His gaze riveted on the chestnut colt who had extricated himself from a precarious position in heavy traffic and was moving like a flame through kindling on the stretch turn, Nick Zito was overtaken by rapture.
“Show me the way!” he pleaded to forces unseen. “Show me the way.”
Turning into the stretch, the chestnut colt named Strike the Gold lengthened his stride and ran past Hansel, Mane Minister, Corporate Report and Fly So Free. Churchill Downs trembled beneath the wave of noise that meets every Derby field at the quarter pole and the first flight of sixteen horses fanned across the racetrack, forcing Strike the Gold at least seven wide. It was a disadvantageous position from which to mount a decisive drive, but the red colt was just beginning his run.
With every stride that carried Strike the Gold down the middle of the course toward the wire, the strain of excitement was manifest in the timber of the trainer’s strained, gravely exhortation.
“Show me the way!”
The voice, strained in the roar of the moment, was fading as rapidly as the chestnut colt was covering ground. The dream was coming true. The moment of which Nick Zito had dreamed since he could remember dreaming was at hand. His day had come.
“Show me the way!”
At the eighth pole, Strike the Gold and his jockey, the late Chris Antley, were abreast of Sea Cadet, who had set the pace from the outset in the 1991 Kentucky Derby and had little left. No threat loomed behind as Strike the Gold struck the lead. Zito threw his arms in the air. Touchdown.
Strike the Gold hit the wire almost two lengths clear of Best Pal and Zito, shown the way and thankful, was pointing toward the sky, his life forever changed. This is the definition of blessed.
And so, Zito’s love affair with Kentucky and the Derby bloomed -- an appreciative mutual admiration.
Zito, a son of Brooklyn, was raised in a gritty, working-class Queens neighborhood near Aqueduct Race Track. His father once exercised horses for the legendary Max Hirsch and later would leave his son in the care of accommodating security guards while spending an afternoon playing the horses. Zito began his own career as a teenage hotwalker, then became a groom for the infamous Buddy Jacobson before moving on to work and learn the imprecise art of training racehorses beneath the wing of John Campo, then Leroy Jolley. He found his own kind in Louisville.
It had been only a year before Strike the Gold’s Derby win that the first horse Zito brought to Churchill Downs in May spawned his Derby fever, which would become chronic. But for that horse, a quirk of fate named Thirty Six Red, the life and times of Nick Zito may have unfolded quite differently.
Strike the Gold was the watershed in a career that has carried the 60-year-old Zito to a place in the Racing Hall of Fame, where he was enshrined in 2005. Zito is nothing if not frank and it was an honor, he believed, that was long delayed.
“The Hall of Fame is a tough place to get into,”
he said shortly after notification of his election.
“Of course, I wanted to be in the Hall of Fame. I was frustrated. On the other hand, you have to wait your turn, be humble, do the right thing and realize this game is bigger than everyone involved. Just to be in there with so many great trainers is an amazing thing. It’s hard for me to believe. This is quite an accomplishment to be in the Hall of Fame. I must have had some good days in my career.”
Zito believes, and among the things in which he believes strongly are fate and divine intervention. “You hear so many great sermons, so I'll preach a little bit: It's a privilege to know God, but it's rubbish to tell everybody else. You learn to be humble in this game. I was starting to lose it, and in 1990 here came Thirty Six Red.”
Four years after Thirty Six Red provided Zito with his first Derby experience, Go for Gin scored a front-running win in the 120th Derby, giving owners William Condren and James Cornacchia, partners with B. Giles Brophy in Strike the Gold, their second victory in American’s race with Zito at the helm.
The thrill of a second Derby is no less than the first, and this time, with Go for Gin taking a clear and widening lead past the quarter pole, Zito was again on his feet, arms pumping, again exhorting unseen forces and quoting the late Dan Fogelberg’s tribute to the Derby.
“We know the way!” he shouted. “We know the way! Run for the roses! As fast as you can!”
Running over sloppy ground on a dreary, damp first Saturday of May, Go for Gin, with Chris McCarron astride, was cruising on a four-length lead leaving the eighth pole.
“I love you, God!” Zito screamed. “I love you, America!”
It was a victory popular in Louisville. By then, a photo of Zito hung above the lunch counter alongside those of Woody Stephens and Jack Van Berg at Wagner’s. The restaurant is across Fourth Street from Churchill Downs, and is where horsemen and horseplayers gather, real people who come with no pretense or title, to talk about horses and life over plates of eggs, bowls of soup, and sandwiches. The city adopted Zito as an unofficial favorite son.
“Regular people,” Zito says. “You don’t get that at many tracks.”
The unprecedented fondness exhibited for the New Yorker by Kentuckians is shared. “My love affair with Kentucky started in 1990, with Thirty Six Red on my first trip there. It got stronger over the years. The people in Louisville, for some reason, really latched onto me. Even in Lexington, it’s gotten that way. I really like that town, too,” he said.
“There is a genuine love for horses and horse racing in Kentucky.”
He is a man, homespun in a New York sort of way, who expresses emotion without speaking, but speaks in often meandering streams of consciousness, nonlinear and without a filter between thought and word. He is a man who believes in a higher power, in dreams and omens. Before Go for Gin’s win in a year when Holy Bull was heavily favored to win the Derby, Zito said a dream foretold the upset. He saw Go for Gin at the wire.
“He was first,” Zito said, recalling the nocturnal revelation on the eve of that Derby. Jeff Lukas, the trainer and son of D. Wayne Lukas who had been gravely injured in California when run down by a loose horse, Tabasco Cat, appeared in the same dream.
“I dreamed Jeff hugged me. What can I tell you? You want a stronger dream than that?”
Visit Zito’s barn, whether in New York, Saratoga, Florida or on the road in pursuit of the titles that propel this game. He is as likely to be found on the floor of a stall, up to his elbows in poultice, as in an office. He is said by many to be as good with legs as any trainer in the business. You learn these things on the floors of countless stalls, by getting your hands dirty.
In the 18 years since he saddled his first Derby starter, Zito’s participation has become almost perennial and while he has achieved the most rare and coveted title in racing twice, he has also taken his lumps. Those came most notably in 2005, when he sent out five horses for as many owners, including the George Steinbrenner-owned favorite Bellamy Road, and drew a blank. Though he sent out Bird Town to upset the 2003 Kentucky Oaks, took the Preakness with Louis Quatorze in 1996 and the Belmont Stakes of 2004 with Birdstone, thwarting a Triple Crown bid by the immensely popular Smarty Jones, Zito will return to Louisville for the 134th running of the Kentucky Derby on May 3 in hopes of ending a span of 14 years without having won the Derby or posed a threat since Go for Gin.
The quest, however, is eternal. “If you can believe it,”
Zito said, “the Derby has gotten bigger and bigger every year. A race? It’s more than a race. It’s an event. You can say it’s like the World Series,
the Super Bowl, the Masters, the Indy 500 – what are they? These are the biggest events in sports. The Derby is one of those and, yes, winning it has changed my life.”
Whatever their fate, the horses Zito brings to the Derby will merit careful consideration. Those who have watched horses like Bird Town, Birdstone and others are rarely surprised by the success of a Zito-trained longshot. His approach is straightforward: If the horse is capable, competitive and ready, it is better to have run and lost than to not have run at all. “You have to play the game. If you don’t run,”
he has said often in various circumstances, “you can’t even lose.”
The illustration of the power of this approach, Zito explained, is the 2004 Belmont Stakes, in which Smarty Jones appeared all but certain to complete the first sweep of the Triple Crown since 1978.
“People thought I was crazy, even some people who worked for me,” he said. “But we ran Birdstone when it looked as though there was no way that Smarty Jones could lose that race. But Birdstone won the race and became part of history – biggest upset, biggest crowd ever to see a Belmont.”
But there is far more method than madness in Zito’s philosophy of horsemanship, particularly in the process of getting a horse to the Kentucky Derby-- a race Zito refers to as “the promised land.”
Horse and trainer, Zito believes, get to the Derby in tandem at the end of a long, focused process in which fate and fortune are integral parts of the equation. “Seven months, day and night, thinking about it,” he told an interviewer. “You start thinking about it in November and that’s seven months until May. What’s most important is that the horse takes you there. I don’t think that any trainer has won the Kentucky Derby. The horse wins the Derby.”
This philosophy, coupled with indefatigable work ethic, an uncommon, street-smart humility formed from the mental scars of disappointment, a keen eye for young horses and the resultant success on the sport’s most brightly lit stages has brought Zito a group steadfast clients who provide an annual replenishment of prospects and shared goals. They include Steinbrenner, University of Louisville head basketball coach Rick Pitino, Tracy Farmer, Robert La Penta, Live Oak Plantation, John Hettinger and Richard Brand. He is an astute student of pedigree and conformation but insists there is something more ethereal in the process. “It’s hard to say and this may sound corny but they often have this great presence. The way they walk. It’s something you can’t really talk about,” Zito said.
Success is accompanied by expectation and expectation brings pressure. “Owners come to our barn for that reason – to get that thrill,”
Zito said. “If I don’t get there, it’s really disappointing. You’re expected to be there. But I’ve always said: With great expectation comes great disappointment.”
Zito began his seven months of focus on the 134th Kentucky Derby with a small army of prospects that includes War Pass, the champion two-year-old male of 2006, and the promising Cool Coal Man, who stamped himself a contender with a victory in the Fountain of Youth Stakes. Yet, the transition from winter to spring has not been without setback. The group he will bring to Churchill Downs is somewhat more exclusive.
War Pass, at the point of Zito’s current assault at the season’s outset, ran an inexplicable dull race in the Tampa Bay Derby, then rebounded with a very solid effort in the Wood, yielding in the final strides to Tale of Ekati after having set a suicidal pace.
“It’s sad that we didn’t win because he is a champion,” Zito said after the Wood. “I’m still happy with the way he ran; he wasn’t up the track. There were no excuses. We’ll take him to Kentucky. We’ll take it one day at a time. If War Pass has a good month, we’ll see if we can make it to the Derby.”
Much can go wrong in the four weeks between the Wood Memorial and the Derby. Zito’s original herd of prospects has been reduced to a few, and with the recent defection of the aforementioned War Pass due to an ankle injury, his hopes now lie with Cool Coal Man and Anak Nakal.
“Bob Baffert jinxed me early in the year. He said Zito’s got all the horses. Zito this and Zito that. Zito’s loaded. Pretty soon, one wheel falls off at a time and before you know it, you’re stuck in the mud. Am I loaded? Let me tell you something. Sometimes you're loaded and the gun don't shoot.”