Kentucky Derby

By Terry Conway H.P. McGrath was a barroom brawler who worked his way up from crooked dice games in his native Kentucky to owning posh gambling parlors in New Orleans and New York City. Cashing in his enormous profits, McGrath returned to Lexington, Ky. as a member of the landed gentry in 1867. He built his lordly estate McGrathiana on the crest of a hill a few miles outside town. There, horse-breeding, racing, and wagering on topflight thoroughbreds would dominate the rest of his life.

LOUISVILLE, Ky. - Rick Pitino takes two vacations every summer and, like any rational individual, takes them at Saratoga, the upstate New York site of America's most historic racetrack, and Del Mar, the country's most scenic track, just north of San Diego, with the Pacific Ocean in view from the grandstand. A native New Yorker, Pitino knew a little about horse racing, but it was not until he came to coach at Kentucky a quarter century ago that he really got into it. Now the Louisville basketball coach, fresh off that national championship, is all the way in. When word of his imminent arrival at Churchill Downs spread through the backstretch Wednesday morning, you would have thought a head of state was coming to Barn 45 to see Goldencents.

LONGTIME Daily News sports writer Stan Hochman has a stable full of great stories about the Kentucky Derby, including a dandy from the first one he covered. We'll get to that in a minute. For the second year in a row, Hochman will headline a charity benefit on Derby Day at the Paramour restaurant in the Wayne Hotel in Wayne, Pa. The event kicks off at 3 p.m. and guests are encouraged to dress as if they were attending the Derby at Churchill Downs - plenty of ostentatious hats, hold the manure.

Download our bettors' guide and in-depth look at the Kentucky Derby here : LOUISVILLE, Ky. - The best way to understand a race is to envision how it will be run. I have decided that Goldencents is fast enough to clear Saturday's Kentucky Derby field in the first few hundred yards, set moderate fractions and be in front from start to finish. Whenever you can find a quality horse that possesses an attribute that is different from the other logical contenders, you have a live play.

LOUISVILLE, Ky. - It's easy to figure out where Todd Pletcher got the idea to enter five horses in this year's Kentucky Derby. He used to work for D. Wayne Lukas. For the longest time, Lukas was the biggest star in the sport, the guy in the white hat with an army of thoroughbreds stashed coast-to-coast, winning every big race in sight. In 1996, Lukas won his third Derby with Grindstone, a horse he considered the weakest of his five entries. It took him decades to admit as much, but he can do that now. At 77, Lukas has 13 Triple Crown wins, including four in the Derby, and is the sport's elder statesman.

LOUISVILLE, Ky. - The Kentucky Derby post position draw draws a lot of scrutiny, but the reality is that nobody can predict what will go down in the first few seconds when the 20 stall doors open in the annual cavalry charge. And that matters more than the actual post positions. There is no better example than what happened to Union Rags last year when he got squeezed from his inside and outside and lost all chance to get a decent early position in a race where position is critical.

LOUISVILLE, Ky. - Trainer Doug O'Neill had a pretty darned good day on two courses. First he birdied the eighth hole during a Wednesday afternoon golf outing at Valhalla, then he aced the Kentucky Derby draw when Goldencents landed in the No. 8 post and was made the 5-1 third choice for Saturday's race. "It should be perfect for him," said O'Neill, who saddled last year's winner, I'll Have Another. "Perfect" was not the way last year's Triple Crown series ended for O'Neill and his colt.

LOUISVILLE, Ky. - Todd Pletcher has won 2,500 races in the last 10 years. The horses he trains have accounted for nearly $200 million in purses during that time. He has accumulated somewhere around $20 million for himself. His horses are 1-for-31 in the Kentucky Derby. "I think a couple ways you can look at it," Pletcher said. "I think for one, people seem to think that I've been training for 50 years or something, when in reality I first got my license in '96 and I think we had our first Derby starters in 2000.

LOUISVILLE, Ky. - Normandy Invasion, runner-up in the Wood Memorial, is named for the pivotal Allied assault in World War II. Rick Porter, the colt's owner, decided he could do more to honor that effort than simply naming a horse. He has arranged for four veterans of that campaign to join him at the Derby. "Three of them were on the beaches for the D-Day invasion," said Porter, a Wilmington native who has two-second place finishes in the Derby with Hard Spun (2007) and Eight Belles (2008)

Looking at unraced horses, hundreds of them, plucking out a thoroughbred with a future, maybe even in the Kentucky Derby - it takes a certain confidence. Tom McGreevy had it even before he began picking horses out. On his first day on Penn State's campus as a transfer student in 1972, McGreevy knocked on the head football coach's door. He wanted a tryout as a placekicker. "I think we have enough kickers," Joe Paterno told him. McGreevy, who believed Penn State's kickers had been lousy, persisted, explaining he'd been practicing for a couple of years before transferring over from York College.