This Day Just Wasn’t What Lukas Had in Mind

If D. Wayne Lukas were a baseball manager, he would get buried on the talk shows today.

The hard-cores in the cheap seats would boo him on sight.

His owner, stewing in a luxury box, would call him a knucklehead and wonder if he had any idea what he was doing.

Lukas made what he called “a coaching change” before the Preakness Saturday at Pimlico. It was the racing version of a crazy managerial hunch in baseball, a move that went totally against convention and left him open to criticism if it didn’t work out.

It didn’t work out.

Big time.

Lukas benched one jockey, Pat Day, in favor of another, Jerry Bailey, then watched Day win the Preakness in wire-to-wire fashion on someone else’s horse.

Oops.

“I put in a new quarterback, and the other guy came in and threw a touchdown on us,” Lukas said after Louis Quatorze won the Preakness by 3 1/4 lengths.

Edward Bennett Williams would have called Lukas “a cement head.”

Bob Irsay would have stumbled down to the locker room and fired him at halftime.

Lukas benched the most accomplished jockey of this generation, a Hall of Famer who had won three prior Preaknesses aboard Lukas-trained horses.

Day and Lukas won the race together in 1994 with Tabasco Cat.

They won the race together again in 1995 with Timber Country.

In 1996 ... you’re fired!

With teammates like that, who needs archenemies?

Lukas was infatuated with Bailey, who is on a near mythical roll with wins in the most recent Kentucky Derby, the past three Breeders’ Cup Classics and the last 13 races of Cigar’s winning streak.

Bailey rode Grindstone to victory for Lukas in the Derby two weeks ago, then found himself without a ride in the Preakness when Grindstone suddenly was retired after suffering a knee injury.

Day had ridden another Lukas horse, Prince of Thieves, to a third-place finish in the Derby. Day was counting on riding the Prince in the Preakness.

“Last Friday at 4:30 a.m., my agent checked with Wayne at his barn at Churchill Downs, and everything was fine,” Day said Saturday. “At 10:30, he was paged back to the barn and told that we no longer had the mount.”

Bailey did.

What happened in those six hours?

“I couldn’t begin to tell you,” Day said. “You should ask Wayne.”

Wayne?

“It was just a hunch,” Lukas said. “I made a gut reaction like a coach. No reflection on Pat. Pat is one of the world-class riders. We have had a lot of success together, especially at the Preakness. I never doubted that he was going to ride a tremendous race.”

According to Day, Lukas and Day saw each other several times during the past week at Churchill Downs and never discussed the firing.

“It was just, ‘Good morning, good afternoon,’ that kind of thing,” Day said.

Such “coaching changes” are just part of racing’s everyday routine, of course. Jockeys often fire horses to ride others they think are superior. Trainers often fire jockeys when more successful ones become available.

“I’ve been taken off plenty of horses,” Day said. “It’s part of the business, part of the game. No hard feelings. None whatsoever.”

So, the circumstances didn’t make this the sweetest of his five Preakness wins?

“If you need extra incentive to get motivated to ride in a Triple Crown race, you need to find another occupation,” Day said.

He has to make nice, of course; he will continue to ride good horses for Lukas, so his relationship with Lukas is money in the bank.

Don’t be fooled. Maybe he wasn’t motivated just to beat Lukas, but you can be sure he was plenty peeved about getting yanked off a high-profile mount. It’s just human nature. His boss wanted someone else.