Steve Dennis pays tribute to the legendary trainer, a true giant of the sport who died on Saturday night [June 28] at the age of 89
The D part stood for Darrell; no-one ever used it. The Wayne Lukas part stood for something special, something iconic in racing, a hallmark not just of enduring greatness and revolutionary change but of something eternally fascinating, so compelling that it was impossible to tear away the gaze for wonder of what might happen next.
It is generally facile to trot out the old trope that ‘they don’t make them like that any more’, but here it is the unvarnished truth. The all-time-great trainer D Wayne Lukas has died at the age of 89 – he relinquished his licence just a week ago, as terminal illness took hold – and there will never be another like him; they wouldn’t dare.
“He changed the Thoroughbred industry,” said trainer Kiaran McLaughlin, one of a legion of Lukas’s former assistants to have parlayed an apprenticeship with the sorcerer into a fine career.
“He was a great coach and a great teacher to us. We all worked very well together. It’s been a great fraternity. He was almost like a second father to all of us.”
Not for Lukas the conventional career arc of triumph, failure and redemption, although from a distance that held valid. No, his wild ride through racing was a far more complex, intertwining journey of pushy outsider, establishment bete noire, undisputed champion, object of suspicion and derision, fading star, grudgingly admired resurgent, loved and revered elder statesman. Oh, never a dull moment with D Wayne.
No-one who spent long enough considering Lukas maintained the same opinion of him throughout. Apart from the man himself, that is, whose imperturbable self-belief was best illustrated by a quote he once gave Pat Forde of Sports Illustrated at a time when it all seemed to be falling apart, his reputation at an all-time low after Union City broke down in the 1993 Preakness, his family life fractured after his son Jeff had been run down in the barn by a horse called Tabasco Cat and left in a coma.
“You can strip me naked and drop me off in East LA at midnight, and I’ll be back in a month,” he said. “I’ll be back with my clothes on, a full stable and a nice place to work.”
It was almost as though he could see the future. Three weeks later Lukas sent out Tabasco Cat for a redemptive victory in the Preakness, the first strike in an unparalleled streak of six consecutive Triple Crown race wins across three years.
That turnaround echoed the words of his biographer Carlo DeVito, who described Lukas as ‘a walking advertisement for himself’. DeVito also chronicled the man from Wisconsin as ‘generous and understanding, yet also arrogant, charming, demanding, gregarious, driven and a born salesman. He is either the man you love or the man you love to hate.’
Game changer
“He’s meant so much to so many people, to the entire industry,” said Todd Pletcher, another of Lukas’s former assistants, in the Blood-Horse.
“He’s been the face of racing for as long as I can remember, and I don’t think anyone has changed the game the way that he has.”
Racing’s stuffy Establishment was initially suspicious of Lukas, because he did not follow the time-honoured path to the top table. Lukas was never a follower; he was a pioneer, a maverick innovator who blazed his own trail, drew his own map.
He began his sporting life as a high-school basketball coach, a role that naturally meant he was later nicknamed ‘Coach’ in perpetuity. In 1967 he turned to training Quarter Horses on a full-time basis, and laid the sport to waste in a way he would later mirror on the Thoroughbred circuit.
He won everything, notably with a cannonball of a horse called Dash For Cash, who would stick like a burr in his mind through the subsequent decades of great horses who ran themselves and their trainer into the Hall of Fame.
“I never thought I’d ever get him beat,” he said of Dash For Cash, years later. “I can’t say that about any Thoroughbred I’ve trained, so I would rank him at number one.”
In 1978, he switched codes to Thoroughbred racing, coming in through the back door, making himself comfortable, putting his boots on the fancy chairs. Neither he nor the sport would ever be the same again.
“This is a hand-me-down profession,” he told Andy Beyer, for the Washington Post. “Top trainers start out by working for somebody, and they pick up generalisations from them. I don’t necessarily believe in all these training theories that are chiselled in stone.”
Self-belief
Lukas believed in himself, implicitly. He began with a rush – of course he did – winning Graded stakes in his first year with the speedy juvenile Terlingua. Just two years later he sent out Codex to win the Preakness, the colt rough-housing racing’s sweetheart filly Genuine Risk out of the winner’s circle. He had arrived.
The 1980s belonged to Lukas. His connection with hard-nosed businessman Eugene Klein, owner of the San Diego Chargers, allowed him a scale of operation that was unheard of, quantity and quality. A corporate approach enabled him to set up barns across North America – always notably well presented, freshly painted, bedecked with flowers, especially his fabled Barn 44 at Churchill Downs – from where he could target big races every weekend.
This facility gave the sport the memorable mantra ‘D Wayne Off The Plane’, as people cottoned on to the way Lukas horses would ship in, take the money and ship out. And so much money. In 1987, he became the first trainer in history to earn more than the leading US jockey. His horses won $17.8 million in 1988, more than double the amount ever won in a single year by any other trainer.
He farmed the newly established Breeders’ Cup with the likes of Life’s Magic and Lady’s Secret, winning a quarter of the Cup races run that decade, and in 1988 finally won his first Kentucky Derby with another superstar filly in Winning Colors, owned by Klein, the apotheosis of their game-changing partnership.
Then came the crash. Klein left the sport, Lukas became embroiled in financial troubles. Those who had chafed at praising him as he reinvented the sport now took their chance to bury him as the winners dried up and scandal threatened to envelop him. The press gleefully salted the wounds and it stung, but Lukas never lost the bravura bravado that had brought him so far.
It was the moment of that Sports Illustrated quote. With his inner resilience so promptly and lavishly rewarded, the second half of the 1990s was all Team Lukas again, lit up by Tabasco Cat, Timber Country, Thunder Gulch, Grindstone, Serena’s Song and ultimately the former claimer Charismatic, cruelly denied a Triple Crown sweep when sustaining a career-ending injury during the Belmont.
Iron discipline
Yet as one century dissolved into another, Lukas’s remarkable dominance began to dwindle. However, he kept on keeping on, unearthing a good horse every now and then, maintaining his iron discipline and fearsome work ethic even as he approached his 80th year, arriving at the track at 3.30am and still as snappy with his quotes as he was with his clothes.
And as it almost invariably does, persistence and longevity brought affection where once there had been disdain and dislike. So when Lukas conjured up the old days by winning the 2013 Preakness with Oxbow, it was celebrated as though racing’s prodigal son had come home again, but this time through the front door, no-one minding the boots on the fine upholstery.
“I’ve been left for dead so many times,” he told Joe Drape in the New York Times. “When you’re younger, you think you have to prove to everybody every day that you can train a racehorse. I know I can train a racehorse.
“When Sunny Jim Fitzsimmons won the Preakness with Bold Ruler he was 82 years old, and it made him the oldest person to ever win a Triple Crown race. That’s one more record for me to gun for. It will mean I’m still in the game.”
Once again, it was as though he could see the future. In 2024, at the age of 88, Lukas proved he was still in the game by winning the Preakness for a seventh time with Seize The Grey, the old ringmaster’s final flourish to set a seal on the most extraordinary career.
“It doesn’t get old; it’s still the same,” he said. “In 1980 I had the first one here I ever ran, and it still feels the same – in fact, the last one is always the sweetest.
Very significant
“One thing that was very significant to me today – and maybe it’s because I’m getting a little bit older – but as I came out of the grandstand and went across the racetrack, every one of the guys that were in that race stopped and hugged me and gave me a handshake. That meant more to me than anything.
“This is really, really special. It’s what gets me up in the morning. If you have a passion you eliminate all the excuses. You get up early. You go without a meal. You drive. You go without sleep. As long as you got the passion.
“The most important decision you’ll ever make in your life is your attitude decision. Make it early and make the right one.”
Spoken like a true ‘walking advertisement for himself’. Lukas had said much the same years earlier, when telling the New York Times “it’s a lifestyle for me. I don’t know any other way to do it. My son Jeff once told me, ‘You’ll be out there on your pony some morning, you’ll fall off dead, they’ll just harrow you under the track, and everything will go on as usual’.”
That, bar a few days of grace, is exactly how it has come to pass. Turn the pages of the record books, largely rewritten by Lukas, and they show that he rode off into the sunset through a statistical blizzard of superlatives, across a landscape populated with landmarks and milestones and monuments.
Cataloguing them is like pouring out one of Lukas’s trademark ten-gallon hats into a shot glass. There isn’t enough room, but what you are left with makes the head spin. The 15 Triple Crown races; the 20 Breeders’ Cup victories, a joint-record, including three in one seven-race day in 1988; four Eclipse Awards as outstanding trainer; three Horses of the Year and 23 other Eclipse Award winners; 4,953 winners; more than $300m in purses.
Records are beaten by competitors. ‘First’ achievements are left behind by the march of time. Revolutionaries are overcome by other revolutions.
This is the ordinary transience of life, but some manage to transcend it. A legend in his own lifetime, D Wayne Lukas will forever remain one now that it is all over, and everything goes on as usual.
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