Whispering Oaks Farm: Right now I'm ahead. . .

Keith Crupper stands in the barn on a cold and wet Kentucky morning, ready to take Toby's Corner's mare, Brandon's Ride out of her stall. Boarding here while waiting to be bred back to Bellamy Road, she is not what you would expect of a dam of a Kentucky Derby hopeful. She is not a pretty dam, put together in a way that you don't see in her son. She may give him something else than looks…smarts, maybe, a mental toughness that let him get bounced around in the Wood and still win. While we are talking, Toby's Corner is taken out of contention for the Derby, holding his left hind leg beneath him after a workout. But as we talk there in the barn, we still believe he will be running on Saturday. The cold encourages you to believe in many things, to see dreams in the thin clouds our breath makes. Keith had a job at Toyota. A good job. He had been raised around horses as a boy, and something had been sitting there, a dream maybe, that made him rent a farm, quit his job and go into the horse business. And success followed, recently with the name Tiz Chrome. "Right now I'm ahead," Keith says. "And I'd like to stay that way."

Whatever else happens here today, this race will stay with me, and Tater Taunter, a horse I may have never met, will be a special filly. Keith Crupper of Whispering Oaks Farm called and invited me to the paddock for the race, and I walked back and met him and his family at the receiving barn. His brother Allen trains the filly, and he and his wife talked about the hurry up and wait life of the track, and the difference of day to day training and the race day atmosphere as we watched the clouds gather and thicken out there, west of the track. A groom wearing the pink number 8 jersey is on one side of the horse, and Keith's son on the other, we walked through the gap and onto the track, the stands thin but filling, down the stretch, through the tunnel and into the pink bannered paddock. Saddled and ready, with a change of jockeys from injured Robby Albarado to the jockey that was up when she broke her maiden, Corey Nakatani, we all move out to the track. For just over a minute and thirty six seconds, there is no other feeling than urging her on, as she moves up through the pack, sits second on the turn then enters the stretch.

She doesn't win, runs second, but that feeling, the sense of attachment and pride in her will remain through the generosity of the Cruppers.