It's a Hard Road Back for Trainer Jeff Lukas : Horse racing: The words came out quickly, clipped short. He paused between phrases, forcing his injured brain to remember how to answer questions, how to make conversation.

By JOHN NELSON

April 24, 1994 12 AM PT

ASSOCIATED PRESS

Jeff Lukas stepped gingerly through the doorway of a busy Mexican restaurant a couple of miles from his Glendora home in the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains.

He wore a plaid shirt buttoned just below an angry, red scar at the base of his throat, where a tube had been. His hair, shaved to his scalp for surgery, was growing back, and he’d gained the 40 pounds he lost while in a coma for nearly a month.

His wife, Linda, had to remind him several times to stop eating nachos.

“The doctor will kill me,” she said. “He’s on a diet.”

Lukas’ handshake wasn’t yet strong, but it was firm. Still blurry, the vision was starting to come back in his right eye, and just the night before, he was able to read a book slowly to his 4-year-old son, Brady.

It was painstaking work, but Jeff Lukas is getting used to that.

“I’m doing better. Doing better,” he said. “It’s been fairly quiet.”

The words came out quickly, clipped short. He paused between phrases, forcing his injured brain to remember how to answer questions, how to make conversation. Sometimes he missed the mark. He’s been working on being more specific.

Four months earlier, Jeff Lukas, horse trainer, almost died. Two days after the accident, nurses asked Linda Lukas if she wanted a priest at her husband’s bedside.

It happened Dec. 15. Jeff’s father, trainer D. Wayne Lukas, had a promising 2-year-old named Tabasco Cat. The colt got loose in the stable area and, like any horseman would, Jeff stepped out to stop him. The colt ran over the younger Lukas, slamming his head to the ground.

Twice in the next week, Lukas nearly died as his brain swelled. His eyes fluttered open on Christmas Day, but he quickly slipped back into unconsciousness, where he remained until the first week of January.

Lukas, 36, recalls none of this.

The last thing he remembers is going Christmas shopping the day before the accident.

“I remember buying a Dallas Cowboys jacket for Brady,” he said.

“We never even thought about this before,” Linda said, then asked her husband if he remembered what he bought for his 1-year-old daughter, Kelly.

“Something to wear,” he said. “Yes, it was something to wear.”

The rest is a blank, and Lukas doesn’t seem to mind, for now. He’s too busy learning to think and talk and walk again.

“I haven’t given a lot of thought to it,” he said. “I still feel it’s very important to get back to the routine I was in before. That’s my No. 1 priority.”

That’s a long way off yet, even though he baffled the hospital crew by getting up at 3:30 a.m. He’s still keeping trainer’s hours, and miraculously, there’s a good chance he’ll be able to go back to work some day. Doctors now say Lukas is out of danger and has about two years in which he should continue to improve. At his current rate of improvement, that would seem to be plenty of time.

Lukas was still living at the Casa Colina Rehabilitation Center in Pomona, Calif., when Tabasco Cat finished second to Brocco in the Santa Anita Derby on April 9, but he was looking forward to getting home.

“I was going to keep a scrapbook,” Linda Lukas said, “and I started to. Then I thought to myself, ‘Why am I saving all this? I don’t want to remember it.’ The girls at the hospital did a summary of Jeff’s milestones for me. The days kind of run together.”

After regaining consciousness, Lukas spoke his first word on Jan. 13. He called his wife’s name. One week later, he took his first halting step, and on March 2, he walked out of the hospital under his own power, on his way to the rehab center.

In the meantime, his father has watched Tabasco Cat become one of the best 3-year-old racehorses in the country and a strong contender for the Kentucky Derby on May 7. Yet, D. Wayne Lukas admits Tabasco Cat will always “be the horse that ran over Jeff.”

Jeff Lukas has seen tapes of Tabasco Cat’s races, and he came to the Santa Anita Derby, where he watched from under a secluded orange grove in a private area outside the final turn.

Still, he has little first-hand knowledge of the horse that nearly killed him, and he seems to struggle to find words to describe his feelings about that.

“The horse business is such that it’s so unusual to see a horse do something like that,” Lukas said, rambling. “His job is to race, and what they do when they’re not racing, that’s something else.”

He knew what he wanted to say, but it wasn’t coming out right. He tried again.

“It’s not like he went out looking for me,” Jeff said. “He didn’t do it on purpose.”

Forgiveness did not come as easy for Linda Lukas, who was all too aware that she faced life without a father for her two children because of the horse.

“I hated him at first. I really hated that horse,” she said, admitting she fantasized about sneaking into the stable late and night and doing away with him.

Her eye teared briefly, then it was gone--as quickly as the hatred.

The next morning, in the Santa Anita stable area, D. Wayne Lukas pointed to the spot where it happened. “Right over there,” he said. “I couldn’t have talked about that a few weeks ago.”

Jeff Lukas is more than his father’s top assistant. He’s more like a partner, or an alter-ego. This is about the time of year he would have headed to New York to take care of the East Coast half of the Lukas stable, one of the nation’s largest.

“Him being gone makes a huge difference,” D. Wayne Lukas said. “He was my key assistant coach. He handled all the nominations, coordinated shipping, pored over the conditions books. Now I have to do all that. I can’t even leave the barn anymore.”

In Shug McGaughey’s barn at Belmont Park in New York, assistant trainer Buzzy Tenney is a neighbor of Jeff Lukas.

“I’ve always believed Jeff was very much his own person, his own trainer,” Tenney said. “By the same token, he grew up in his dad’s shedrow and knows what his dad wants. He’s a very good trainer, and I’m not going to put that in the past tense.”

Jeff Lukas’ strongest trait as a trainer might be that he has the patience his father doesn’t, Tenney said.

“Everybody around here thinks Jeff is the glue that keeps everything together for Lukas,” Tenney said. “I’m sure all the other Lukas assistants called Jeff, wherever they were, to find out what to do with their horses.”

Another Belmont neighbor, John Veitch, said their strength as a team is that “they see things through each other’s eyes, and that’s important.”

It was almost unanimous among Jeff Lukas’ fellow trainers.

“You can use the word professional to describe him, and it would be an understatement,” said Nick Zito, who trained 1991 Kentucky Derby winner Strike the Gold. “He’s the ultimate trainer.”

Jeff Lukas was due back at rehab by 9 p.m., and he kept looking at his watch that night at dinner. It was like he needed to reorient himself periodically. Since the accident, he’d spent little time around so many people.

Linda Lukas used the analogy of a bruised elbow. It hurts when you bump it. Lukas had a bruised brain, and it was getting jostled a little.

That’s part of the reason he hadn’t moved home yet. Once an easy-going, doting father, he now feared he wouldn’t have the patience for his children.

“I was always the disciplinarian with the kids,” Linda Lukas said. “That was my job. He really just enjoyed being around them. But now, he’s so afraid he’ll over-discipline them. He thinks he might hurt the children. Don’t you, Jeff?”

He nodded.

“Jeff didn’t know what to tell them, how they’d handle it. We didn’t even know if he’d live,” she said.

They both fell silent for a moment.

Linda Lukas looked pensive. “We’ve talked about how this will change our lives, haven’t we, Jeff? You’re going to look at your life a little differently now?”

“I hope so,” he said.

“I hope so, too,” she said. “Maybe something good will come of it.”

“Maybe something good will come of it,” he said.

What about those words, “loose horse?” How will he react if he hears those words again in the stable area? Will he step in front of another half-ton racehorse?

“I haven’t been through the situation again, but it’s very unlikely it would happen again,” Jeff Lukas said, rambling a little again.

“That wasn’t the question, Jeff,” Linda Lukas said. “Would you jump out in front of a horse again?”

“Sure,” he said. “If it needs to be done, I’ll do it. I don’t feel any fear.”

“I was hoping you wouldn’t say that,” she said.