Lucky Charm

By LON EUBANKS

Aug. 27, 1997 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

DEL MAR — It’s a lazy morning at Del Mar race track, a piece of horse racing heaven a few miles north of San Diego and only a summer breeze away from the ocean. Trainer Bob Baffert is looking relaxed and unruffled.

It has been more than two months since Baffert went on that wild, dizzying ride with America’s Horse, Silver Charm, along with owners Bob and Beverly Lewis of Newport Beach and jockey Gary Stevens in the bid for thoroughbred racing’s Triple Crown.

Silver Charm is looking equally at ease and content, snacking on a ball of straw that hangs on the door outside stall No. 58 in Baffert’s barn. Silver Charm is living the good life on his vacation.

Things are almost back to normal for both of them.

“About as normal as they’ll ever be again, I guess,” Baffert said. “But we’re all still riding the Silver Charm wave.”

Baffert, who lives in Huntington Beach with his wife and four children, measures normal in odd ways.

“The bill for my three cellular phones is back down to around $1,200 a month,” he said.

Baffert says it reached $5,000 at the height of the Silver Charm mania last June, before the Belmont and after the colt won the Kentucky Derby and Preakness.

“It seems like everyone I ever knew in college was calling me then,” said Baffert, joking. “The only ones who didn’t check in were my high school girlfriends.”

Baffert can’t help wondering how it might have been if Silver Charm had won the Belmont and the first Triple Crown in 19 years, instead of finishing second to Touch Gold.

“I know I was 50 yards away from being on the Jay Leno show,” Baffert said. “Fifty yards. Can you believe that? They told me that I’d be on the show only if we won. But Jay’s still my guy anyway.”

Never mind the $5 million Triple Crown bonus that also went down the drain.

Baffert still believes his horse would have won the race had not Silver Charm been surprised by Touch Gold’s stretch run on the outside. “If he had seen the other horse, he would never have gotten by him,” Baffert said. “That’s why I still think that while we were beaten, we really weren’t out-run.”

But those are the might-have-beens.

Since then, Silver Charm has recovered from a minor illness, and Baffert is going about the business of restocking his barn with fresh horses.

“There were all kinds of rumors about Silver Charm, about him having this or that, but he’s fine now,” Baffert said. “It was a situation where the horse’s system had gone down on me. I’m not going to run him like that, and get him beat. People don’t want to see that. And I don’t want to take any chance on him getting hurt. Hey, I’ve got all this good fan mail coming in. I don’t want hate mail.”

Baffert is planning to parade the colt at Del Mar Monday, the day of the Del Mar Derby, and he says Silver Charm probably will return to racing in the winter meeting at Santa Anita in the Malibu Stakes.

While Silver Charm remains the superstar of the 40-plus horse stable, several other horses also have been doing well, ensuring Baffert’s status as one of the nation’s top trainers this season. His other top 3-year-old, Anet, recently finished second to Free House, one of Silver Charm’s Triple Crown rivals, in the $1 million Haskell Handicap at Monmouth Park.

Baffert ranks third nationally in money won at $5.4 million, with only Richard Mandella ($7.2 million) and Wayne Lukas ($5.8 million) ahead of him, and Lukas horses have more than twice as many starts. Baffert ranked eighth a year ago with earnings of $4.4 million.

“There’s no question he’s at the top of his profession right now,” said horse owner Mike Pegram, who convinced Baffert to move from quarterhorse racing to the thoroughbreds. Pegram has been one of Baffert’s best friends and strongest supporters since they met in 1986. “He loves racing, and it couldn’t be happening to anyone more deserving,” Pegram said.

A story in USA Today recently referred to Baffert as “the Tiger Woods of thoroughbred racing.” That might be a bit of a stretch, but there’s no doubt that Baffert, 44, with his prematurely silver hair, quickly has become the sport’s most recognizable trainer.

“Yeah, when I’m in the grocery store now with the kids, people will walk up to me and say, ‘Hey, I know you. Aren’t you that horse guy?’ ” Baffert said.

“And I was over at the University of Arizona not long ago. My kids were in a basketball camp there. I go over to buy a drink at this little stand there, and I can see the guy looking at me, and finally he says, ‘The horse guy, right?’ I guess that’s me now: the horse guy.”

Baffert even has his own public relations man now. Well, sort of.

Not long ago, when Baffert went back to Nogales, Ariz., where he grew up, the family was having dinner at one of Baffert’s favorite Mexican restaurants. Baffert noticed his 6-year-old son, Forest, involved in a conversation with the owner. Not long afterward, Forest showed up back at the table with one of the paper placemats and said, “Dad, how about signing this for my friend; he’s a nice guy. I thought he might like an autograph.”

“That just cracked me up,” Baffert said, laughing.

Baffert remains the same unpretentious, sometimes-a-little-zany guy he was before Silver Charm came along.

“My wife, Sherry, wouldn’t let any of this go to my head,” Baffert said. “She’s the one that keeps the race track from engulfing me. I don’t think any other trainers have danced with the trophy in the winner’s circle at the Kentucky Derby, but I wanted to have a good time with it.”

Winning the Derby remains such a delight to Baffert because of the agony he felt there the year before when his horse, Cavonnier, was beaten by a nose by Grindstone. “And the Derby is such an emotional race,” Baffert said.

He has come a long way since that disappointment.

This year, for the first time, Baffert went to the July Keeneland Selected Yearling Sales at Lexington Ky., where the most expensive horses are usually sold.

“I’d never gone there before because it would have been like taking your kids to a toy store, then telling them you weren’t going to buy them anything,” Baffert said.

But this time he went there as a major player. Even more than that. “He was like a rock star there,” said J.B. McKathan Jr., a horse buyer who also breaks yearlings for Baffert in Ocala, Fla., and was at Keeneland with him. “There were all kinds of people there just asking him for autographs.”

Baffert picked up one new owner--Oregon lumberman Aaron Jones--along the way.

“He got my mobile telephone number, called me when I was there, and asked me if I’d look for something for him,” Baffert said. “As it turns out, he’s a friend of Bob Lewis. According to Bob, he was watching the Triple Crown races on television with his wife, and she asked him, ‘Hey, how come we’re not having that much fun?’ ”

Baffert found a horse he liked, a son of Storm Cat and stakes winner Shared Interest, and it ended up costing Jones $1.5 million, the top price at the sale.

“Mr. Jones and Mr. Lewis both went to college at Oregon,” Baffert said. “I guess I’m going to have to change my barn’s colors to green and yellow.”

Baffert’s relationship with the Lewises also continues to grow stronger following Silver Charm’s success. Baffert has five horses in training for the Lewises, and has bought four more yearlings for them, two in the last few weeks.

One of Baffert’s most promising 2-year-olds, Hot Wire, is owned by the Lewises. Baffert paid only $75,000 for that colt, and says he has already turned down $500,000 for him. “He’s bred to go the distance and won his first race,” Baffert said. “He came from dead-last and won on opening day here.” Since then, however, Hot Wire has developed a minor shin problem and won’t run again until Santa Anita’s winter meeting.

Baffert has three other promising 2-year-olds. One of them, Johnbill, is owned by Pegram. The others are Indian Charley, owned by Arizona car dealer Hal Earnhardt, and Souvenir Copy, owned by the Golden Eagle Farm of San Diego.

All four are Kentucky Derby prospects. “That’s a big difference from a year ago when I only had one,” Baffert said.

Despite the recent success, Baffert says he hasn’t been overwhelmed by offers from new owners. “Maybe people think I already have all the horses I want,” Baffert said. “But I am pretty selective about the owners I train for, and I like to keep my numbers down.

“If I’m not comfortable with a guy, it will never work. I like to train for people where there’s a mutual respect. The chemistry has to be there. That’s the beauty of training for Bob Lewis. He’s become like a father figure to me. I think I rode a lot of Bob’s good karma with Silver Charm.”

But Baffert is being asked more about what he looks for in a horse, especially after it became so well known that he paid only $85,000 for Silver Charm as a 2-year-old.

Baffert isn’t going to give away any trade secrets, but . . .

“What I tell people is to look at my horses,” Baffert said. “They all look pretty much alike. I loved Silver Charm’s body the first time I saw him on that film. But there was nothing in his pedigree that gave me an indication of the kind of horse he could be. If he had been by one of the top sires, he would have cost me a million dollars. But I look at all horses the same whether they’re priced at $1 million or $20,000.”

Baffert says he has concentrated lately on buying quality young horses.

“The quality in our barn definitely appears to be improved,” said Baffert’s assistant trainer Eoin Harty. “The pedigrees are better, and they cost more, but you still never know they’re going to perform until they’re on the race track for a while.”

Baffert’s bank account also has gotten a boost in the last year. He collects 10% of the purse money when his horses finish in the top three places, which determines how successful he is financially.

But the stable’s costs, particularly because of the additional travel, also have increased.

“I don’t know where [the money] all goes at the end of the month, although I know I’m better off than I was before Silver Charm,” Baffert said. “But I don’t cut any corners. My overhead is pretty high. I treat all these horses like I own them myself.”

But Baffert says the bottom line isn’t the most important thing.

“I got into this business because I wanted to win races and have a good time,” Baffert said. “That’s one thing that definitely hasn’t changed.”