What can Brown do for the sport?

Big Brown is hyped to be horse racing's ticket back into the mainstream. AP Tim Layden's Mailbag Submit a question or comment for Tim Layden. Name: Email: Hometown: Question: SEND Related Links GALLERY: 134th Kentucky Derby preview

LOUISVILLE, Kentucky -- The story of the 134th Kentucky Derby begins and ends with Big Brown. Not the handicapping story, the story story.

As sports fans, we love performance, but we love potential even more. This is why the NFL Draft is in some ways more popular than the NFL itself. This is why college football and basketball recruiting is in some ways a more intense arena than the seasons and the games.

Big Brown stands in Barn 22 on the Churchill Downs backstretch, a majestic and powerful bay colt. There is little doubt that he is a gifted racehorse. He has won three races so impressively that seasoned horseplayers -- the type of people who do not cry during Brian's Song -- are left stammering for descriptive phrases. In his final prep for the Derby, Big Brown won the Florida Derby by an easy five lengths from the hell-hole of post position No. 12, which is simply not possible.

This followed a maiden-grass victory last September, on the final day of the Saratoga race meet, and then a 12 ¾-length allowance win at Gulfstream Park on March 5. It is a small body of work (more on this to come), but impressive enough to produce the unmistakable scent of greatness. It's still far off but the signs are impossible to ignore.

All sports find themselves, to varying degrees, always in search of the "Next Great Thing." But this is perhaps more true in horse racing than in any other sport because the game is so memorably defined by the epic performances of a small number of superstars. This rapidly aging generation remembers (most of all) Secretariat (and his Belmont), Seattle Slew and Affirmed (alongside Alydar), the three Triple Crown champions of the 70s, growing collectively smaller in the rear-view mirror but larger in the mind.

In the three decades since, the sports landscape has been altered spectacularly, and with it racing's place in the pantheon. While sport flourishes via simulcasting and Internet wagering, hulking racetracks like Belmont Park, Santa Anita and Churchill Downs sit mostly empty on race days, like giant fossils in memory of a bygone time.

Every year it is widely argued that "racing needs a superstar'' to revive interest among the mainstream. Whether this would occur is hugely debatable -- "What you would get is a temporary bump,'' Hall of Fame trainer D. Wayne Lukes has said repeatedly -- but the topic arises almost every year. If not before the Kentucky Derby, then surely after it, when some horse begins chasing the Triple Crown.

(Here's my view: racing will not return to the mainstream in my lifetime. Probably not in the lifetimes of most Americans. Like many once-prominent sports -- boxing, track and field, to name two -- horse racing is now a niche sport that generates a little widespread buzz every couple of years, and then retreats. I could be wrong, but I see no evidence that I am.)

But a superstar would make noise and Big Brown is or is not that superstar. (Here at Churchill Downs during Derby week, Colonel John is also getting the type of buzz that might have legs, but nobody is applying the type of rhetoric -- "freak'' being the operative word -- to him that they are applying to Big Brown.

Big Brown's trainer, Rick Dutrow, has stoked the hype machine relentlessly. Maybe he doesn't even mean to stoke it. He says he's just speaking his mind. Wednesday was typical: "When you have the best horse in the race, that's usually what you need to win the race,'' he said. "I've seen the other horses in this race. I think I have the best horse.''

I was leaving the Churchill Downs barn area late Thursday morning after several hours of visiting with trainers and owners (including the remarkable Charles Fipke, a diamond miner and genuine postmodern Indiana Jones who owns Tale of Ekati), walking with a veteran horse photographer. "We all want to see Big Brown win, don't we?'' he asked. "Because it would be so good for the sport?''

I'm not comfortable here with the universal "We,'' in this case, because I'm clinging to my old-school reporter's values. I don't care who wins. (OK, I was pulling for War Emblem to win the Belmont in 2002 and Funny Cide to win in 2003 and most of all, for Smarty Jones to win in 2004, because, damn straight, I wanted to write the story of the first Triple Crown winner since 1978).

But I do get it. And what makes Big Brown such a temptation is precisely the quality that makes him such a risk: His lack of experience. You can spin his greenness either way. Good God, imagine what he's going to become. Or: Good God, you can't win the Kentucky Derby off only three lifetime starts. It hasn't happened since 1915, and even Curlin, Horse of the Year in 2007, couldn't do it.

The issue was further complicated on Wednesday when Dutrow put Big Brown in the No. 20 -- furthest outside -- post position. (In fairness, Dutrow has few better options; only one, two, 18, 19 and 20 were available). One horse -- gelding Clyde Van Dusen -- has won the Derby from the 20 post and that was in 1929. Jockey Kent Desormeaux is confident that Big Brown can cruise into a solid position from the 20 hole and then settle in. Still, it's a lot to ask.

There's more. Big Brown has been a fragile horse, twice sitting 45 days with a quarter crack in one of his front hooves. He will wear front bandages in the Derby, which is always a rodeo heading into the first turn.

To review: Three lifetime starts, post position 20, bad feet. "I know Mr. Dutrow thinks his horse is a whole lot better than everybody else,'' says trainer Larry Jones, who will saddle filly Eight Belles in the Derby. "Well, this is gonna be a race where he gets the chance to show it, because he's gonna have to be some bit better than the rest of us.''

Personally, I'm picking against him. But think of it this way: If Big Brown can justify the hype under these circumstances, maybe he will resurrect the game. For now, there is one more day to dream of what he might be before he shows us what he actually is.