Big East Comes to Santa Anita : Racing: Dehere, named after the Clipper rookie, is the 2-year-old pride of New York.

Bob Brennan recently visited St. Benedict’s Prep School in the inner city of Newark, N.J., where he and his father had studied.

Whenever he goes back to the school, Brennan is struck by the change.

“When I went there, you worried about getting a bloody nose,” Brennan said. “Now, you worry about getting shot.”

Brennan’s younger brother, Kevin, was shot and killed in New Jersey in an apparent robbery 26 years ago, leaving behind a child and his pregnant wife. Brennan’s mother, 53, died a few days later--”of a broken heart,” a doctor said--and illegal handguns have been Brennan’s demons ever since.

About six weeks ago, a few days before Dehere, a 2-year-old bred by Brennan, was to run in the Futurity Stakes at Belmont Park, the colt’s owner stood under the stately oaks that grace the walking ring at the New York track.

“Walk just a few blocks from here and you’ll get a reality check,” Brennan said.

The 49-year-old Brennan has answered his reality check with another kind of check, for $1 million. Earlier this year, Brennan, a graduate of Seton Hall and a member of that university’s board of directors at South Orange, N.J., started the Dehere Foundation. It is named after the horse who is named after Terry Dehere, the former Seton Hall basketball star who is a Clipper rookie. Brennan has pledged all of Dehere’s purses to the foundation, guaranteeing at least the $1 million.

“The purpose of the foundation is to educate inner-city young people and to get guns out of their hands,” Brennan said.

“We’re both from the inner cities,” Brennan said of Terry Dehere, who grew up in Jersey City. “The senseless violence that’s being perpetrated by kids’ easy access to guns appalls both of us.”

Brennan’s Dehere, winner of five of six starts, has already earned $595,912 and probably will be the shortest-priced favorite in the seven Breeders’ Cup races at Santa Anita on Saturday.

Chris McCarron, Dehere’s jockey, says the colt is the best 2-year-old he has ever ridden. And Reynaldo Nobles, the 56-year-old Cuban who has trained Brennan’s horses since the early 1980s, pulled out half of a torn $100 bill after one of Dehere’s races at Saratoga. Ten years ago, Nobles and a friend had split the bill, agreeing to tape it together when the trainer came up with a horse good enough to bet in the Kentucky Derby.

Dehere has been favored in all six of his races--going off at less than even money five times. After breaking his maiden at Monmouth Park on June 30 in his first race, he won the Saratoga Special, the Sanford and the Hopeful Stakes during a 32-day period at the upstate New York track. No other horse had swept those three races since Campfire in 1916.

Going for his fifth in a row, Dehere was bet down to 2-5 in the Futurity at Belmont Park on Sept. 18. The track was sloppy and Holy Bull, a horse not eligible for the Breeders’ Cup, beat Dehere by a half-length.

“It was the track that got him beat,” said McCarron, who went through five pairs of goggles as the mud kept hitting him and his mount in the face. “He was really slipping and sliding. He was actually running like he couldn’t see where he was going.”

Dehere also had traction problems, having lost a shoe early in the race, as he had the day he won the Saratoga Special.

A month later, on dry ground at Belmont, Dehere was 3-10, kept his shoes on and won the one-mile Champagne Stakes by four lengths.

Brennan bred Dehere in a mating of Deputy Minister, the best horse he has ever raced, and Sister Dot, a daughter of Secretariat who won four races in four years, none of them stakes.

In 1981, Deputy Minister was champion 2-year-old male in North America and horse of the year in Canada, but early the next year he suffered a wrenched knee in Florida and didn’t run in the Kentucky Derby. His racing career ended in 1984 after 12 victories and purses of almost $700,000.

“Reynaldo kept Deputy Minister together with sticks and glue,” Brennan said. “He never fully recovered from that injury early in his 3-year-old year. Dehere has the same confident demeanor that Deputy Minister had. Deputy Minister used to come into the paddock and then plant his feet, and scan left and right as if he was making an announcement. Dehere had that same confidence, almost a cockiness, before he ran in the Champagne.”

Brennan is not without his own self-assurance. Starting with two employees in 1974, he formed First Jersey Securities, a company that grew to 1,200 employees and half a million clients. When Garden State Park closed after a major fire in 1977, Brennan and his shareholders in International Thoroughbred Breeders rebuilt the track for $180 million. When the new Garden State opened in 1985, it was billed as “The track for the 21st Century.”

Garden State was barely open when Brennan introduced a four-race bonus series that at first infuriated the racing Establishment. Any horse winning the Kentucky Derby and three races at Brennan’s track, among them the Jersey Derby, would earn a $2-million bonus.

The first year of the bonus, 1985, Spend A Buck swept the series. The Jersey Derby, the final race, was scheduled after the Kentucky Derby and so close to the Preakness at Pimlico that Spend A Buck skipped the Triple Crown race to shoot for the Garden State bonus. Chick Lang, then the general manager at Pimlico, put a donkey in the stall that had been reserved for Spend A Buck, and began referring to Brennan as “that snake-oil salesman from New Jersey.”

Two years later, the Triple Crown tracks--Churchill Downs, Pimlico and Belmont Park--announced their own inducements, offering $5 million to a horse for sweeping the races and a $1-million bonus to the horse that runs in all three and earns the most points.

Competition from casinos in Atlantic City and other tracks proved too much for Garden State to overcome. The track has lost an estimated $100 million since it opened, the four-race bonus series has vanished and the Jersey Derby, a $1-million race when Spend A Buck won it, was run this year on grass for only $150,000.

Brennan has reportedly bought $18 million of the track’s stock, and after suggesting late this year that Garden State might close, now says that there will be racing there next year.

“This year we’ve had the best positive cash flow we’ve ever had,” Brennan said. “And the best news is that we’re finally debt-free.”

Besides Lang, the business publications Forbes and Barron’s have also taken shots at Brennan’s free-wheeling style, and the Securities and Exchange Commission has been investigating Brennan since the 1970s.

“The SEC’s two cases were dismissed in 1984,” Brennan said. “Now they’ve brought up another case that I think is the same as one that was dismissed. It’s an abuse of power. Double jeopardy will be one of my defenses.”

One of Brennan’s investments, a workers’ compensation medical firm based in Culver City, has caused Brennan considerable grief. Called Primedex Corp., it has been investigated by local and federal authorities.

“The company was mired in potential problems when we got there,” Brennan said. “Being associated with it has been like walking around with hand grenades in both hands. We’ve decided to terminate the business at the California end and I’ve brought in a new chairman to turn things around.”