The late Vince Lombardi began his NFL head coaching career with the Green Bay Packers in 1959. That same autumn future horse trainer D. Wayne Lukas went back to the University of Wisconsin to get his master’s degree after two years as a teacher and basketball coach at tiny Blair High School in northwest Wisconsin.
Over the next eight years, while Lukas was in graduate school, studying physical education and working as Wisconsin’s assistant freshman basketball coach, and then as a teacher and coach at LaCrosse Logan High School, he became one of Lombardi’s most fervent disciples.
When Lombardi had a speaking engagement, Lukas would hit the highways and byways of Wisconsin to hear him, and took every word to heart.
“I’d drive 80 miles, 120 miles, 150 miles to hear Vince speak,” Lukas remembered. “He was very visible and very accessible. I bought into everything he said–the work ethic, what it takes to be No. 1, the whole nine yards. He was my role model. He still is my role model.”
More than three decades later, the disciple has all but outdone the master. Lombardi’s teams ran to daylight and won championships. But Lukas’ horses have redefined racing success, putting statistical light years between his barn and those of other trainers both in terms of races won and money earned.
The two most prestigious and popular events in American racing are the Triple Crown races, consisting of the Kentucky Derby, the Preakness and Belmont, and the eight Breeders’ Cup races that will be held Saturday at Arlington Park.
Lukas has won the Kentucky Derby four times, the Preakness five times and the Belmont four times. He is the only trainer in history to have swept a Triple Crown series with two different horses, winning the 1995 Derby and Belmont with Thunder Gulch and the Preakness with Timber Country.
Perhaps more remarkably, his horses won six consecutive legs of the Triple Crown, starting with the 1994 Preakness and continuing through the 1996 Derby.
He has only two horses–his all-time low–running in Saturday’s Breeders’ Cup. Probable favorite Orientate and long shot Day Trader are both in the Sprint. But his records of 16 Cup victories and $18,015,600 in purse earnings are safe. The runners-up have seven wins and $8,492,562 in purses, respectively.
Along with Lukas’ accomplishments have come a legion of detractors who take exception to his often-unconventional methods and frequent departures from traditional techniques.
Fellow Hall of Fame trainer Bud Delp, who trains the traditional way, and Bob Lewis, Orientate’s owner, beg to differ.
“I contend if Wayne had not been an outstanding horse trainer he probably would have wound up as a president of General Motors or some other big corporation,” Lewis said. “He is just an unbelievable salesman.”
According to Delp: “He has a great eye for a horse. The man can train a horse, and he puts them where they can win.”
Lukas’ statistics are so dazzling that they obscure rather than illuminate his life story. It is a tale every bit as fascinating as that of his role model, the former New Jersey high school coach who took over the Packers late in life and became a legend. It is the story of a man who drove himself and his horses to unprecedented success.
Yet that career has also brought tragedy–a racetrack accident that nearly cost the life of his best assistant, his protege and son. Lukas says his career has never been quite the same.
Hoop dreams
After Lukas earned his master’s, he went to Logan to be a social studies teacher, an assistant football coach and the head basketball coach. He believed his future was in basketball, as did the coaches he had worked under at Wisconsin, head coach John Erickson and assistant Johnny Orr.
“I didn’t know him when he came to the university,” Erickson recalled. “He came to my office to see if he could help.
“He was very energetic and innovative, a great disciplinarian and a very hard worker. He also was very compassionate. He would have been a great recruiter, and I think he’d have made a great college coach.”
Unlike Lombardi, Lukas wasn’t a successful high school coach. Logan was the smallest school in the Big Rivers Conference and had losing records. “We were grossly undermanned in a lot of games,” Lukas said. “[But] when we lost, we lost with a lot of dignity.”
Terry Erickson, who played for him from 1965-67, said that dignity came from Lukas.
“We were kids from lower-income, blue-collar factory-type families from the wrong side of town,” said Erickson, now executive director of the local Boys and Girls Clubs. “Kids perceived us as a step below other cities in the conference, and we were aware of that perception. By him being there, we rose to a new level as individuals and as a cohesive unit.
“He taught us life skills as much as he taught us basketball. He brought in people to talk about grooming and etiquette and dress. He asked the Booster Club to buy us gray sport coats with the Logan emblem, and we bought matching black slacks. We had to get haircuts, wear ties and have shined shoes. We were by far the sharpest looking team in the area.”
Erickson recalls Lukas as a strict disciplinarian who insisted on a spotless locker room and brought “incredible energy and an incredible passion” to his work.
“He didn’t get tangible results,” Erickson said. “To draw an analogy, we were quarter horses playing in a thoroughbred conference, competing against bigger schools with more talent. What was interesting is we came to believe in ourselves. We never felt we were a step below; he made us feel we were special people.”
It was most evident to Erickson, who had lost his father when he was 10 years old. “I didn’t have any direction until he entered my life and left an indelible impact on me,” he said. “I hadn’t planned on going to college; he inspired me to get my degree and become a coach and a sports official and make a difference in other people’s lives.”
LaCrosse Tribune stories tell of Lukas’ players carrying him off the court after the school upset Central, its rival from the upscale part of town.
But for Lukas the triumphs were too few. He was losing basketball games during the winter, but during the summer he was winning quarter horse races at the bush tracks around the Midwest, following a passion he had had since his youth. And his hobby made him more money. At age 31, he quit. The time had come for him to hit the lonesome road with his quarter horses and embark on a new career as a full-time trainer.
A nomadic childhood
Life on the road was nothing new for Darrell Wayne Lukas, born on Sept. 2, 1935, in Antigo, the second of three children. When Wayne was 2 1/2 years old, travel became a way of life.
His father, Ted, was a construction worker, and for the next six years his work took the family to roads, army bases and airports in New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland and Pennsylvania. “In 1st grade I went to four schools in four states,” remembered Dauna Moths, eldest of the three children. “We lived in this little, tiny 8-x-16-foot trailer. The table was like a booth and two benches. At night the table went down between the benches and the cushions folded over, and that was the bed for the boys. My bed was a chair in the daytime.
“At night you put the cushion down and it was my bed in the kitchen part of the trailer. In the back part there was a double bed where my folks slept.”
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In 1945, the family returned to Wisconsin to live on a 10-acre farm outside Antigo where Ted raised dairy cows and pigs and had a milk route. His children went to a one-room country school.
“Wayne would go with his dad on the milk route, and he came across this little horse that Dick Thorn had,” reminisced his mother, Bea, who at age 89 still lives in a care facility in town. “Wayne said: `I’d like to have that horse. Do you think the Thorns will sell her?’
“His Dad said: `We can ask.’
“Well, the next morning the little horse was riding home in the milk truck and Wayne was the happiest kid in the world.” The Arabian-Welsh pony named Queenie was young Wayne’s pride and joy. “I’ve always said my career was based on one horse, and that was Queenie,” he said. “She gave me the opportunity to go places.”
He taught Queenie tricks. He did rodeo stunts on her back. He trained her to run in races at Antigo’s Langlade County Fairgrounds and at nearby Indian reservations.
When he went to college at Wisconsin, he took Queenie. When his son, Jeff, learned to ride, it was on Queenie’s back.
Until she died at age 28, Queenie was his most constant companion.
“Kids today have bicycles and cars,” said Jim Lund, a boyhood pal who still lives in Antigo. “All of us kids got around on horseback. Wayne trained that little Queenie horse so she could do anything.”
By the time they were teenagers, Lukas and another boyhood friend, Clyde Rice, who also became a successful thoroughbred trainer, were buying wild mustangs brought to the fairgrounds to be slaughtered as animal food.
Lukas would “clean them up, break them and resell them as riding horses or to race in the area,” his sister said. “One time he had a horse who didn’t want to go into the gate because of the crowds at the fairs. He hired the local kids, giving them a quarter each, to throw paper cups and make a noise so he could train a horse to get used to being around a crowd.
“Sure enough, the next time at the race the horse didn’t care about the crowd and got right in the gate.”
He also was an entrepreneur who bought a goat so he could sell goat’s milk to families whose children were allergic to cow’s milk. He raised rabbits and sold them at Easter time.
“From about 6th grade on he had a paper route,” his mother said. “He never depended on his dad or mother to rouse him. If we’d be snowed in, he would shovel his way out and deliver those papers. All the money he earned would revert back to the horses.”
He ran on track and cross-country teams, played on the football team and briefly on the golf team and was an intramural star at basketball. “I worked hard at it and tried a lot of sports, trying to be good at something, but I just wasn’t a good athlete,” Lukas said.
“It didn’t come easy, the way it did for my brother, Lowell. When you’re weak you study the game and become a student of the game, but that will take you only so far. That’s the reason I got into coaching.”
He competed in rodeo, riding broncos and bulls and wrestling steers until the early years of his teaching and coaching career at LaCrosse Logan. His trophies were concussions and broken bones.
“It was nothing I ever had any aspirations of being very good at,” Lukas said. “It was just something I had a lot of fun with.”
Eventually, Lukas got off the rodeo circuit and devoted more of his time and energy to his quarter horses. During his years at Logan, he stabled the horses 83 miles to the north at Rochester, Minn., and made the drive before and after school to get them for a summer on the bush tracks.
“In the area I came from, there was no way you could wake up and think you someday could make a living training horses,” Lukas said. “But I came to see that it could be done. I was making $5,800 teaching and coaching basketball at Logan and another $400 as assistant football coach. With the quarter horses during the summer my take was $6,000.”
Lowell Lukas, who was a football player and runner at the University of Missouri and became a Hall of Fame college golf coach at Southern Connecticut State, thinks that if it weren’t for the losing records at Logan the horses would have remained a hobby.
“Believe me, he was as intense then in coaching as he is now in basketball,” he said. “The horses were always a part of him, but at that time I think they were kind of dormant. I think he grew frustrated. He didn’t have the material to succeed fast enough for him.
“It wasn’t just coaching, though. For lack of a better term, he had a midlife crisis. It was sort of a frustration with life, where you are and where you want to be. Wayne ran away with the horses.”
Quarter horse king
No sooner had Lukas embarked on a new career than he was tempted to return to coaching. Orr had been hired as Michigan’s coach and wanted Lukas as his assistant.
“I was doing well with the quarter horses, but not that well,” Lukas said. “The fact that it was Michigan and it was Johnny Orr, one of my dearest friends, made it very hard. But the salary base for assistants in those days was in the $20,000 range, and that was no home run either.
“If Johnny had indicated he was going to move on in a couple of years, giving me the opportunity to become the head coach at Michigan, I’d have taken the job. A lot of things would have fallen into place if I had.
“At the time I didn’t know Bo Schembechler (the football coach who became Michigan’s athletic director), but since then he and I have become very good friends. . . . If I had taken that job, right now I’d probably be the basketball coach at Michigan.”
Initially, Lukas based his racing operation in Oklahoma, but after encountering bad weather moved the horses to Laredo, Texas, during the winter months. In 1969, he moved his headquarters to El Paso, Texas, for the better weather and to be closer to the New Mexico tracks, Sunland Park and Ruidoso Downs. In 1970, he won more races than any quarter horse trainer in America.
But though he was at last on the fast track to success in sports, his marriage was failing. He and Janet, the college sweetheart he had married in 1957, divorced in 1971 when their only child, Jeff, was 13.
Lukas hit the road again, taking seven horses to California and Los Alamitos, the nation’s top quarter horse track.
He had claimed a mare, Native Empress, in New Mexico for $3,500, and she didn’t win a stakes race until the advanced age of 5. But Lukas developed her into Los Alamitos’ No. 1 runner in 1973.
In 1974 and 1975 he led the nation in races won and smashed nearly every record in quarter horse annals, virtually monopolizing the sport.
He trained 23 world champion quarter horses, including two-time Horse of the Year Dash for Cash, and won every major race except the All-American Futurity, the quarter horse counterpart to the Kentucky Derby.
By the mid-’70s, Lukas was “testing the water” for a plunge into thoroughbred racing, dabbling with them in the afternoons and going back to his quarter horses at night. He won his first thoroughbred race on June 10, 1967, and on Sept. 13, 1974, he won his first thoroughbred stakes, the second division of the Foothill at Pomona, Calif., with a 3-year-old colt, Harbour Hauler.
One of his first thoroughbred clients was the late Gene Cashman, a former Chicago police officer who made a fortune in the commodities market and parlayed it into a 1975 Preakness victory with Elocutionist.
“Through another friend, Gene sent me three or four horses when I was training both ways,” Lukas said. “We were on the fringe, but I think he recognized we were an up-and-coming outfit. They weren’t top-flight horses, but I was grateful.
“I realized I could compete [in thoroughbred racing], but I also realized to compete at the highest level, where I wanted to be, I had to get my ducks in a row, so to speak.”
For two years, Lukas worked on his leading quarter horse owners, persuading them to compete with thoroughbreds. He returned with the money that enabled him to buy top prospects at the yearling sales.
In 1978, Lukas dissolved his quarter horse stable to immerse himself in thoroughbred racing at Santa Anita. The rest is racing history.
Within a few years, Lukas revolutionized the sport, rolling stakes winners and champions off a figurative assembly line and opening stable franchises at top tracks from coast to coast, keeping as many as 160 horses in training.
His first Triple Crown victory came with Codex in the 1980 Preakness. Since 1983, he has led the nation in earnings every year but 1993. He reached the height of his career in 1987 when his horses won 342 races–92 of them stakes–and earned $17.5 million.
Along with the broken records came heartbreak. In late November, 1982, Landaluce, a 2-year-old filly so brilliant that she was compared to the immortal Ruffian and described by Lukas as “perfect in every way–in sheer brilliance there was nothing close to her,” died in her trainer’s arms, the victim of a mysterious virus.
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In 1989, his 2-year-old colt Grand Canyon raced the mile in a spectacular 1 minute 33 seconds in winning the Hollywood Futurity. “He was maybe the best-looking horse I ever saw,” Lukas said. But the colt died of a blood disorder.
“He’d have been my best shot at winning the Triple Crown,” Lukas said. “I thought he was a mortal lock.”
These tragedies coincided with an unprecedented slump for Lukas’ horses in 1993. But they were only a foretaste of the tragedy that was to befall him at Santa Anita that Dec. 15.
Tragic event
Tabasco Cat, the colt who would go on to win the 1994 Preakness, broke loose and trampled Jeff Lukas, who had been working as his father’s assistant for 11 years.
The brain injury that Jeff sustained put him in a coma for days and on the brink of death.
“For the first time in Wayne’s life, the horses weren’t first,” said his sister, Dauna. “It was the lowest point in his life. He just stayed there by Jeff’s bedside. You look at the pictures of them at some of those early Breeders’ Cups and you’ll see the sheer joy the two of them had together. Jeff was learning from him and was as good a trainer as Wayne, and then that happened.”
Jeff Lukas made an incredible recovery, but no longer could work as his father’s top assistant. “He’s not the same person,” his aunt said. Today he assists another of Lukas’ former assistants, Randy Bradshaw, in training about 130 yearlings at Padua Farm in Ocala, Fla., and does administrative work.
D. Wayne Lukas surmounted the tragedy by winning his six consecutive Triple Crown races, starting with Tabasco Cat’s 1994 Preakness. In 1999, he won the Kentucky Derby and Preakness with Charismatic.
Nevertheless, the stable is no longer the force that it was in the late ’80s and Lukas believes the reason is because Jeff no longer is working at the track.
“He was absolutely outstanding,” Lukas said. His input enabled me to be where I wasn’t. His ability enabled us to do things that we normally couldn’t do.”
In the ensuing years, Lukas’ sister and brother have seen him mellow ever so slightly. “He has that intensity, but now he has other things too,” Dauna said. “Thanks to his fourth wife, Laura (whom he married in 1998), he has a hobby for probably the first time in his life. She trains quarter horses, and they have become his hobby.”
That’s not surprising. A quote from Shakespeare that appeared as a caption beneath D. Wayne Lukas’ senior class photo in the 1953 Antigo High School yearbook provides the perfect synopsis of the life he has lived: “A horse! A horse! My kingdom for a horse.”