Having gone 7 years without a Derby win, Baffert eyes a victory for someone close to home

Baffert mellower but funny after all these years

LOUISVILLE, Ky. — The laugh track still works, even with the volume turned down.

Bob Baffert’s mood these days swings between sweet and sad, funny one moment and reflective the next. The three-time Derby-winning trainer arrived at Churchill Downs last week with Lookin At Lucky, his best horse in years. The muscular bay colt then got promoted to the favorite on Sunday, when Eskendereya was withdrawn. Baffert had all of three days to relish the role.

At Wednesday’s post-position draw, Lucky turned out to be anything but. He drew the No. 1 slot along the inside rail, a tough spot to start what figures to be a 20-horse stampede into the first turn.

“Plan A is to break well. Plan B,” Baffert said, “is we’re screwed.”

That line got more laughs than any other all week, but shortly after uttering it, Baffert slipped into a deep funk.

Seven years without a Derby win is hardly an eternity, but it came on the heels of Baffert’s three Triple Crown tries between 1997 and 2002, one of the best runs his sport has seen. That spot along the rail had already scraped some of the luster off the planned comeback, and that was before thunderstorms — Lucky has never raced in the slop — were forecast for Saturday.

Fortunately, close pal Mike Pegram came up with an idea to break the gloomy spell.

“He says, ‘C’mon, let’s go over to the Derby Museum and watch Real Quiet win,’” Baffert recalled.

The first time Baffert came to Churchill Downs, in 1996, his horse, Cavonnier, lost by a nose. He spent a minute that day waiting for the official results and a year suffering after they were posted. When he returned in 1997, Baffert walked over to the museum and watched a replay, up to when the camera catches him learning that Grindstone had edged Cavonnier.

It was, Baffert said at the time, “like viewing the body all over again.” But he won that year with Silver Charm, and the next with Real Quiet, which may have been more satisfying still since Pegram was the owner and the same guy who gave Baffert enough cash to step up from the quarterhorse ranks to thoroughbreds nearly 20 years ago.

They’ve been through a few life-changing events since — divorces, second marriages, even a young son in Baffert’s case — and mellowed to the point where Baffert’s wife, Jill, likes to joke that Geritol has replaced beer as their beverage of choice. Pegram is one of Lucky’s three owners and having his fellow traveler along has made the trip a lot smoother.

“We’re watching the race,” Baffert said about their visit to the museum, “and you know how people always say your life’s already written, that you just turn the pages? Well, by the time we got to the end, I started wondering, ‘How did that happen?’”

One of those pages is turning even now, thousands of miles from the backstretch at Churchill Downs. Back at the Baffert family home in Nogales, Ariz., his mother, Ellie, is gravely ill and struggling to enjoy one more Derby memory.

“His mom called me Wednesday, right after the draw and I said, ‘Aren’t you supposed to be at dialysis?’” Jill said. “And she laughed and said, ‘Yeah, but we left an hour early. The old man wanted to get back in time to watch the draw on TV.’”

Comedy courses through the entire family, but it’s muted now. There is little left in thoroughbred racing for its point man to accomplish, but there’s few doubts how badly he wants this one.

Baffert, 57, went into the Hall of Fame last August and the only thing his resume lacks is a Triple Crown, a feat no trainer has achieved since 1978. All that success made his barbs seem more pointed, put his personal life in play and set off whispers that he was big-timing the business that made him wealthy. Baffert came through the experience playful as ever, but more guarded than he was once.

“I’d like to win it for my mother. She still lights candles for me every day,” he said quietly. “This is keeping them going.”

In the next moment Baffert recalled how his father, Bill, a quarterhorse trainer himself, didn’t stop Bob from taking a year off between high school and college to chase his dream of being a jockey. At the end of that year, his mother, who never liked the idea, laid down the law. She told him either go back to school or, Baffert remembered glumly, “get a job.”

But in the moment after that, someone asked how Lucky got his name and Baffert’s eyes widened behind the ever-present sunglasses. He saw an opening and began riffing about all of Pegram’s really bad or too-bawdy suggestions for naming horses over the years and then detours to a scene where Pegram and Karl Watson, another of Lucky’s owners, wind up in Watson’s wine cellar after a bottle or two too many.

That’s when Pegram decided to try out several of his names for their colt. Watson wouldn’t bite and finally, according to Baffert’s retelling, abruptly cut him off.

“Mike, I know you’re lucky,” Watson said, then pointed at his own chest. “But you’re looking at lucky.”

Baffert is beaming, but the story gets only a few laughs.

“I’ll tell you what,” he added, brightening. Then he looked back over his shoulder, where Lucky was biding his time in a stall. “The better they run, the better the name is going to sound.”

Jim Litke is a national sports columnist for The Associated Press. Write to him at jlitke(at)ap.org