A NEW CLAIM TO FAME : Cutlass Reality Makes Trainer Craig Lewis a Wanted Man

The white telephone in Craig Lewis’ barn office at Hollywood Park keeps ringing--and ringing.

A reporter from New York is on the line, seeking the unabridged Craig Lewis story. Ring! Lewis puts the first caller on hold, to talk to someone from Detroit Race Course.

“Yes, it’s been considered,” Lewis says to Detroit, talking about a $300,000 race there a week from Saturday. “But I can’t commit right now that we’ll be there. Tell me, how much weight will Lost Code carry?”

The conversation ends just in time for the phone to ring again. To complete his interview, the reporter in New York had better have a roll of quarters.

Trainer Lewis has been in danger of getting a cauliflower ear with the telephone in only the last five weeks, or since Cutlass Reality joined about 40 other horses in his care. The strapping 6-year-old chestnut, after winning only 2 of his first 27 starts in 1984-86 and winning just 1 race in 14 tries last year, is racing’s fresh breath of summer, having won two major races--the Californian and the Hollywood Gold Cup--in 15 days.

The giant has become the giant killer, for in those two races, the 1,100-pound Cutlass Reality beat Kentucky Derby winners Ferdinand and Alysheba, besides Gulch and Judge Angelucci, who are also established stakes winners.

“Have you ever seen such a training job as this?” asks Harvey Cohen, an attorney and the owner of Music Merci, a 2-year-old gelding who has won his only two starts under Lewis. “Craig got Cutlass Reality just three races ago, and right away he won those two stakes with him. And the incredible thing is that he’s done it with a 6-year-old.”

With the telephone quiet at last, Lewis makes room on his desk to place the Daily Racing Form and the day’s Hollywood Park program side by side. With a pen, he begins to transfer information--such as horses running on bleeder medication for the first time--from the program to the Form. And he starts to zero in on the claiming races, those races with horses that can be bought by other trainers if they put in a claim at an established price before post time. Before the day is over, Lewis will claim, for $16,000, a filly who runs fourth in the third race.

Before Cutlass Reality, Lewis was known as a claiming trainer. His phone didn’t ring as much, he didn’t need to memorize the stakes schedules of tracks all over the country and he was asked for about one interview a year, tops. Now, he rattles off the names of six-figure--and even million-dollar--races at Detroit, Monmouth Park, Woodbine and Hawthorne, besides Hollywood Park and Del Mar. And when interviewers call from as far away as New York, it’s not collect.

Lewis is still a claiming trainer. His barn has changed slightly in character, because in addition to Cutlass Reality there are several other horses of stakes caliber, but he still has about 30 horses that came his way after he dropped a pre-race slip into a box in the racing secretary’s office.

Most trainers yearn to chuck the claiming image. It took Jack Van Berg a long time, after Gate Dancer and Alysheba came along. Bobby Frankel, who learned the claiming game in New York 20 years ago and then brought that sixth sense with him to California, hardly ever claims a horse anymore. Mike Mitchell, who has had highs and lows claiming horses in California, would love to go big time, if someone would introduce him to another Cutlass Reality.

“Any trainer would like to come to his barn in the morning and be greeted by 50 Grade I horses,” Lewis said. “But I’ve only been training on my own since 1981, and I’ve got a balanced stable. If I were 100 years old and first came across a horse like Cutlass Reality, it would be exciting.”

The careers of horse and trainer have been parallel. In 1984, as a 2-year-old, Cutlass Reality won only 1 race. Lewis, with 153 starters, won 19. The next year, Cutlass Reality won just 1 more race, and Lewis’ production slipped to 14.

This year, with Cutlass Reality winning almost half a million dollars and sending his career total to nearly a million, Lewis is the leading trainer in races won at Hollywood Park and will have about 50 wins for the year by the time the season ends July 25.

The second of three sons born to a couple of Long Beach schoolteachers, Lewis studied American history and has a law degree. But from the time he went to work for Hirsch Jacobs, when the Hall of Fame trainer wintered at Santa Anita in the 1960s, Lewis never envisioned anything other than a training career.

If anybody could have inspired a young stablehand to try claiming horses, it would have been Jacobs, who led the country in wins 11 times, largely by shuffling horses in and out of his barn. In 1928, Jacobs won 38 races, all with claimers, and 15 years later he put in a $1,500 claim for the poorly bred Stymie, who was retired with winnings of $918,000, a record at the time.

“I wouldn’t have been a very good lawyer,” Lewis said. “Working with horses is much more enjoyable. And I’m lucky, because my avocation has also become my vocation. I’m able to make a reasonable living at something I enjoy very much.”

There seems to be no accurate count of how many trainers Cutlass Reality had before he was put in Lewis’ hands, but there have been enough to fill a stretch limo. Lewis, with just a passing interest in Cutlass Reality early in his career in New York, can name at least four, and since his owner back there was John Ballis, it’s likely there were several others. Ballis, a Houston real-estate developer, played a merry game of dial-a-trainer when he raced Groovy, one of the top sprinters of this decade.

Last December, for an undisclosed amount, Ballis sold Cutlass Reality to two investment bankers--Howard Crash of Beverly Hills and Jim Hankoff of New York--and they had a relationship with Jim Benedict, a Northern California trainer who sometimes handles horses for Lewis when they run at Bay Meadows and Golden Gate Fields.

After running fourth at Golden Gate on May 1 in only the second grass race of his life, Cutlass Reality was shipped to Lewis’ barn at Hollywood Park.

The new owners seemed to be following a plan that literally worked like a million several years ago for Sam Rubin. He sent John Henry from New York to California, put him on grass and retired him a few years later with record earnings of $6.5 million. Cutlass Reality won one of two starts on grass at Hollywood, and Lewis’ options include a return to the turf, but the Californian and the Gold Cup were on dirt.

At Golden Gate, Cutlass Reality bled from the lungs and he now races on medication for that condition, besides using an analgesic for soreness in the legs. In 59 starts, the one-time $13,000 yearling, a grandson of 1967 horse-of-the- year Damascus, has been asked to run over all kinds of surfaces.

“When I first saw him, I thought he was a nice horse,” Lewis said. “He had to be, because he had made a half-million dollars, and once last year he outran a good horse like Java Gold.

“He’s big and powerful, and he has an enormous stride. He covers a lot of real estate. He’s blossomed since I got him. He seems to have regained his confidence and he’s getting better as time goes on.”

There are still the skeptics who wonder what Cutlass Reality would do against top horses at equal weights. In the Californian, he carried only 115 pounds, 11 less than Gulch, Judge Angelucci and Ferdinand, the only other horses in the race. In the Gold Cup, Cutlass Reality’s weight was 116 pounds, with Alysheba at 126 and Ferdinand at 125.

The answer to the weight question will be found in the months and races ahead. But meantime, Craig Lewis has a horse who’s dangerous every time he runs, and the trainer doesn’t have to worry about losing him because somebody drops a slip into the claiming box.