Miller-Mellon Exacta Pays Dividends for Old Money : Horse racing: With the clock running out on their association, 71-year-old trainer and 85-year-old owner win at Churchill Downs with Sea Hero.

Mack Miller figures his run of good luck started about 50 years ago on a gangplank in a Seattle harbor.

“I had one foot on a ship heading for Japan,” Miller recalled the morning before Sea Hero gave him his first Kentucky Derby victory, “and the CO says, ‘Wait a minute. We don’t need two staff sergeants. We’ll toss a coin.’ ”

Guess who won?

Miller can’t recall if it was heads or tails. But, like so many of the moves he has made in an almost seamless 44-year career, it was right on the money. The native Kentuckian made an about-face and left the ship before the commanding officer changed his mind. Miller played out the rest of World War II running the base printing shop, then mustered out to begin writing his own considerable history in thoroughbred racing.

The culmination came on Saturday, when Miller left Sea Hero’s peek-a-boo blinkers in the barn, strapped on the colt’s win-a-lot bridle and won the Derby for his patron of 16 years, philanthropist Paul Mellon.

“I’ve always felt like I’ve gone through life under a lucky cloud,” Miller said. After watching the huge field part for Sea Hero on Saturday, no one could argue.

The Miller-Mellon relationship is a throwback to the days of private stables supplied with the regal bloodstock of wealthy American industrialists and businessmen. Since 1977, Miller has trained only those horses bred by Mellon--good, bad or indifferent.

The Mellon horses have done most of their winning in New York, where Miller reigns over a vast barn with its own cottage living quarters and covered jogging ring.

“When I agreed to go to work for Mr. Mellon”--Miller, 71, always says “Mister” when referring to the 85-year-old Mellon--”I had 24 horses in my Belmont Park barn and eight of them were stakes winners. But how could I say no?”

How indeed, when the Mellon legacy already included such American champions as Arts And Letters, Fort Marcy, Run The Gantlet and Key To The Mint, along with Mill Reef, winner of the 1971 Epsom Derby and Arc de Triomphe. There was a salary, job security and a steady flow of talent coming from Mellon’s 4,000-acre Rokeby Farm in Virginia.

The typical thoroughbred trainer these days is more often a frayed bundle of nerves, sweating bullets under the stress of pressure from belt-tightening owners in a highly competitive business. The 30-year-olds act twice their age, the 40-year-olds are prematurely gray and the 50-year-olds are looking for ways to retire early.

Because of Mellon’s benevolent, hands-off approach, Miller glides through life as if he were heading for a tee time, rather than handling millions of dollars worth of horseflesh. Not even the hyped-up challenge for Mellon and Miller to at long last win a Kentucky Derby could rattle the implacable trainer.

“You can’t force it,” Miller observed. “These are animals, and you can’t make them do something they’re not prepared to do.”

Still, with Mellon scaling back his breeding operation in recent years, the clock was definitely ticking on a Miller-Mellon victory in the Kentucky Derby. They have had several top stakes winners during their association--among them handicap star Fit to Fight and turf star Dance of Life--but they could never seem to develop a top 2-year-old into a Derby horse.

Every summer, a Rokeby hotshot would surface in New York, then disappear, usually because of injury: Java Gold, Red Ransom, Eastern Echo and, last year, England Expects, who resurfaced this spring to win easily on Friday’s Churchill Downs program.

Java Gold was the best of them. He was back in action during the summer of his 1986 3-year-old season, won the Travers at Saratoga, then won major races the following year. But even to a New York-oriented stable like Miller-Mellon, the Travers is not the Kentucky Derby.

“I’m delighted to have finally won the Darby ,” Mellon said late Saturday afternoon, giving the pronunciation an English spin. “I mean Derby.”

“But it is Mack Miller who deserves 99% of the credit.”