LOUISVILLE, Ky. (WDRB) — He wore a cowboy hat like it was issued with his birth certificate. With movie star friends and a superfecta smile, D. Wayne Lukas didn’t walk into a racetrack — he annexed it.
“D. Wayne Lukas is always the headliner,” Hall of Fame jockey Gary Stevens said.
This morning the headlines are sad ones. D. Wayne Lukas has given up his racing operation and won’t be back at the racetrack. He’s in the home stretch.
Faced with complications from a serious infection and an aggressive and difficult course of treatment, he has decided to go home and spend what time he has left with his family, his wife Laurie, grandchildren Brady Wayne Lukas and Kelly Roy and their spouses, as well as his great-grandchildren Johnny and Thomas Roy and Walker Wayne Lukas and Quinn Palmer Lukas.
Keep the family in your thoughts and prayers.
In a sport that has always been about horsepower, Lukas was jet fuel. He flew his horses around like they were CEOs. He ran his barn like a boardroom. Corporate precision. Strength in numbers.
A basketball coach-turned thoroughbred trainer, Lukas has always understood the importance of depth. Particularly in the Kentucky Derby, sometimes if his best colt couldn’t beat you, his bench did.
He didn’t train horses so much as command them.
He kept old school company, was friends with Bob Knight and Bill Parcells. When Clint Eastwood needed a horse for his film Pale Rider, Lukas gave him one of his ponies.
D. Wayne Lukas in his barn at Churchill Downs.
In the sport of kings, Lukas is a prince. In his heyday, he was “D. Wayne off the plane.” Lately, he dubbed himself “the old man off the van.”
In between, he went from perceived arrogant interloper to elder statesman, from showing a sport stuck in its past how it could be, to telling a sport limping toward the future how it should be.
It’s hard to imagine horse racing without him. It’s hard to imagine the Kentucky Derby without him. The epicenter of Churchill Downs’ backside is his barn, decked with flower boxes, orderly as a surgical tray. The kind of place where even the dust knows where to settle.
Lukas loved to quote a song of his friend Toby Keith: “Don’t let the old man in.” At age 89, Lukas held the old man off his entire life. None of us, though, can hold him off forever.
But even when the time came, I imagine Lukas telling him to wait until the harrow break, until he slid out of his saddle, and greeted him on his own terms.
Quick sips
• Once Indiana Pacers star Tyrese Haliburton went down with an apparent Achilles injury in the first quarter of Sunday’s NBA Finals Game 7 against Oklahoma City, the game followed a predictable pattern. Indiana showed resolve and inspiration for a time, but quality again rose to the surface as OKC rolled to its first NBA title in the second half. The Thunder were the best team in the NBA all season. Still, it’s a shame we didn’t get to see one more duel with the teams at full strength down the stretch.
• The College World Series finale was a wild one, with Coastal Carolina coach Kevin Schnall and his first base coach being ejected in the bottom of the first inning. After the game, a 5-3 win by LSU that clinched the championship, Schnall said, “I’m sorry for the way it ended,” but was otherwise defiant. Read more about it here.
The Last Drop
“If you are passionate about the game, you eliminate the excuses. If you’re passionate about your job, you’ll go without lunch. You’ll drive somewhere you didn’t want to be, you’ll stay up a little bit later to cover something. It’s the same thing with me.”
D. Wayne Lukas, talking to a group of reporters at his barn in 2024
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