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THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
FRIDAY, MAY 4, 2007
KENTUCKY DERBY
Unbridled performance
Today's races can't compare with wild finish of the past
BY BETH HARRIS ASSOCIATED PRESS
LOUISVILLE. Ky. — The Kentucky Derby begins with 20 horses stampeding three-eighths of a mile before squeezing through the first turn. No matter how crazy Saturday's race starts, there's little chance the finish will be as wild as it was 50 years ago.
"I don't think there was ever that good a race," 94-year-old trainer John Nerud recalled in Thursday. "I've never seen that in my lifetime."
The 1957 Kentucky Derby is
remembered as horse racing's version of baseball's "Shot Heart" "Round the World," the dramatics triggered by the late Bill Shoemaker, considered the sport's greatest jockey. He was aboard Gallant
"When your horse finishes 12th, you hardly notice where the wire is."
Man and gaining on rival Bill Hartack and Iron Liege as the two horses duelled down the stretch.
Upstairs in a clubhouse box, Nerud slapped owner Ralph Lowe on the back and said, "Go down to the winner's circle and get your roses and take them back to Texas."
Then, something incredible happened.
As the horses passed the sixteenth pole, Shoemaker inexplicably stood up in the irons on Gallant Man, misjudging the finish line. It happened so quickly, hardly anyone noticed at first. In a flash, Shoemaker bounced back into the saddle and began riding hard again.
But Gallant Man couldn't overhaul Hartack and Iron Liege, who won by a nose.
est riders ever,” Nerud said from his home in Long Island, N.Y. “I didn’t know what happened at the time until it was over.”
"I never figured out why he pulled up. He was one of the great-
Come Saturday, he'll be watching the 133rd Derby and cheering on Street Sense, trained by 65-year-old Carl Nafzger.
BILL SHOEMAKER Former jockey
"Carl is one of my protgs," Nerud said. "Every one of them is my friend, but Carl, I kind of put him on the right track. I gave him some horses that could run about 25 years ago."
Nafziger won the 1990 Derby with Unbridled and credits Nerud
for much of his success. Besides sending him good horses, Nafzger said Nerud gave him the confidence to stick to his own training theories and helped even more by keeping demanding owners off his back.
"He taught me so much," Nafzger said. "You can never fail, you can only learn. That's the way I live."
Street Sense is the early 4-1 second choice in a full field of 3-year-olds entered for Saturday's race. Curlin, the 7-2 favorite, is unbeaten in three starts, but with a 50 percent chance of thunderstorms forecast, things could get interesting. Street Sense finished third in his only race on a sloppy track; Curlin has never raced in mud.
The Churchill Downs track was rated "fast" on May 4, 1957. The night before, Lowe told Shoemaker that he dreamed a jockey on one of his horses misjudged the finish line and lost the race.
"Not me," Shoemaker replied.
But the very next day, race day,
he did just that.
"I knew," Shoemaker would write in his 1988 biography, "I had made a big boo-boo."
The blunder earned him a 15-day suspension, not just because Shoemaker pulled up the horse but, according to Nerud, because he lied about it afterward. Shoemaker originally claimed the horse took a bad step, but relented after being confronted by the stewards. The strange thing is he wasn't even supposed to be aboard Gallant Man in the Derby.
Nerud insisted that John Choquette should ride the horse, at one point telling Lowe, "You want another jockey, you can get another trainer, too."
In that year's pre-Derby Wood Memorial race, Chooste rode Gallant Man and lost by a nose to Bold Ruler and Eddie Arcaro. Shoemaker was in that race, too, but his horse hit the gate and was injured, leaving him without a Derby mount.
But after the Wood, Choquette was suspended for rough riding and in those days there were no appeals. So Nerud called Shoemaker and asked him to ride Gallant Man in the Derby. The jockey arrived at Churchill Downs wanting to get a feel for the track, but his agent couldn't book him a ride on the Derby Day undercard.
"The finish line at Churchill Downs was a sixteenth of a mile farther toward the first turn than it was at other tracks in the country," Shoemaker wrote. "And I hadn't had a ride over a track like that in a year. The year before, my Derby horse had been Terrang and he finished 12th.
"When your horse finishes 12th," he continued, "you hardly notice where the wire is."
Shoemaker, who won in 1955 with Swaps, went on to three more Derby victories in his career.
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>> NBA
Nuggets hopeful for 2008
DENVER — Allen Iverson wasn't "The Answer" in the short-term.
BY ARNIE STAPLETON ASSOCIATED PRESS
His presence couldn't prevent the Denver Nuggets from getting bounced in the first round of the playoffs for the fourth straight season.
Still, they weren't sullen or sour this time around.
They sauntered into the offseason defiantly confident that the addition of A.I. will soon produce a postseason party that will last a lot longer than five games.
"I think we definitely have a great team," forward Eduardo Najera said Thursday. "We have great players. As long as we stay together, were very close of getting past that first round nightmare ... But we got to stay together and we definitely got to have a better year during the regular season — with no brawls, with no trades, hopefully. I can almost guarantee that we will be so much better next year."
The Spurs think so, too.
"Next year, they're probably going
To do that, the Nuggets will need to add an outside shooter to open up the lanes for Carmelo Anthony and Iverson, who was smothered by the Spurs and averaged a career-worst 22.8 points in the postseason.
to be a 1-, 2- or 3-seed," Robert Horry said.
This year's Nuggets were a work in progress because of injuries, trades and suspensions.
"I'm excited about how good we can be," Iverson said. "I think we have a lot of talent. Our biggest thing is to have a training camp (together)."
Iverson made just 31 of 92 shots after he scored 31 points in Denver's Game 1 win in San Antonio.
Anthony and J.R. Smith were banished for fighting and Iverson came over from Philadelphia in December for two first-round draft picks, Joe Smith and Andre Miller. Then, the Nuggets sent Earl Boykins and Julius Hodge to Milwaukee for Steve Blake.
It took a while for them to mesh and they entered April at 35-36 before going 10-1 to secure the sixth seed in the West.
"It's been a roller-coaster season for us," said defensive player of the year Marcus Camby. "The fight in
New York, the trades that we had. You know, me personally, I wanted to see the A.I. and 'Melo combination work. But hopefully next year with training camp under our belts we'll get that continuity that we started to develop the last two months of the season carry over. That way we can get a better record. So we can get home-court advantage. I'm looking forward to next season."
"I felt like this was the worst playoff series that I've played in my career," Iverson said. "It was kind of frustrating, coming into a new situation, wanting to be the one that gets this team over the hump, get them out of the first round. And to play like I'm not capable of playing is just frustrating."
The bench provided almost no boost as Smith got into coach George Karl's doghouse for a series of mental mistakes and Linas Kleiza shrank in the glare of the playoffs. Still, they were competitive, unlike two years ago, when they lost to the Spurs in the first round.
Driving competition
Natacha Pisarenko/ASSOCIATED PRESS
Norwegian Petter Solberg acknowledges the crowd on his Subaru Impreza WRC during the first stage of the Argentine Rally on Thursday at the Monumental Stadium in Buenos Aires, Argentina.
NCAA
BCS teams to face stricter policy
BY MICHAEL MAROT ASSOCIATED PRESS
INDIANAPOLIS — Big-money athletic programs avoided most of the NCAA's penalties. Next year, they might not be so lucky.
The latest Academic Progress Report released by the NCAA on Wednesday showed only 11 BCS teams were punished for poor classroom performance, while historically black colleges and universities accounted for 13 percent of all sanctioned schools. Of the 49 warning letters sent out, 13 went to Louisiana teams.
That discrepancy could change next year when the NCAA plans to drop a mathematical calculation
"Many more teams could be subject to these penalties next year," he said. "We've written letters to coaches and others saying we are concerned about this issue and we want to help put together plans that will help them improve."
that helped some BCS teams avoid punishment this year, and NCAA president Myles Brand is already sounding the warnings.
That's little consolation to the schools already facing penalties. This is the first time the NCAA has sent out warning letters based on academic performance.
The NCAA compiles an APR, which measures eligibility and retention of student athletes, for every program at every Division I school.
Teams scoring less than 925 — the equivalent of a 60 percent graduation rate under the NCAA's formula — received warning letters and could face harsher sanctions over the next three years. A second offense during that time would result in a reduction of practice time or games played. A third offense would result in disqualification from NCAA tournaments.
Louisiana-based Nicholls State received the second-most warning letters in four sports: baseball, men's cross country and women's indoor and outdoor track. Texas Southern in Houston received five.
BCS teams, in contrast, received no warning letters.
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