Hurley Feeling Good as First-Timer at Big Race

Bobby Hurley, first-time owner of a Kentucky Derby horse, stared at the arrangement of clapboard and shingle that is Churchill Downs and he said, “They got princes and sheikhs here, man. Where do I fit in?” When you’re a first-timer like Hurley, you stand on the backside and tilt your head at the twin spires, and you aren’t embarrassed to be caught looking up, either.

You cheerfully sink your sneakers--not boots--into the muck, and when it slops into your socks you don’t mind, because it’s Derby dirt. You gawk at the money that walks by--some of it tobacco, some of it oil, some of it horse, a lot of it inherited--and you wonder if you should have gotten in this deep. But then you take a breath of the air, that concoction of animal heat, Early Times and sweet hay, and it’s like you never breathed before.

Nobody gets mad at you for blocking foot-traffic when you’re a first-timer. The first-timer is as much a part of Derby scenery as a julep and or a hat. People just smile, and step around you.

The first time Bobby Hurley came to Churchill Downs, it was 5:30 in the morning, before the sun had come up, and the spires were lit and churchly-seeming. He walked with his horse, Songandaprayer, down the soft-dirt path for his debut Derby workout in the predawn.

On race day, Hurley will take the penultimate walk with the horse, this one from the barn around the oval track to the paddock, a stroll more experienced owners decline to make, but an experience Hurley approaches with something like awe, and with which he has nothing to compare. The horse’s trainer, John Dowd, has encouraged him to go every step of the way. He says, “Go on Bobby, you’ve got to try it, you’ve got to take that walk just one time.” It will be an enviable moment--how often does anybody feel newness anymore?

Hurley is as fresh as the horses that stand around the barns on legs like schoolgirls, clean, bright and unmarked. He was just a dabbler in owning when he was smitten by Songandaprayer at a sale of 2-year-olds last year, and bought him for the sum of $1 million.

“All of a sudden I was in there deep,” he says. “I think I went a little nuts. It’s mixed emotions spending that kind of money.”

Prior to that day, his experience in horse racing consisted of placing $2 bets at Monmouth Park in New Jersey when he was a kid and owning a couple of moderately priced yearlings.

When Hurley’s NBA career fizzled out last October, he figured he’d done his last great thing. He’d had his moment, when he helped lead Duke to the 1992 NCAA title after watching teammate Christian Laettner hit that immortal last-second shot to beat Kentucky in the East Region final. Hurley graduated from Duke in ’93 and was drafted seventh by Sacramento Kings, but then he was in a life-threatening car wreck that left him broken and lying in a ditch, and his game never recovered.

He was thinking about coaching high school ball when Songandaprayer came along and won the Fountain of Youth. Hurley found himself wind-milling in the stands in a celebratory frenzy. “People talk about Laettner’s shot,” he says, “but when my horse won the Fountain of Youth, that’s the kind of joy and excitement it was. Twenty people who didn’t know me got high fives. You win a race like that, you go a little crazy.”

So here he is, looking as much like the owner of a Derby horse as you or I, in his khaki shorts, a T-shirt, and old Nikes. Owners are supposed to wear wide-brimmed straw hats, and saunter the balustrades on Millionaire Row.

An owner is Sheikh Mohammad bin Rashid Maktoum, who is making his third Derby attempt and has flown his horse, Express Tour, in from Dubai. You couldn’t miss the Sheikh when he arrived on Thursday afternoon, his jet cruising over Churchill Downs in a majestic kind of flyby. Shortly afterward, two SUVs pulled up in front of his barn, and assorted assistants, trainers, race managers and security guards stepped out. The Sheikh had decided to visit his horse.

An owner is Prince Ahmed Salman, the possessor of the colt Point Given, trained by Bob Baffert. At the opposite end of the spectrum from Hurley and Songandaprayer is Point Given, and the sophisticated Baffert. Everything about the Baffert operation has a high sheen, from the trainer’s shock of white hair, to his white linen shirt pressed straight and sharp as a picket fence, to his polished whiskey-colored boots. It is unmistakably the barn of the favorite. Point Given is a chestnut colt so perfect he looks varnished, as does his stable partner and the race’s second favorite, Congaree. The horses are assured and imperious; they have a peel-me-another-grape kind of expectancy. “They’re sitting on go,” Baffert says.

For two-time victor Baffert, the walk from paddock to track has become a formality. “I just walk ‘em,” he says, shrugging. But that wasn’t so in 1996, when Baffert came to the Derby for the first time with Cavonnier. “That first time, I said, ‘Now I know what Wyatt Earp felt like walking toward the O.K. Corral,’ ” Baffert says. “You just try to keep yourself composed, because you don’t want the horse to feel it.”

Hurley is feeling it. “I’ll just be glad the horse is running and not me,” he says. His education is progressing by the moment: He seems to study everything, from the hissing hoses that wash down his horse to the scratch of rakes in the hay.

“I’m in love with the event,” he says. So much so that he has decided he may have found his second career. “I really see myself staying with it,” he says. Like the good former ballplayer he is, he even watches videotapes of horses to learn more about them. Dowd says he has an eye for an “athlete,” a horse with good movement.

Some day, Hurley might acquire the shine and sangfroid of an established owner. But on this race day, he will be that most sentimental of Derby favorites, a first-timer.