farther behind than gaining any ground. And as the holes went by without Woods making a move, Immelman just played rock-steady golf, content to take his pars and move on.

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