KENTUCKY DERBY : Handlers of Urbane and Talkin Man Happy About Serena’s Song Decision

The horseman most pleased about Serena’s Song running in Saturday’s Kentucky Derby is trainer Brian Mayberry, whose Urbane now becomes the odds-on favorite to win Friday’s Kentucky Oaks. The classy Urbane has spent much of her career unsuccessfully chasing Serena’s Song, most recently when they were separated by only a head in the Santa Anita Oaks.

Mayberry was said to be out shopping for a Serena’s Song baseball cap Sunday. Jockey Mike Smith and trainer Roger Attfield are almost as pleased about Serena’s Song’s presence in the Derby, which might seem strange since this is another horse that their horse, Talkin Man, must beat at Churchill Downs.

Attfield and Smith reason that they don’t want Talkin Man running on the lead in the Derby, a style that served him well in a 7 3/4-length victory in the Wood Memorial at Aqueduct on April 15. The 1 1/4-mile Kentucky Derby is an eighth of a mile longer than the Wood, and is seldom won in wire-to-wire fashion.

So here comes the filly Serena’s Song, and Smith doesn’t mind. “Talkin Man is not a rank horse by any means,” the 29-year-old jockey said. “He can rate. With the filly in there, she should give my horse something to run at.”

On oddsmaker Mike Battaglia’s early morning line, the entry of Serena’s Song and Timber Country is listed as the 5-2 Derby favorite. Next at 7-2 is Talkin Man, who probably would have been favored if trainer Wayne Lukas had kept Serena’s Song in the Kentucky Oaks.

Talkin Man is Mike Smith’s Derby favorite. “I feel very good about this horse,” he said. “I wouldn’t trade places with anybody else.”

Because he was committed to ride Concern in the Oaklawn Handicap, Smith wasn’t available for the Wood and Shane Sellers rode Talkin Man. Smith was aboard Talkin Man twice before, for his disappointing 10th-place finish in the Breeders’ Cup Juvenile at Churchill Downs in November and a seven-length victory in the Gotham at Aqueduct on March 25.

Talkin Man’s Breeders’ Cup race comes with a bold-faced footnote. He was sick the last time he was in Kentucky. Before that, the Canadian-bred had been the toast of Woodbine, winning three stakes there by combined margins of more than 16 lengths late in his 2-year-old season.

“We found that the horse had a virus at the time of the Breeders’ Cup,” Attfield said. Very Proper are the words that come to mind in describing the tall, polite trainer with salt-and-pepper hair. Attfield is a 55-year-old Englishman who has been training in Canada since 1971. Tracie Attfield, his wife, gallops her husband’s horses and hung the nickname “Snoopy” on Talkin Man, an inquisitive horse, before he had run a race.

Attfield has won five Sovereign Awards, the Canadian equivalent of Eclipse Awards for trainers. Since 1976, Attfield has won the Canadian horse-of-the-year title five times--with Norcliffe, Play the King, With Approval, Izvestia and Alywow--and he has won the Canadian Triple Crown with Play the King, With Approval and Peteski.

Talkin Man, a son of With Approval and Pookette, a Miswaki mare, might eventually forge his way into that pantheon. His breeders, Helen Stollery and David Willmot of Kinghaven Farms, sold a one-third interest in the colt to Vancouver financier Peter Wall last week, and the reported price for Wall’s share makes Talkin Man’s overall book value about $5 million.

“Off his two races this year, he’s at the head of the class,” Attfield said. “It took him a month to get over that virus. We took him to Florida to recuperate. He was a very flat horse and he lost a lot of weight. He didn’t lift his head for a month. All told, we were two months getting him back to where he was ready to train again.”

Those rave notices from New York have to be tempered because of the horses Talkin Man ran against. Not having run in almost five months, Talkin Man was a 7-1 third choice in the Gotham and he paid $2.90 after winning the Wood.

Of his opponents in those two races, only Knockadoon has made the Derby. A distant second-place finisher in the Wood, Knockadoon was a lackluster fourth in the Louisiana Derby before that and will be part of the parimutuel field--the group that Battaglia says has the least chance of winning--in the Kentucky Derby.

Smith, winner of two consecutive Eclipse Awards, is winless with five Derby mounts, including four horses--Pine Circle, Thirty Six Red, Prairie Bayou and Holy Bull--that were 6-1 or less. His best chance came last year with Holy Bull, the 2-1 favorite. On a sloppy track, they broke flat-footed, never got into the race and finished a dismal 12th. Holy Bull, with Smith riding, went on to win the horse-of-the-year title anyway.

These Churchill Downs disappointments have given Smith all the perspective he needs for another Derby. “What happened last year only makes me want to win this one that much more,” he said. “This horse has the ability to win it, but so did some of the others I’ve ridden. The hard part is winning it.”