Lukas’ gamble continues to pay off 50 years later

HOT SPRINGS — Contemporary horse racing relies on gamblers, and it is in many ways made for them.

Take Hall of Fame trainer D. Wayne Lukas, for instance.

Late in the 1960s, Lukas risked the security of his nine-year career as a public school teacher and basketball coach for the speculative uncertainty of a life in horse racing.

“I agonized over that,” Lukas said. “I wondered if I could be successful at horse racing. The security of the teaching profession was certainly a strong consideration.”

Lukas followed two years as a graduate-assistant freshman coach at the University of Wisconsin-Madison with a seven-season run as head boys basketball coach for Logan High in LaCrosse, Wis.

All the while, Lukas rose early to work with a string of quarter horses, a passion from his childhood developed while on his parent’s farm near Antigo, Wis. He trained and raced his quarter horses each summer, and success began to mount.

“When I broke off from teaching 100%, I had already had great success in the summers as a horse trainer,” Lukas said. “I got the feeling that if I put all the energy I put into coaching into the training, I could probably be successful, and of course that’s what happened.”

Lukas, 84, trained 24 world-champion quarter horses in 10 years, but he has trained thoroughbreds exclusively since 1978.

More than two decades removed from a string of unequaled Triple Crown success, Lukas works from his immaculate, meticulously landscaped barn less than a quarter-mile southeast of Oaklawn Racing Casino Resort’s racetrack.

There is none of the clutter in his office common to horsemen. Some people from his long-ago basketball past have said it was Lukas’ way. Johnny Orr — a former head basketball coach at Massachusetts, Michigan and Iowa State — was a full-time assistant at Wisconsin during Lukas’ graduate work there.

“He’d do anything you wanted,” Orr once told Sports Illustrated. “If you told him to have a practice, he’d have it all laid out, every one organized.

“When I got my first head-coaching job at Massachusetts, I couldn’t take an assistant. If I could have, I’d have taken Wayne with me. I’ve read how immaculate his barns are. That’s him, boy. That’s the way he is.”

It was that way through Lukas’ rise to fame, which first drew national attention when he trained Codex to victory in the 1980 Preakness Stakes.

“The Preakness win certainly made a difference,” said Lukas, who led all U.S. trainers in purse earnings from 1983-92. “The reaction was this quarter horse guy and this basketball coach won the Preakness. It was that sort of reaction. You know, ‘I don’t know about this basketball coach, but he’s winning races.’ That was the kind of reaction we got.”

Lukas’ first Kentucky Derby win came with the filly Winning Colors in 1988.

“You can win one of those kinds of races, and it will certainly help your career and give you a certain amount of credibility, but it doesn’t really send your career skyrocketing like you would think,” Lukas said. “The thing you have to do in horse racing is do it over and over.”

Lukas has trained winners of 14 Triple Crown races, a record since surpassed by Hall of Fame trainer Bob Baffert, who ran his current total to 15 when Justify won the Kentucky Derby, Preakness and Belmont Stakes in 2018. Lukas also has trained winners of 20 Breeders’ Cup Championship races, five more than any other trainer.

“I recognized real quick that the Breeders’ Cup and the Triple Crown races were the ones that my clientele were interested in,” Lukas said. “I thought, I’m going to take them where they want to go.”

Lukas said he still lives for his work, despite a shortage of championship-caliber horses in his barn. He said the restrictions enacted to slow progression of the new coronavirus pandemic have served to remind him he wants nothing to do with retirement.

“I’ve been doing this for over 50 years and still wake up very enthused about what to expect,” Lukas said. “You know what? Nothing has hit home more than having the whole country shut down. It drives home the fact that I don’t want to retire. This slowed-down living that everyone has been forced to do, I don’t care for this at all.”

Lukas