Barns and Noble

After 65 years in a dark barn, the old trainer blinks.

“I’d like to walk along the track on Saturday, but I can’t walk that far anymore,” he said.

After a lifetime in the back shed, the old trainer pines.

“I never wanted to come here; I thought it was too much hullabaloo,” he said. “One of the mistakes of my life.”

Shuffling into a Churchill Downs dawn, Warren Stute, 83, was asked if he really believed he could be the oldest trainer to win a Kentucky Derby.

He coughed.

“I’ve been taking this blood pressure medicine, it makes my mouth dry,” he said.

Then he answered.

“There was this fella ...” he said.

Stute talked of recently walking into an Arcadia doughnut shop, one day after being discharged from the hospital.

Standing there was a jilted bettor who noticed Stute’s droopy lip and pained limp.

“What happened to you?” the bettor said.

“I just had a stroke,” Stute said.

“Too bad you didn’t die,” the bettor said.

So Stute curled up his wrinkled fist and punched the man.

“I can still get stirred up,” he said.

And dissolve an entire race into his rough charm, the Derby faithful falling in love this week with a man who was born the same year that racegoers first heard “My Old Kentucky Home.”

Why on earth would owner B. Wayne Hughes give him Greeley’s Galaxy?

“He wanted experience,” Stute said. “And, boy, was I loaded.”

Why on earth would Hughes keep one of his prized possessions in the hands of a man who has been to only one previous Derby, 38 years ago, when he finished 13th with Field Master?

“The man still gets in street fights,” Hughes said with a grin. “If I took the horse away from him, I was afraid of what he might do.”

What he might do, even with a 15-1 shot, is become the oldest trainer to win here, surpassing Charlie Whittingham, who won at 76.

What he was already doing was stealing the usual thunder from the Zitos and Lukases and you-know-whos.

“If he wins, we’ll all have to carry him down to the winner’s circle,” trainer Bob Baffert said. “He’s the best story here.”

It’s a story of a guy who, when he began training in 1940, had the silly idea that horse racing should be about the horses, not the wolves. Stute spent his life ignoring the sport’s commercialization and listening only to the horse’s whisper.

He has dumped nearly as many owners as have dumped him. He has refused to talk to at least one reporter for years at a time.

Wearing dress shoes and a snarl, he even galloped his own horses until he was 81, stopping only because of one of the several strokes he has suffered.

Even now, even though his own gait is unsteady, he still rides a stable pony.

“At first I’d be so worried, following him on the track, waiting for something to happen,” said his son, Glen, who also trains. “But then I saw this big grin on his face and thought, ‘This is the place he needs to be.’ ”

Stute never thought the Derby was one of those places. He even turned down a chance to bring a horse here in the early 1950s, because he thought neither he nor his horse was ready for the commotion.

“It wasn’t that big of a deal to me,” Stute said. “I thought if I wanted to go, I could go every year.”

It was more than 15 years before he did make it, then not again until now.

“Now I know,” he said, surrounded by more reporters in one morning than he has seen in his entire career.

Of course, this is a guy who went 51 years between Del Mar Debutante victories, so he’s used to being patient.

This is a guy who didn’t buy a cellphone until a couple of years ago, and then scolded Hughes for making calls that used up his free minutes.

This is a guy who saw Seabiscuit before he was jockeyed by Tobey Maguire, and who says he has still never seen a better horse than Citation.

The reason he always galloped his own horses?

“I didn’t want to pay $10 a horse to get somebody else,” he said.

And now, finally, part of the spotlight is on him, its heat briefly causing him to stagger backward during an interview session before his son gently put his arms around his father and led him away.

“For him to be training at a high level at that age, he’s a miracle,” Nick Zito said.

His son knows miracles, having watched his father’s mouth suddenly curl up before a big race at Del Mar.

“Dad, you’re having a stroke, let’s go to the hospital,” Glen told him.

“After the race,” the father said.

His horse ran the race, and the son again insisted.

“After we go to the winner’s circle,” the father said.

He posed for photos, and the son was adamant.

“After we go upstairs and have a drink with the owners,” the father said.

Who could have imagined where, a couple of years later, this combination of old-fashioned stubbornness and newfound serendipity would land him?

Greeley’s Galaxy meets Warren’s World meets horse racing heaven, loud and loopy and not a dark barn in sight.

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