THE BUTTON MAN : Kentucky Derby Field of 17 Is a Real Load for Churchill Downs Starter Tom Wagoner and His Crew

If a poll were taken of the 125,000 fans who will attend Saturday’s Kentucky Derby, most of them would probably say that the toughest job in the race belongs to the jockeys, those little men who weigh between 100 and 116 pounds and must direct horses weighing 1,000 pounds or more through heavy traffic for 1 miles.

For a jockey, under a magnifying glass because of the importance of a race that will be watched by millions on television, the livin’ is seldom easy at Churchill Downs. There are hazards not found at other races. One year a jockey who finished last could, honestly, claim that his mount had been struck by a flying beer can.

There is a tougher job than riding in the Derby, though. It belongs to Tom Wagoner and a crew of more than a dozen men who work with him.

Wagoner is the official starter at the track. He occupies a stand just to the front of and inside the starting gate and presses a hand-held electric button that opens the gates and sends the field on its way.

The hard part for Wagoner and his assistant starters will be the loading of the 17 horses, a field that will probably be larger than any other race this year.

There are two starting gates, because the largest gate at Churchill Downs will accommodate only 14 horses. The horses, still young, inexperienced 3-year-olds, are facing a crowd that is larger and more raucous than any they’ve ever seen.

The gate crew has souvenirs of previous Derbies and other races--broken bones, scars, welts and gnarled fingers that came from horses who got excited and even ornery while being loaded.

Wagoner is a 55-year-old Kentuckian who grew up in the Lexington area and has been around race tracks all his life. His goal is to start the Derby less than two minutes after the first horse has been escorted into his stall. The longer a horse has to stand in the gate, the greater the chance that he’ll get temperamental and not break properly.

Wagoner could have been someone out of the cast of “High Noon.” He’s tall, silver-haired and wears cowboy boots about as big as Bill Shoemaker.

Wagoner says he even met his two-minute goal in 1974’s centennial Derby, which drew a record field of 23 horses.

That was Wagoner’s first Derby as the starter. He has worked all over the Midwest, and has served as the starter at Oaklawn Park in Hot Springs, Ark., and Keeneland in Lexington as well as at Churchill Downs.

After he decided that training horses wasn’t going to provide a sufficient livelihood, Wagoner worked his way up through the ranks as an assistant starter and has those inevitable souvenirs from that job. Some of his fingers aren’t as straight as they once were, and under that full head of gray hair is a scar he collected at Hawthorne, near Chicago, where a horse slammed him into the gate, causing a wound that took 18 stitches to close.

“The horse’s name was Bold Favorite,” Wagoner said. “One of (trainer) Del Carroll’s. The reason I remember is that he turned out to be a pretty good horse. If you’re going to get hurt, you’d just as soon it be a good one rather than a bad one.”

Wagoner anticipates that this year’s Derby field should be reasonably easy to load. He has reviewed tapes of earlier races by the Derby starters, and pored over Daily Racing Form charts of the races.

“Demons Begone (the Derby favorite) is very good in the gate,” Wagoner said. “I had him at Oaklawn. His trainer (Phil Hauswald) brings him out and stands him in the gate between races. He did get a trifle squirmy in the gate before one of his races in Arkansas, though.”

Wagoner will receive requests from trainers regarding the way they want their horses to be handled in the gate.

“The jockeys help an awful lot once the horses get in there,” Wagoner said. “And since most of these jocks are the game’s top-notch riders, you’re usually in good hands.”

In the 1977 Derby, heavily favored Seattle Slew, who went on to win the Triple Crown, broke badly and swerved to the outside, bumping the horse next to him.

“I didn’t think his break was that bad,” Wagoner said. “He got squeezed at the start and then his rider (Jean Cruguet) took back, which made it look worse than what it was.”

Spectacular Bid won the 1979 Derby despite being ridden by a fidgety Ronnie Franklin.

“Franklin was nervous,” Wagoner said. “I had to talk to him through the P.A. microphone that I usually use to give instructions to the crew. Then Bid was paying more attention to the man alongside him than he was to breaking. He stood like a champ, but then he didn’t break too good.”

In 1985, the owners of Eternal Prince, who included George Steinbrenner, were critical of the gate crew after their horse broke sluggishly. Eternal Prince, who was expected to be one of the pace setters, was never in contention and finished 12th in a 13-horse field.

“The horse was looking down the track just before the start,” Wagoner said. “But I don’t think he had any reason for not breaking sharp. Maybe he just wasn’t paying attention. There’s not much you can do except send off the field when it looks like everybody’s standing right.”

In 1981, after Pleasant Colony won the Derby and Preakness, he finished third in the Belmont, missing the Triple Crown. The Pleasant Colony camp said that a CBS cameraman, who was stationed inside the starting gate, distracted the horse.

On Saturday, ABC will use two unmanned cameras on the gate--one looking across at the lineup of horses and another looking down on the field as it begins the race.

“There’s a lot more commotion around the gate in the Derby then you’ll find in a regular race,” Wagoner said. “There’ll be, like, 100 photographers there.

“The thing you don’t want to be in starting the Derby is over-cautious. My responsibility is getting a good start, not helping television.

“If they ask me to do anything that jeopardizes the horses, it will fall on deaf ears. I’m sure not going to sit on a field just so ABC can come back from a commercial.”

Roger Nagel, 43, will be an assistant starter Saturday for his ninth Derby. He has loaded the favorite the last six years, and they all have lost. Sometimes, a trainer will tip an assistant starter a few hundred dollars after winning the Derby, although that practice is frowned on by the stewards.

Ron Adcock, 35, has been a gate loader for the Derby since 1982. That year he handled the winner, Gato Del Sol, and he was also with Ferdinand last year.

Gato Del Sol broke from post 18 in a 19-horse field and is the only horse to win the Derby after breaking from the auxiliary gate.

“Being way outside, he didn’t have to stand there very long,” Adcock said.

“When the (starting) bell rang, I just let him go and kicked him in the butt on the way out.”

Nagel has suffered two dislocated shoulders, two broken elbows, broken ribs and assorted hand injuries, none in the Derby.

Wagoner assigns his assistant starters to horses he thinks they fit, much the way trainers pick jockeys for horses. Churchill Downs’ gate crew normally consists of eight men, so others are brought in from Keeneland, a track that ended its season a week ago. On Saturday, a blacksmith from the Churchill Downs backstretch will also serve as a gate man.

In his 13 Derbies, Wagoner can recall only two horses--Spectacular Bid and Prince Thou Art, who was sixth in 1975--who went into the gate without help from an assistant starter.

Trainer LeRoy Jolley considered blindfolding Mogambo to get him into the gate last year, then changed his mind. Jim Holley, another assistant starter, says that trainers are more likely to use blindfolds on horses in New York than they are in Kentucky.

The bad part about Wagoner’s job Saturday is that his stand is only about 10 feet above the ground and he won’t be able to see much of the race until the field reaches the second turn and heads through the stretch.

“But that’s all right,” Wagoner said. “Some of those stands are high enough to give you a nosebleed. If you ever fell off that one at Keeneland, you’d break your neck.”