THE FORCE IS WITH LUKAS

He is Wayne Lukas and the horse he has prepared so well is Charismatic. They are a perfect fit. The name of the horse describes the personality of the trainer.

At 63, he is arguably the most famous trainer of his time, and with the success that has produced 12 Triple Crown race wins and just shy of $200 million in purses have come fame and fortune. And more than his share of frustration.

The road that brought him here to Belmont Park and Saturday’s run by Charismatic for racing’s Triple Crown has had turns and bumps. And one gigantic pothole.

But there is every reason to believe that Saturday represents a real paving job for Lukas, even if Charismatic does not become the first horse in 21 years to win the Kentucky Derby, Preakness and Belmont.

There is likely to be a symbolic moment just before Charismatic heads for the starting gate. The paddock will be jammed with family, friends and well-wishers. While the horses are walked in the saddling area, trainers and jockeys will discuss strategy. Much of it is ritual.

Soon, it will be time to saddle the horse and give the jockeys a boost. It’s called giving a leg up, another racing ritual.

Normally, Lukas would provide the boost for Chris Antley. But while the TV cameras hum and much of the sports world focuses on Charismatic, the athlete of the moment, Lukas is likely to beckon to his son, Jeff, to do the honors.

There are no guarantees. The paddock before a Triple Crown race is a beehive. Rituals and intentions can get lost in the pressure of the moment.

But there will be something important going on at that moment, something that will go beyond the simple fact that Jeff Lukas has given the jockey a leg up on all four of his father’s Kentucky Derby winners. It will be much more than superstition. More like a public gesture of great personal significance.

A Doctor Named Caton and a Boy Named Brady

The training routine at the Lukas barn at Santa Anita the morning of Dec. 15, 1993, was no different from any other day’s. Wayne was on the phone, attending to the myriad details that he must. Horses were being worked or walked or washed. His only son, Jeff, who had become his main assistant and who had built Lukas’ Eastern operation into something nearly as formidable as his Western, was there too.

“I have a phone with one of those long cords,” Lukas recalled, “and so, I was up and walking around and right near the door when it happened. I was the first one to get to him.”

One of Lukas’ Triple Crown prospects, Tabasco Cat, had bolted and was loose. Jeff Lukas, a veteran horseman well schooled in the procedures for such situations, had stepped in Tabasco Cat’s path and was waving his arms. Horses always stop, or veer away. But this time . . .

“It’s like when you meet somebody in a narrow hallway,” Lukas said. “You go right and he goes right, and then you both go the other way. But eventually, one goes right and one left. Well, Jeff and the horse both went the same way.”

Witnesses say that the sound of Jeff Lukas’ head hitting hard, compact ground after the collision could be heard several barns away. There was no blood, just an unconscious, badly injured 36-year-old man.

The immediate aftermath is both blurred and vivid for Wayne Lukas.

He remembers the helicopter coming in to get his son. He remembers his drive on the 210 Freeway, west toward Huntington Memorial Hospital a few miles away in Pasadena. He remembers driving on the shoulder of the road, straining to see the helicopter as it headed for its landing pad on the hospital’s west wing.

The rest was doctors and IVs and sitting and pacing, reading to Jeff and talking sports to somebody who could not respond: “Hey, Jeff. The Lakers are playing the Celtics tonight.”

Two days later, Dec. 17, the neurosurgeon on the case, William Caton, told the family that a gauge that measures pressure on the brain had measured Jeff’s at 80. Caton said that any measurement exceeding 25 was extremely dangerous.

Visitors came by. Jockey Gary Stevens told Wayne and the family that he had had a fall and a head injury and had awakened four days later and “felt just fine.” Caton told the family Jeff would not be waking up just fine in four days.

By Christmas Eve, the pressure on Jeff’s brain had subsided enough for Caton to tell the family that Jeff would not die from it. That was the good news. The bad news was that he still might die of pneumonia.

Jeff’s son, Brady, then 4, visited his father, but was allowed to view only from afar. Among the things he saw was a monitor with a red light attached to Jeff’s finger.

“Look, Mommy,” Brady said to Linda Lukas. “Daddy’s got ET finger.”

The next day, Christmas 1993, the miracle began. Jeff Lukas opened his eyes.

On Jan. 5, he squeezed Linda’s hand. On the 11th, he sat on the edge of his bed for five minutes and two days later, he said three words: “Linda,” “no” and “bye.”

A month or so later, he walked the length of the hall at Huntington Memorial. Up and down the hall, people stood and watched. Then they cheered.

A Fast Cat and a Horse Named Caton

At Kentucky Derby time, 1994, Wayne Lukas was in a valley of a career that had been mostly peaks. After averaging 14 stakes winners a year in the 1980s, Lukas went three years in the early ‘90s with nary a stakes win.

He had lost his main owner with the death of Gene Klein, the former San Diego Charger owner, who had charged hard into racing with enthusiasm and dollars. Lukas suffered another major setback when Calumet Farm, another of his main employers, went bankrupt.

All that, plus the terrible injury to his only son, was a great deal to shoulder.

So the irony of being brought back, at least partly, by Tabasco Cat, the very horse that had nearly killed Jeff, was lost on nobody. The story is, and remains, pure Hollywood.

In the ’94 Kentucky Derby, Tabasco Cat started badly and lost valuable ground, finishing sixth. In the Preakness, he won. Same in the Belmont.

Two consecutive wins in Triple Crown races. Lukas was back.

On ABC, after the race, they flashed live to Glendora, where Jeff sat at home on the couch with Linda and his children, Brady and Kelly. The world knew the story and didn’t know what to expect. How would Jeff Lukas speak? Comprehend?

Had there not been public knowledge of the accident and injury, it would have been impossible to tell. Jeff spoke of pride in his father and the horse--yes, the horse that had nearly killed him. And the happy, happy sound bite that ABC--indeed, the entire horse racing world--had hoped for was achieved.

The whole truth was not quite so rosy.

Jeff Lukas had years of difficult therapy ahead of him, most of it in Pomona at Casa Colina Hospitals for Rehabilitation, where Jeff later recalled one of his tasks.

“They had one test where they had you read numbers, like 6, 2, 7, 9, 3,” he said. “Then, you had to call them back to them--backward. When I started to master that, I was so proud.”

But the injury, the lengthy rehab, and the all-too-common family fallout from this sort of injury and its aftermath took its toll. Jeff and Linda Lukas were eventually divorced.

“We’re the best of friends,” Linda said. “Jeff’s a great dad, and he has a key to my house and is over here, working on the computer a lot. The kids haven’t missed a beat in this. I’m getting remarried and Jeff likes my fiance and my fiance likes Jeff. It’s unique. It’s hard to describe. We’re just better being friends than being married.”

On the other hand, Tabasco Cat had taken Wayne Lukas out of his professional valley and had him racing from one peak to the next.

Lukas also had hooked up with a beer distributor from Pomona who had turned Foothill Beverage into one of the top Budweiser outlets in the country. Bob Lewis, along with his wife, Beverly, had decided to ease into horse racing ownership. They were nearly 70, their son, also named Jeff, was well suited and positioned to take over the daily operation of the business, so all the Lewises needed was the right trainer to get them a few wins and make this late-in-life hobby-business fun and financially sound.

The Lewises, strong supporters of Casa Colina, pushed for Jeff Lukas to do his therapy there. And Wayne Lukas, looking to pay whatever homage he could to the man he felt responsible for keeping his son alive, asked if they would be willing to take on ownership of a Seattle Slew colt that Lukas wanted named Dr. Caton.

“I was honored,” Bob Lewis said.

Dr. Caton became a well-raced, sentimental favorite of many fans, reaching a pinnacle of success with a near-miss second place to Skip Away in the 1996 Haskell at Monmouth Park and turning a nice profit for the Lewises before being sold.

Wayne Lukas was also pleased with the horse he had hand-picked for the doctor, but he always kept things in perspective.

“The doctor was a lot better than the horse,” he said.

Coach Wayne and the Cockroaches

Antigo, Wis., is among the least likely places to produce the most famous race trainer in the country.

But from that northeastern Wisconsin potato-growing community of fewer than 10,000 came young Wayne Lukas, who learned to ride a horse before he turned 10 and rode over to the Langlade County Fairgrounds as often as he could. To this day, there is no thoroughbred racing in Wisconsin, but Lukas said the fairgrounds was a good place for trainers from nearby states to rest and work sore horses.

“I hung around all the time, learned the language,” he said.

He also learned that his parents did not look upon horse racing as their son’s future, so he was sent off to the University of Wisconsin, which led him, after graduation, to coaching and teaching.

He took over the basketball program at tiny Blair (Wis.) High in the mid-1960s, demanded that his players start dressing in blazers to travel to games and start taking pride in the way they looked and acted, hoping that pride would rub off on how they played. It did. Blair started winning, and Lukas was soon coaching at larger La Crosse Logan, and eventually headed to an assistant’s spot under John Erickson at Wisconsin.

But the little boy riding his horse around the stables in Antigo never really quite climbed down out of that saddle. While coaching high school basketball, he also trained horses in the summers. Soon, the training income was surpassing the teaching-coaching income. The next step, training quarter horses in the Dakotas and eventually New Mexico--en route to a thoroughbred career with a home base in California--was obvious.

“There were some tough decisions along the way,” he said. “At one point, Johnny Orr had the Michigan job and he wanted me to come on as his assistant. He held the spot open for 48 hours while I pondered. Eventually, he left and his assistant, Bill Frieder, took over. If you follow that to its possible conclusion, I might have been basketball coach at Michigan when Bo Schembechler was football coach.”

His basketball background allows Lukas to number among his best friends Bob Knight of Indiana, which might help explain his occasional love-hate relationship with the media.

The most serious rift occurred when his colt, Union City, broke down in the 1993 Preakness and had to be destroyed. The media--some say unfairly--came after Lukas with the contention that the horse had not been ready to run and shouldn’t have been sent out. Lukas denied this and no solid evidence was ever presented that Union City had been unsound going into the race. But the clash left Lukas smarting and led to his occasional reference to some members of the media as “cockroaches.”

Mostly, Lukas is among the most accessible, cooperative and articulate of sports figures. His quick lines and wit make him one of the most popular and quotable personalities in sports.

But the cockroaches designation has apparently become part of the family lexicon.

Thursday morning, Lukas’ wife, Laura, a quarter horse and thoroughbred trainer, arrived at the barn at Belmont, and was a bit miffed after having had trouble gaining access to the barn area.

“Isn’t that something,” she said to her husband. “The cockroaches can get in and I can’t.”

Fame, Fortune and Perspective

Lukas has won the Kentucky Derby four times, the Preakness five times and the Belmont three times. Over one span from 1994 to 1996, he won six consecutive Triple Crown races, winning all three in 1995, but with two horses. If he wins Saturday, his 13th victory in a Triple Crown race will tie the record now held by Sunny Jim Fitzsimmons, who trained from the ‘30s through the ‘50s and had two Triple Crown winners.

He is the only trainer even approaching $200 million in purses, and a victory Saturday will put him over the top. When asked about that, he quickly said that $300 million is a reachable goal.

On Aug. 9, he will be inducted into racing’s Hall of Fame.

Many of the story lines have played out.

Caton, the doctor, continues to save lives. Dr. Caton, the horse, stands as a stallion, making new ones.

Tabasco Cat stands at stud at William T. Young’s Overbrook Farms in Lexington, Ky., and commands a $40,000 fee.

Jeff Lukas, despite the eventual loss of sight in his right eye, has been back at work for some time, handling office duties at Santa Anita and making sure that every Little League and T-ball game that includes Brady, 9, and Kelly, 6, is attended by their dad.

“Heaven forbid that we have some racing going on when there is a Little League game,” said proud grandpa Wayne Lukas.

But Saturday, Charismatic will be running for the Triple Crown before what figures to be the largest viewing audience for a horse race in some time. And there is one testimonial to Wayne Lukas that should be noted.

“I am just so proud of the way he has prepared Charismatic for this race,” said proud son Jeff.

Chasing the TRIPLE CROWN

Charismatic is trying to become only the 12th horse to win the Kentucky Derby, Preakness and Belmont Stakes

BELMONT STAKES

* POST: 2:30 p.m. Saturday

* WHERE: Belmont Park, Elmont, N.Y.

* TV: 1:30 p.m., Channel 7

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Belmont Stakes

Post positions and early odds for Saturday’s 131st running of the Belmont Stakes. Distance: 1 1/2 miles on dirt; Purse: $1 million; Post time: 2:30 p.m. PDT; TV: Channel 7 (coverage starts at 1:30 p.m. PDT).

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PP Horse Jockey Trainer Odds 1. Teletable John Velazquez A. Callejas 99-1 2. Vision And Verse H. Castillo Jr. B. Mott 20-1 3. Silverbulletday Jerry Bailey B. Baffert 4-1 4. Charismatic Chris Antley W. Lukas 2-1 5. Pineaff S. LeJeune Jr. K. McPeek 30-1 6. Lemon Drop Kid Jose Santos S. Schulhofer 20-1 7. Patience Game Kent Desormeaux A. Hassinger 20-1 8. Adonis Jorge Chavez N. Zito 20-1 9. Prime Directive Mike Smith P. Byrne 30-1 10. Menifee Pat Day E. Walden 7-2 11. Stephen Got Even Shane Sellers N. Zito 10-1 12. Best Of Luck Jean Luc Samyn A. Jerkens 6-1

*--*

Note: All carry 126 pounds, with exception of Silverbulletday, a filly, who carries 121.

*

Times staff writer Bill Christine contributed to this story.