.Da Hoss Whisperer

Five weeks after Da Hoss’ astounding win in the Breeders’ Cup Mile, trainer Michael Dickinson is still saying he lucked out that sunny November day at Churchill Downs.

“I was very lucky,” Dickinson said. “I had a courageous horse, and he was right on the right day.”

Branch Rickey, the baseball pioneer, defined luck as the residue of design. Some day in the hereafter, Rickey and Dickinson should meet. Oh, sure, Dickinson might have been lucky when Da Hoss won his first Breeders’ Cup Mile, at Woodbine in 1996. But it was more than luck when he brought back Da Hoss, off only one race in two years, to win the Mile again in Kentucky. And it was more than luck this year when Dickinson twice beat some of the best grass horses in the country with Cetewayo, a colt who was running against $13,000 claimers not that long ago.

There aren’t any four-leaf clovers to be found at Dickinson’s new 200-acre Maryland farm, only horses that have been rejuvenated via the innovative ways of this former English steeplechase rider. “The biggest comeback since Lazarus,” NBC racecaller Tom Durkin said after Da Hoss, a 6-year-old gelding, overcame the apparent winner, Hawksley Hill, in the final strides of the most recent Breeders’ Cup.

At Tapeta Farm these days, Da Hoss has been reunited in Dickinson’s open turnout paddocks with his old sidekick, Business Is Boomin, another recovery project who has been sprinkled with the 48-year-old trainer’s magic dust. In 1997, five years to the day after his previous race, Business Is Boomin won a race at Garden State Park, and Dickinson seems almost as proud of this turnaround as he is of his work with Da Hoss.

“Business Is Boomin won three races in 1997 and three more this year,” Dickinson said. “Not bad for a 9-year-old gelding. And we still feel he has some more races in him.”

Dickinson’s philosophy is to keep horses happy and train them over surfaces that are kind to those thin legs that must support 1,000-pound bodies traveling at speeds of 35 mph. The extra-large 40 stalls at Tapeta--the Latin word for carpet--have outside windows, which give the horses a pleasant view they wouldn’t get at a racetrack. On the other side, 20 of the stalls are enclosed by “friendship grills,” which are rodded walls that give the horses good views of other horses.

At Tapeta, a three-year Dickinson project that opened this year, horses can exercise on three different grass surfaces plus work on a seven-furlong, slightly uphill dirt gallop.

“Noah’s Ark” is the name of one of the grass surfaces. “Yes, Noah’s Ark,” Dickinson said. “It can take rain for 40 days and 40 nights, and they can still run over it.”

George Pratt, an MIT professor who has studied racing surfaces for decades, told Blood-Horse magazine that horses running over Dickinson’s dirt gallop experience only half the pounding they might sustain from other surfaces. The gallop is made up of half sand, 5% rubber and a variety of other components that Dickinson declines to identify.

“I have a passion for surfaces,” Dickinson said. That’s an understatement. Before Da Hoss’ 1996 Breeders’ Cup win, Joan Wakefield, Dickinson’s close friend of more than 15 years and now his assistant trainer and business partner, bought a pair of shoes with five-inch stiletto heels and they poked around the course at Woodbine to find the patches where the running would be best. Before this year’s Breeders’ Cup, he walked the grass course at Churchill Downs six times, testing the turf for the most reliable going.

In order for Da Hoss to win two $1-million races against world-class opposition, this brittle horse required all the special care and preparation Dickinson and his staff could muster. There probably won’t be any Eclipse awards waiting for Da Hoss and Dickinson, but for one-shot training accomplishments in 1998--or any year--Dickinson’s feat arguably stands alone.

“Michael is the only trainer who could have done what he’s done with this horse,” said Jack Preston, one of Da Hoss’ owners. “It’s amazing to me that the horse is still here.”

Da Hoss was born with an infected hoof, and his catalog of ailments has multiplied since then. Bone spurs. Tendon problems. And now, acute arthritis.

“You don’t know which wheel is going to fall off next,” Dickinson said.

His groom, Miguel Piedra, spends six hours a day rubbing and massaging Da Hoss. Four veterinarians have been kept on call. In September, Da Hoss was lame for three weeks, but Dickinson had him ready for a prep race in early October, and he won at 1 1/8 miles at Colonial Downs in Virginia. It was the first time Da Hoss had won going that far since the Del Mar Derby in 1995. Six weeks before Del Mar, in the Swaps Stakes on dirt at Hollywood Park, Da Hoss had finished second to Thunder Gulch, the Kentucky Derby and Belmont winner, and then collapsed twice, of dehydration, before he was vanned back to the barn. Dickinson brought his own water for Da Hoss when he won at Del Mar.

“It’s been a roller-coaster ride,” Dickinson said. “But when we got to the Breeders’ Cup the second time, there was light at the end of the tunnel. This is the best game because of the horses. They run their hearts out, and they run because they love it.”

The Yorkshire-born Dickinson comes from a family of horsemen. As an amateur and professional steeplechase jockey, he won 378 races in 11 years. He began training jumpers in 1980 and led England in wins for three years. On one day in 1982, he started 21 horses countrywide and won with 12 of them. In 1983, Dickinson started five horses in the Cheltenham Gold Cup, a preeminent jumping race, and they were the first five finishers.

Elected to England’s Steeplechase Hall of Fame, Dickinson moved on to the flats, signing a five-year contract with Robert Sangster at a time when the British soccer-pools tycoon was buying, breeding and racing dozens of the world’s best-bred horses. Dickinson went to the post with some fine tutelage--two summers with Ireland’s legendary Vincent O’Brien, well-stirred with a six-week stint at Santa Anita with the American icon, Charlie Whittingham.

The job with Sangster lasted six months. “We had a bad season and I was fired,” Dickinson said. “Then a U.S. veterinarian, David Lambert, said that if I came over here, he could find some horses and get me going.”

Dickinson won his first U.S. race, at Philadelphia Park in 1987, with the first horse he saddled here. He doesn’t start many horses, but usually wins with a high percentage of them, and has saddled more than 40 stakes winners in the U.S.

“The first Breeders’ Cup win was the happiest day of my life,” he said. “The second win is now the happiest.”

In 1999, Dickinson will try more smoke and mirrors with Da Hoss. Because of his two-year vacation from 1996 to the end of this year, Da Hoss was not voted into the Churchill Downs Breeders’ Cup by the selection committee; he leapfrogged into the field from the also-eligible list when a scheduled starter defected. Gary Stevens, who won with Da Hoss at Woodbine, passed him up this time, to the glee of replacement jockey John Velazquez.

Dickinson plans to run Da Hoss only once, probably in Virginia again in the fall, before the Breeders’ Cup Mile at Gulfstream Park next Nov. 6. Da Hoss became the fourth horse to win a second Breeders’ Cup race; no horse has registered three Breeders’ Cup wins.

He can get restless when he isn’t busy, and it will be up to Dickinson, Wakefield, Miguel Piedra and Business Is Boomin, that soon-to-be 10-year-old, to keep Da Hoss’ morale purring.

“There aren’t any horses around that Joan likes better than Da Hoss and Boomer,” Dickinson said. “In a good week, I might make the top three.”