Impact of Lukas’ Style Is Being Felt in Racing Game

As hard as it is to knock success, the thoroughbred industry has always found reasons to snipe at Wayne Lukas, the maverick who has become the nation’s dominant trainer after only 10 full-time years in the business.

Still, it appears that the ridicule and revulsion with which the most conservative element of the staid and tradition-bound sport regards Lukas, the nation’s money leader six years running, is becoming tempered by respect.

The evidence is in what his rivals do, rather than in what they say.

While they continue to pick at Lukas’ highly publicized Kentucky Derby failures and equine breakdowns, his picture-perfect barns and GQ-style appearance, an increasing number of handlers also are trying -- and, in some cases, adopting -- some of his most basic theories of training.

They are making increased use of air transport for horses, spending more time organizing the business side of their stables, paying more attention to 2-year-olds and concentrating more on developing owner and public relations.

“I give the guy a lot of credit. He has changed the game,” says Brian Howlett, manager of Tartan Farm, one of the most respected breeding operations in the United States.

“He taught us how to go from covered wagons to airplanes,” adds young California trainer Gary Jones.

“I think we’re more businessmen now,” says veteran handler Mel Stute.

“(He) has helped a lot of people convince owners that running 2-year-olds is not the worst thing in the world,” adds Hall of Fame handler LeRoy Jolley. “We went through a stage where we were coddling them, keeping them on the farms. It’s much easier to convince people to spend the time and the effort and get them ready to run. He’s proved you can win a lot of money with them.”

Money. That’s the key to the grudging respect given to Lukas, a man resented for what is incorrecty interpreted as overnight success and distrusted primarily because he is an outsider.

Lukas, 52, is the son of a Wisconsin milk hauler, holds a master’s degree in education and a work background that includes teaching, coaching basketball and -- to thoroughbred bluebloods, the biggest sin of all -- training quarterhorses.

The industry’s snobbery towards Lukas has been misplaced. The sport of kings has always been just that, a hobby that usually made the rich richer without noticeably improving the lot of any of the other horsemen except an elite group of jockeys and an even smaller group of trainers.

Lukas, who spent years racing cheap horses of many breeds for three-figure pots on the midwestern fair circuit, has changed that.

In 1986, he became the first trainer to win more purse money in one year ($12.3 million) than the nation’s leading jockey (Jose Santos, with $11.3 million). He repeated and improved on that feat last year, winning more than $17.5 million in purses while Santos settled for $12.3 million.

“That’s phemonenal,” says Howlett.

Trainers continue to gripe that Lukas’ wealthy owners buy his success, and it’s true that his customers allow him to purchase an inordinately large number of well-bred, well-built and extremely expensive yearlings on their behalf each year. They also foot the bills that enable him to stock his carefully landscaped, green and white barns with the best equipment, best feed, best help -- best everything -- that money can buy.

Those facts, however, actually are a tribute, rather than an insult, to his ability. His articulate, persuasive, corporate-style patter and his show-place barns would soon pale if the owners found themselves losing money.

“I think Wayne develops the owners,” says Kiaran McLaughlin, one of Lukas’ top assistants. “I’ve seen some change. With other trainers, other owners have a lot of input. It continues like that, and pretty soon the owners are telling the trainers what to do ...

“The bottom line is that he does what he thinks is best,” McLaughlin adds. “It’s nice that Wayne has that privilege and trust.”

He earns it. Lukas’ amazing purse totals are not derived only from the stakes winners. Almost all the couple hundred horses he races each year earn their keep.

“He takes each horse as an individual and does the best he can to improve it,” said McLaughlin, who worked for three more traditional trainers before he hired on with Lukas in 1985.

As an example, McLaughlin points to Matthews Keep, who was 0-2, largely because of nervousness and an inordinate fear of the starting gate, when he arrived at Lukas’ New York stable last year.

Lukas moved the horse from a stall to an outdoor pony pen. He rejected the gate crew’s suggestion that the horse be loaded into the gate backwards or blindfolded and instead patiently repeated the loading process with the horse until it became comfortable with the routine.

“He gained 200 pounds, quit stall-walking, and since then he’s made $200,000 and is Grade III placed,” McLaughlin says. “Wayne schooled the gate crew too. They learned from him.”

Blindfolds and backing into gates are just two of the more traditional thoroughbred training methods Lukas has eschewed.

“He doesn’t work horses long distances. He doesn’t gallop long distances, and he doesn’t blow horses out, as they say, before a race,” McLaughlin says.

But people are wrong in assuming that just because Lukas has never worked for another trainer that his theories are academic hogwash. In fact, he learned the trade in much the same way his rivals did, by observing and experimenting as a grammar-school kid enamored with horses.

“People have the wrong idea, that I came out of nowhere,” Lukas says. “I was totally invoved with horses all the way through. I got my first pony when I was in the third grade. All through high school, I worked with horses, trained them, rode them.”

Most of the horses he trained were his own; some belonged to neighbors.

“I would venture to say if you would talk to the top 50 trainers in America, you won’t find any that started at the level I was at,” Lukas says. “I’m talking about starting with horses, I had three or four horses, and $400 probably would buy them all, racing for $25 and $35 pots.

“But even then, I had a high ambition level, and I asked a lot of questions. I was a kid, no threat, so the old guys answered them. I learned by osmosis, by watching the old gyps around the fairgrounds, by trial and error.

“I’m not tied to tradition because I never worked for anybody, but I probably learned more from the quarterhorsemen than if I had ...”