In Housebuster, Croll Rights Historical Wrong

“You have perhaps the fastest racehorse in America,” ABC commentator Jim McKay said to owner Bob Levy before his colt, Housebuster, ran in the Derby Trial Saturday. “Why will you not consider the Kentucky Derby for him?”

Levy explained to a national television audience that he and trainer Jimmy Croll thought that Housebuster was basically a sprinter, but McKay wouldn’t take no for an answer. “Well, what about the Preakness?” he demanded. And after Housebuster won the Derby Trial with an effortless 5 1/4-length victory, McKay was immediately back on the air to ask, “Well, Bob, what do you say now?”

McKay’s incredulity was understandable, because prudence and caution are qualities rarely seen at Churchill Downs in the springtime. The owners and trainers of decent 3-year-olds will rationalize, will deceive themselves, will ask horses to do the impossible to get to the Kentucky Derby. Many will go into Saturday’s Derby with horses who aren’t remotely in Housebuster’s class. Many would love to run a horse who would be in front as the field turned into the stretch. From that point, anything could happen. What trainer could resist such a chance to win America’s most famous horse race?

Jimmy Croll could, because he’s still haunted by memories of the last time he pursued the Derby with a horse who shouldn’t have been here. It was 1973, and the horse was Mr. Prospector, who might have been one of the most brilliant thoroughbreds of all time. We’ll never know.

In the spring of his 3-year-old season, in only the third start of his career, Mr. Prospector ran six furlongs in an unbelievable 1:07 4/5. “Right away the owners were talking about the Derby,” Croll said. “I tried to tell them he didn’t have enough seasoning. I kept saying, ‘We can’t run in the Derby! We can’t do it! We can’t do it!’ I wasn’t successful in dissuading them.”

So Mr. Prospector came to Kentucky, where Croll tried to transform the speedster into the classic distance runner he wasn’t cut out to be. The colt lost an allowance race in his first attempt to go a distance. Then he ran in the Derby Trial, where he was bumped around and he broke a cannon bone. He never ran again.

But at stud, Mr. Prospector proved a special animal--something that Croll had known all along. “He could have been one of the great ones; I truly believe that,” the trainer said. “I never got over it.”

In a sense, Housebuster has given Croll a chance to relive the past, and to correct it. Like Mr. Prospector, the colt has displayed brilliant speed ever since he set foot on the track. He won a seven-furlong stakes at Gulfstream Park this winter, defeating Summer Squall, the favorite for the Kentucky Derby, and Thirty Six Red, the winner of the $500,000 Wood Memorial at Aqueduct.

Yet Housebuster doesn’t have the pedigree to win the Kentucky Derby. While horses with humble pedigrees may win the Derby, horses with pure sprint pedigrees don’t. And Croll knows this.