Just a Hoofbeat Short of Glory

Believe, if you will, that Silver Charm is only an easy jog from winning today’s Belmont Stakes and racing’s Triple Crown.

But before reaching for your wallet, pull on your boots. Clomp though the mud and flies of the Hollywood Park stable area. Stop at Barn 60, find a guy in blue jeans carrying a shovel.

Tell him you want to see a man about a dog.

The man is trainer Jack Van Berg.

The dog is a 3-year-old Australian shepherd, crippled by shoulder problems, born with a white eye. He spends his days hobbling around the hay and staring eerily at the grooms.

A dog named Alysheba.

Right about now, those who appreciate the wonder that is racing’s Triple Crown will know what this story is about, and they will be right.

This is the story’s 10-year anniversary, and in that decade it has not changed one lick.

It is still about one of the best horses in racing history, poised on the brink of legend, backed by a small-town trainer on the verge of becoming a giant.

It is still about that horse needing one more victory, in the Belmont Stakes, to win the Triple Crown and secure futures for everyone who touched him.

It is still a story about how a 10-second conversation made all that disappear.

Concede today’s Belmont to Silver Charm, if you will, but understand that the biggest problem in any horse race is still the humans.

When Silver Charm’s trainer, Bob Baffert, talks about needing luck, understand he knows exactly what he is talking about.

If you don’t, Jack Van Berg will be happy to spend a few minutes explaining it to you as he sits on a bench in Barn 60, that poor dog flopping at his spurred boots.

“Do I still think about that race? Sure, I still think about it,” he said. “So does my banker. My banker, he has nightmares.”

Van Berg turns 61 today, and what a nice present this will be, another reminder of the sort of disappointment that time only inflates.

“It’s OK, I still watch it on video,” he said. “I guess I’m used to torture.”

On June 6, 1987, Alysheba took the track at Belmont Park as the favorite to become the 12th Triple Crown winner and first in nine years.

Van Berg, who had entered racing’s Hall of Fame two years earlier after more than 4,000 wins at mostly smaller Midwestern tracks, was his trainer.

Even though Alysheba had defeated a horse named Bet Twice by less than a length in the Kentucky Derby and Preakness, this ultimate test was not supposed to be that close.

Alysheba was a 4-5 favorite in the nine-horse field . . . and Bet Twice was only the 8-1 fifth choice.

“It was obvious, my horse could gallop faster than most of those horses could run,” Van Berg said.

With a victory would come a $5-million bonus. With a second-place finish, there would be a $1-million bonus.

For Van Berg, as important as the money would have been the respect. No longer would he be viewed simply as a Nebraska farm boy who fattened his resume in places like Omaha and Shreveport.

He had won the Preakness three years earlier with Gate Dancer, but not many big ones until the arrival of Alysheba, so this victory would prove that he was a superstar worthy of every owner’s trust.

So what if he didn’t court the media like some, or tell cute stories around the owners’ boxes like others? So what if he wore a cowboy hat and turquoise watchband and snarled when he talked?

So what if his best asset was an ability to get out of bed at 4 a.m. every day of his life and work every one of them as if it were his last?

If he won this race, rich people would start treating old Jack as if his middle initials were G.Q.

And no doubt, old Jack was going to win this race.

“All week, I told the owners, ‘This horse is going to be in front every step of the way,’ ” Van Berg said. “All week I said that.”

Just before the race, in the paddock with jockey Chris McCarron, he said it one more time.

He told McCarron that Alysheba should take the lead and hold it.

At least, he thought he did.

“Chris looked at me like I had fallen off a banana truck,” Van Berg said.

Perhaps because McCarron heard something different.

“I misconstrued what he wanted me to do,” McCarron acknowledged this week.

McCarron had won the previous year’s Belmont Stakes on Danzig Connection, so perhaps what he heard was filtered through his own experience. Or maybe it was just the background noise of approaching fame.

Whatever happened, Alysheba never had a chance.

He broke running, and while Van Berg was cheering for him to keep running, McCarron was holding him back.

By the time Bet Twice broke away for what was an eventual 14-length victory, Alysheba was too crowded to move.

When he finally did run, McCarron admitted to whipping him at the wrong time and forcing him into another horse, eventually costing him even second or third place.

“I rode a poor race,” McCarron acknowledged. “It hurt for a long time.”

Alysheba finished fourth, and while the trainer said he was too speechless to confront the jockey, some of the color left Van Berg’s face forever.

A year later, McCarron rode Alysheba to a Breeders’ Cup win and afterward told Van Berg, “What you said about your horse last year, you were right.”

Van Berg replied, “You’re a year late and $5 million short.”

McCarron has since become the all-time leading money winner among jockeys, and will ironically be trying to end another Triple Crown dream today when he rides Touch Gold.

Van Berg? He’s watching the race on television.

He’s still among the all-time leading trainers in North America. To many longtime horseplayers, he is still as beloved as a bugle.

He still thinks Alysheba, second to Cigar on the all-time money list, could have been the best horse ever.

“I am not going to criticize McCarron today, because we all make mistakes,” he said. “But if he had just let him run. . . . That horse was once in a lifetime.”

Yet today, the owners of Alysheba, the Scharbauer family, have since taken their business elsewhere.

And McCarron doesn’t ride many of Van Berg’s horses because they just aren’t good enough.

Van Berg sits with his dog and his claiming horses and is asked if he has any advice today for Silver-Charmed Bob Baffert.

“Yeah,” Van Berg said. “He better quit talking and start praying.”