A Tale Nearly as Old as Horse Racing Itself

In some ways, this place has never felt so unfamiliar.

Glance at the grandstand and everything looks as if it’s under construction, except for the fabled Twin Spires.

So maybe it’s only fitting, with the ancient dowager Churchill Downs halfway through a $121 million facelift, that the most captivating story at the Kentucky Derby is nearly as old as horse racing itself.

The star of the tale is an undersized chestnut named Smarty Jones, whose difficulties could fill two barns. Barely nine months ago, before his first race, Smarty’s handlers were training him in the starting gate when the horse suddenly reared, struck his head on an iron bar and knocked himself cold.

“Oh, my God,” trainer John Servis yelped as the colt lay unconscious on the dirt. “The horse killed himself.”

Not quite -- though Smarty did put a sizable dent in his skull, not to mention the dreams of a half-dozen people whose decades in racing were filled with as many tragedies as triumphs, but not even one horse good enough to get them to the Derby.

“If you haven’t been here yet, after all this time, you start to think, ‘What are your chances now?’ ” jockey Stewart Elliott said.

The morning sun glinted off his shiny black leather riding vest and bathed the front of Smarty Jones’ stall in a soft white glow. Elliott has won more than 3,200 races up and down the Atlantic seaboard, but not one you’ve ever heard of.

Last year, he watched the Derby at home on TV as Funny Cide began an improbable run of his own.

Now, the horse that will put Elliott squarely in the middle of that same picture was standing just off his right shoulder, idly pulling clumps of hay from a bale nailed to the wall.

“It just goes to show,” Elliott said, “that in this business, you never know.”

That could be the motto for the strivers and unknowns who hitched their star to a gritty Pennsylvania-bred. They watched him win race after race -- six in all without a defeat -- all the way to the starting gate at Churchill Downs as the 9-2 second-choice on the first Saturday in May.

His owners, Roy and Pat Chapman, a car dealer and former social worker, didn’t get into the racket until late in life, and even then, only as a sidelight. They bought 100 acres outside Philadelphia and started making plans that never seemed to go anywhere.

“Every day we’d get up and say, ‘Someday we’re going to do this, someday we’re going to do that,’ ” Pat Chapman recalled, “and so we wound up calling it Someday Farm.”

Roy Chapman, hooked up to an oxygen tank and sitting nearby in a wheelchair, chuckled at the memory. He has emphysema and struggles to speak sometimes, but for the moment his life couldn’t be much easier.

His family was gathered around him and Servis’ 10-year-old son, Tyler, stood behind him, gently massaging Chapman’s shoulders.

He doesn’t have the time or the breath to tell the story of how Smarty Jones wound up in his barn, but the short version is this:

The Chapmans hired a trainer named Bob Camac, who found the dam and stallion that sired Smarty Jones. Nine months later, Camac was found shot to death in his New Jersey home.

Because of Roy’s health, the Chapmans had already begun curtailing their modest racing operation; Camac’s death nearly drove them out of the business altogether.

After selling most of their stock, they sent Smarty Jones to Florida to be broken. “He kind of moved like Michael Jordan in a bridle, smooth as silk,” said George Isaacs, the horseman who handled those chores.

At Isaacs’ urging, the Chapmans kept Smarty and sent him to Servis instead.

Like Elliott, Servis was a regular winner at Philadelphia Park but largely unknown outside that corner of the racing world. The two of them hooked up in 1980, at the start of what would become a very successful partnership.

But the closer they came to breaking into the big time, the more they must have wondered whether they’d both be around for the end of the ride. After all, the last time Derby rookies combined to win the race was 25 years ago.

So someone asked Roy Chapman whether he ever considered replacing Servis.

“I think we talked about it exactly once. He said, ‘You know, Roy, this is a special horse.’ And I said, ‘Then it’s up to you to get me to the Derby,”’ Chapman said.

Chapman didn’t even bother discussing the matter with Elliott.

“No way,” Chapman said. “He’s Mr. Cool. And he’s already shown he knows how to ride this horse.”

And a few minutes later, Chapman steered his chair slowly across the bumpy lawn outside Smarty Jones’ barn toward a car.

Off in the distance, beyond the storied oval racetrack, the sun reflected off the hundreds of new panes of glass lining the renovated clubhouse, shining like a giant beacon.

But if you lowered your gaze and kept it fixed on the finish line for a moment, Churchill Downs looked much the same as it always does: like gold at the end of a sporting rainbow.