COMMENTARY : Prudence Certainly Paying Off for Housebuster

“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 next 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. The year 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 as if it were the roller derby, and he broke a cannon bone. He never ran for the roses; he never ran again at all.

But after he went to stud and became one of the most influential sires in the world, Mr. Prospector proved what a special animal he was--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 first 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. This may sound unfair and elitist, especially in a country that reveres the concept of equal opportunity for all, but the truth is inescapable. While horses with humble pedigrees may win the Derby, horses with pure sprint pedigrees don’t. Croll knows this. The trainer believes that Housebuster can be effective up to distances of a mile or thereabouts, but said that “our ultimate goal is to be the champion sprinter.”

With this goal in mind, Croll has assiduously avoided temptations that might divert him. When Housebuster was in Florida this winter, the 3-year-olds in the big-money stakes races were a rather weak group, and Housebuster probably could have beaten them even though he isn’t a distance runner. But Croll passed the 1 1/16-mile Fountain of Youth Stakes, explaining, “I think he could have won, but if he had we’d have had to go to the Florida Derby, and then if he’d run half decently he’d have to go somewhere else (the Kentucky Derby, for instance). I think it would have been the wrong thing to do.”

So Croll plans to spend most of the year finding appropriate spots at one mile or shorter for Housebuster. The Derby Trial, with a weak field and a $75,000 purse, looked like an ideal place to test the colt at a mile for the first time. It was.

Housebuster battled head and head down the backstretch with another speedster, Falling Sky, but while his rival was under a drive, Housebuster was cruising. He sped the first half-mile on this dull racing strip in 45 3-5 seconds and jockey Craig Perret had him under wraps as he cruised to victory over Private School. Falling Sky was third.

“He was a powerhouse,” marveled Keith Allen, who rode the runner-up. Housebuster covered the mile in 1:37 3/5, a good time on this track, considering that cheap horses in the last race of the day required 1:43 3/5 to go that distance.

But the difference between running this distance and one-quarter mile farther constitutes a whole new game, and requires a whole different type of horse. Casual fans may not understand this, and optimistic horsemen at the Derby might not either, but Levy and Croll do. When they put Housebuster on a van and ship him out of Churchill Downs, they won’t have any doubts about the wisdom of their decision.