Kentucky Derby Diary : 19-Month-Old Pulls for 3-Year-Old

On Friday, Elliott Hunter Diaz, 19 months old, is flying with a nurse from Miami to Louisville, where he will watch his first Kentucky Derby. He will be part of a crowd of about 130,000--most of them older--at Churchill Downs.

Young Elliott doesn’t read the Daily Racing Form yet, but he’s got his horse picked out for the Derby. That would be Spend a Buck, who’s owned by Dennis and Linda Diaz, who adopted Elliott two days after he was born.

In Florida, where the Diazes live, people under 18 aren’t allowed to attend the races, but Elliott has seen Spend a Buck run on television. “Go, Bucky, go,” he’s been known to shout at the screen.

The Diazes, who have three children ranging from 13 to 18 by previous marriages, weren’t really thinking about expanding their family when a lawyer they didn’t know called them about two years ago.

“He knew a young woman who was pregnant by a Puerto Rican man,” Linda Diaz said. “Because our last name was Diaz, he thought we were Latins. But of course we don’t look Latin at all. But we were still accepted as the parents. And you know what? We’re gonna do it (adopt a child) again. We just love having this one and we want another one. It’s like having grandkids, except they’re really your kids.”

Elliott was named after Elliott Fuentes, a friend who was instrumental in getting Dennis Diaz into the racing business a couple of years ago. The child’s middle name, Hunter, was Linda’s idea.

“We wanted something horsey,” she said. “Dennis didn’t like it at first. But I convinced him when I said, ‘It’ll look just perfect on a name plate in front of the President’s desk some day.’ ”

After naming their adopted son Hunter, the Diazes named their 83-acre farm the same thing. A former cattle ranch near Tampa, Hunter Farm has a six-furlong training track, a 32-stall training barn and a 12-stall broodmare barn.

Spend a Buck’s dam, Belle de Jour, who won only one race and $3,163 and never produced a stakes winner until this Derby colt, is at Hunter Farm. Bred on Feb. 13 to Buckaroo, Spend a Buck’s sire and a son of Buckpasser, 1966 horse of the year, Belle de Jour will drop a foal early next year who will be either a full brother or full sister to Spend a Buck.

Fate didn’t bring Dennis and Linda Diaz together before their marriage seven years ago. “I picked up Dennis in a Tampa bar,” Linda said. “He’s my Renaissance man (successful in insurance, real estate and construction, and now, virtually overnight, horse racing). It proves that my mother was wrong when she said you can never find a good man in a bar. Of course, she was wrong about sex, too.”

Dennis Diaz put together a syndicate--about 20 people--that has paid $1 million for lifetime breeding rights to Buckaroo, who had been standing at Greentree Farm near Lexington, Ky. The stallion was owned by Happy Valley Farm.

“The 40 shares sold out in 24 hours,” Diaz said. “There was a waiting list for 43 more shares. I’ll say one thing for the sellers; with that kind of demand, they could have doubled the price and got it, but they didn’t.”

While most thoroughbred investors can go forever without buying or developing a top horse, Diaz seems to have the Midas touch. Spend a Buck, who cost $12,500, was the second horse Diaz ever owned. But the Spend a Buck bunch doesn’t do everything right. They brought their horse to the Derby, after he had won the Garden State Stakes April 20, under a misapprehension. They thought that a win Saturday would yield the Derby purse, approximately $500,000, plus $1 million, the first half of a $2-million bonus being offered by Garden State Park.

It wasn’t until April 26, four days after Spend a Buck had arrived at Churchill Downs, that the Diazes and trainer Cam Gambolati realized that they must win the Jersey Derby May 27 in order to qualify for either bonus. A win in both the Kentucky Derby and the Jersey Derby would give them the $2 million.

That would be a big payday for even such wealthy people as the Diazes, but for Bobby Velez, Spend a Buck’s 38-year-old exercise rider, it would be the windfall of a lifetime. A career racetracker, Velez gets 1% of Spend a Buck’s earnings. Money that the 3-year-old colt might bring him would enable Velez to expand his own racing stable, which currently consists of no more than a 4-year-old gelding that he and a friend bought for $1,500 at Delaware Park.

Early Wednesday morning, shortly after a driving, 10-minute rainstorm that left standing water along the rail at Churchill Downs, Velez got on Spend a Buck for a half-mile workout. Clockers caught the colt in :47, fastest time of the day at that distance.

Earlier, Chief’s Crown, the Derby favorite, had worked in the rain and was timed in :47 3/5.

“As soon as Chief’s Crown finished his work, the rain just stopped as quickly as it started,” Gambolati said. “It was like a miracle.”

It won’t take a miracle for Spend a Buck to win the Derby, just a superlative effort by a colt who will try to sprint 1 miles. Elliott Hunter Diaz can hardly wait.