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Posted on Sun, May. 04, 2008

Gary West: Just contemplate how much Big Brown outran a bad field

By GARY WEST

Star-Telegram staff writer

Maybe Big Brown will be the next cover boy superhorse, and perhaps he's on his way, with his victory Saturday in the Kentucky Derby, to a sweep of the gemstones. Or maybe his competition represents the biggest collection of losers since Jeff Spicoli was at Ridgemont High.

But either way, this Kentucky Derby was, and always will be, difficult to accept. Not because I was wrong, but because Big Brown's trainer, Richard Dutrow, approaches horse racing like a worm to an apple and because Eight Belles lost her life among the roses. And so how can anything good emerge from something so tragic?

Saturday's events at Churchill Downs in Louisville, Ky., didn't defy expectations so much as they knocked harmony and orderliness off their bicycles.

But maybe I should look at this Derby as if it's a koan -- you know, something Zen Buddhists contemplate to raise their awareness and reconcile life's contradictions. After Kentucky Derby 134, I could use some mysticism.

Could Big Brown be so good, so uncommonly and extraordinarily talented, that he could overcome his No. 20 post position and his inexperience to win the most difficult of all races, the Kentucky Derby? Or could these other 3-year-olds be so mediocre, such congenital lumpen, that they would allow an inexperienced horse from post position No. 20 to beat them?

And not just beat them, but embarrass them: Big Brown drew clear subito in the stretch to finish nearly five lengths ahead of Eight Belles. After the most celebrated 1 1/4 miles in America, Big Brown stopped the teletimer at 2:01.82, which was a solid but hardly dazzling time for the day.

In other words, Big Brown's performance was more visually than actually impressive, and was that because he was running against a bunch of losers who would have had a tough time keeping pace at the petting zoo?

Think about it. Yes, that's it, contemplate the koan, meditate upon it, inhale the mystical aroma, hear the vina, and then arrive at this reconciliation: Big Brown is indeed quite talented, the other 3-year-olds are, for the moment anyway, woefully pedestrian, and the sum of those two realities can only mean Triple Crown.

Big Brown couldn't have beaten Smarty Jones or Afleet Alex or Alysheba, but he could very well run the table on this pitiful group of 3-year-olds. He's already the best, as the Brown Derby showed Saturday, and he's getting better.

Big Brown, after all, has run only four times. And he just won the world's most famous race despite missing a month of training with foot problems. He couldn't have been at his best Saturday.

And so how good will he be in two weeks for the Preakness, the second of the Triple Crown's jewels, at Pimlico in Baltimore? The Derby winner's saurian trainer wouldn't speculate except to say that if he doesn't "do anything stupid," then Big Brown "will run like that again."

Big Brown's jockey, Kent Desormeaux, praised colt's intelligence, saying that's what separates him from crowd and, of course, what enables him, somewhat amazingly, to cruise unhurriedly behind Saturday's modes pace. "That's what makes him the best I've ever ridden," Desormeaux said about the Big Brown smarts after winning his third Kentucky Derby.

And Big Brown, Desormeaux said, responds to every request. "Every time I ask him," the jockey explained, "it's like he's leaving the starting gate again."

Or could it be it that his rivals are so slow and plodding and dilatory that Big Brown only gives an impression that he's accelerating? Yes, contemplate and meditate, reconcile the differences and see what coalesces, and it's the image of a crown, isn't it, or could that be a jelly doughnut?