When Around Gentlemen, Don’t Expect Etiquette

During 40 years in the saddle, Steve Willard knows what it’s like to be out of the saddle.

He has broken, and been broken by, hundreds of wild horses. He has ridden, and been ridden by, thoroughbreds on dusty tracks across the betting plains.

His jobs have caused him to sail, spill and spend more than two months nursing a broken back.

None of which have been as dangerous as what he is about to do with the favorite in today’s $1-million Santa Anita Handicap.

“Here, boy, want some carrots?”

The horse sneers at Willard as if he asked, “Here, boy, want some fingers?”

A shock of red hair falls unkempt across the horse’s face. A strange-looking left eye-- different from the right eye, with as much white as brown--glares menacingly.

From underneath flared nostrils comes a growl.

“OK, boy, want some more carrots?”

Another growl. Now the horse is nudging Willard’s empty hand, harder, harder, slapping the hand with his face, showing his teeth . . .

“That’s enough! That’s enough!”

Willard backs off, sticks his thumb in his jeans, grins.

“It’s OK to pet him, you just don’t want to turn away when you do it,” the exercise rider says. “Don’t want to lose a piece of your hand or anything.”

Meet the Southland’s most inappropriately named sports star since a Dodger manager started calling a skinny, bespectacled pitcher “Bulldog.”

Gentlemen.

A 5-foot-5, 1,200-pound jerk.

“I would just say, mischievous,” trainer Richard Mandella says.

And Albert Belle is just playful.

After several exercise riders couldn’t control Gentlemen when the horse joined Mandella’s stable last year, the trainer himself jumped aboard.

“He was bucking like a bronco, and I’d never seen that in an older horse,’ Mandella says. “So I said, ‘Let me get on him.’ ”

And?

“And it opened my eyes. He didn’t exactly throw up any white flags. I couldn’t get him to surrender. I got off. Heck if I could figure it out.”

By increasing Gentlemen’s time under saddle from 30 minutes daily to an hour, Mandella has calmed him a bit.

But arguably the best horse in the country is still one of the most ornery.

Jockey Gary Stevens, who will ride him on the rail today, will love all two minutes of it.

“It’s like everyone says about Dennis Rodman,” Stevens says. “You hate him on the other team. You love to have him on your team.”

Stevens doesn’t think it’s a coincidence that something so mean has won five consecutive races while breaking a track record at Hollywood Park.

You don’t win a race by nine lengths--as Gentlemen did in his record-setting Native Diver Handicap in December--without being intimidating.

“He has an aura about him, you can just feel it, and I believe other horses can feel it,” Stevens says. “You’ll see horses run faster times at the same distance when they are not with Gentlemen, and much slower times when he is in their race.”

That sounds crazy, but then so does a horse that intentionally runs his exercise rider toward a rail. Happens with Willard all the time.

Afraid to steer him in another direction which he might reject, which could cause him to hit the rail in protest, Willard lets him continue toward danger.

“I want to let him see the rail, at which point he should stop, which he does,” he says. “Inches away.”

And after a great deal of scolding by his rider.

“Yeah, I do a lot of cussing and yelling up there,” Willard says.

“We do yell sometimes,” Mandella says.

Gentlemen is so explosive that en route to his workouts, he is accompanied by a stable pony to steady him.

Remember when good guy Jack Haley would pal around with Rodman? Same thing.

“He pushes those stable ponies around,” Willard says. “They don’t stand a chance.”

Once Gentlemen returns to his stable, he is given no such luxury.

Some horses sleep with goats to keep them calm. Not our hero.

“He would kill it,” Willard says.

Stevens treats him like you would treat any brat, with reverse psychology.

“If he wants an inch, I give him a mile,” Steven says, smiling. “He doesn’t know how to respond to that. So he gives back the inch.”

Nobody knows when this Argentine-bred creature starting acting like such a bad horse. His owner named him Gentlemen as a call to attention, sort of like, “Gentlemen, start your engines.”

In one sense, the name works.

“He’s like driving a very fast race car,” Stevens says. “You can feel the power under him.”

In every other sense, though, it flops.

“You want to feed him?” Willard says, smiling.

Of course you do. Scared? Of a silly four-legged redhead?

Gentlemen nabs the flying carrot like a champ.