Living A Kentucky Derby Fantasy, Win Or Lose
By William F. Reed

I must admit that I approached this year's Churchill Downs Fantasy Game with an unusual amount of excitement and, yes, prejudice. That's what happens when you own a very, very small piece of a 3-year-old colt who shows signs of being good enough to make the field for the 128th Derby on May 4.

During my 42 years as a sports writer, you see, I've come to love the Derby more than the NCAA Final Four, the World Series, the Super Bowl or any other major event you want to name. I suppose that comes partly from being a native Kentuckian. But it also has much to do with history, tradition, sentiment, romance, and the beauty of Thoroughbreds.

I'm a sucker for all of it.

I covered my first Derby in 1966 and have missed only two since. At times, I've dreamed of owning a Derby horse. However, newspaper wages being what they are, I figured my only shot was marrying a rich lady or talking somebody such as W.T. Young or Bob Lewis into adopting me. The odds on either were about the same as the odds on Drexel to win the NCAA tournament.

This is where Bill Malone, my longtime friend, comes in.

A longtime Louisville CPA and monster sports fan, Malone knows hundreds of folks like me -- people who love horses and the game, but don't have the means to go to a sale and bid $100,000, or even $10,000, for an untested yearling. So he began putting together ownership syndicates to buy horses that would be trained by Vickie Foley.

Over the years, the syndicates have been profitable, for the most part. One owned a nice sprinter named Red and White. And I was part of one that owned Dynafleet. When that colt got as far as the Spiral at Turfway Park, I was in Charlotte for the 1994 NCAA Final Four. But Karl Schmitt of Churchill Downs got me into a TV trailer where we could pick up the ESPN feed of the race.

Unfortunately, Dynafleet ran so poorly that he got off the Derby trail quicker than a Jay Leno one-liner.

I figured I'd never get that close again. However, as a wedding gift to me and my wife Jan, Malone gave us an interest in a couple of horses. That's how we ended up with a piece of Sky Terrace, a son of Skywalker that Malone and Vickie bought in Florida for $65,000.

The most prominent syndicate member, Tom Theineman, owned only 10 percent, so you can imagine how many of us were in the syndicate. We thought of printing up bumper stickers that said, "Honk if you DON'T own a part of Sky Terrace. We laughed at the idea of Churchill Downs trying to get a cast of thousands into the Derby winner's circle.

Well, Sky Terrace last year won his first two starts as a 2-year-old so impressively that a prominent Derby-winning trainer called to offer us $500,000 for him. Had I been in charge, I would have taken the money and run. But Malone declined on the very sound grounds that since all of us had gotten into the syndicate for the fun, not the money, we might as well hang on to him and see if he was our real-life fantasy horse.

In last fall's Brown & Williamson Kentucky Jockey Club Stakes (GIII), Sky Terrace set the pace until midway in the stretch, when he tired and finished fourth, beaten only slightly more than two lengths by Repent, one of the early Derby favorites. But we had excuses. The "muddy" track wasn't to his liking, it was his first race around two turns, and he got hit in the face by another jockey's whip near the finish line. So our hopes were still high when Vickie shipped him to the Fair Grounds in New Orleans to prep for the Derby. The plan was to run him in the mile Lecomte on Jan. 16 and the 1 1/16th-mile Risen Star ojn Feb. 17. If he performed well in those races, we would put him in the 1 1/8-mile Louisiana Derby (GII) on March 10.

On the morning of the Lecomte, a friend at the Courier-Journal put it in the paper that I was a member of the Sky Terrace syndicate. Later that day, when I went to Trackside to bet on the colt, a gatekeeper said, "How's your horse going to do today?"

My horse. Imagine that. But that's the thing about belonging to a syndicate. No matter how little you own, the feeling of proprietorship is strong and heady stuff. So I told the gatekeeper how the colt had been working, what jockey Craig Perret thought about him, and whether he would like the track.

You would have thought I was one of the Maktoum brothers.

In the Lecomte, our colt got beat in the last jump by Easyfromthegitgo.

Once again, however, we had excuses. He got pinched at the start and had to be checked, Perret had to use him too soon to get back in contention, and the winner got a trip as perfect as ours was flawed. The winning trainer was more complimentary of our horse than his own and said we would be tough to beat in the Risen Star.

This is when I got serious about the Kentucky Derby Fantasy Game, where each participant gets to pick an "A" and "B" trainer and jockey to handle a 10-horse stable of Derby contenders. The winner is the player whose trainers, jockeys, and horses compile the most points in the Derby prep races.

Naturally, I wanted to include Sky Terrace in my stable. This is when Malone told me that Vickie had neglected to put up the $600 necessary to nominate him for the Triple Crown. I was surprised, but Malone pointed out that if he ran well in the Risen Star and the Louisiana Derby, we would have no problem coming up with the $6,000 to make him a supplemental Triple Crown nominee.

Without Sky Terrace, I picked a 10-horse stable that includes Johannesburg, the unbeaten winner of the Breeders Cup Juvenile; Repent, mainly because I like trainer Kenny McPeek and his wife; Siphonic, apparently the best horse in California; Saarland (2) and D'Coach, who are trained by the talented Shug McGaughey; Booklet, who could join Monarchos to give trainer John Ward back-to-back Derby winners; Cappuchino, an impressive recent winner in California; Danthebluegrassman, who's named for longtime friend Dan Chandler; and Harlan's Holiday, in memory of Cawood Ledford, who came from Harlan, Ky.

For my "A" trainer, I picked D. Wayne Lukas, who nominated 19 for the Triple Crown. He doesn't seem to have much as of the moment, but remember that nobody had heard of Charismatic at this time in 1999. For my "B" trainer, I took Aidan O'Brien, who trains Johannesburg.

For my "A" jockey, I took Jerry Bailey over all-time Churchill Downs riding king Pat Day because Day has only one Derby victory to his credit (the longhsot Lil E. Tee in 1992). For my "B" jockey, I selected Frankie Detorri, who rides many of the best foreign horses.

My stable set for the time being, I was looking for a breakout race by Sky Terrace in the Risen Star. He sat comfortably behind a modest pace in the early going and seemed perfectly placed for a big run at the stop of the long Fair Grounds stretch. But this time he failed to fire. He began falling back instead of moving forward. At the end, he beat only one horse and finished far back of Repent, who closed strongly and proved to be much the best.

So now my partners and I are back at the drawing board, our real-life fantasy shattered. The mile Derby Trial (GIII) now looms as a more realistic goal than the Derby. There seems no way that poor Sky Terrace will ever compete for the Reed Stable in the Kentucky Derby Fantasy Game.

But at least I'll have the memory of that brief mention in the paper and the gatekeeper who asked me if "my" horse was going to win.

Native Kentuckian William F. Reed has been a sports writer in various capacities for 42 years and has missed covering the Kentucky Derby a mere two times since 1966. He has been a high-profile sports writer in Kentucky for the Commonwealth's two largest daily newspapers, the Louisville Courier-Journal and the Lexington Herald-Leader and was a national columnist for Sports Illustrated, covering among other sports, Thoroughbred horse racing and college basketball. Reed currently pens a column for the Louisville Sports Report and will be filing Kentucky Derby installments on www.kentuckyderby.com.

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