Dutrow Loudly Ignores the Odds

Troubled Trainer Says Bet It All on Big Brown in Derby

LOUISVILLE, May 1 -- Trouble and success appear to follow Richard Dutrow Jr. wherever he goes, the combustible yin and yang of one of the top trainers in thoroughbred racing.

Even this past week, a week of nothing but good, he has courted controversy, giving free rein to his natural ability to provoke.

Dutrow's colt, Big Brown, is the 3-1 morning-line favorite to win the 134th Kentucky Derby even though the horse has made just three starts in his life. The 1 1/4 -mile race for 3-year-olds, with 20 horses in the field, is the most demanding test in American racing, and few horses ever have won with so little experience.

Dutrow, 48, however, routinely tells everyone within earshot to bet everything they have on him. The Daily Racing Form ran a lengthy story with the headline, "Dutrow on Derby: 'Not a tough horse race.' "

At the post position draw Wednesday, he selected the outside slot, from which only one horse in the history of the Derby has ever won.

"I don't think I'm talking big," Dutrow said, but he alone holds that opinion.

"God rest his soul, Bud Delp was out there like this," Hall of Fame jockey Jerry Bailey said. "He told people Spectacular Bid was the greatest horse ever to look through a bridle. But if you watched [Big Brown win] the Florida Derby, you have to believe him."

Yet it hasn't been all fun and games this week outside of Barn 22, where Big Brown is stabled. Reporters have pointedly questioned Dutrow about his past, which is strewn with drug violations, both his horses' and his own.

The litany of misdeeds is lengthy for the trainer, who was born in Hagerstown, Md., one of three brothers who followed in the footsteps of their father, the late Maryland training star Dick Dutrow, who died of cancer in 1999.

In the late 1980s, at the start of his career, Dutrow was ruled off New York racetracks for five years after testing positive for marijuana. He returned in the early 1990s, broke and living in a tack room at Aqueduct.

"I got into jams, mostly drugs," Dutrow said. "Going out, getting pulled over, stuff like that. I don't know how to explain it. My mind just wasn't on the right stuff. I was into gambling. It was ridiculous, a joke. But I was out at the barn every morning, and I would concentrate on what was happening."

Dutrow's father, on the downside of a brief run of success training in New York, returned to Maryland. Dutrow, who had a fallout with his father, had one or two horses in his care and was spinning his wheels. Then his girlfriend, the mother of his daughter, Molly, was killed.