They’ll laugh themselves horse

If horse racing were more Hollywood, it would have turned today’s Santa Anita Derby into a sitcom. There’d be billboards, TV ads, people twittering.

It would be called the “Julio and Bob Show.” Get your tickets now. Come and laugh. There will even be some racing.

Of course, Bob Baffert would say it should be the “Bob and Julio Show,” and Julio Canani would want the title translated into his native tongue, which is Spanish/Portuguese/Mandarin and Swiss German, with a touch of dialect from Mars.

Baffert and Canani train the two prominent horses for today’s $750,000 Kentucky Derby prep race. Baffert’s is Pioneerof The Nile, who has won his last three races, four of seven overall, and tends to get in front and gaze around at the flower pots. Canani’s is The Pamplemousse, who has also won his last three, three of five overall, and tends to get the lead and dislike giving it up.

The Pamplemousse is the slight morning-line favorite at 9-5, with Pioneerof The Nile at 2-1.

But enough about the horses, who, if they could talk, would be rolling their eyes and giggling over the two guys who train them.

Baffert is 56, looks 46 despite his head of snow-white hair, and is a veteran of all this Triple Crown stuff. He’s won the Kentucky Derby three times, plus five other Triple Crown races, and has been a player in the Derby almost every year since 1996. Canani is listed as 70, will tell you 71 or 72, depending on the day -- “I spent four years in one grade in school,” he says -- and while a successful trainer of older horses with three Breeders’ Cup titles, is a newcomer to this annual circus for 3-year-olds.

“I’m an old story. They’ll just Google me,” Baffert says. “But Julio? He’s a new deal.”

Barring something bad happening, both will make their way to Churchill Downs on May 2, and both of their horses will be among the favorites.

Baffert says he’s excited already, says he’s getting some weight off so he can fit into his best suits for the big show. As he talks, he pinches his cheeks to seek out any excess rolls and wrinkles. “You forget what it feels like there,” he says.

Canani calls the race the Kentucky Fried Chicken, and when Baffert talks about how much the media at Churchill Downs are going to love the Peruvian native and his story, Canani says, “They got to find me first.”

That, of course is laughable, because much of Canani’s time, at least at Santa Anita, is spent in the press box. There, he chats with fellow handicappers and shows them how broke he is by producing two or three crumpled dollar bills from his left pocket. In his right pocket, of course, are likely to be seven or eight hundred-dollar bills.

With apologies to Jack Klugman and Tony Randall, if there were ever to be an odd couple of the Kentucky Derby, this is it.

Baffert, cool, calm and collected, calls Canani “Kramer,” after the character on “Seinfeld.” Canani tends to walk around and jabber a lot. At race time, he is a bundle of energy, whether it is the Santa Anita Derby or a $10,000 claimer.

“I’ll be upstairs for the race Saturday,” Cananisays. “By the end, I’ll be at the quarter pole.”

That isn’t always funny. Recently, Canani was stopped on a DUI charge, and it wasn’t until this week that the charge was dropped, when tests showed he was well within the legal alcohol limit. It is hard to fault the arresting officer’s immediate reaction to a guy talking with both hands and in four languages.

Alex Solis, the Panamanian who rides The Pamplemousse, says that when he talks to Canani, “We start in English, go to Spanish and end up in Russian.”

Canani came to the United States in 1963. His bio says he had $600 in his pocket, but nobody checked the other pocket. He said he came to be a movie star.

“Nobody discovered me,” he says, “and that was before Antonio Banderas.”

He says an uncle in Peru told him he was crazy to come here.

“He said, you’ll just be washing dishes,” Canani says, “and he was right.”

After a less-than-noteworthy career washing cars, Canani became a busboy at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel. One day, during the filming at the hotel of the 1965 movie “Ship of Fools,” Canani dropped a tray of dishes and was fired. That pushed him toward odd jobs at the racetrack and 39 years later, he was back at the Beverly Wilshire, this time to receive an Eclipse award for his star filly, Sweet Catomine.

Baffert bought him a cowboy hat for the occasion and says Canani wore it backward.

They have done business with each other often.

“He wanted to sell me a horse one time,” Baffert says, “but the horse had a pet goat. Julio says $5,000 for the goat or no deal. So it was no deal.”

Canani says, “That horse was lost without his goat.”

Today, Baffert will be dapper in coat and tie in the box seats. If he is superstitious, he is too cool to show it.

Canani will be upstairs somewhere, probably in jeans and a lucky shirt that may not get laundered until May 3. He will carry with him a striped computer case that belongs to the daughter of a friend. He happened to be carrying it a couple of months ago when one of his horses won.

At Wednesday morning’s post-position draw, several photographers asked Baffert and Canani to face each other, fists clenched in one of those phony boxing poses. Nobody threw a punch, but in four weeks, Louisville, Ky., won’t know what hit it.

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