Starstruck. That's what we were. Absolutely starstruck like U2 groupies beholding Bono suddenly wandering in our midst. Only it was hard to figure out how to act around this D. Wayne Lukas person, a tireless self-promoter whose idea of a role model was the chair-throwing basketball coach Bobby Knight.
Why did he prefer Wayne to Darrell, a perfectly good first name? And what was it with all the flower boxes and the sod and fresh paint? This was nothing like the Gary Jones barn—"Welcome to Cannery Row," Gary'd proclaim, above the blare of Spanish radio—or the cool, buttoned-down vibe emanating from the shed rows of Bobby Frankel and Ron McAnally.
Still, the Lukas stable was an open book, welcoming to visitors (as long as they didn't get in the way) and adorned with a wall-hanging of daily reminders straight out of Norman Vincent Peale, as if the power of positive thinking would make horses run faster. Maybe so. In the end, we figured it was all for show—sparkles to impress the gullible—and the real test would be out there between the rails.
Lukas passed, and then some, at first with hand-picked gems guaranteed to attract the right kind of attention (read investors). In 1978, he had fewer than 50 individual runners, but one of them was Terlingua, Secretariat's first good daughter. In 1982, he unwrapped Landaluce, a magnificent 2-year-old from the first crop of Seattle Slew. He fell for Blush With Pride from the first crop of Blushing Groom and with her won the 1982 Kentucky Oaks (G1).
Oh, how the man could shop—for yearlings, for clothes, for saddlery—while spending other people's money at a pace that sent opposing trainers into fits of self-loathing. Tagged as an innovator, Lukas really did not do anything new. Instead, he took the basic elements of stocking and running a public training operation and cranked everything up to 11, or higher.
"No one worked harder than Wayne" goes the mantra, which is probably true, although the number of trainers who worked just as hard as Lukas is legion.
When Lukas arrived at his Santa Anita Park barn, in the wee-hour darkness, Bill Spawr and Paco Gonzalez were already on the job. In the quiet of his office, Charlie Whittingham would be halfway through his L.A. Times. Warren Stute would be saddled up and itching for sunrise.
The international horseman Stavros Niarchos once got a look at the dilapidated backstretch of revered Santa Anita and declared he wouldn't allow his hounds to be housed there, which of course made the Lukas nursery stand out like an oasis in deepest Sahara. But all it took was a short walk around the backstretch to also appreciate the barns of trainers like Willard Proctor, Richard Mandella, and Eddie Gregson, all well-groomed and neat as a pin, displaying a pride of presentation and respect for horse and human that came from the top. They did not begrudge Wayne his flowers. They only wondered when House & Garden replaced the Daily Racing Form.
Lukas did what every trainer of his generation was taught to do, if they had the means: buy them hot and handsome, train them hard, and run them often. After that, it did not take long for Lukas to figure out the way to the top of the national standings was power in numbers.
More than a decade before the Lukas stable blossomed into a nationwide network of franchise stables, Jack Van Berg had barns full of horses throughout the Midwest. Van Berg, however, was required to show up at each of his satellite stables on a regular basis in order to satisfy local officials that he was the person in charge as the ultimate insurer, more than trainer in name only. It helped that Van Berg had assistants like Frank Brothers, Bill Mott, and Wayne Catalano running the barns in Detroit, Chicago, and New Orleans. Even so, Jack had to show his face.
By the time Lukas began to spread his wings—first to Ak-Sar-Ben in Nebraska and then New York and beyond—the demand for the head man to be seen on the scene had loosened considerably. Based in Southern California, Lukas could do his "training" of hundreds of horses by phone, confident in the fact that his eyes, ears, and hands on the other end of the line belonged to such highly qualified assistants as Todd Pletcher, Dallas Stewart, Kiaran McLaughlin, Randy Bradshaw, Laura Cotter, Barry Knight, and his son, Jeff Lukas.
Such an organization underlined the man's greatest skill. As a talent scout, Lukas was an almost peerless judge of both horse and human flesh. Unfortunately, the horses seemed to be very much in service to the Lukas system, rather than the other way around. But those in the human pool of talent emerged from the fire to become exemplary practitioners of the craft.
Judged by the numbers alone, his career has been remarkable. Earnings by the horses running under the Lukas label passed $300 million last year. Only five trainers can boast more. His 4,953 winners ranks ninth on the all-time list.
Even in his declining years, when his starters fell well below the 300 level for a season, they never earned less than a million dollars, even resurging in 2024 to $5.4 million, placing Lukas ahead of such household names as Shug McGaughey, John Sadler, and Tom Amoss.
Lukas trained 12 winners of Triple Crown races. They included champions Winning Colors, Timber Country, Thunder Gulch, and Charismatic. Of those dozen, five did not make it past the Triple Crown (retiring with injuries), only two raced at age 4, and of those two, only Winning Colors won a small stakes event.
Does that matter? To those who embrace the sport as valuable beyond the Kentucky Derby (G1), Preakness Stakes (G1), and Belmont Stakes (G1), yes it does, or at least it should. Thoroughbreds are not at their matured peak at age 3, which leaves the history of the sport to wonder what kind of impact the older versions of Tabasco Cat, Grindstone, Tank's Prospect, or Codex would have made.
The Lukas clients did not care. His pitch to them was buying horses built and bred for a quick return as 2-year-olds and classic 3-year-olds. Anything gleaned beyond that was gravy. Of his 26 individual Eclipse Award winners, 19 were champions at either 2 or 3.
Lukas was aggressively protective of his image and his version of stories others like to tell. The hype for certain horses would commence well before their accomplishments caught up. Fellow trainers winced at the hubris (well, maybe not Woody Stephens) and wondered how Wayne got away with it. But Lukas was right enough times to make his investors forget about the misfires and the empty exaggerations.
Eventually, the scales fell from the eyes. Each time a Lukas colt would come up lame, or worse, reporters would take the opportunity to bring up others from the past. He would grit his teeth and, when the opportunity arose, deliver his rebuttal, like when the Whittingham colt Effect suffered a fatal injury on the cusp of the 1997 Santa Anita Derby (G1). Lukas, who was running the filly Sharp Cat in the race, regretfully noted, in so many words, that if it can happen to Charlie, it can happen to anyone. So lay off.
Chris Antley's actions to lift Charismatic's injured ankle after pulling up at the end of the 1999 Belmont Stakes took the spotlight off Lukas as caretaker of the colt and gave the sport a compassionate image that also embraced Antley's travails in his off-and-on recovery from addiction. Antley's drug-fueled death, 18 months later, for some reason prompted Lukas to insist the troubled jockey in fact showed no particular connection to Charismatic beyond riders up, and that anything to the contrary was a media-fabricated fairy tale. Les Antley, Chris's mourning father, said the comments "hurt me to the bone."
But that was Lukas, who fancied himself a conveyor of hard truths, stripped of hearts and flowers.
I once interviewed Lukas at his bedside in Arcadia Methodist Hospital after he'd come off this pony and fractured a couple of ribs. He never seemed more vulnerable, on a day the horse had the final say.
It is easy to understand the grandfatherly persona Wayne Lukas has taken into his forced retirement from training, due to his end-of-life coping with a terrible infection. His outreach for youngsters to join him in the Oaklawn Park winner's circle was a stroke of such obvious good public relations that every track should be doing it. His cultivation of a new media generation, blessed with historical amnesia, has been consistently positive, free of the old rancor. For that matter, we all should be so intellectually engaged as Lukas well into our 80s, showing up for work and determined to represent the profession with as much dignity as possible. In today's racing world, he is already missed, and at this point for all the right reasons.
