Lukas Seems to Have a Way With the Ladies

When you talk of a great ladies’ man of history, you probably have to start with Don Juan, Marc Antony, Porfirio Rubirosa, Aly Khan or Errol Flynn.

Then, you have to put Darrell Wayne Lukas in there.

You look at Wayne Lukas and it doesn’t show. Oh, he has these dark-eyed good looks, a ready smile, olive skin, salt-and-pepper hair. But he probably can’t even dance. And he’s hardly the type to show up beneath your balcony with a guitar in hand and a rose in his teeth.

But he has a whole stableful of females who knock themselves out for him, will do whatever he wants. When he leaves home in the morning, he visits each one of them. He pampers them, whispers sweet nothings in their ears, romances them, promises them anything--then turns them loose to go out and make millions for him, which they do with a will, and all they ask in return is that he buy them dinner and pat them on the nose once in a while.

Don Juan would be awed. Porfirio Rubirosa might join a monastery.

It’s not that Wayne is a two-timer. His wife, Shari, encourages his double life. Because it’s not philandering, it’s horse training. It’s not a soap opera, it’s the sport of kings.

Wayne Lukas just knows something about the care and handling of female race horses that the other trainers do not. The evidence is overwhelming. Wayne Lukas was a trainer of quarter horses, those graduate cow ponies who can run harder for 440 yards than any living creature with a saddle on it. Then, he got a pretty female named Terlingua, a daughter of the great Secretariat, who was beginning to prove to be something of a dud as a sire. Not when Wayne got through with Big Sec’s daughter. Terlingua (and Lukas) almost made him father of the year.

Lukas moved on to Landaluce, a filly who died tragically after beating colts and giving promise she might have gone on doing it throughout her career.

Lukas then turned his skills to a bonnie pair of young ladies named Althea and Life’s Magic, good enough so that Althea won the Arkansas Derby and became a 2 1/2-1 favorite to win the Kentucky Derby, and she and Life’s Magic became the first entry of fillies in the modern history of the Derby.

Lukas then prepped Lady’s Secret to terrorize filly-and-mare fields from coast to coast, and not surprisingly, Sacahuista won the Distaff in the Breeders’ Cup last fall.

But Lukas never put a more gorgeous specimen on a race track than the fair lady he unveiled in the Santa Anita Derby Saturday afternoon.

If Winning Colors were human, she’d be climbing trees and have frogs in her pockets and be begging the boys to let her play second base--or fullback. She’s actually got freckles. She couldn’t make up her mind whether she wanted to be black or gray at birth, and she has these spots all over her back and face. Around a race track, they call it “roan,” but if she were a dog, they’d call her “Spot.”

What she did to the boys in the 51st running of the Santa Anita Derby Saturday was humiliating. It wasn’t a race, it was a parade. She didn’t win it, she took it over. She toyed with the best boy horses the West has to offer as if they were a field of burros carrying frying pans uphill.

She wasn’t even breathing hard when it was over. She came down the stretch under a hand ride looking for more horses to beat. She did it pretty much on her own. She isn’t a filly, she’s Superwoman. If she were an athlete, she’d be in a front court, batting cleanup, or dominating women’s golf. She’s 16-3 hands, which translates into power forward, and she’s nearly 1200 pounds. You’d give her the ball on the goal line.

She didn’t beat much Saturday. It’s an article of faith around a race track that if you take eight cheap horses and run them against each other eight times, you’ll get eight different winners. Well, in the field at the Santa Anita Derby Saturday, you had a whole bunch of horses who can’t even beat each other consistently. You had Mi Preferido who beat Purdue King who beat What A Diplomat who beat Mi Preferido. You had Ruhlmann, who never beat anybody but came within a second of the world record at Bay Meadows in January, then went to Florida and finished eighth, 20 lengths back. You had Tejano, who finished first, 2 1/2 lengths ahead of Purdue King, one week and third, a length behind him, another.

You handicap this bunch with a ouija board. A Hatpin Derby.

Until, along comes Super Filly.

For Lukas, it was a case of love at first sight. Well, almost.

In movies, the perfect figure is a 10. When Wayne Lukas grades horses at yearling sales for Owner Gene Klein, his evaluation tops out at about 9.

He gave Winning Colors a high 8. Then he got a clock on her. She went to an 11.

She is only the third female to win the Santa Anita Derby. Will she go on to become the third to win the Kentucky Derby?

It’s a good thing she’s a tall horse because it’s a tall order. The last glamour horse Lukas took back there, Althea, finished 19th.

Female horses are not supposed to have their minds on racing in the spring of the year.

Part of Lukas’ secret of his success with fillies is his confidence in his fair ladies. If females can go to the stars, they can go to Kentucky. Where the boys are. Where the boys will get beat (Wayne thinks).

It’s probably a good thing Wayne’s girls can’t talk. Because in expressing confidence in his lady to evoke national support, Wayne was incautious enough to say, “Every woman working on somebody’s nails some place, every girl working in a beauty parlor, every waitress in every restaurant is going to be rooting for her.” If Winning Colors could talk--and maybe she can--she’d probably bring Wayne up short with “Hey! I don’t do nails or windows or rinse hair or bus tables. I just beat men at their own game!” What Wayne has to do is try a little tenderness with the two-legged breed of female, too.