Point Given, Born to Be Wild, Is Settling Into Role of Favorite

When Point Given was in New York in October, getting ready to run in the Champagne Stakes, Tonja Terranova, who used to work for trainer Bob Baffert in California, was filling in as the elephantine colt’s exercise rider.

“One thing about this horse,” Baffert told Terranova by phone from Santa Anita, “he has a tendency to rear up a little bit.”

The next day, Terranova got on Point Given for the first time. Another exercise rider, Jose Cuevas, was there.

“I’ve never seen anything like it,” said Cuevas the other day. “The horse reared up and came down. Then he reared up again. And again. He reared up 10 times before he quit.”

Mike Marten, a photographer for the Daily Racing Form, captured the moment. Marten’s picture--one of the few horse shots Baffert hangs in his home--showed Point Given almost perpendicular to the ground.

Later that morning, Terranova was on the phone again with Baffert.

“You were saying that this horse rears a little bit?” Terranova said.

Point Given’s final workout behind him, Baffert is biding his time as he waits to send out the favorite Saturday in the 127th Kentucky Derby.

“His only chink would be if he ran off again tomorrow morning,” Baffert said Tuesday.

The Baffert employee most familiar with Point Given’s early-morning antics in California is veteran exercise rider Pepe Aragon. Between workouts, when Dana Barnes is aboard, Aragon gallops the 17-hand, 1,255-pound colt. A hand, the unit used to measure a horse’s height at the withers, is four inches.

“He’s always been a wild horse,” Aragon said after work hours at the Baffert barn here. “The first day I ever got on him, at Del Mar last summer, he heard a noise and he reared. In five seconds, he had gone up and down three or four times. At a time like that, you’ve got to take over or you’re in trouble. He’s gotten better. Now, he respects the whip and he respects me.”

Baffert prides himself on hiring the right people, and he was surprised five years ago when Aragon, a Peruvian whose weight problem ended his modest riding career in California in 1987, turned down the trainer’s former assistant, Eoin Harty, for a job. Aragon had galloped horses for John Valpredo, Bruce Headley and Pete Eurton before Harty asked him if he’d join Baffert’s team.

Aragon said that he didn’t think the money was enough, but after a one-on-one conversation with Baffert, there was an adjustment and he came aboard.

“To think what I almost passed up,” Aragon says now. “When I look back, I was crazy to even think twice about it.”

Exercise riders are salaried help, but they can make the long green by earning 1% of a horse’s stakes purses. In the Baffert barn, four California riders--Aragon, Barnes, Lupe Navarro and Larry Damore--split the 1% evenly, no matter which horses they gallop.

“It’s a good system,” Aragon said. “That way, there’s not a question of favoritism.”

His first year with Baffert, Aragon galloped Silver Charm, who won the 1997 Derby. Besides Point Given, Aragon also gallops Captain Steve, the Dubai World Cup winner who’s earned $6.5 million. Roughly, that’s $65,000 for the four exercise riders to divvy up.

Aragon, 42, was married for a couple of years to jockey Vicky Baze. Thirteen years ago, he remarried, and Renee Aragon was not too happy when her husband had the effrontery to keep Baffert dangling.

“I call her by her real middle name--Miracle,” Pepe Aragon said. “Because her life has been a miracle.”

Miracle Aragon was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s disease, but for the last nine years it has been in remission. The Aragons have gone from not being able to risk having a family to three children, ages 8, 9 and 10. Pepe Aragon is taking his wife to the Derby.

Point Given has run off, only to be caught, a few times at Santa Anita, and last week at Churchill Downs, coming back from the track, was spooked by a photographer and started rearing.

“After he reared twice, I jumped off,” Aragon said. “I was worried, because he was near some concrete pavement near the barn, and I didn’t want him to hurt himself.”

Except for the rearing, Aragon seems to have Point Given figured out.

“You have to watch him close after he’s had a day off,” he said. “He’s as big as a tank, and when he comes back from a day off, he’s like a tank ready to explode. He’s big and he’s solid. That’s quite a combination. He might be getting better, but still, you never know.”

The last time Point Given ran off at Santa Anita, on April 12, Aragon was left with only the bridle. Baffert said that during his long career as a trainer, he has never had a horse get loose and leave his bridle behind.

“We were jogging near the finish line and the horse heard a noise from some workers nearby,” Aragon said. “He went up the highest I’ve ever seen him. We came down hard. But he didn’t drop me. I got off, but then I couldn’t hold him.”

When Fusaichi Pegasus, last year’s Derby winner, would rear in the mornings, he reminded his trainer, Neil Drysdale, of the Lipizzaner stallions, those magnificent show horses from Austria. Point Given is not Fusaichi Pegasus in the mornings--he’s a more willing worker than Drysdale’s colt. But when he’s high in the air, as high as those powerful rear legs will thrust him, Baffert’s impetuous horse might as well be from the same mold.