Flatter: Recalling Lukas & meeting in dark with gang of 7

After Triple Crown races, it has become a routine question to punctuate the winner’s news conference.

“What time will you be at the barn tomorrow morning?”

D. Wayne Lukas heard it 12 years ago after Oxbow won the Preakness.

“At 4:30 tomorrow morning, if you want to get up and watch him load on that van, he’ll be on it,” Lukas said. “My truck driver and I will get in that big, old truck, and we’ll head down the road. We’ll make about two Wendy’s stops on the way, and we’ll be in Louisville, Ky., by 5:30 or 6 tomorrow night.”

Training legend D. Wayne Lukas dies Saturday at age 89.

Most of us in the media only heard the 4:30 part. All of us bristled. A colleague asked Lukas if he could push everything back an hour.

“Some of us in this great nation get up and get after it in the morning,” he said. “Others sleep in.”

Lukas was just a 77-year-old colt in 2013. Fortunately, they ran the Preakness at a decent hour back then. By the time he finished speaking to the media in an infield tent at Pimlico, it was about 7 p.m. Those of us who were deciding whether to show up for his morning-after barn chat were backtiming. Eight hours of sleep? Ha.

“I might just go find an empty stall and sleep in the hay at the barn,” one writer said.

The coach had the media in the palm of his hand that overnight. Racing’s dapper pied piper who revolutionized the sport in the 1980s had long been comfortable in his own skin.

By the time he won six consecutive classics in the mid ’90s, Lukas already had pioneered the super stable, practically franchising his good name with assistants posted around the country to look after strings of star horses.

The Lukas zeitgeist built on durable stars who answered the bell with reliable frequency was well established by then. With Hall of Fame bona fides, only mortality could stop him. Not his. Gene Klein, Bill Young and Bob Lewis, who had Lukas look after Kentucky Derby winners Winning Colors, Grindstone and Charismatic, all passed away. The pipeline of equine talent was drying up.

So it was in 2013 that Lukas found his way back for what felt like one last victory lap. It was his first triumph in a U.S. classic since Commendable won the 2000 Belmont Stakes. Pity the media type who would dare ask Lukas if he felt like he was back.

“I don’t think I ever left anywhere,” he told me in 2018. “I don’t agree with that comment at all. I think that we’ve been very competitive over the years. These are very difficult to win. There’s guys who have been in 20 of these and haven’t won one yet.”

Of course he was right, and I was loud wrong. He was not done. Seize the Grey proved that last year in the slop at Pimlico when he won the Preakness. It might have been his only score in a Triple Crown race after Oxbow, but it also was one of the three Grade 1 races Lukas won since 2022. The micro-share partnership MyRacehorse sent him Seize the Grey and reinvigorated both his career and his outlook around the barn.

“That’s what you need,” Lukas said last year. “If you’ve got to look down that shed row and train the same $20,000 or $10,000 claimer every day, those guys are admirable. But recycling those type of horses and everything, I don’t know if that fits me.”

By the time Oxbow won the Preakness, Lukas was in the middle of a changing sport. Younger trainers working with cautious owners eyeing the big, breeding bucks were racing their investments less and less. Coach stuck to his guns that made him a success. He kept his racehorses racing.

A creature of habit, Lukas was a real-life monument. Seeing him near Churchill Downs’ three-quarter-mile pole seated on Bucky, the last of his ponies, was like visiting Old Faithful. Every time I saw him there, he looked 30 years younger.

And Lukas was no slave to anyone else’s routine. Based in the eastern United States, he kept banker’s hours, as long as the banker was based in Europe.

“I’ve been up since about 10 to 3,” Lukas said that morning after the 2013 Preakness.

He actually was a couple minutes late to the barn. Six members of the media and former Preakness publicist Mike Gathagan were waiting for him. So were Steve Haskin and Claire Novak from BloodHorse. Kentucky turf writers Jennie Rees from the Louisville Courier Journal and Alicia Hughes from the Lexington Herald-Leader were there, too. So was Scott Wykoff of WBAL radio in Baltimore. And I was there as a free-lancer for Australia racing radio station RSN 927.

“I am impressed,” Lukas said. “I really am. I was actually helping my driver and those guys. They’ve got the truck there, and we were getting that packed up.”

There was perfunctory conversation about winning again with jockey Gary Stevens and how Oxbow looked good all week and how they would go to the Belmont Stakes. It was bookended by how he celebrated the victory.

“I went back to the Cross Keys (village), and I had hot apple pie with double ice cream and went to bed,” he said.

Eleven years later, when he won the Preakness one more time, there was no reunion of the magnificent media seven. Gathagan is the senior associate athletic director at Towson University. Haskin writes for a Secretariat website. Novak is Claire Crosby now. She, Rees and Hughes are racing publicists. I landed at Horse Racing Nation during COVID. Only Wykoff has the same job now that he did back in 2013.

Lukas was up at 3:30 a.m. and back at the barn early Sunday at 4:30 sharp, but there was no media throng. There are fewer of us now. We wandered by one at a time, and he indulged us without the benefit of an ice-cream hangover.

“I went home, and I crashed,” Lukas said. “I was dead. I’d had enough that day.”

Seize the Grey already was out of his stall, eating the wet grass across the path from the old stakes barn. It was much more relaxed than it was 11 years earlier. No hurry whatsoever.

“I gave him an extra day,” Lukas said. “We were going to leave this morning at 5 a.m. Yesterday after the race I got to thinking about it. I thought, you know what? Why are we rushing out of here? We’ll give him an extra day. He’s out there grazing right now, so we’ll let him have a little grass and take life easy.”

Once a young basketball coach in his native Wisconsin, once the razzmatazz image of racing’s post-Secretariat heyday, once the template for the modern-day super trainer, Lukas actually allowed for some tweaks to his veneer.

Perish the thought, though, that he would have skipped cheeseburgers and chili at a couple Wendy’s on the drive back from Maryland to Kentucky. There was a time when Lukas might have been instantly recognized on those fast-food stops. That, too, changed.

“If you’re in the racehorse business, your notoriety is in a one-block area,” he said to the seven of us in 2013.

He enjoyed the limelight, and he had no peer in racing when it came to public speaking with a deep well of funny, edgy jokes that was bottomless. He was married five times, and he endured the ultimate tragedy of outliving his only child. Through it all, Lukas was first, last and always a man whose greatest creature comfort was God’s greatest four-legged creature.

“It’s just a wonderful lifestyle,” he said less than an hour after Oxbow won that Preakness. “I mean where in the hell can you get paid to ride out there? I ride out on my saddle horse in the beautiful weather four hours a morning, go to the turf club to have lunch, deal with great people. I mean is this a great country or what?”

Greater if one Darrell Wayne Lukas could have outlived us all. If we could wake up one more time at an ungodly hour while he held pre-dawn court the morning after another big win. I just hope someone salvaged that white chair that was all his at the west end of the Pimlico stakes barn. It should be in the Smithsonian.