Despite Injury, Larry’s Legend Grows : Horse racing: Trainer Craig Lewis says the Santa Anita Derby-winning colt, recovering from surgery, still gets fan mail.

To find the trainer of Larry The Legend on the Del Mar backstretch, merely head for the brightest fire-engine red T-shirt. The 3-year-old colt is out of sight for now, but never out of mind.

“A lawyer from Kentucky sent us some of these,” Craig Lewis said. “Never met the man. But he’s typical of the people who got wrapped up in this horse. His following hasn’t diminished. During Hollywood Park, we’d still get letters, people wanting pictures of him.”

Lewis’ T-shirt reads “Larry The Legend” across the chest, in black lettering, with crossed baseball bats and a baseball underneath. It’s a nice touch, a professional job. The colt is named after Lewis’ brother, an Orange County attorney who managed a couple of championship Little League baseball teams from Long Beach.

Larry The Legend is back at Santa Anita, walking around the shedrow a couple of times a day, recovering from knee surgery. In a perfect world, Lewis will have him ready to run at Santa Anita this winter, in the three-race Strub series for 4-year-olds.

From the day last October when Lewis was able to buy Larry The Legend for $2,500, the result of a longtime client filing for bankruptcy, the colt gave him nothing but pleasure. Making his first start on New Year’s Eve, he finished second to Petionville, a future stakes winner, before reeling off four consecutive victories, climaxed by a narrow victory over Afternoon Deelites in the Santa Anita Derby.

A month later, Larry The Legend would have gone to Churchill Downs and been one of the favorites in the Kentucky Derby, but a couple of weeks after the Santa Anita Derby a chip was discovered in his left knee and it was surgically removed. Larry The Legend’s total 3-year-old record will read as it does now: Five starts, four victories, one second and earnings of $548,425.

From California, Lewis watched as Thunder Gulch won two-thirds of the Triple Crown--the Kentucky Derby and the Belmont Stakes--and the other Wayne Lukas trainee, Timber Country, captured the Preakness. Larry The Legend never faced Thunder Gulch, but in the Santa Anita Derby he beat Timber Country by 1 1/2 lengths.

“There’s not much point in trying to figure how your horse would have done had he been there,” Lewis said. “But you still do it, don’t you? I’m forced to say that they would have had to reckon with him. He’s as game as they come.”

It’s also no more than a theoretical exercise in trying to forecast how Larry The Legend will do in 1996.

“You don’t know until they actually come back,” Lewis said. “The chip was medium-sized and it came out pretty nice [for veterinarian Greg Ferraro]. But I’ll say this: This horse’s heart is a long way from his knee.”

Some barns have been known to collapse when the star is sidelined, but the Lewis outfit had a banner season at Santa Anita, soldiered through a so-so meeting at Hollywood Park and is ready to pick up the tempo at Del Mar.

“We won with 32% of our starters at Santa Anita [20 victories out of 62 starts],” Lewis, 48, said. “I don’t think I’ll ever duplicate a meeting like that.”

Based on victories, the Lewis barn finished in a tie for seventh at Santa Anita, but no one with any significant amount of starters had a higher winning percentage.

At Hollywood Park, the victory clip dipped to 16%, with eight from 51 starters.