Moving into the fast lane

Meet Doug O’Neill, horse trainer.

He is 38 and has a receding hairline. Actually, he’s bald.

He once told a high school counselor that his first three choices for college were, in order, Del Mar, Santa Anita and Hollywood Park.

His brother isn’t an official part of his racing team, but has proved to be the best in the family at spotting great thoroughbreds.

And his wife is allergic to his constituents. Put us next to the great horse Lava Man and we’ll be thrilled. Put Linette O’Neill there and she will sniffle, cough and leave.

None of which is a big deal except that we are talking about a man who, along about the first Saturday in May, is odds-on to become the biggest name in horse racing. That is especially interesting because, at the moment, his identity to the general public is not a first and second name, but a six-word description: The Guy Who Trains Lava Man.

O’Neill could possibly have as many as four starters in the Kentucky Derby. Considering that 90% of trainers never come close to getting a horse to the sport’s classic, that’s incredible. Considering that O’Neill never has had a Derby starter is also incredible. Most incredible is how he is handling all this.

“Hope I’m not peaking at 38,” he says, laughing at himself.

Saturday, O’Neill will send Liquidity out as the morning-line favorite in the Santa Anita Derby, and Cobalt Blue as a contender in the Illinois Derby. Next Saturday, Great Hunter will go in the Blue Grass Stakes at Keeneland. Notional was second last week in the Florida Derby and is in at Churchill Downs.

Because all four horses have enough winnings in graded stakes to make the Derby, it is not clear what effect the final tune-ups will have on Liquidity, Cobalt Blue and Great Hunter.

“I’m not sure, either,” O’Neill says. “You may hesitate to send a horse that throws in a clunker.”

O’Neill’s path to this spot among racing’s elite was not traditional, to say the least. No relatives, or even friends, grew up in big, old mansions, surrounded by miles of white fence and rolling green fields. Instead, there was the late Patrick O’Neill, father of Dave, Danny, Dennis and Doug, and husband of Dixie, who played the ponies at nondescript tracks around Detroit and often took his sons along.

“My mom loved the fact that Dad had a hobby he enjoyed,” O’Neill says, “but she didn’t like it so much when the bills were paid late. When I was a kid, we lived in seven different houses and I thought that was cool. But you wonder what the real reason was for those moves” around Dearborn, Mich.

You had to be 14 to get into the tracks around Detroit, and Doug O’Neill moved to Santa Monica with his family before he got that old. Once here, he remembers the day that he became an adult, in a horse racing sense.

“My dad brought us here, to Santa Anita,” O’Neill says. “I remember looking around and wanting to be part of this.”

After telling his high school counselor about his college choices -- not the Harvard, Michigan or California she was hoping for -- O’Neill got his chance when his grade school basketball coach, Mike Amodei, got him a job with former trainer Jude Feld. O’Neill went to Del Mar with no skills, no money, no place to stay and a big dream.

“I stayed at the YMCA in San Diego,” O’Neill says. “Right out of Catholic school and there I was with drunks, hookers, addicts.”

He cleaned out stalls, walked horses, groomed them and learned the trade.

“It was backstretch 101,” he says.

In 1994, he got his trainer’s license, started with two horses, soon had six and eventually got a horse named Lava Man, one of the sport’s biggest stars. Lava Man has won more than $4 million and can beat a cheetah in California but lose to a turtle anywhere else.

O’Neill has won 12 training titles at area tracks, trained Eclipse Award winner Stevie Wonderboy and made headlines with Lava Man for the last three years. But he will be the first to admit that Triple Crown racing is a whole new level.

“I’ve been tagged a claimer-trainer for a long time, a guy who lives off of claiming horses,” O’Neill says.

Now, he has four possible Derby horses that even the richest men can’t claim. He will be with Cobalt Blue and owner Merv Griffin in Illinois on Saturday, and his brother, Dennis, who O’Neill says spotted Cobalt Blue, Liquidity and Notional at the sales, will be at Santa Anita with owner J. Paul Reddam.

May 5, O’Neill will be at Churchill Downs. Whether he saddles one horse or four, that’s pretty fast company for a kid from the Midwest who was just one of the horde watching from the infield not too many years ago.

The Kentucky Derby. The twin spires. A huge national audience of fans who pay attention to racing at least for this one race every year.

For Doug and the entire O’Neill clan, especially Linette, that is nothing to sneeze at.

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Bill Dwyre can be reached at bill.dwyre@latimes.com. To read previous columns by Dwyre, go to latimes.com/dwyre.